They Wore Uniforms

East German politician Margot Honecker and Angela Davis at the communist World Festival of Youth and Students. Photo courtesy of Ullstein Bild, Getty Images, and the Wall Street Journal

In yesterday’s edition, the Wall Street Journal revealed the grim truth about actually existing socialism.

“In the Atrium Gallery, the Regimes Museum displays uniforms, flags, posters and other paraphernalia from East Germany. Not only soldiers, sailors and police wore military-style uniforms. So did postmen, bus and streetcar operators, volunteer firefighters and members of the Red Cross.” (Joseph D’Hippolito, “Angela Davis, East Germany and Fullerton,” Wall Street Journal, June 27, 2019)

Mr. D’Hippolito might be interested to know that East Berlin actually had streetcar operators because it actually had streetcars. The last tram made its last run in West Berlin in October 1967. Since reunification, the city’s transport authority has tentatively expanded a few of the East Berlin lines into West Berlin, but there are bigger plans afoot for expanding the city’s “half of a tram network.”

Nevertheless, Berlin has the third longest streetcar system in the world, after Melbourne and Petersburg. I have no clue about what has been going on in Melbourne, but Petersburg has spent many of the last thirty some years devastating its network, once the longest in the world. Trams there have had to give way, as they did in West Berlin, to private cars, thus exacerbating climate change.

But capitalism is superior to socialism, no?

Watch this space for “Was There Life on Mars?”, my report on East Berlin: Half a Capital, a terrific exhibition currently on view at the Ephraim Palace in Berlin-Mitte.

Needless to say, the exhibition’s curators have a slightly more sophisticated take on life under socialism than the WSJ could ever imagine. Tellingly, the day I visited, all the other visitors were my age and older and had the bearing and look of East Germans, meaning they were revisiting their childhoods and youths.

I doubt what they were feeling was the much-dreaded or much-celebrated “Ostalgia,” but something more akin to surprise. After all, the planet on which they were born and grew up disappeared in the twinkling of an eye. Since there was an extraordinarily large, determined grassroots resistance and reform movement in East Germany in the seventies and eighties, a movement wholly or almost wholly absent in West Germany, the country and the world lost a lot when the capitalist vacuum cleaner simply sucked up the country after 1989.

In Berlin, one effect has been the extraordinarily intense gentrification of many former East Berlin districts, especially Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg, and Friedrichshain. As I discovered recently, however, there are pockets of wholesale gentrification as far east as Friedrichshagen, now a picture-perfect bourgeois colony for West Germans.

You do find yourself wondering where all the pre-1989 inhabitants of these places have gone.

In Fullerton, California, however, they are still fighting “communism,” something that never existed in any case {TRR}

One Solution: Demolition

4561128 — Sculptor Salavat Shcherbakov putting the final touches on his monument to weapons designer Mikhail Kalashnikov. Photo courtesy of Valery Sharifulin/TASS

Sergey Abashin
Facebook
September 19, 2017

Everything about the new monument in Moscow is disgusting. Once again, it is huge, and it shows us a non-military man holding a rifle. As an obvious symbol of militarism, it looks savage in the downtown of a major city. And then there is the very man the monument commemorates, who besides giving his surname to a lucrative arms brands apparently did nothing else for his country, let alone for a city in which he never lived.

Debates are underway about what to do with monuments when the context in which we view them has changed. Should we demolish them? We are not obliged to destroy them: we could move them to places where their symbolic baggage vanishes. Or would it be better to recode monuments where they stand by building something around them and thus imparting a new meaning to them? In my opinion, we have no choice in this case. There is no way to remedy this abomination. It can only be demolished.

Sergey Abashin is British Petroleum Professor of Migration Studies at the European University in St. Petersburg. His most recent book is Sovetskii kishlak: Mezhdu kolonializmom i modernizatsiei [The Soviet Central Asian village: between colonialism and modernization], Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2015. Translated by the Russian Reader

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Moscow To Unveil Statue Of AK-47 Inventor Mikhail Kalashnikov
Tom Balmforth
RFE/RL
September 18, 2017

75AC53AB-0E8F-47DE-BC13-452E78BD5FBF_w1023_r1_s The 7.5-meter tall statue to Mikhail Kalashnikov, which stands on a northern intersection of the Garden Ring around central Moscow.

MOSCOW — After several false starts and some grumbling from locals, a prominent statue of a gun-toting Mikhail Kalashnikov, designer of one of the world’s most ubiquitous weapons of war, is set to be unveiled in an official ceremony in the Russian capital on September 19.

The 7.5-meter metal likeness — still covered in plastic — features Kalashnikov cradling his eponymous AK-47 assault rifle and looking west down the Garden Ring that loops around central Moscow.

The statue was hoisted onto its plinth over the weekend beside a new business center.

A second metalwork sculpture, of St. George slaying a dragon with a spear tipped with a rifle sight with AK-47 written on it, stands nearby.

The Kalashnikov statues’ sculptor, Salavat Shcherbakov, is also the artist behind a towering 17-meter statue of Prince Vladimir the Great that was erected — amid controversy — outside the Kremlin in November at a ceremony attended by President Vladimir Putin.

A4E87823-7F31-405E-A58C-7FE440CBDC33_w650_r0_s Russian sculptor Salavat Shcherbakov presents a model for a monument to Mikhail Kalashnikov, Russian designer of the AK-47 assault rifle, at his workshop in Moscow on November 10, 2016.

Shcherbakov told TASS news agency that the rifle was added to his original plan for the Kalashnikov statue because people might not recognize him without his signature contribution to the Soviet Army.

“So we dared to include the rifle after all,” Shcherbakov said.

Other prominent statues in the vicinity include statues to poets Alexander Pushkin and Vladimir Mayakovsky.

Russian Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky presented plans to Putin for the Kalashnikov statue in September 2016 during a tour of the Kalashnikov arms manufacturer, headquartered in Izhevsk, the capital of the republic of Udmurtia.

The project was backed by the Russian Military-Historic Society, which is chaired by Medinsky and Rostec, the state weapons and technology conglomerate run by powerful Putin ally Sergei Chemezov.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, Medinsky, Chemezov, and Kalashnikov’s daughter, Yelena Kalashnikova, were expected to attend the unveiling ceremony on September 19.

The statue was originally meant to be unveiled on January 21, marking the day in 1948 when Soviet Defense Minister Dmitry Ustinov signed a decree ordering the construction of an experimental batch of Kalashnikov rifles.

But the ceremony was moved because of inclement weather to May 8, ahead of Victory Day, and then to September 19, Gunmaker Day.

Not everyone is on board with the project.

7926FEAF-D770-479A-84A0-0FB57CC87D96_w650_r0_s Mikhail Kalashnikov with one of his fabled assault rifles in 2006.

Veronika Dolina, a local resident, posted a photograph of an apparent protester at the still-shrouded Kalashnikov statue holding a sign that said, “No to weapons, no to war.” She wrote: “Man at Kalashnikov pedestal. Humble hero, no posing.”

21731069_1536832173044144_5241152260190270688_n — “No to weapons, no to war.” Photo courtesy of Veronika Dolina/Facebook

Resident Natalya Seina told 360, a local media outlet, “This is not artistic, to put it mildly. This is trash. It’s loathsome.” She also noted how Kalashnikov had lived his life in Izhevsk, not Moscow, unlike playwright Anton Chekhov and poet Aleksandr Pleshchev. “These are probably more worthy people than the creator of a rifle.”

There are estimated to be as many as 200 million Kalashnikov rifles around the world —prompting one expert to label it “the Coca-Cola of small arms” — and they are manufactured in dozens of countries.

Mikhail Kalashnikov died in 2013 at the age of 94.

To All the “Antifascists” Out There, from Petrograd

The sticker reads, in part, “Work for ethnic Russians.” Photographed by The Russian Reader in the Petersburg subway.

A young Petersburg leftist, A.N., made the following comment on his Facebook page earlier today. What he says here is obvious to anyone with a brain and elementary powers of observation who has been living in Russia the past five or ten years (if not longer), but it had to be said now. People outside Russia who don’t understand these “alphabetical truths” (home truths), as the Russians say, should refrain from commenting on “the situation” in Ukraine and Russia.

It’s been funny watching as people absolutely incapable of doing anything at home in Russia have been vigorously calling for the “restoration of order” in a neighboring country, Ukraine. Day and night, they have been seeking out “fascists,” provocateurs, and victims on Maidan and in Crimea, while paying no attention to what has been happening right under their own noses.

The only thing these latter-day “antifascists” want to avoid seeing is that there has been fascism here in Russia for a long time already. It has been manifested in assaults on migrants, in the ongoing homophobic hysteria, in flagrant censorship, in cutbacks to social services, in political show trials and folks sent to prison for political or trade union activism, in the implantation of right-wing reactionary views in society, in increasing social stratification, in insane laws passed with such speed we don’t have time to react to them, and in many other things.

But this is of no interest to anyone, because it’s not a YouTube video or a comment on Facebook, and basically we got used to all of it long ago. And it’s okay: life goes on. And now our neighbors in Ukraine can get used to it, too.

“In short, all those who traditionally cause problems for the police”

You’ll be hard pressed, for better or worse, to find much of anything in the English-language press (except, tellingly, in The Daily Mail) about this past weekend’s clashes between people defending the Rote Flora cultural center in Hamburg and the police, but the hyper-reactionary Russian mainstream media has been furiously sending out foaming-at-the-mouth dispatches to its subjugated target audience that include telltale verbal gems like this:

Здание оккупировали леворадикальные группировки, иммигранты, панки, рокеры, бездомные — в общем, все те, кто традиционно доставляет проблемы полиции.

(“The building was occupied by radical leftist groups, immigrants, punks, rockers, homeless people—in short, all those who traditionally cause problems for the police.”)

Meanwhile, at Putinist state-controlled cable network RT, the best friend of “anti-imperialist” rebuhlooshinaries the world over since 2005, you can purchase video footage of the clashes starting at fifty euros.