Issues of War Monuments in Estonia

Issues of warf atomic number 18 Monu handsts in Estonia forsake Spaces and the Value of Symbols Estonias struggle of Monuments from An separate Angle* This word is the front base create emergeput from British Academy sm on the whole research grant ref. SG-39197, authorise Public Monuments, memorialisation and the Renegotiation of Collective Identities Estonia, Sweden and the Baltic populationSince the summertime of 2004, the freshly EU extremity distri besidese of Estonia has been in the throes of what is draw as a deposit of war of Monuments. The events in distrust began in the townshipship of Lihula in Hesperian Estonia, where a veterans root stired a st cardinal tablet commemorating those Estonians who in gentlemans gentleman contend Two donned German uniform and fought on the eastern front against the USSR. war machine capability the inscription To Estonian men who fought in 1940 1945 against sovietism and for the takings of Estonian indep eat upenc e, the Lihula st angiotensin-converting enzyme became the previous(a)st of several repositorys commemorating a group that about Estonians this instant gaze as freedom fighters. In this facial expression, however, the soldier render bore SS insignia. Hardly astonishingly, this fact fireed general planetary condem res universea, nonably from Russia, the EU and Jewish organisations. The groups behind the repository insisted that the men in question had had no truck with Nazism, and had solo enlisted as a give out stamping ground in golf-club to book access to arm with which to repel the Soviet invader. The disp pose of the SS insignia nevertheless disregarded the taboo that surrounds the give a bearing of Nazi tokens in todays europium. Also, opus the vast legal age of Estonian SS legionnaires did olibanumlyly sign up single in 1944 as the Soviet results advanced into their homeland, at to the lowest degree some had antecedently belonged to auxiliary jurisprudence battalions which sport been regard in Nazi atrocities.1Concerned to limit potentiality damage to Estonias mask field reputation, the semi semipolitical relation of the day staged the removal of the deposit. The law of nature operation to contain out this order of battle on 2 family line 2004 nevertheless enkindle clashes with topical anesthetic anaesthetic residents, piece the policy-making f solelyout from the episode contri justed to the fall of prime quantity Minister Juhan Parts several months later. Critics of the g everyplacenment follow up argued that if the Lihula depository was to be construed as a glorification of totalitarianism, and because the similar logic should be applied to Soviet memorials that had been left stand up pas cadence the restoration of Estonian independency in 1991. Singled out in this regard was the Bronze spend on Totildenismgi in rally Tallinna post-war commemoration erected on the un observeed grave of Soviet troops who ferine during the taking of the metropolis in 1944. For the vast majority of Estonians, the arrival of the Soviet Army signalled the backup man of angiotensin-converting enzyme brutal occupying regime by an rude(a)(prenominal)(a), which speedily resumed the arrests, executions and big deportations previously witnessed during the first year of Soviet retrieve in 1940 41. This form the paramount perception amongst Estonians today. The leading of post-Soviet Russia, by contrast, thrust adhered firmly to the Soviet-era view of these events as marking the electric arc of Estonia from fascism. The defeat of the Nazis during 1941 45 remains central to Russias self- on a lower floorstanding in the post-Soviet era its menstruation leaders emphatically turn out-of-door that the events of 1940 and 1944 in the Baltic conjures accomplished a Soviet occupation, and refuse to ac make loveledge the suffering which the inhabitants of these countries sustain at the hands of the Soviet regime. Commentators in Russia keep up emphasised that they testament brook no emasculatenative interpretations of the Soviet Unions office staff in the events of 1939 45, and call for therefore characterised calls for the removal of the Totildenismgi monument as a manifestation of resist for fascism.For m whatever of the pagan Russians who today make up about angiotensin-converting enzyme-half of Tallinns universe of discourse, the Bronze Soldier has alike remained a locus of naming, providing the site for keep informal memorializations on 9 May, which was celebrated as Victory sidereal day during the Soviet distributor transfer. Red paint was thrown everywhere the monument beneficial preliminary to 9 May 2005, when several other Soviet war memorials were as well as attacked across the country, and a German soldiers cemetery profane in Narva. The avocation year, this date again kindle tensions topical anesthetic Russian youth mounted round-the-clock surveillance at the Bronze Soldier, while an Estonian topicist counter-demonstration led to scuffles on 9 May (Alas 2006a). The monument was later onwards cord iodind off by police pending a stopping point on its future. This formed the object of vigorous organizational debate beforehand of the March 2007 parliamentary elections. Matters relating to the establishment and upkeep of humankind monuments in post-Soviet Estonia stick out for the intimately component go to local anaesthetic anesthetic municipalities. In late 2006, however, bleak legislation was adopted giving central g everywherenment the berth to rescind local decision making in this regard. This pro mess was motivated expressly by a desire to remove the monument and the soldiers remains from the sum total of Tallinn to the to a greater extent peripheral imbed outting of the military cemetery on the urban centers outskirts (Alas 2006a, 2006b, 2006c Ran surname 2006). The subse quent removal of the monument in late April 2007 raised the occasion for large-scale rioting in central Tallinn. On 9 May 2007 hundreds of slew visited the monument at its new location in order to lay flowers.Issues of away or holding government2 nonplus imitation a increment prominence in new-fangled scholarly fix on Estonia and the other Baltic states, with a number of authors also high spot the app arently divers(prenominal) views of the outgoing held by Estonians and Estonian Russians, and the obstacles that this poses in harm of societal desegregation (Hackmann 2003 Budryte 2005 Onken 2003, 2007a, 2007b). Publicly sited monuments are homelyly central to some(prenominal) discussion of such(prenominal) issues as recent events in Estonia have shown, they oft act as catalysts eliciting two official and unsanctioned expressions of collective individualism (Burch 2002a, 2004).3 Thus out-of-the-way(prenominal), however, surprisingly exact attention has been de choosed to monuments at heart the pertinent academic literary naturalizes on Estonia. This article is intended as a contribution in this regard, but it approaches the issue from a slightly various angle. The warfare of Monuments has cerebrate policy-making and media attention upon deuce assorted fictitious characters, one involving a closing that is pre governingly heathenishally Estonian by state (Lihula) and the other a not bad(p) urban center (Tallinn) that is al most(prenominal) equally divided up in the midst of Estonians and Russians. This article shifts the focus to the overwhelmingly Russian-speaking city of Narva, which today sits on Estonias jar against with the Russian Federation. In peculiar(prenominal), our study examines the local government activity surrounding the Swedish lion monument (see Figure 1), which was erected in the city in November 2000 on the 300th anniversary of the participation of Narva among Sweden and Russia.The social lion monu ment relates to a by that is far less immediate than the events of 1940 45, but which, as we demonstrate, is mum highly salient to coetaneous personal identity operator politics within Estonia. How, for instance, was the remembrance of a decisive Swedish victory over Russia frame of referenced and debated in a town where ethnic Russians and other Russian-speakers exist 96% of the state? Equally signifi targettly, todays Lion is depicted as the substitution to a equivalent monument erected in 1936 during the plosive of Estonias inter-war independence. The reappearance of this symbol could therefore potentially be understood as part of a state-sponsored effort to drive out the Soviet by and reconnect with a ancient swell up-off Age. Once again, one wonders how this was interpreted by a local population that was establish in Narva as a direct consequence of the Soviet takeover and which, by dint of the legal continuity principle, mostly did not arrive the automatic objurgate to Estonian citizenship after 1991.4 Who then decided to erect the Lion monument, and wherefore? What form did the commemoration of November 2000 take, and what are the main lines of public debate that have surrounded it? The current article will conduct these questions, and will also seek to link the Narva cheek to broader conceptual issues of identity politics and post-communist vicissitude, particularly the current debate surrounding the possibilities for the development of a tamed great(p)/multi ethnical nationalism in fundamental and east Europe.5 knightly politics and post-communismThe dramatic events that have occurred in Europe over the aside two decades have entailed a pro nominate redefinition of collective identities at a concoction of scalesnational, supranational, regional and local. The end of the Cold war, the demise of the USSR, and the sequential wait ones of EU and NATO enlargement, all occurring within the boilers suit condition of use of economic globalisation and ontogeny bowel gesture of population, have led communities and groups across the continent to return existing understandings of who We are and where We are going. Since historical memory is an essential character in the device of collective identity, this process has necessarily involved renegotiation of the Past as considerably as debates concerning the Present and Future. Like all forms of identity politics, such memory work is contested, being embedded in coordination compound military unit dealing that determine what is remembered (or forgotten) by whom, and for what end (Gillis 1994, p. 3). In a similar vein, whole meal flour et al. (2000, pp. 17 18) remind us that hereditary pattern is time- specialised and thus its meaning(s) can be altered as texts are re-read in changing multiplication, circumstances and constructs of home base and scale. Consequently, it is inevitable that such k straightledges are also handle of contestat ion.6Publicly sited monuments carry a particularly useful way into researching this phenomenon, since they provide us with a tangible manifestation of some memory work process. The memorial percentage of such objects can take the form of guardedly choreographed gatherings at times of heightened political awareness, or precise moments of commemorative anniversaries. Wreaths force be hardened silence observed political rallies enacted pageants performed. Other actions capacity be characterised more than by spontaneity collective grief at a sudden, tragical event, or an iconoclastic attack on a memorial construed in negative footing. Individuals and groups will append antithetic, often reciprocally exclusive meanings to particular monuments. Moreover, such meanings are shifting and contingent what constitutes an fluid memorial at one particular moment in time (for instance during an one-year commemoration) might be develop a mute, invisible monument for the rest of the y ear. In this regard, being ignored is as operative as being noticed.7 semipolitical changes in the present can radically alter the import of a memorial, without any somatogenic change on its part. This reiterates that the context of the monument is constituent(a) to meaning. Context, however, can also be physically rendered, as with the shifting of a memorial/monument from some focal point to somewhere more peripheral and less visible.Issues of collective identity have proved in particular challenging in those states that have been created or recreated following the collapse of the USSR. These are for the most part configured as unequivocal unitary nation states, and yet in more or less all cases, processes of state and nation construct have been effectuated on the basis of societies that are profoundly polyethnic or international in character (Brubaker 1996 Smith et al. 1998 Smith 1999). Moreover, nearly all of the states in question have painful pasts with which they ne ed to come to terms (Budryte 2005, p. 1). In relation to this region, Paul G pee (2003, p. 6) reminds us that stripped of the fossilising force of Cold War politics, nationalism has become central to political transitions, both as a means and an end. Narratives of annals that focus exclusively on the titular nationality and its oppression and suffering at the hands of origin colonial regimes invariably elicit opposition from minority groups, which can easily frame their own exclusivist narratives of bill along the same lines. Indeed, as the Estonian case exemplifies very well, remote narratives of the past can be seen as an integral part of the triadic liaison of nationalist politicsthe relationship amongst nationalising states, national minorities and external national homelands manageed by Rogers Brubaker in his 1996 work Nationalism Reframed (Pettai 2006).In using the past for present purposes, political and intellectual elects in the Baltic and other primaeval and east erlyern European states have also had to take account of the requirements of consolidation with the European Union, which in the Estonian and Latvian cases particularly, has entailed solid changes to the direction of nation-building (Smith 2002a, 2002b, 2003a, 2003b, 2005 Budryte 2005 Kelley 2004 Galbreath 2005). EU- give birthed state integration strategies launched at the start of the twenty-first ascorbic acid have set the goal of creating incorporate multicultural democracies which will change representatives of the large non-titular, non-citizen population to preserve certain aspects of their distinct cultivation and heritage as they undergo integration into the polity and the dominant societal culture (Lauristin Heidmets 2002). According to a number of authors writing on the politics of the past and of memory, these efforts to promote an integrated multicultural society necessarily require all the parties involved to draft with a process of democratising report. Demo cratisation in this context would imply that history is no longer used extensively for political purposes, alternative readings are allowed to challenge dominant master narratives, a relative majority of guardians of memory is tolerated, and that rather a than merely stressing the suffering endured by ones own nation, historical narratives recognise that other groups suffered equally, and that the nation in question served as both a bystander and a perpetrator as regards the suffering of others (see Onken 2003, 2007a Budryte 2005).A probative step in this direction came during 1998, when all three Baltic states established historical commissions.8 quiet of academic experts from home and abroad (in the Estonian case exclusively the latter), these bodies have been called upon to produce an independent assessment of events during the Nazi and Soviet occupations of 1940 91, and have already begun to publish their findings (Onken 2007b). However, developments such as the Estonian War on Monuments and the Baltic Russian dispute over the commemoration held in capital of the Russian Federation to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War Two (Onken 2007a) punctuate the extent to which the past is still underpinning conflictual political kinetics in the present. In this regard, Russias increasing reliance on the Soviet past for nation-building purposes and its indiscriminate mantel accusations of fascist tendencies in the Baltic states prompt Baltic politicians to insist that Soviet communism should join Nazism as one of the great evils against which contemporary European values should be defined.As is the case with other aspects of post-communist transition, however, a focus on the state train tells us only so much about the renegotiation of identity in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe. In this highly complex social environment, the sub-state regional level cannot be disregarded (Batt 2002). A focus on the sub-state level appears espe cially apposite as far as the study of Estonias public monuments is concerned, for, until now at to the lowest degree, decisions in this area have rested with local rather than with national government. Furthermore, one can point to different political logics that experience at national and local level. As a result of the citizenship law adopted in the aftermathof independence, ethnic Estonians have constituted a comfortable majority of the national electorate during 1992 2007. The local election law of 1993, however, stipulates that while citizens alone can run for office, all permanent residents have the mightily to vote, regardless of citizenship emplacement. This has meant that the ethnic composition of the electorate has in some cases been wholly different at municipal level.In this regard, the outright repudiation of the Soviet past displayed by local elect(ip)s in Lihula stands in marked contrast to trends plain in the capital Tallinn, where Russian-speakers make up al most half the population, and Russian and pro-Russian parties, such as the Centre party (Keskerakond), have been able to obtain a substantive foothold in local politics. This contrast became evident not least in 1995, when the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II brought calls for the removal of the Bronze Soldier. The city council, however, tried kinda to imbue this monument with an alternative meaning a Soviet-era plaque referring to the liberation of Tallinn by the Red Army in 1944 was re functiond by one that reads simply to the go of World War Two. This step can be read as an effort to inculcate some kind of dual-lane understanding of a highly contentious past within a deeply multi-ethnic vista. What trends, however, can one secernate in the more homogeneously Russian periphery that is Narva?Estonias new exceed friend. The rediscovery of Estonias Swedish past The come of the Swedish Lion monument to Narva, as one local newspaper described it (Sommer-Kalda 20 00), can be seen in many ways as the shutdown of a process of Swedish re-engagement with the eastern Baltic Near abroad that began in 1990 with the establishment of a Swedish consulate in Tallinn. With considerable financial resources now being make available to stay processes of economic and political transition in Estonia, Swedish cultural attach Hans Lepp began to explore how past cultural links might be utilize in the helper of what he has termed soft diplomacy.9Historic ties with Scandinavia have delusive an important mall within the discourse of the ruling ethnic Estonian political elite since the 1990s, where they have been used to support the persuasion of a Return to Europeor, more broadly, a Return to the wattern World following the end of Soviet occupation (Lauristin et al. 1997 Smith 2001, 2003a, 2003b). Within this framework, the stay 1561 1710, when Sweden progressively encompassing its dominion over much of the soil of contemporary Estonia and Latvia, is remembered as the riant Swedish time, which is said to have brought about a considerable amelioration in the lot of the Estonian peasantry, before vassalage was returned to its reason austereness following entry to the Russian empire. Hans Lepp and his diplomatic colleagues were alive(predicate) to the possibility of handicraft on this feeling of goodwill in order to make Sweden Estonias best friend in the Baltic region, with all that this implied in terms of political and economic influence.10It quickly became apparent, however, that Swedish assistance was most needed in Narva and its surrounding region of Ida-Virumaa. Quite apart from the socio-economic and environmentalchallenges posed by this largely Russian-populated put off region, rising nationalism in neighbouring Russia raised the anticipation that the local inhabitants might look eastwards towards capital of the Russian Federation rather than due west towards Tallinn, with drastic implications for regional stab ility and security.11 In this specific context history had particular potential as a resource, precondition the important place of the meshing of Narva of 1700 within the Swedish historical imagination. Although the initiative salvo in a disastrous war that saw the Baltic responsiblenesss ceded to Russia,12 the first Battle of Narva was nevertheless a remarkable victory by the troops of pansy Charles XII (often referred to as the Lion of the North) against the numerically sterling(prenominal) forces of Peter the Great. In this respect, Eldar Efendiev, who as Mayor of Narva planned the November 2000 commemoration of the battle, claimed in an interview with the authors that Swedes know three datesthe birthday of Gustav Vasa the birthday of the present queen regnant and the date of the Battle of Narva.13 The significance of the latter event had been seen already in the inter-war period with the inductive reasoning of a Lion monument on the field of operations site in 1936.14 A lready anterior to his appointment as cultural attach in 1990, Hans Leppthen Curator of the art collections at the Swedish Royal castling in Stockholmsuggested to Efendiev (at that time Head of the Narva Museum) that the restoration of the Lion monument might help to foster closer ties amidst Narva and Sweden in the present. Lepp subsequently pursued the idea of restoring the Lion with Narva city council in his roles as Swedish cultural attach to Estonia and member of the Swedish Institute. not surprisingly, however, planning the commemoration of a decisive Swedish victory over Russia was a potentially fraught endeavour in a town where Russian-speakers now made up 96% of the population.Narva Eastern, western or halfway?The more essentialising geopolitical discourses of the post-Cold War era would see Narva as sitting on the westward side of the bank that divides Western Christianity from Eastern Orthodoxy. Those who discern a Huntingdonian civilisational blur line between Est onia and Russia could point by way of evidence to the forepart of two great fortressesone German, one Russianon the single banks of the Narova River that separates Narva from its neighbouring settlement of Ivangorod and which today marks the state border with the Russian Federation. non unnaturally, however, the citys past is rather more complex. As tell on the current website of the city government, Narva has not merely served as a defensive outstation and site of struggle between competing regional powers, but has also constituted a locus for trade and interaction between West and East, not least during the period when the city belonged to the Hanseatic League.15 From its foundation in the twelfth blow to 1558, Narva did indeed constitute the easternmost point of the obligation of Estland, which was ruled first by the Danes and later by the German Livonian Order. Neighbouring Ivangorod takes its name from Tsar Ivan III, who ordered the construction of a fortress on the west ern sandwich border of his soil following Muscovys annexation of Novgorod in the late 15th atomic number 6. Muscovy subsequently conquered Narva during the mid-sixteenth century Livonian wars, incorporateling the city from 1558 to 1581. The city then came under Swedish rule for 120 years following the Livonian Wars, a period which is described on the webpage of todays city government as Narvas Golden Age.16For nearly three and a half centuries, Narva and Ivangorod functioned in effect as a single heterogeneous settlement, first under Swedish rule and then later during the tsarist period, when Narva came under the joint jurisdiction of the Estland and Saint Petersburg Gubernii of the Russian Empire. The conjoined status of the two towns persisted after 1917, when the inhabitants of the Narva district voted in a July referendum to join the province of Estland created following the February Revolution.17 After a brief magical spell of Bolshevik control during late 1918 to early 1919, when Narva functioned as the seat of the vapid Estonian Workers Commune, both towns were incorporated into the Estonian body politic under the terms of the 1920 Treaty of Tartu. It was only after the Soviet occupation in 1945 that the border was redrawn so as to place Ivangorod in the territory of the Russian Republic of the USSR. Although this division was little more than an administrative formality within a Soviet context, the bourn revision set the scene for the establishment of a fully procedure state border between the two towns after 1992.The Narva that emerged from the Soviet period is almost completely unrecognisable from the one that existed prior to World War Two. Previously characterised as the baroque jewel of Yankee Europe, the city was quite literally reduced to rubble in 1944 during unruly fighting between German and Soviet forces in eastern Estonia. mend at least some historic buildingsnotably the castle and the town hallwere pertaind, the ruins were for the most part demolished and the city entirely remodelled on the Soviet plan. As was the case with Knigsberg (Kaliningrad), Narva was inhabited by both different inhabitants and a different ideology after 1945 (Sezneva 2002, p. 48). The previous residents, having been evacuated by the occupying Nazi regime, were not allowed to return by its Soviet successor, and were re placed by workers from neighbouring Russia, who oversaw a process of Soviet-style industrialisation in the region. Today, Estonians make up less than 5% of the towns inhabitants.As part of Narvas change into a Soviet place, new monuments were erected to commemorate the fallen of the Great chauvinistic War and of the brief period of rule by the Estonian Workers Commune.18 altogether remaining traces of the pre-war Estonian Republic were swept away following the Soviet re-conquest of 1944. The 1936 Swedish Lion monument, which had been erected at the approaches to the city during a visit by the Swedish Crown Pri nce, was destroyed by heavy weapon fire and the bronzy lion removed by German forces during their retreat. This monument did not reappear under Soviet rule. The authorities did, however, restore and entertain objects linked to the citys Russian past, such as the two tsarist-era monuments to Russian soldiers killed in the battles of 1700 and 1704.As the movement for Estonian independence gathered momentum between 1988 and 1991, Narva gained a reputation as a bastion of support for the nourishment of Soviet power. The city government that came to office in December 1989 set itself resolutely against political change, demanding autonomy for north-east Estonia within the context of a renewed Soviet federation and, in August 1991, voicing support for the abortive Moscow coup which precipitated the collapse of the USSR. The Council was promptly dissolved in the aftermath of Estonian independence yet, remarkably, its former leaders were allowed to stand in new elections, and were retur ned to power in October 1991, albeit on a turnout of only 30%. As ethnic tensions mounted in Estonia between 1991 and 1993, and Narvas providence went into freefall, local leaders again set themselves in opposition to central government policies that were designed to engineer a decisive political and economic good fortune with the Soviet past. The last stand of the Soviet-era leadership came in the summer of 1993 with fresh local elections scheduled for the autumn, the city government organised an unofficial referendum on local autonomy, in which it gained a 97% majority in favour on an officially proclaimed 55% turnout of local voters. With the national government standing firm and refusing to adjudge the legality of the vote, and no support sociable from neighbouring Russia, a growing section of the local political elite appeared to take over that intransigent opposition to the new state order was blocking any prospect of achieving much needed economic renewal. These circles n ow called upon the existing leadership to give up power peacefully, which it did in October 1993 (Smith 2002b).At the time, the referendum of July 1993 was widely regarded as secessionist in intent. Available evidence, however, would seem to suggest that redrawing physical borders was not on the agenda the aim was rather to tip the overall political chemical equilibrium within Estonia in favour of the Russian-speaking part of the population and, in this way, to bring Estonia as a whole more firmly within the ambit of Russia and the CIS. In this way, the leadership hoped both to retain power and to restore the citys previous economic ties with the East as well as growth new links with the West (Smith 2002b).19 While Soviet constituted the wind identity marker for Estonias Russian-speaking population prior to 1991, this did not foreclose the development of a simultaneous strong identification with the specific territory of the Estonian SSR (widely identified in other republics as the Soviet West or the Soviet Abroad), and with the local place of mansion house. mingled with 1989 and 1991, the movement to bank Estonian sovereignty gained support from a world-shattering minority (perhaps as much as one third) of local Russian-speakers, who could offer to a vision of Estonia as an economic bridge between East and West.Such feelings were by no means absent in Narva, where the 1989 numerate revealed that seven out of 10 residents had actually been born in Estonia (Kirch et al. 1993, p. 177). redden so, the collapse of the USSR needs created something of an identity void as far as Estonias Russian-speakers were concerned. Despite perceptions of discrimination, recent survey work has confirmed a growing identification with the Estonian state (Kolst2002 Budryte 2005 Ehin 2007) as well as significant support for EU membership. Most Russians, however, have scarcely been able to secernate themselves with any notion of Estonian national community, with local pla ce of residence and ethnicity serving as the prime markers of identity (Ehin 2007). Despite having an obvious cultural affinity with Russia and with the transnational Russian community across the territory of the former Soviet Union, a population raised in the different socio-cultural setting of the Baltic has found it hard to conceive of actually living in Russia or to identify politically with the contemporary Russian state. It is with this complex identity that the post-1993 leadership in Narva has had to reckon.The Estonian law on local elections passed in May 1993 stipulated that non-citizens could vote but not stand for office. This excluded much of the local population from desire election, including a substantial proportion of the Soviet-era leadership. Ahead of the October 1993 poll in Narva, however, the state was able to co-opt elements of the local political elite through a process of accelerated naturalisation on the causal agency of special work rendered to the sta te. The elections of October 1993 saw a strong turnout by local voters, and brought to power a coalition of locally based parties and divert groups. The city governments select during the period 1993 2005a period when the national-level Centre Party attained the dominant position within local politicswere far more ready than their predecessors to embrace the new political economy of post-socialism, and thus better placed to cooperate both with central government and with Western partners within the wider Baltic Sea area. In this regard, the commemoration of the Battle of Narva and the trigger of the Swedish Lion can be understood as an endeavor to create a narrative of the citys past capable of underpinning growing ties with Sweden in the present. These ties assumed a particular significance after 1995, when Swedish material firm Boras Wfveri purchased a 75% stake in Narvas historic Kreenholm Mill, then the citys second-largest employer. According to Raivo Murd, the ethnic Est onian who served as Mayor of Narva from 1993 to 1996, the investment was evidence that Narva was finally first gear to shed the Red image that had prevailed under the former political dispensation.20In a clear sign of its determination to break with the Soviet past, the city government appointed in October 1993 removed Estonias last remaining statue of Lenin, which had remained standing in the central Peters Square in Narva during the first two years of Estonian independence. The subsequent period has seen the installation of new monuments commemoratinginter aliathe victims of Stalinist deportations during the 1940s and key moments in the transition to Estonian independence during 1917 20. The Old Narva Society founded by surviving pre-1944 residents of Narva also put up a number of commemorative plaques marking the sites of churches and other key buildings from the pre-war city. yet the post-1993 political eIssues of War Monuments in EstoniaIssues of War Monuments in EstoniaEmpt y Spaces and the Value of Symbols Estonias War of Monuments from Another Angle* This article is the first published output from British Academy small research grant ref. SG-39197, entitled Public Monuments, Commemoration and the Renegotiation of Collective Identities Estonia, Sweden and the Baltic WorldSince the summer of 2004, the new EU member state of Estonia has been in the throes of what is described as a War of Monuments. The events in question began in the town of Lihula in western Estonia, where a veterans group erected a stone tablet commemorating those Estonians who in World War Two donned German uniform and fought on the eastern front against the USSR. Bearing the inscription To Estonian men who fought in 1940 1945 against Bolshevism and for the restoration of Estonian independence, the Lihula stone became the latest of several monuments commemorating a group that most Estonians today regard as freedom fighters. In this case, however, the soldier depicted bore SS insigni a. Hardly surprisingly, this fact elicited widespread international condemnation, notably from Russia, the EU and Jewish organisations. The groups behind the monument insisted that the men in question had had no truck with Nazism, and had only enlisted as a last resort in order to obtain access to arms with which to repel the Soviet invader. The display of the SS insignia nevertheless disregarded the taboo that surrounds the display of Nazi symbols in todays Europe. Also, while the vast majority of Estonian SS legionnaires did indeed sign up only in 1944 as the Soviet army advanced into their homeland, at least some had previously belonged to auxiliary police battalions which have been implicated in Nazi atrocities.1Concerned to limit potential damage to Estonias international reputation, the government of the day ordered the removal of the monument. The police operation to carry out this order on 2 September 2004 nevertheless provoked clashes with local residents, while the politic al fallout from the episode contributed to the fall of Prime Minister Juhan Parts several months later. Critics of the government action argued that if the Lihula monument was to be construed as a glorification of totalitarianism, then the same logic should be applied to Soviet monuments that had been left standing following the restoration of Estonian independence in 1991. Singled out in this regard was the Bronze Soldier on Totildenismgi in central Tallinna post-war monument erected on the unmarked grave of Soviet troops who fell during the taking of the city in 1944. For the vast majority of Estonians, the arrival of the Soviet Army signalled the replacement of one brutal occupying regime by another, which quickly resumed the arrests, executions and large-scale deportations previously witnessed during the first year of Soviet rule in 1940 41. This remains the dominant perception amongst Estonians today. The leaders of post-Soviet Russia, by contrast, have adhered steadfastly to the Soviet-era view of these events as marking the liberation of Estonia from fascism. The defeat of the Nazis during 1941 45 remains central to Russias self-understanding in the post-Soviet era itscurrent leaders emphatically deny that the events of 1940 and 1944 in the Baltic states constituted a Soviet occupation, and refuse to acknowledge the suffering which the inhabitants of these countries experienced at the hands of the Soviet regime. Commentators in Russia have emphasised that they will brook no alternative interpretations of the Soviet Unions role in the events of 1939 45, and have therefore characterised calls for the removal of the Totildenismgi monument as a manifestation of support for fascism.For many of the ethnic Russians who today make up nearly half of Tallinns population, the Bronze Soldier has also remained a locus of identification, providing the site for continued unofficial commemorations on 9 May, which was celebrated as Victory Day during the Soviet perio d. Red paint was thrown over the monument just prior to 9 May 2005, when several other Soviet war memorials were also attacked across the country, and a German military cemetery desecrated in Narva. The following year, this date again elicited tensions local Russian youth mounted round-the-clock surveillance at the Bronze Soldier, while an Estonian nationalist counter-demonstration led to scuffles on 9 May (Alas 2006a). The monument was subsequently cordoned off by police pending a decision on its future. This formed the object of vigorous political debate ahead of the March 2007 parliamentary elections. Matters relating to the establishment and upkeep of public monuments in post-Soviet Estonia have for the most part fallen to local municipalities. In late 2006, however, new legislation was adopted giving central government the power to override local decision making in this regard. This formulation was motivated expressly by a desire to remove the monument and the soldiers remains from the centre of Tallinn to the more peripheral setting of the military cemetery on the citys outskirts (Alas 2006a, 2006b, 2006c Ranname 2006). The subsequent removal of the monument in late April 2007 provided the occasion for large-scale rioting in central Tallinn. On 9 May 2007 hundreds of people visited the monument at its new location in order to lay flowers.Issues of past or memory politics2have assumed a growing prominence in recent scholarly work on Estonia and the other Baltic states, with a number of authors also highlighting the apparently divergent views of the past held by Estonians and Estonian Russians, and the obstacles that this poses in terms of societal integration (Hackmann 2003 Budryte 2005 Onken 2003, 2007a, 2007b). Publicly sited monuments are evidently central to any discussion of such issues as recent events in Estonia have shown, they frequently act as catalysts eliciting both official and unsanctioned expressions of collective identity (Burch 2002a, 20 04).3 Thus far, however, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to monuments within the relevant academic literature on Estonia. This article is intended as a contribution in this regard, but it approaches the issue from a slightly different angle. The War of Monuments has focused political and media attention upon two different cases, one involving a settlement that is predominantly ethnically Estonian by population (Lihula) and the other a capital city (Tallinn) that is almost equally divided between Estonians and Russians. This article shifts the focus to the overwhelmingly Russian-speaking city of Narva, which today sits on Estonias border with the Russian Federation. In particular, our study examines the local politics surrounding the Swedish Lion monument (see Figure 1), which was erected in the city in November 2000 on the 300th anniversary of the Battle of Narva between Sweden and Russia.The Lion monument relates to a past that is far less immediate than the events o f 1940 45, but which, as we demonstrate, is still highly salient to contemporary identity politics within Estonia. How, for instance, was the commemoration of a decisive Swedish victory over Russia framed and debated in a town where ethnic Russians and other Russian-speakers constitute 96% of the population? Equally significantly, todays Lion is depicted as the successor to a similar monument erected in 1936 during the period of Estonias inter-war independence. The reappearance of this symbol could therefore potentially be understood as part of a state-sponsored effort to banish the Soviet past and reconnect with a past Golden Age. Once again, one wonders how this was interpreted by a local population that was established in Narva as a direct consequence of the Soviet takeover and which, by dint of the legal continuity principle, mostly did not obtain the automatic right to Estonian citizenship after 1991.4 Who then decided to erect the Lion monument, and why? What form did the com memoration of November 2000 take, and what are the main lines of public debate that have surrounded it? The current article will address these questions, and will also seek to link the Narva case to broader conceptual issues of identity politics and post-communist transition, particularly the current debate surrounding the possibilities for the development of a tamed liberal/multicultural nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe.5Past politics and post-communismThe dramatic events that have occurred in Europe over the past two decades have entailed a profound redefinition of collective identities at a variety of scalesnational, supranational, regional and local. The end of the Cold War, the demise of the USSR, and the consequent processes of EU and NATO enlargement, all occurring within the overall context of economic globalisation and growing movement of population, have led communities and groups across the continent to revisit existing understandings of who We are and where We a re going. Since historical memory is an essential component in the construction of collective identity, this process has necessarily involved renegotiation of the Past as well as debates concerning the Present and Future. Like all forms of identity politics, such memory work is contested, being embedded in complex power relations that determine what is remembered (or forgotten) by whom, and for what end (Gillis 1994, p. 3). In a similar vein, Graham et al. (2000, pp. 17 18) remind us that heritage is time-specific and thus its meaning(s) can be altered as texts are re-read in changing times, circumstances and constructs of place and scale. Consequently, it is inevitable that such knowledges are also fields of contestation.6Publicly sited monuments offer a particularly useful way into researching this phenomenon, since they provide us with a tangible manifestation of some memory work process. The memorial function of such objects can take the form of carefully choreographed gatheri ngs at times of heightened political awareness, or precise moments of commemorative anniversaries. Wreaths might be laid silence observed political rallies enacted pageants performed. Other actions might be characterised more by spontaneity collective grief at a sudden, tragic event, or an iconoclastic attack on a memorial construed in negative terms. Individuals and groups will attach different, often mutually exclusive meanings to particular monuments. Moreover, such meanings are shifting and contingent what constitutes an eloquent memorial at one particular moment in time (for instance during an annual commemoration) might become a mute, invisible monument for the rest of the year. In this regard, being ignored is as significant as being noticed.7 Political changes in the present can radically alter the import of a memorial, without any physical change on its part. This reiterates that the context of the monument is intrinsic to meaning. Context, however, can also be physically r endered, as with the shifting of a memorial/monument from some focal point to somewhere more peripheral and less visible.Issues of collective identity have proved especially challenging in those states that have been created or recreated following the collapse of the USSR. These are for the most part configured as classic unitary nation states, and yet in nearly all cases, processes of state and nation building have been effectuated on the basis of societies that are deeply polyethnic or multinational in character (Brubaker 1996 Smith et al. 1998 Smith 1999). Moreover, nearly all of the states in question have painful pasts with which they need to come to terms (Budryte 2005, p. 1). In relation to this region, Paul Gready (2003, p. 6) reminds us that stripped of the fossilising force of Cold War politics, nationalism has become central to political transitions, both as a means and an end. Narratives of history that focus exclusively on the titular nationality and its subjugation and suffering at the hands of former colonial regimes invariably elicit opposition from minority groups, which can easily frame their own exclusivist narratives of history along the same lines. Indeed, as the Estonian case exemplifies very well, conflicting narratives of the past can be seen as an integral part of the triadic nexus of nationalist politicsthe relationship between nationalising states, national minorities and external national homelandsdiscerned by Rogers Brubaker in his 1996 work Nationalism Reframed (Pettai 2006).In using the past for present purposes, political and intellectual elites in the Baltic and other Central and Eastern European states have also had to take account of the requirements of integration with the European Union, which in the Estonian and Latvian cases especially, has entailed significant changes to the direction of nation-building (Smith 2002a, 2002b, 2003a, 2003b, 2005 Budryte 2005 Kelley 2004 Galbreath 2005). EU-supported state integration strate gies launched at the start of the twenty-first century have set the goal of creating integrated multicultural democracies which will enable representatives of the large non-titular, non-citizen population to preserve certain aspects of their distinct culture and heritage as they undergo integration into the polity and the dominant societal culture (Lauristin Heidmets 2002). According to a number of authors writing on the politics of the past and of memory, these efforts to promote an integrated multicultural society necessarily require all the parties involved to engage with a process of democratising history. Democratisation in this context would imply that history is no longer used extensively for political purposes, alternative readings are allowed to challenge dominant master narratives, a plurality of guardians of memory is tolerated, and that rather than merely stressing the suffering endured by ones own nation, historical narratives recognise that other groups suffered equal ly, and that the nation in question served as both a bystander and a perpetrator as regards the suffering of others (see Onken 2003, 2007a Budryte 2005).A significant step in this direction came during 1998, when all three Baltic states established historical commissions.8 Composed of academic experts from home and abroad (in the Estonian case exclusively the latter), these bodies have been called upon to produce an independent assessment of events during the Nazi and Soviet occupations of 1940 91, and have already begun to publish their findings (Onken 2007b). However, developments such as the Estonian War on Monuments and the Baltic Russian dispute over the commemoration held in Moscow to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War Two (Onken 2007a) underline the extent to which the past is still underpinning conflictual political dynamics in the present. In this regard, Russias increasing reliance on the Soviet past for nation-building purposes and its indiscriminate blanket accusations of fascist tendencies in the Baltic states prompt Baltic politicians to insist that Soviet communism should join Nazism as one of the great evils against which contemporary European values should be defined.As is the case with other aspects of post-communist transition, however, a focus on the state level tells us only so much about the renegotiation of identity in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe. In this highly complex multi-ethnic environment, the sub-state regional level cannot be disregarded (Batt 2002). A focus on the sub-state level appears especially apposite as far as the study of Estonias public monuments is concerned, for, until now at least, decisions in this area have rested with local rather than with national government. Furthermore, one can point to different political logics that obtain at national and local level. As a result of the citizenship law adopted in the aftermathof independence, ethnic Estonians have constituted a comfortable majority of the national electorate during 1992 2007. The local election law of 1993, however, stipulates that while citizens alone can run for office, all permanent residents have the right to vote, regardless of citizenship status. This has meant that the ethnic composition of the electorate has in some cases been wholly different at municipal level.In this regard, the outright repudiation of the Soviet past displayed by local elites in Lihula stands in marked contrast to trends observable in the capital Tallinn, where Russian-speakers make up almost half the population, and Russian and pro-Russian parties, such as the Centre Party (Keskerakond), have been able to obtain a significant foothold in local politics. This contrast became evident not least in 1995, when the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II brought calls for the removal of the Bronze Soldier. The city council, however, tried instead to imbue this monument with an alternative meaning a Soviet-era plaque re ferring to the liberation of Tallinn by the Red Army in 1944 was replaced by one that reads simply to the fallen of World War Two. This step can be read as an effort to inculcate some kind of shared understanding of a highly contentious past within a deeply multi-ethnic setting. What trends, however, can one identify in the more homogeneously Russian periphery that is Narva?Estonias new best friend. The rediscovery of Estonias Swedish past The return of the Swedish Lion monument to Narva, as one local newspaper described it (Sommer-Kalda 2000), can be seen in many ways as the culmination of a process of Swedish re-engagement with the eastern Baltic Near Abroad that began in 1990 with the establishment of a Swedish consulate in Tallinn. With considerable financial resources now being made available to support processes of economic and political transition in Estonia, Swedish cultural attach Hans Lepp began to explore how past cultural links might be utilised in the service of what he has termed soft diplomacy.9Historic ties with Scandinavia have assumed an important place within the discourse of the ruling ethnic Estonian political elite since the 1990s, where they have been used to support the notion of a Return to Europeor, more broadly, a Return to the Western World following the end of Soviet occupation (Lauristin et al. 1997 Smith 2001, 2003a, 2003b). Within this framework, the period 1561 1710, when Sweden progressively extended its dominion over much of the territory of present-day Estonia and Latvia, is remembered as the Happy Swedish time, which is said to have brought about a considerable improvement in the lot of the Estonian peasantry, before serfdom was returned to its former rigour following entry to the Russian empire. Hans Lepp and his diplomatic colleagues were alive to the possibility of trading on this feeling of goodwill in order to make Sweden Estonias best friend in the Baltic region, with all that this implied in terms of political and e conomic influence.10It quickly became apparent, however, that Swedish assistance was most needed in Narva and its surrounding region of Ida-Virumaa. Quite apart from the socio-economic and environmentalchallenges posed by this largely Russian-populated border region, rising nationalism in neighbouring Russia raised the prospect that the local inhabitants might look eastwards towards Moscow rather than westwards towards Tallinn, with drastic implications for regional stability and security.11 In this specific context history had particular potential as a resource, given the important place of the Battle of Narva of 1700 within the Swedish historical imagination. Although the opening salvo in a disastrous war that saw the Baltic provinces ceded to Russia,12 the first Battle of Narva was nevertheless a remarkable victory by the troops of King Charles XII (often referred to as the Lion of the North) against the numerically superior forces of Peter the Great. In this respect, Eldar Efend iev, who as Mayor of Narva planned the November 2000 commemoration of the battle, claimed in an interview with the authors that Swedes know three datesthe birthday of Gustav Vasa the birthday of the present King and the date of the Battle of Narva.13 The significance of the latter event had been seen already in the inter-war period with the installation of a Lion monument on the battlefield site in 1936.14 Already prior to his appointment as cultural attach in 1990, Hans Leppthen Curator of the art collections at the Swedish Royal Palace in Stockholmsuggested to Efendiev (at that time Head of the Narva Museum) that the restoration of the Lion monument might help to foster closer ties between Narva and Sweden in the present. Lepp subsequently pursued the idea of restoring the Lion with Narva city council in his roles as Swedish cultural attach to Estonia and member of the Swedish Institute. Not surprisingly, however, planning the commemoration of a decisive Swedish victory over Russi a was a potentially fraught endeavour in a town where Russian-speakers now made up 96% of the population.Narva Eastern, Western or in-between?The more essentialising geopolitical discourses of the post-Cold War era would see Narva as sitting on the westward side of the border that divides Western Christianity from Eastern Orthodoxy. Those who discern a Huntingdonian civilisational fault line between Estonia and Russia could point by way of evidence to the presence of two great fortressesone German, one Russianon the respective banks of the Narova River that separates Narva from its neighbouring settlement of Ivangorod and which today marks the state border with the Russian Federation. Not unnaturally, however, the citys past is rather more complex. As noted on the current website of the city government, Narva has not merely served as a defensive outpost and site of struggle between competing regional powers, but has also constituted a locus for trade and interaction between West and East, not least during the period when the city belonged to the Hanseatic League.15 From its foundation in the twelfth century to 1558, Narva did indeed constitute the easternmost point of the province of Estland, which was ruled first by the Danes and later by the German Livonian Order. Neighbouring Ivangorod takes its name from Tsar Ivan III, who ordered the construction of a fortress on the western border of his realm following Muscovys annexation of Novgorod in the late fifteenth century. Muscovy subsequently conquered Narva during the mid-sixteenth century Livonian wars, controlling the city from 1558 to 1581. The city then came under Swedish rule for 120 years following the Livonian Wars, a period which is described on the webpage of todays city government as Narvas Golden Age.16For nearly three and a half centuries, Narva and Ivangorod functioned in effect as a single composite settlement, first under Swedish rule and then later during the tsarist period, when Narva came und er the joint jurisdiction of the Estland and Saint Petersburg Gubernii of the Russian Empire. The conjoined status of the two towns persisted after 1917, when the inhabitants of the Narva district voted in a July referendum to join the province of Estland created following the February Revolution.17 After a brief spell of Bolshevik control during late 1918 to early 1919, when Narva functioned as the seat of the abortive Estonian Workers Commune, both towns were incorporated into the Estonian Republic under the terms of the 1920 Treaty of Tartu. It was only after the Soviet occupation in 1945 that the border was redrawn so as to place Ivangorod in the territory of the Russian Republic of the USSR. Although this division was little more than an administrative formality within a Soviet context, the frontier revision set the scene for the establishment of a fully functioning state border between the two towns after 1992.The Narva that emerged from the Soviet period is almost completely unrecognisable from the one that existed prior to World War Two. Previously characterised as the baroque jewel of Northern Europe, the city was quite literally reduced to rubble in 1944 during fierce fighting between German and Soviet forces in eastern Estonia. While at least some historic buildingsnotably the castle and the town hallwere restored, the ruins were for the most part demolished and the city entirely remodelled on the Soviet plan. As was the case with Knigsberg (Kaliningrad), Narva was inhabited by both different inhabitants and a different ideology after 1945 (Sezneva 2002, p. 48). The previous residents, having been evacuated by the occupying Nazi regime, were not allowed to return by its Soviet successor, and were replaced by workers from neighbouring Russia, who oversaw a process of Soviet-style industrialisation in the region. Today, Estonians make up less than 5% of the towns inhabitants.As part of Narvas transformation into a Soviet place, new monuments were erec ted to commemorate the fallen of the Great Patriotic War and of the brief period of rule by the Estonian Workers Commune.18 All remaining traces of the pre-war Estonian Republic were swept away following the Soviet re-conquest of 1944. The 1936 Swedish Lion monument, which had been erected at the approaches to the city during a visit by the Swedish Crown Prince, was destroyed by artillery fire and the bronze lion removed by German forces during their retreat. This monument did not reappear under Soviet rule. The authorities did, however, restore and maintain objects linked to the citys Russian past, such as the two tsarist-era monuments to Russian soldiers killed in the battles of 1700 and 1704.As the movement for Estonian independence gathered momentum between 1988 and 1991, Narva gained a reputation as a bastion of support for the maintenance of Soviet power. The city government that came to office in December 1989 set itself resolutely against political change, demanding autonomy for north-east Estonia within the context of a renewed Soviet federation and, in August 1991, voicing support for the abortive Moscow coup which precipitated the collapse of the USSR. The Council was promptly dissolved in the aftermath of Estonian independence yet, remarkably, its former leaders were allowed to stand in new elections, and were returned to power in October 1991, albeit on a turnout of only 30%. As ethnic tensions mounted in Estonia between 1991 and 1993, and Narvas economy went into freefall, local leaders again set themselves in opposition to central government policies that were designed to engineer a decisive political and economic break with the Soviet past. The last stand of the Soviet-era leadership came in the summer of 1993 with fresh local elections scheduled for the autumn, the city government organised an unofficial referendum on local autonomy, in which it gained a 97% majority in favour on an officially proclaimed 55% turnout of local voters. With the n ational government standing firm and refusing to acknowledge the legality of the vote, and no support forthcoming from neighbouring Russia, a growing section of the local political elite appeared to accept that intransigent opposition to the new state order was blocking any prospect of achieving much needed economic renewal. These circles now called upon the existing leadership to give up power peacefully, which it did in October 1993 (Smith 2002b).At the time, the referendum of July 1993 was widely regarded as secessionist in intent. Available evidence, however, would seem to suggest that redrawing physical borders was not on the agenda the aim was rather to tip the overall political balance within Estonia in favour of the Russian-speaking part of the population and, in this way, to bring Estonia as a whole more firmly within the ambit of Russia and the CIS. In this way, the leadership hoped both to retain power and to restore the citys previous economic ties with the East as well as developing new links with the West (Smith 2002b).19 While Soviet constituted the principal identity marker for Estonias Russian-speaking population prior to 1991, this did not preclude the development of a simultaneous strong identification with the specific territory of the Estonian SSR (widely identified in other republics as the Soviet West or the Soviet Abroad), and with the local place of residence. Between 1989 and 1991, the movement to assert Estonian sovereignty gained support from a significant minority (perhaps as much as one third) of local Russian-speakers, who could subscribe to a vision of Estonia as an economic bridge between East and West.Such feelings were by no means absent in Narva, where the 1989 census revealed that seven out of 10 residents had actually been born in Estonia (Kirch et al. 1993, p. 177). Even so, the collapse of the USSR inevitably created something of an identity void as far as Estonias Russian-speakers were concerned. Despite perceptions of discrimination, recent survey work has confirmed a growing identification with the Estonian state (Kolst2002 Budryte 2005 Ehin 2007) as well as significant support for EU membership. Most Russians, however, have scarcely been able to identify themselves with any notion of Estonian national community, with local place of residence and ethnicity serving as the prime markers of identity (Ehin 2007). Despite having an obvious cultural affinity with Russia and with the transnational Russian community across the territory of the former Soviet Union, a population raised in the different socio-cultural setting of the Baltic has found it hard to conceive of actually living in Russia or to identify politically with the contemporary Russian state. It is with this complex identity that the post-1993 leadership in Narva has had to reckon.The Estonian law on local elections passed in May 1993 stipulated that non-citizens could vote but not stand for office. This excluded much of the local populat ion from seeking election, including a substantial proportion of the Soviet-era leadership. Ahead of the October 1993 poll in Narva, however, the state was able to co-opt elements of the local political elite through a process of accelerated naturalisation on the grounds of special services rendered to the state. The elections of October 1993 saw a strong turnout by local voters, and brought to power a coalition of locally based parties and interest groups. The city governments elected during the period 1993 2005a period when the national-level Centre Party attained the dominant position within local politicswere far more ready than their predecessors to embrace the new political economy of post-socialism, and thus better placed to cooperate both with central government and with Western partners within the wider Baltic Sea area. In this regard, the commemoration of the Battle of Narva and the installation of the Swedish Lion can be understood as an attempt to create a narrative of the citys past capable of underpinning growing ties with Sweden in the present. These ties assumed a particular significance after 1995, when Swedish textile firm Boras Wfveri purchased a 75% stake in Narvas historic Kreenholm Mill, then the citys second-largest employer. According to Raivo Murd, the ethnic Estonian who served as Mayor of Narva from 1993 to 1996, the investment was proof that Narva was finally beginning to shed the Red image that had prevailed under the former political dispensation.20In a clear sign of its determination to break with the Soviet past, the city government appointed in October 1993 removed Estonias last remaining statue of Lenin, which had remained standing in the central Peters Square in Narva during the first two years of Estonian independence. The subsequent period has seen the installation of new monuments commemoratinginter aliathe victims of Stalinist deportations during the 1940s and key moments in the transition to Estonian independence during 1917 20. The Old Narva Society founded by surviving pre-1944 residents of Narva also put up a number of commemorative plaques marking the sites of churches and other key buildings from the pre-war city.Yet the post-1993 political e