Journal of Baltic Studies

ISSN: 0162-9778 (Print) 1751-7877 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbal20

From sacrum to profanum: reinterpretation of

communist places of power in Baltic cities
Mariusz Czepczyski & Helen Soovli-Sepping
To cite this article: Mariusz Czepczyski & Helen Soovli-Sepping (2016) From sacrum to
profanum: reinterpretation of communist places of power in Baltic cities, Journal of Baltic
Studies, 47:2, 239-255, DOI: 10.1080/01629778.2015.1102154
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01629778.2015.1102154

Published online: 17 Nov 2015.

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Date: 10 November 2016, At: 01:13

JOURNAL OF BALTIC STUDIES, 2016

VOL. 47, NO. 2, 239255
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01629778.2015.1102154

From sacrum to profanum: reinterpretation

of communist places of power in Baltic cities
Mariusz Czepczyskia and Helen Soovli-Seppingb
a

Institute of Geography, Spatial Management Department, University of Gdask, Gdask, Poland;

School of Humanities, Centre for Landscape and Culture, Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia

ABSTRACT

Places always represent the social and cultural dimensions of societies, seen through
relationships between ideas, beliefs, and hopes. Places and their social practices are
interwoven into the urban fabric and have become vital components of urban and
ideological identities. Ideological systems create unique arrangements and classications of those special places, which can be called hallowed or profaned. This
project focuses on the recent transformation of the communist system of sacral
spaces and their recent profanation. The transformation of meaning, together with
the use and attitude toward landscape, has become visible due to spatial and
functional manifestations of post-socialist cities.
ARTICLE HISTORY Received 17 February 2013; Accepted 22 January 2015
KEYWORDS Cultural landscape; post-socialism; sacrum; place; CentralEastern Europe; Baltic; social semiotics

Introduction
The fall of the Berlin Wall led to the need to redene and re-contextualize state socialist
spaces. The projects of post-socialist national and local reconstruction have been, rst
and foremost, about rejecting the Soviet/socialist past, reclaiming the historical homeland and reconnecting with the Western World following decades of isolation (Lauristin,
et al. 1997; Kasekamp 2010; Tamm 2013). The spatial re-imaging and re-writing of state
histories have brought about a boom in studies and discussions, both in CentralEastern
European and in Anglo-American academic literature, in terms of how dierent nationalities perceive changes in urban spaces, and in how new identities are being created
through new iconographies in urban space (Osborne 1998; Forest and Johnson 2002;
Hoelscher and Alderman 2004; Czepczyski 2008; DeLyser 2008; Stachel 2008; Sarmento
2009; Lindstrm, et al. 2012). In line with the ideas of Forest, Johnson, and Till (2004),
there is a need to study the national, international, and transnational contexts of public
memory in any given society, as they have had profound inuences on the negotiation
and denition of places of memory. Sidaway and Mayell (2007), in their study on
monumental geographies, urge a focus on ocial memorialization, as this work explores
the ways in which the entire layout and function of a city, and its distribution of
monuments and public buildings, can often become an exercise in ideology and
power (see Figure 1). Foote (2003) and Marshall (2004) have among others explored
CONTACT Helen Soovli-Sepping
2015 Journal of Baltic Studies

helen.soovali@tlu.ee

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M. CZEPCZYSKI AND H. SOOVLI-SEPPING

Figure 1. Axis mundi of the whole communist universe was Lenins mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow.
Nomenklatura, the communist elite, welcomed the participants of parades from the stairs of the mausoleum.
The mausoleum has been covered with decorations in recent parades indicating the loss of V. I. Lenins
signicance in current state propaganda. Photo: Helen Soovli-Sepping, May 2010.

how time erodes meaningful places and gives rise to new memorials by certain groups
and communities.
After the collapse of state socialism in Europe and the decline of formerly centrally
controlled regulatory mechanisms, the cities of Eastern Europe were faced with radical
changes in their development (Axenov, Brade, and Bondarchuk 2006). The post-socialist
cities changed their economies, politics, infrastructure, legal system, lifestyles and
cultures, and landscapes. The changes by post-socialist cities are all broadly described,
and often in the context of transforming the national identities, in both national and
international literature (Born and Gentile 2007). The functional and aesthetic transformation of cultural landscape has been facilitated by semiotic transformation, rather
poorly discussed in contemporary academic writings (for few studies see Born 2009;
Palang and Soovli-Sepping 2012; Printsmann 2015; Soovli-Sepping, Reinert, and MilesWatson 2015). To deal with that gap, this paper studies the discursive circulation of
communism and its deconstruction in both rhetoric and forms conveyed in the cultural
landscape. The circular reference of the idea of communism contends how the idea has
been expressed and spread throughout former Eastern bloc states as well as discusses
the fate of the buildings, monuments, and spaces. Here, the landscape plays a vital role,
as Daniels and Cosgrove (1988, 8) have stated . . .landscape seems less like a palimpsest
whose real or authentic meanings can somehow be recovered with correct techniques, theories and ideologies (see also Della Dora and Soovli 2009). To open up those
techniques and theories we start by introducing theoretical standpoints and lean on
Eliades model of spatial structure. Eliades model helps to structure the logic of socialist
space. We then move on to apply the model by exploring the processes of Central and
Eastern European de-memorialization practices that serve to legitimize state power,
illustrated by spatial transformation in post-communist cities. We address the physical
and transcendent changes in the cityscape and point out the reasons and arguments for
these changes. Emphasis is placed on a number of key aspects of the urban landscape:

JOURNAL OF BALTIC STUDIES

241

main squares and street names, as well as public buildings and statues. As such, this
study follows the ideas of grounded theory, inuenced by symbolic interactionism
(Blumer 1969), looking systematically at qualitative data aiming at the generation of
theory (Charmaz 2009). The meaning of places is derived from, and arises out of, the
social interaction. These meanings are handled in, and modied through, an interpretive
process used by the authors in dealing with the thing we encounter. Hence, we have
categorized the transformations into four discursive practices: that of de-communization, de-sacralization, re-signication, and individualization. By adopting a constructivist
grounded theory approach, we can move grounded theory methods further into the
realm of interpretive social science consistent with an emphasis on meaning, without
assuming the existence of a one-dimensional external reality (Charmaz 2000, 521). The
study draws on eldwork projects and in situ comparisons analysis of historical maps by
both authors from 2005 and 20072012, complemented by formal and informal interviews and media reports that serve as background material. We conclude by opening
up a discussion on the possible signicance of analyzing communist and post-communist landscapes in wider transnational spatial processes.
From its very beginning, the communist powers were involved in creation of the
representational system, visible and clear for the masses. Communist rituals and ritual
spaces had been generated to empower, visualize, and construct new social, cultural,
and political reality (Benton 1995). Metaphorically speaking, we could draw parallels
between Communist and Christian ceremonial practices. We could even assume that
whilst the aggressive and violent anti-sacral dogma, the Party and state apparatus,
copied numerous rituals, mostly somehow transforming Christian ceremonies and
rites, making new modes of baptizing, marriage, conrmation, funerals, facilitated by
processions, banners, messes, buildings, and respected celebrations. There had been
special, civil rituals created to replace Christening (in Poland the procedure was called
civic Christening), as an ocial name-giving ritual, the same happened at every step of
life: such as civic conrmations in Pioneers camps or at schools. Specially designed
palaces had been built to meet the new demand for sacral functions in atheist
semiotic, especially for weddings, when just signed contract at the desk did not meet
expectations for the newlywed and their families. Wedding Palaces had been adopted
and constructed, like the famous church-looking Ritual (Ceremonial) Palace in Tbilisi,
Georgia. The wedding rites had been accomplished with ceremonial meetings at the
important (often communist) monuments and places, like the Commemoration
Complex Maarjame memorial dedicated to victims of WWII (up to today widely
known in urban lore as impotents dream) in Tallinn, while the habit of a picture
session in front of the local Lenin statue is still being practiced in many Russian cities.
The politically laden rituals were to embrace practically all the aspects of social life, and
meet the cultural expectations, previously fullled by religious institutions. Therefore, we
could argue that communist ritual practices and places became often, in a sense,
Christian in form, and Communist in matter.
The shift from communist sacral to capitalist vernacular spaces is nowhere more
visible than in port cities, where heavy industries have been replaced by leisure and
tourism, and political powers by investors motivations. Port cities have always been
very atypical but representative urban structures. These cities are often more open,
more exible, but also more vulnerable in terms of internal and external social, economic, and cultural change hence the focus of our study on port cities. Many sociocultural and economic processes happened there earlier or more intensively than in

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inland areas. Baltic cities create a unique but, to some extent, emblematic mlange of
post-socialist representations, old and new places and meanings. At the same time,
Baltic cases show immense variability: from the closed former military enclave of
Kaliningrad, to the German peripheral city of Rostock, to Polands new entrepreneurship
and liberal stronghold of Gdask, to the new state capitals of Riga, Tallinn, and Vilnius.
Similar processes experienced in dierentiated milieu help to synthesize and understand
ongoing processes. Through examples from chosen locations around the Baltic area, we
have with the help of grounded theory categorized the processes into ve discursive
practices of landscape cleansing, reinterpretation, and the functional and formal repositioning of former urban centers and structures of power.

Eliades model of spatial structure

Human existential space is always subjectively centralized, while some are externalized
as reference points for the surrounding environments or milieu (Norberg-Schulz 1971).
Centralization is inherently related to its opposite: the peripheries. If the central can be
seen as sacral, then the peripheral becomes profane. Durkheim (1965) considered the
dichotomy between the sacred and the profane to be the central characteristic of
any system of beliefs. The sacred represents the interests of the group (especially the
need for unity), which were embodied in sacred group symbols; the profane, on the
other hand, involves mundane individual concerns. Eliade (1971) argues that religions
rest on a sharp distinction between the sacred and the profane; whether it takes the
form of gods, mythical ancestors, heroes or founding fathers, the sacred contains all
reality, or value, and other things acquire reality only to the extent that they participate in the sacred. Aron (1957) broadens the denition of the sacred to include
ideological thoughts in general, and calls ideology the opium of the intellectuals,
exercised by secular clericalism, political myths, and the idolatry of history.
Eliades (1961) understanding of the sacral centers on his concept of hierophany, or
the manifestation of the sacred. This manifestation is often spatial, and takes the form
of a holy or transcendent place (for a topology of sacred places, see Claval 2001, 140;
see also; Cosgrove 1984, 2008, 54). Hierophanies give structure and orientation to the
world, establishing a consecrated order. The profane space can only be divided up
geometrically; it has no qualitative dierentiation and, hence, no orientation is given
by virtue of its inherent structure (Eliade 1961, 22). Thus, profane space provides the
human being with no pattern for his or her behavior. In contrast to profane space, the
site of a hierophany has a sacred structure to which a believer conforms himself.
The need for hierarchies and to centralize space is as old as civilization; the world
has always been something with a middle, the most important place. This place is
often called the axis mundi, and expresses a point of connection between sky and
earth where the four compass directions meet. At this place, communication from
lower realms may ascend to higher ones and blessings from higher realms may
descend to lower ones, and be disseminated to all (Eliade 1991). This spot functions
as the omphalos, the navel, the worlds point of beginning (Eliade 1971). It may take
the form of a natural object or a product of human manufacture, such as a tower, a
maypole, or a pillar. Its proximity to heaven may carry implications that are chiey
religious or at least symbolic and transcendent, as with many obelisks, monuments,
and skyscrapers (Chevalier and Gheerbrandt 1996). As Eliade (1991, 39) observed
every microcosm, every inhabited region, has a center; that is to say, a place that is

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243

sacred above all. The symbol can operate in a number of locales at once. Sacred
places constitute world ideological or symbolic centers, with places of worship or
practice. The axis mundi symbolism is continually evoked in modern societies. The idea
has proven especially consequential in the realm of architecture. Capital (or literally:
head) buildings, as the direct descendants of palaces and cathedrals, ll this role, as do
commemorative structures, for example memorials and monuments. Such buildings
come to be regarded as centers of inhabited areas, or even the world, and serve as
icons of ideals (Dupr 2008). As such, these centers articulate and materialize spatiality
of cultural transformation, along with ideological and economic circulation. Such
iconographic symbols become models and occur throughout the world; thus they
are re-interpreted in several ways (see e.g. Jackson and Della Dora 2009).

The importance of new sacral spaces of urban socialism

Forms, functions, and meanings of the urban landscape appeared to be perfect media
to communicate the relationship of power, as well as new aesthetics and styles (for
more, see Goldzamt and Szwidkowski 1987; Rembowska 1998; Satjukow and Gries
2002). Questions of spatial organization and urban planning were often discussed by
communist elites, including such names as Engels, Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. The newly
created landscape, in line with communist instructions, was usually monumental, to
be easily understood for the masses. Space served the ideological apparatus and, like
other modes of life, such as the ocial art of that time, it had to be accessible to the
masses on the level of form, although its content and goals were ideologically
determined and aimed at re-educating the masses (Groys 2008, 146). State socialism
was characterized by a general ideologization of nearly every aspect of social life, and
there was no exception in urban design and the cultural landscape (Czepczyski 2008).
Socialism, as an ideological system, was based on various myths, connected with
beliefs, idolatries, specic sancta and their rites (ukasiewicz 1996). Socialist rites
required objects of celebrations and particular spaces of celebrations, both of which
were created in socialist cities: the socialist gods were produced, together with a
whole pantheon of socialist heroes, celebrated according to a ritualized cult (Unfried
1996; Satjukow and Gries 2002). The socialist pantheon can be divided into two
categories: allegorical abstract concepts and idolized people (Rembowska 1998). The
Revolution was considered to be the prime god and divided the universe into bad,
before it, and good, which came after the October Revolution. Many monuments and
sanctuaries were erected to worship the Revolution, often in dominant positions in the
urban structure, located on main squares or exhibited on the border of green areas.
The Communist Party was the other abstract god, present in socialist landscapes, in
houses of the Party1 as its local headquarters was ephemerally called. The other
category of celebrated people included mainly the establishing fathers of the communist system: Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin. Their cult was hierarchic, changing as
time went on,2 and supplemented by dozens of other, less signicant heroes, including military leaders, local martyrs, and communists. Schools, streets, and factories were
named after them, while their ocial portraits decorated streets and oces
(Czepczyski 2008).
The socialist illusion created a mythic chronotope (ukasiewicz 1996). This mythical
timeplace had a dichotomous structure: it plainly separated the good space from the
bad one, the world of progress from the world of the backward. It was a purposefully

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M. CZEPCZYSKI AND H. SOOVLI-SEPPING

designed space associated with building a new, better world, work for advancement
and the Party. The spaces of progress opposed the negative, pre-socialist ones, which
were testimonies of the past, fallen systems, and were either adapted to new functions, usually as places of production, power, education, and culture, or demolished
and left to slow decay. The sacred spaces were most evident during celebrations of
countless newly established feasts, which required large, open spaces. Signicant
socialist spaces had to be constructed for public manifestations supporting regimes:
regularly organized demonstrations, meetings, gatherings, and marches backing the
system created demand for spacious streets and squares, which were imperative
modes or axes of spatial organization of socialist cities, particularly visible in large or
new cities. Those squares usually served as containers of anonymous crowds, ready to
cheer, greet, and support their leaders.
As an example, the concept of a large public square served as a designed agora-like
space (see Figure 1). These spaces were either re-designed from existing public spaces
or new spaces were constructed to serve the power. The masses could and often had
to worship and admire their rulers in those vast squares and avenues. The open spaces
were not used for democratic practices, but to enhance the communist power, and
those places became anti-agoras of socialist cities, where the people could only
manifest their, mostly involuntary, support for their representatives (Smith 1996).
Such central squares as the Peoples Meeting Square in Gdask or Victory Square3 in
Tallinn were typical anti-agoras, where the individual as a part of the mass could and
should reveal his or her collaboration with the system (Nawratek 2005). The antiagoras created the best possible scenery for May Day, Victory Day,4 the Revolution
anniversary, National Day, Army Day or any, by and large, obligatory gathering. Grand
and spacious squares in almost every city center of the socialist town led to a lack of
rental space and a lack of a feasible real estate market, but also played important
ideological functions. Those celebrations created new sacra in socialist cities, where
the cult of the abstract or of personal gods was ritualized (Rembowska 1998;
Satjukow and Gries 2002).
The dictatorship of the proletariat, as with every dictatorship, implied a dictatorship
of designation and denomination of places. All of the names connected with the
profane of the past system had to be erased and replaced by new patrons. There was
a clear hierarchy in place naming: the biggest saints could patronize only the main
squares, streets, or largest factories. Thus, Lenin, Stalin, Marx, Revolution, Liberation,
and Victory Streets were unmistakably the most central and important streets in many
towns and cities of the Baltic and Central Europe, and it was impossible to name a
small and peripheral street with such a signicant name. For example the main road of
Gdynia, Koszalin, and Elblg was called Victory Avenue, while main streets of Szczecin
had names such as Liberation and National Unity. The main representational road of
Rostock held a name of National Reconstruction Works, while Lenin still remains the
patron of the major urban axis of Kaliningrad, with the central piazza at Victory Square.
Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius hosted Marx Streets and Victory Squares in the very centers of
the cities (see Figure 2). However, the numerous place names named after Jossif Stalin
were replaced soon after his death.
Additional naming was connected with monuments of the liberating Red Army.
Since the Soviet troops captured all of Central Europe, thousands of war graves and
memorials, often with eternal ames, were erected to commemorate the dead soldiers, as well as to strengthen the eternal friendship between the Soviet nation and

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245

Figure 2. Rostock: main political urban magistrale: The 1950s Lange Strasse. Photo: Mariusz Czepczyski, July
2010.

the nations of the brotherhood of democratic republics. At the same time, regional
and local saints usually patronized less important places.
The structure of the socialist microcosmic system included a more or less central
square, a chief commemorative memorial, usually of a communist hero or soldiers
ghting for the Soviet army, and a vital magistrale, a broad street for marches. Those
landmarks or nodes, accompanied by paths and districts, created the scheme of an
image of a socialist city, vaguely repeated in many locations (e.g., Vilnius, Riga,
Kaliningrad, Elblg, Gdynia, Koszalin; towns of Prnu, Ventspils, etc.). Making the
socialist landscape signicant and controlling that signicance were important tasks
of the new communist regimes. Ideological features of the cultural landscape could be
implemented on many dierent levels, and in dierent incarnations and
manifestations.

Re-signication and functional de-sacralization: from meaningful

buildings to ordinary serviceable features
Transformation of political system, followed by the collapse of the communist regimes
went through a process of, more (Poland and the Baltic States) or less urgent (Russia),
depending on the local and national expectations, transformation of the urban
semiotic system. All the above-mentioned meanings and functions related to political
concepts had to change. One of the most important functional places of the communist city was to be the center of political power, always located in the central
committee of the Communist Partys headquarters. The committees were sometimes
located in the same building as municipal governments, but only in smaller towns,
while in larger cities the Party had a separate, usually newly constructed building. The
Communist Partys quarters were clearly the focal point of power in landscapes. In
every country of Central and Eastern Europe, Central Committees of the Communist
Party were located in representational buildings in prestigious locations. The process

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M. CZEPCZYSKI AND H. SOOVLI-SEPPING

of transforming objectives by xing new intentions to old icons is best exemplied by

the role of the former Communist Party buildings in every Baltic city and town.
Regional or municipal Communist Party quarters almost everywhere lost their primary
intentions and signicance. The former centers of power and supremacy were turned
into much less dominant, but locally important public buildings, such as schools,
oces, banks, or culture centers. The regional Party headquarters in Gdask became
an oce building, while in Riga the appearance of the Communist Party headquarters
was radically transformed into the World Trade Center. The House of Political
Education faced a drastic change in the heart of Tallinn: this architecturally nelooking building from early 1980s was demolished, despite the wide public resistance,
and replaced by the glass-faade dominated mall and entertainment center Solaris.
Another important transitional profanation is the sacrum industriarum, particularly
in its heavy machinery manifestation. Grand industrial plants were built to do more
than produce much needed steel for more construction and cruisers, corvettes and
submarines. One of the main goals of the forced industrialization was to produce new,
class-conscious workers, as a nal product of the socialist social revolution. Thus, it was
also designed to create an industrial infrastructure which would produce the proletariat for whom Communist Party rule was designed and who, according to Marxist
theory, would inevitably inherit the earth (Crampton and Crampton 2002, 159).
Powerful plants carried many varied functions, going far beyond manufacturing. The
paternalistic model of industrial duties was fully implemented in practically every large
factory, many of which provided free-time activities for their employees. The most
important industry of a communist port city, in both the economic and ideological
senses, was shipbuilding, and there was other heavy industries, often working for the
military sector. Some of them, rather ironically, became cradles of the real new
working class, highly resentful of the communist regimes. Baltic shipyards, such as
Rostocks Neptun, the Parisian Commune in Szczecin and the largest of them all,
the Lenin Shipyard in Gdask, became symbols of sacralization of the profane. Let us
here have a detailed look at the functional transformation of Gdask Shipyard.
The Gdask Shipyard was opened just after WWII, in spring 1945, and in 1967 was
honored with the name of V. I. Lenin, which was a great privilege and mark of
distinction. The ocial reason for choosing such a patron was the commonly accepted
fact that Lenin achieved a success far more important than any previous triumph of
human genius5 (Fortuna and Tusk 1990, 172). The shipyard was the largest shipbuilding company in the Eastern Bloc, employing at its peak about 16,000 workers. The
yard and its multi-use hall were important parts of the urban infrastructure, and
hosted the rst post-War Miss Poland contest in 1957, as well as Marlene Dietrich
and Nikita Khrushchev, among others. Practically every important visitor to Gdask
had to pay a visit to the shipyard, including all the high-ranking ocials. In 1975 the
shipyard was awarded the prestigious First Class Workers Banner award. The shipyard,
as with any grand entity, developed an extended system of social institutions, including its own internal transportation system, telecommunications, health care, sport
clubs, education, recreation, and housing.
The shipyard, as a massive conglomerate of quite privileged labor, achieved one of
the main social and class goals of the communist ideologists: it created an opportunity
to develop an independent, active, and self-aware social class. Unfortunately for the
Party, the self-aware class became too aware and turned against the feeding hand of
Mother-Party (for more, see Jarecki 1985; see Figure 3). After 1970 the shipyard was a

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247

Figure 3. Gdansk: the former provincial headquarter of the Polish Workers United Party, burned by the
protesters in December 1970, now secondary oce building. Photo: Mariusz Czepczyski, May 2010.

cradle of independent and illegal trade unions and human rights activities. Those
activities resulted in massive strikes and riots in August 1980, led by Lech Wasa.
The political heritage of the shipyard did not end up being benecial, although the
political support of the former worker, and later the president of Poland, Lech Wasa
brought some hope, but not the much needed investment. Potential German,
Norwegian, and American investors were nervous about powerful trade unions and
high social expectations. In 1998 the shipyard declared bankruptcy. The shipyard was
taken over by the Gdynia Shipyard and a private developer (Czepczyski 2005). As a
typical example of transformation from state-owned, collective into individual practice
of industries, in 2010 the shipyard, owned by sole Ukrainian investor, employed about
2000 people and no longer plays a signicant role in social or political life. A part of
the former yards and quays are being prepared for waterfront development, the
European Solidarity Center, and a few buildings are leased to local artists. This
example clearly illustrates how de-industrialization, changes in ownership, the rise of
entrepreneurship, and the free market violently changed Baltic industries, which were
unprepared for new challenges in the early 1990s. The old supply and demand
connections with the Soviet Bloc were suddenly broken and factories were left on
their own, without state support. Industry again became merely a means of production of goods, while old ideological gods quite quickly vanished. Post-industrial areas
faced rather similar development paths as in Western port cities in the 1970s, and
became urban wastelands, as in Kaliningrad, Tallinn, and Rostock; residual industries,
as in Gdynia and Szczecin; or saw some waterfront development, as in Gdask, Tallinn,
and Riga.

De-communization and re-signication: removed and/or

profaned monuments
Hundreds of memorials and monuments were erected, not only to the great leaders,
such as Lenin or Stalin, but also to numerous local heroes, such as Kingisepp in Tallinn,
Kalinin in Kaliningrad and Tallinn, Krasicki in Gdask, Revolutionary Sailors in Rostock,
Kapsukas in Vilnius, Siaucinunaite in Kaunas, and others.

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The elimination of unwanted attributes of cultural landscape was the rst step in
post-socialist landscape cleansing, which occurred throughout Central Europe, mainly in
the early 1990s. The landscape was cleansed of the main, unsolicited elements and
qualities, to make cities more habitable and acceptable to the liberalized societies.6 This
practice mainly involved the mercy of oblivion: features that were no longer important
were forgotten. Cosgrove (2006) has explained that the public representation of history
in landscapes as heritage is selective. Old icons simply disappeared from public view
and public attention, while many places lost their signicance and sacral quality,
followed by the elimination of social practices and memories.7 The leftover landscapes
of emptiness or silence are meaningful only for those who care and dare to remember.
Since few signicant and central places were able to withstand the silence of meanings,
the old sacrum has sometimes been replaced by a new one, and old pedestals have
been reused for new saints, as in the Polish Koszalin, where a Soviet soldier was replaced
by the 1920s anti-Soviet hero Marshall Pisudski (see Figure 4).
Changing and eliminating unwanted features or residua were among the major
demanded, and sometimes risky, tasks of the political landscape decision-makers
and managers (see e.g. Estonian Bronze Soldier monument case in Burch and Smith
2007; Ehala 2009). The drive for the de-communization of public space was facilitated by right wing, nationalistic, and anti-communist parties and governments,
which usually anchored their identities in anti-socialist, anti-Soviet, and often antiRussian narrations (see Srmny-Parsons 2008). At rst the question was not
whether to remove all the statues put up during the communist regime, nor
whether to return all place-names to their pre-communist forms, but whether to

Figure 4. Old pedestal, changed gure: Polish anti-Soviet leader on the base formally occupied by a sculpture
of a Soviet Soldier in Koszalin, Poland. Photo: Mariusz Czepczyski, June 2011.

JOURNAL OF BALTIC STUDIES

249

Figure 5. Total makeover. The former House of Political Education was demolished despite the protests of
Tallinn citizens (see left). The entertainment center Solaris was opened instead (see right). Photo on the right:
Helen Soovli-Sepping, June 2011.

eliminate the worst and most physically unacceptable icons and oppressive signs of
the fallen regimes (see Figure 5). The monuments faced diverse fates. On the one
hand, in Estonia, the main statue of Lenin, which once stood in front of the Central
Committee building in Tallinn, was turned into an art piece and is now standing in
front of the Museum of New Art in Prnu. On the other hand, the peripherally
located Lenin monument in the Schwerin neighborhood, lled with blocks of ats, is
the only one in the Baltic area remaining in its old position. The Lithuanian Grtas
Park, with a collection of Soviet-era bronze sculptures, has drawn a great deal of
attention in the post-socialist region and has led to a debate over what has to be
preserved of the materialized Soviet iconography, and how and why it has to be
preserved (see for example Harrison 2013). A similar park is being assembled for a
public show in Tallinn at the History Museum.
Another function that fell into oblivion was connected with the revolutionary cult
and shrines of the system. Several museums were established to educate, indoctrinate,
and propagate communist ideas all around the communist bloc. Most of contained
compulsory sections of communist propaganda besides historical artifacts; and were
popular destinations of organized, only partly voluntary, tourism during the communist era. A museum of the revolutionary and workers movement was probably the
most popular type of those ideological shrines. There were no such museums in
northern Poland, while the former museum of Lenins guards the Red Latvian
Riemen in Riga was transformed into the Museum of Occupation 19411991,
mostly dedicated to memorializing the crimes of the Soviet era. The Soviet Science
Academys History Museums branch, the Laborers Basement, in Tallinn was converted to an English pub (see Figure 6).

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Figure 6. Kaliningrad: former location of Lenin monument at Victory Square, replaced by Victory Column near
to new Orthodox Cathedral. Photo: Mariusz Czepczyski, May 2011.

Re-signication of public urban spaces: agoras turned

into ordinary squares
The collapse of state communism in Central Europe and the Soviet Union triggered a
major spatial and semantic transformation of the hierarchy of urban spaces. The
problem of managing leftover landscape, especially highly politicized landscape,
became one of the crucial issues for every transitional society, as these landscapes
were situated in city centers. The grand open public spaces of socialist cities existed as
meaningful or sacral places of practice only as long as they were used for political
purposes. In a capitalist city, the grand squares or avenues are hardly more than
modes of transportation; a street, square, or parking lot, if peripherally located, does
not exist in social memory or consciousness. They are often too big even to walk
around on. From the beginning of the transformation period, it became clear that
large urban areas had to be redeveloped. Many of the places and landscapes became
absolutely useless, while new functions and social needs put more pressure on the
redenition of some of the urban fallows.
Landscapes based on meeting the political needs of socialist socialites and their
power began to wane. The ideological functions of grand open spaces were replaced
by sport and leisure areas, such as the Peoples Meeting Square in Gdansk and
unocial skating parks, such as in Tallinn. Vast, empty, and hardly manageable
squares quickly deteriorated, became meaningless, and then were often sold, redeveloped, and forgotten (Nawratek 2005). The open spaces that functioned as public
squares before WWII, such as in Rostock, Tallinn, and Riga, maintained their function
through spatial re-interpretation, which included small or large physical face-lifts and
changes. For example, in the eastern German medieval university town of Greifswald,
the former Karl-Marx-Platz became the broad Rudolf-Petershagen-Allee, while the KarlMarx-Platz in Rostock regained its historical name and profane, everyday function of
Marktplatz. The vast Lukiks Square in Vilnius, used as a popular market and fair
square before WW II, after major rearrangements, became Lenin Square and a statue

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251

of Lenin was erected in the middle of it in 1953. Now the square serves as a vast city
park, in the middle of busy Gediminas Avenue, the main axis of modern Vilnius, known
during the 20th century as St. Georges, Mickiewicz, Hitler, Stalin, and Lenin Avenue.
Another strategy that was used to create new spaces was to turn to pre-WWII
cultural and historical denotations of particular spaces. Eglitis (2002) has described the
importance of reasserting symbolic dominion over places in the project of returning
the streets of Riga to their pre-war names. As she writes, In the case at hand, the
creative power of naming was used less to create than to re-create a normal symbolic
landscape, to call forth a historical memory, and to reassert the Latvian identity of the
city (Eglitis 2002, 130).

Conclusions
Urban sacra always represent the spiritual dimensions of a given society, while the
past, to some extent, creates contemporary societies and their spaces. Everyday
practices tend to choose some parts of the past and incorporate them into contemporary reality. As Eliade has pointed out, the manifestation of sacriality is quintessentially spatial. The spiritual experience of the nonhomogeneity of space is a primordial
experience, homologizable to a founding of the world. . . For it is the break aected in
space that allows the world to be constituted because it reveals the xed point, the
central axis (axis mundi) of future orientation (Eliade 1961, 20). Both the communists
in the mid-1940s, and the post-communist leaders of the early 1990s realized the
importance of the future orientation based on spatial structure of forms and meanings. The experience of sacred space makes possible the founding of the world,
where the sacred manifests itself in space; the real unveils itself, the world comes into
existence (Eliade 1961, 63). The sacrum, as an important part of individual and
collective identity, is spatially anchored, while its transformations bring about important cultural and geographical consequences. The transformation of the sacrum often
creates a particular state of denial, based on information processing, monitoring,
selective perception, ltering, and a limited attention span in terms of understanding
how we notice and simultaneously do not notice (Cohen 2001). The discursive
circulation of post-communist transformation of former sacral places into insignicant
profana or re-signicant sacra can be interpreted as an act of denial, where past
meanings and rituals are mostly forgotten or denied by individual and social memories, or, over-written with new meanings.
Our goal has been to suggest that there is a need to analyze the trends of transformation in the post-socialist city space. The illustrative cases demonstrate the changing
spatialities of socialist iconography, which strive to go beyond the ongoing physical
and rhetorical face-lifts of squares, monuments, and street names. Geographically, the
phenomenon of ideologically driven spatial reorganization is momentous, as a large part
of Europe has faced rapid alteration of spaces. As a result, these spaces have gained new
meanings and practices. It is particularly interesting to consider how similar, and yet
diverse the strategies of change in the communist bloc city network have been.
The settings of post-socialist Baltic area cities carry stigmas of half a century of state
socialism. One of the worst post-socialist heritages is the destruction of natural spatial
and social relations, and cities are not seen as societies in spaces, but rather only as a
congregation of buildings (Nawratek 2005, 188). Reconstruction of the civic signicance of urban space is among the most important tasks facing post-socialist societies.

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The production of new layers of meaning and dierent interpretations of post-socialist

landscape forms an ongoing process. After the rapid changes of the early 1990s, the
process of landscape reinterpretation has settled down recently, or it has entered
another phase. De-communization, and transformations of meanings that were
brought along with it, are always connected with the cultural background of a society,
as well with aspirations and hopes. The landscapes of Central and Eastern Europe are
liminal (sensu Turner 1975) in the essential sense of the word not socialist any more,
but still not truly liberated from the old traumatic and totalitarian burdens, representing societies, and sandwiched in between things they want to remember and things
they would be happy to forget. Each above-mentioned icon is loaded with layers of
meanings, texts, and connotations, attached to it by various social groups of decoders.
All of the existing processes of social and urban conversions are facilitated by local
and national powers and memories. In that sense, the relation to the socialist past is a
mixture between what is remembered, reminded of, and forgotten.
Spaces and places of post-socialist cities function as living laboratories of transforming meanings and forms. The imprints of socialism that are left in the urban landscape
are unusually deep and frequently aect the present outlook and structure of many
cities. The settings of Central European and Baltic area cities carry the prints or stigmas
of at least half a century of socialism. During the period of socialist supremacy, centrally
controlled circulations were enforced in every urban and regional landscape.
Interestingly, after 45 years of Moscow-dictated ows of styles and rules, the region
jumped, often quite unconsciously, into another kind of circulation, dominated by
Western-styled liberalism. The landscape of socialist triumphalism and egalitarian parity
was inhabited and used by the masses, and usually designed and created despite their
needs and expectations. Post-socialism brought many hopes and anticipations. The
landscape is no longer facilitated by the Communist Party and local apparatchiks, but
by new, still not fully realized, economic, and civic powers. On one hand, there is
growing public consciousness and awareness; democratic practices negotiate functions
and signicances of cultural landscape features. Citizens and consumers support landscape transformations leading to a diversied and unknown future. The living landscape
of supremacies and beliefs, of hopes and needs, traumas and memories creates a postmodern landscape blend, which reveals local, national, regional, and global societies.

Notes
1. Since in each Eastern Bloc country there was, for all practical purposes, only the dominant
Communist/Workers/United Party, most people did not bother to use the precise name: The
Party was the only one and was unquestionable.
2. Here we mean the cult of Stalin and the de-Stalinisation campaign in the Khrushchev era.
3. In the CentralEastern European iconic topography, Victory meant the Soviet victory over Nazi
Germany in 1945, and it was a part of the establishing myth of a communist system of power.
4. According to the ocial Soviet calendar, WWII ended not on 8th but on 9th of May 1945, when
the Soviets signed the Nazi surrender.
5. Although it was never clear that that kind of success was indeed achieved by V. I. Lenin.
6. Smith (2008) argues that restoring monuments that were systematically destroyed after 1940
has become an essential part of the process of undermining Soviet power and restoring
sovereign statehood. Major monuments commemorating dierent events connected to communism were removed from city centers. But this cleansing was rather selective as, outwardly
at least, the past did not seem to matter much to most residents of the Baltic states during the

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253

rst decade or so after independence. More than a hundred Soviet era monuments to the Great
Patriotic War, mostly in smaller towns and rural areas, were left in place.
7. The exception of the Bronze Soldier monument in Tallinn triggered large-scale public, as well as
international academic, discussion on space and conicts in collective memory. For that, see an
edited collection of Petersoo and Tamm (2008), the special issue of the Journal of Baltic Studies
2008 and numerous Ph.D. theses written in Western and Eastern Europe, among others.

Disclosure statement
No potential conict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
This paper has been supported by Estonian Ministry of Education target-nanced projects
[SF0130033s07] Landscape Practice and Heritage and IUT3-2 Culturescapes in transformation: towards
an integrated theory of meaning making and from the European Union through the European
Regional Development Fund (Center of Excellence CECT).

Notes on contributors
Mariusz Czepczyski is a professor in the Department of Spatial Management at the University of
Gdansk, Poland. His research elds include post-socialist landscape transformation, the meaning of
culture in urban conversion, social construction theory, local development and its strategies, regionalization as well as cultural heritages and quality of life.
Helen Soovli-Sepping is a senior researcher of Cultural Geography at School of Humanities, Tallinn
University, Estonia. Her research interests include landscape iconography, cultural heritage, rurality,
cultural geography, and sustainable planning. She has recently edited a collection Landscape Ruptures.
Landscape, Identity and Social Change (H. Reinert and J. Miles-Watson as co-editors).

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