Monuments to Lenin in the post-Soviet cultural landscape

Abstract

ABSTRACT Landscape semiotics can be explored by focusing on Vladimir Lenin, whose likeness once graced more than 14,000 toponyms, museums, statues and monuments. During the Soviet period, Lenin monuments reflected a symbolic language linking communist power and ideology to particular sculptural characteristics. After 1991, the significance of Lenin statues took multiple paths of evolution in what Lotman would call “explosion.” Depending on the geographical and political context, Lenin’s statues took on different sorts of “afterlife.” They were variously: (a) preserved and left in place to symbolize the legitimacy of post-Soviet elites, (b) taken for granted but permitted to deteriorate, (c) removed, relocated or destroyed to indicate the end of Soviet occupation, and (d) captured and reworked for use in place promotion and capitalist marketing. These various semiotic trajectories demonstrate a Lotmanian “explosion,” evident in the post-Soviet landscapes of Russia, the former Soviet Republics, and the West.