This thesis focuses on the life of four Soviet liberation monuments–the Monument to Soviet Tank Crews and Soviet Marshal Ivan Konev in Prague, Czech Republic and the Slavín War Memorial and Cemetery and the Victory Monument to the Red Army in Bratislava, Slovakia–to analyze reinterpretations of the monuments after the fall of communism and explore how the monuments reflect the interplay of politics in urban space. The thesis begins by discussing the context in which the monuments were erected prior to the Velvet Revolution in 1989. It then analyzes the monuments after the fall of communism (1989) and the Dissolution of Czechoslovakia (1993) in the emerging capital cities. It argues that in Prague, grassroots and municipal-level interventions in the 1990s greatly influenced the reinterpretation of Soviet liberation monuments there. On the other hand, in Bratislava, the focus was on the history of Great Moravia and cultivating Slovak identity rather than the process of decommunization, as it was in Prague. As a result, the liberation monuments in Bratislava blended into the cityscape and lacked resonance in the 1990s. Following Russia’s aggression in the region, Prague’s Konev statue became a flashpoint for debating Russia’s actions and the legacies of Soviet suppression. Conversely, Slavín became a memory site, used by both Russian and Slovak leaders to represent shared history as a part of a geopolitical alliance.
Evelyn Shea (Thu,) studied this question.