site.btaSofia's Soviet Army Monument: "On danse déjà ici"

Paris, July 15, 1789. Just a day after a crowd of angry insurgents have stormed and captured the Bastille, Pierre-François Palloy, an entrepreneurial building contractor, organizes the demolition of the prison fortress. By November, the structure that epitomized despotism and tyranny is largely dismantled by approximately 1,000 workers. Palloy has a sign put up on the empty site, reading "Désormais on danse ici" (From now on we dance here).

Sofia, August 9, 2015. Organized by an antiques dealer and a lift mechanic, several dozen couples indulge in tango and salsa dancing with the help of a portable sound system. They don't seem daunted by a towering monument that overshadows their open-air dance floor - actually an empty shallow pond behind the landmark.

Liberation or Occupation?

The Monument to the Soviet Army in Sofia is the most impressive of several dozen such structures scattered throughout the country and one of over 4,000 memorials to the USSR's drive against Hitler's Germany in WW II across Europe.

"In quite a few cases, the gratitude expressed by these monuments was forcibly foisted by the victorious army, which itself redefined its presence from occupation to liberation," writes sociologist Elitza Stanoeva.

In September 1946, when the local authority in Sofia adopted a decision on the erection of the monument, it argued that "by its fervent offensive" the Red Army "created conditions for the liberation of the Bulgarian people from the German fascist yoke". A government decision of October 1949 on the same subject referred to the Soviet Red Army as "Bulgaria's liberator from the fascist occupiers".

The monument in the very centre of Sofia is unique in that it has emerged as a focal point of a decades-long clash between a silent nostalgic pro-Russia majority and a vocal liberal pro-Western minority in Bulgarian society.

More than 30 years after the fall of communism, Bulgaria remains the only East European country where a large number of people still regard the Red Army as a liberator rather than oppressor. This view is promoted by the Socialist Party (which proudly claims succession from the Communist Party) and by sundry Russophile and nationalist organizations. The most active proponent of this interpretation of the Soviet troops' presence in Bulgaria between 1944 and 1947 is Russia and its Embassy in Sofia.

"Bulgaria would have hardly existed at present as an independent state if it was not liberated from the pro-fascist regime in 1944 by the Red Army," Russian Military Historical Society Science Director Mikhail Myagkov argued in 2019. He was apparently referring to a theory that it was at Russia's insistence that Bulgaria was treated considerably better than the other allies of Hitler's Germany, rejecting Yugoslavia's and Greece's territorial designs.

Those in favour of keeping the monument argue that it symbolizes respect for the Soviet Army's contribution to the Allies' victory over Nazi Germany in WW II. They recall that some 160 Soviet soldiers and officers were killed in action while fighting the German forces in Bulgarian territory in 1944. In 2022, the Socialist Party's Sofia Chapter described the monument as "a most cherished memory of the feat of the victorious army in World War II" and a memory of the "inhuman calamities that fascism and neofascism can cause".

According to the opposite view, "the Soviet Army's bayonets brought to the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe half a century of repression, stifling of civil conscience, distorted economic development and detachment from the dynamics of processes in the developed European countries," as the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry put it in September 2019. The statement recalled that the Soviet troops entered Bulgarian territory after the USSR had declared war on Bulgaria on September 5, 1944, the same day when Bulgaria's newly appointed democratic government severed diplomatic relations with Germany and confirmed the country's neutrality towards Russia.

A Citizens Initiative for Dismantling the Soviet Army Monument in Sofia argue that the landmark epitomizes the Bulgarian people's "brutal terrorizing" by the Soviet occupiers, the total trampling of civil rights and liberties by a single dominant political force, the requirement to pay respect to violence in the form of a weapon raised high above Sofia, the destroying of Bulgaria's national dignity by turning it into a satellite of the USSR, and the lie that the invading Soviet Army liberated the country.

Totalitarian Totem or Memory Marker?

In the Soviet sphere of influence, Red Army memorials share a common feature: Communist ideology, as a surrogate religion, intended them to serve as a place of worship and pilgrimage. Accordingly, these granite and bronze structures idolized the heroes of the "glorious past", indoctrinating the masses to venerate the Soviet Army which helped establish the regime.

Sofia's sign of gratitude and loyalty to the USSR is a typical example of monumental art in the "classic" Stalinist style. Twelve of the country's best architects, sculptors and artists teamed up to design the landmark in 1950-1951. It was unveiled on September 8, 1954 as a tie-in with the tenth anniversary of the "socialist revolution".

A 37 m high granite-faced truncated pyramid is topped by a Soviet soldier brandishing a PPSh-41 submachine gun. That figure, measuring 12 metres from toe cap to muzzle, is 3.5 m taller than a Bulgarian mineworker and a peasant woman carrying a child (both 8.5 m high) that flank him. At the base of the pyramid, there are three 6 by 2.2 m bronze compositions in high relief, depicting the October 1917 Revolution (east), the 1941-1945 Great Patriotic War (west), and the Home Front (south). Two stand-alone sculpture groups showing the Enthusiastic Welcoming of the Soviet Army in Bulgaria are placed symmetrically at the opposite end of an 80 by 22 m mall leading from Tsar Osvoboditel Blvd. to the central column, followed by bronze wreaths on stone pedestals (five on each side) that glorify the Red Army's ten offensives from Stalingrad to Berlin.

Wreaths are laid at the monument on September 9 (the anniversary of the Communist takeover in 1944), May 9 (V-E Day), November 7 (the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia) and February 23 (Red Army Day, now Defender of the Fatherland Day). Most of these commemorations are initiated by the Russian Embassy, with attendance by diplomats from other "friendly states", including Belarus, Kazakhstan, Serbia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Armenia, South Africa and Vietnam.

The monument is a fixture on the itinerary of Russian package sightseers in Sofia - just as it was for Soviet package tourists before 1989. This is understandable, given that there is not a single Russian family that has not lost relatives in the 1941-1945 war.

Desecration or Desacralization?

Since 2011, the monument has been targeted by a series of "art attacks" expressing discontent with the Kremlin's policy. Admired by some and reviled by others as acts of vandalism, these interventions seem to follow a set pattern: mostly anonymous activists disfigure the landmark with spray paint and graffiti, which are then scrubbed off by Russophile volunteers or professional cleaners, police mount round-the-clock guard in the area, and the Russian Embassy and/or Foreign Ministry voice outrage at the "unprecedented" and "cynical" desecration of the dead heroes' memory and the "highly paid provocation" (in the words of former Ambassador in Sofia Anatoly Makarov).

Thus, in June 2011 the figures of Russian soldiers were colour-sprayed as popular American comic book characters: Superman, the Joker, Wolverine and Captain America, along with Ronald McDonald and Santa Claus.

In August 2012, multi-colour balaclavas were put on the heads of some of the bronze sculptures in protest against the crackdown on the Russian punk-rock band Pussy Riot. In August 2013, the monument was painted pink and graffitied, urging Bulgaria to apologize for its part in the crushing of the 1968 Prague Spring. In February 2014, in solidarity with the Euromaidan protests, a soldier and the banner he holds were painted in the colours of the Ukrainian national flag, with "Glory to Ukraine" graffiti in Ukrainian.

The brass inscription on the front side the monument, reading "To the Soviet Army Liberator from the Grateful Bulgarian People", was stolen for scrap metal in the 1990s and was restored in 2001, this time chiselled with gilt letters into the granite. The inscription was most recently revamped in October 2020 by the Sofia Chapter of Putin's Night Wolves bikers after it had been overpainted with black-spray swastikas.

In the latest such incident, prompted by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, two boys and a girl aged 15 and 16 were arrested and taken to a police station on February 26, 2022 when they wrote "Save Ukraine!" on the monument. A day later, protestors gathered on the site and decorated the landmark with graffiti reading "Murderers", "Occupiers" and "Freedom to Ukraine" and with posters portraying Putin and inscribed "Killer".

On a more peaceful note, local youth drinking beer and apolitical teenage skateboarders have largely taken over the granite-paved approaches and steps to the monument and the surrounding park.

Open-air rock concerts and festivals are staged in the mall in front of the memorial. It is also used as a venue for the opening concert of the annual Sofia Pride parade. In 2021, a mock news website "reported" that pro-Russia nationalists had dismantled the monument for no other reason than to deprive the LGBTI community of a rallying point.

Mend It or Move It?

A heated public debate on the fate of the memorial complex has been going on ever since the advent of democracy in 1989.

Back in March 1993, the Sofia Municipal Council resolved on the removal of the monument. Scaffolding even went up, but the effort was halted on a verbal order by Interior Minister Viktor Mihailov.

In 2019, media expert Georgi Lozanov commented that Russia is obstructing the implementation of that resolution: directly, through its emissaries, and indirectly, through its powerful lobby in Bulgaria's political and public life.

The move was indeed shelved until February 2022 when, a day after Russia attacked Ukraine, Sredets Borough Mayor Traicho Trakov initiated a procedure for the relocation of the landmark in line with the 1993 resolution, now that all municipal councillors except the Socialist representatives had backed the idea. Among other things, Traikov noted that the monument was crumbling with loose slabs endangering the public and called on passers-by to avoid the area and on the authorities to fence it off and ban all events there. The Municipal Council, however, refused to go ahead with the relocation, arguing that only central government was competent to do so.

Financial expert Martin Zaimov estimates that at up to 200,000 leva, relocation would be almost half as cheap as repair. In the opinion of a building contractor, dismantling the monument would cost 50,000-60,000 leva.

A signed comment in the Left daily Duma in May 2021 said that the renewed call for the monument's removal from central Sofia came from "a handful of rabid post-Socialist Russophobes" who missed no occasion "to denigrate, defame and falsify everything Russian". The late Bozhidar Dimitrov, director of the National Museum of History and minister of culture, described the anti-monument campaigners as "politically marginal" and "stinking remnants of fascists."

Ideas on what to do with the landmark include turning it into a museum of modern art or building a green mound around it so as to hide it from public view. Some liberals suggest that it should be left where it is as a reminder of the dire legacy of communism.

In 2014, an Alpha Research poll commissioned by City Hall found that 37 per cent of Sofianites wanted the monument to be transformed into a memorial to the WW II victims.

In 2015 Dimitrovgrad (Southeastern Bulgaria) offered to take Sofia's monument as part of a project to build a park with pieces of monumental art from the totalitarian era.

The prevailing opinion is that the sculptures, whose artistic and historic value is undisputed, should be kept and exhibited at the Museum of Socialist Art in Sofia.

Russia Caring and Concerned

In 2005, Russia's LUKOIL Oil Company unveiled plans to take over the maintenance of the space around the Soviet Army Monument.

In 2020, in time for the 75th anniversary of the victory in the Great Patriotic War, the Russian Embassy in Sofia renovated and beautified the memorial complex.

It transpired that in November 2020 the Russian Embassy offered to finance an overhaul of the monument (estimated to cost 390,000 leva) in exchange for granting Russia a perpetual and gratuitous right to ownership of the memorial. In February 2021, the Embassy requested that Russia be granted gratuitous use of the monument and its adjoining area for the same consideration. Despite a positive opinion from the then Sofia Regional Governor Nikolay Pehlivanov, the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry rejected both proposals.

Reacting to a drive to pull down Soviet monuments across Central and Eastern Europe, in 2020 Russia criminalized the destruction of, or damage to, memorial sites dedicated to Russian military glory during the Great Patriotic War that are located at home and abroad. The offence is punishable by a multi-million fine in roubles or up to 5 years' compulsory labour or imprisonment.

What the Law Says

The monument was registered as State property in 1947, but the Princely Garden in which it is located is owned by Sofia Municipality, which is why the central and local governments have been arguing since 2013 over who should take care of its repair.

The Socialists and City Hall insist that the memorial is protected by international and national documents and Russia should be consulted about any interference. The reference is apparently to the 1992 Treaty of Friendly Relations and Cooperation between Bulgaria and Russia and the 1993 intergovernmental Agreement on Cooperation in Culture, Education and Science. Former Bulgarian ambassador in Moscow Ilian Vassilev insists that the treaty requires Russia to be just notified of the relocation rather than asked for permission. Other opponents argue that the monument does not even come under these international instruments because it was built and paid for by Bulgaria. Nor does it qualify as a soldiers' monument under the War Monuments Act, and it has not been registered as such, they say, citing a 2015 opinion of the Defence Ministry. Besides this, the 2,000 sq m site does not enjoy the status of a stand-alone immovable cultural asset under the Cultural Heritage Act, as evidenced by a 2012 opinion of the National Institute of Immovable Cultural Heritage and as confirmed by a 2019 judgment of the Supreme Administrative Court.

In 2016, the National Assembly failed to adopt draft legislation amending the Act Declaring the Criminal Nature of the Communist Regime in Bulgaria that would have required the removal of the monument as a symbol glorifying the totalitarian dictatorship.

In 2019, the European Parliament passed a resolution against "the continued existence in public spaces in some Member States of monuments and memorials (parks, squares, streets etc.) glorifying totalitarian regimes, which paves the way for the distortion of historical facts about the consequences of the Second World War and for the propagation of the totalitarian political system".

While prosecutors have instituted hooliganism proceedings against arrested activists and unidentified perpetrators for graffitiing and spray-painting the landmark, in 2021 the Supreme Court of Cassation determined that writing on the monument without impairing its integrity did not violate any Bulgarian laws.

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In Sofia, the Soviet Army Monument still stands in the city centre – and yet, "on danse déjà ici". We already dance here.