Perhaps the greatest protest against Soviet war memorials has occurred in Poland . The first casualty in this battle of memory was the Monument to Brotherhood in Arms in Warsaw – a memorial that was erected in the suburb of Praga in 1945 to symbolise a shared Polish-Soviet victory . It featured statues of Polish and Soviet soldiers standing sideby-side , and an inscription on the plinth that read : “ Glory to the heroes of the Soviet Army , comrades in arms , who gave their lives for the freedom and independence of the Polish nation .”
The first calls to tear this statue down came in the 1990s , but were seen off by local people , including one of the original Polish sculptors of the monument , who pointed out that tearing it down would be an insult to the Polish soldiers who were also commemorated here . Despite this , however , the monument was taken down ‘ temporarily ’ in 2011 while improvements were made to the city square
where it stood ; and in 2015 , under considerable pressure from a new , right-wing populist government , the city council announced that the removal would be permanent .
In the following years , dozens of other statues followed all across Poland . The government , which since 2015 has been dominated by the populist Law and Justice Party , embarked on an official program to remove all Communist symbols from the country , including Soviet war memorials . ( This is the same government that sacked the director of the brand new World War II Museum in Gdansk on the grounds that the exhibition he had produced was “ not Polish enough ”; and which passed a law in 2018 making it all-but-illegal for historians to write about Polish complicity in the Holocaust .) The very idea of Soviet heroism during the Second World War barely exists any longer in Poland .
5 . Warsaw Ghetto Heroes Monument . ( Eurom ) overview
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