Bronze Soldier of Tallinn

The sculpture people call the Bronze Soldier went up in Tallinn on 22 September 1947. Enn Roos made it. The date was chosen: three years earlier to the day, on 22 September 1944, the Red Army had reached the city. The first official title said what the Soviet authorities wanted the date to mean — Monument to the Liberators of Tallinn. It was later renamed Monument to the Fallen in the Second World War. In everyday speech it has picked up other names too: Pronkssõdur in Estonian, Bronzovyy soldat in Russian, Alyosha, or simply the Tõnismäe monument, after the place it first stood.

The monument has two parts. One is a bronze figure of a soldier in a Second World War Red Army uniform, roughly 2 metres (6 ft 7 in) tall — about the height of a tall man, not a giant on a plinth. The other is a wall of dolomite, a pale grey stone quarried in Estonia, which rises behind him. The wall does a specific job. It puts a flat surface behind the figure, so the dark bronze outline stands out clearly from a distance. Statue and wall were designed as one thing, not as a figure dropped on open ground.

The site did a job as well. The monument stood in a small park on Tõnismägi in central Tallinn, called Liberators’ Square during the Soviet years. Underneath it were the bodies of Soviet soldiers, moved there and reburied in April 1945. So the memorial was a grave marker and a public image at the same time. That double role is the reason later arguments turned so hard: to move the sculpture was also to disturb a burial ground.

In April 2007 the Estonian government did move it. The bronze figure went to the Defence Forces Cemetery of Tallinn. The remains went too, but only after they had been dug up and identified, and only some of them. Relatives were given the chance to claim their dead, and several bodies were reburied elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, wherever the families asked. The soldier’s second home is a military cemetery rather than a square in the middle of town.

The move was never only a matter of cranes and paperwork. Many of Estonia’s Russian-speaking residents — families who arrived after the war — read the figure as a memorial to victory over Nazi Germany and to their own dead. Many Estonians read the same figure as a marker of a second occupation, the Soviet one that followed the German one. Both readings were already in place, and they had strained relations between the two communities and between Estonia and Russia for years.

When the relocation went ahead, that strain broke open. Tallinn saw two nights of rioting, known as the Bronze Night. Crowds in Moscow besieged the Estonian embassy for a week. Estonian organisations were hit by cyberattacks — coordinated attempts to flood and disable their computer systems and websites. The events were reported worldwide and drew political reactions well beyond the two countries. A figure cast to fix one version of 1944 in place had become an object that could not be shifted without reopening the question of who was entitled to remember that year in the centre of the city.