Belarus part III - Back in the USSR

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Communist Symbols

All over Belarus there are Lenin statues, murals of proud workers, nationalist symbols and hammer and sickle symbols. I have a soft spot for these various communist symbols. I am not a communist, but I do like the symbols from an artistic point of view.

In the years prior to the fall of the Soviet Union people in the communist world had to be constantly reminded of how great a system communism is. Therefore every town had a Lenin statue, there were always streets in each town named after Lenin and Karl Marx, statues of war heroes dotted the cities and on city walls you could find plaques commemorating communist leaders or perhaps a visit by Lenin a long time ago. There was frequent use of the hammer and sickle symbol and sometimes even entire cities were named after a former leader, like Karl-Marx-Stadt, Stalingrad and Leningrad.

This was going on not only in the Soviet Union. The situation was similar in all of the Eastern Bloc. When the communist system eventually collapsed in the late 80-ies and early 90-ies there were different ways to deal with these communist symbols, the statues and everything else.

In many countries they pulled down the statues that symbolised the communist system and threw them away.

Karl-Marx-Stadt , Stalingrad and Leningrad were renamed and are today known as Chemnitz, Volgograd and St Petersburg.

In many cities the streets were renamed. However, this has caused some confusion because now people tend to use both names and thereby effectively making a lot of streets having two names, one official and one unofficial.

In Budapest in Hungary they pulled down the statues but put them back up in an open air museum. A similar park can be found in Grutas not far from Vilnius in Lithuania.

When I visited Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula I noticed that they had kept the communist symbols and they had not bothered to rename the streets named after Lenin and Karl Marx. In Belarus it is a similar situation. Belarus used to be part of the Soviet Union. When they became independent they not only kept the statues and the hammer and sickle symbols they also kept communism. I never visited Soviet but for all of us who never did there is still a chunk of Soviet left that can be visited and that is Belarus.

One of the reasons that I like the communist symbols is that I like to take photos and these objects are easy to take excellent photos of. There were so many Lenin statues and other communist symbols around in Belarus that I have decided to put up a separate blog with some of these photos. One or two of them have been featured in the Minsk blog entry but most of them is published here in this blog entry for the first time.

Well, I am not going to write any more text for this entry on the blog. Instead I let the photos do the talking. So look at the pictures and go Back in the USSR

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Photos

Large mural
Mural showing strong men holding a hammer and a sickle. Why do they keep forgetting the women in these pictures? There are very strong women too

Hammer and sickle
The hammer and sickle symbol can be found in many places

Hammer and sickle
Some of the hammer and sickle symbols are quite colourful

Hammer and sickle
Found this one on a bridge I think

Hammer and sickle
On the buildings you can find them

Hammer and sickle
Look carefully and you can see it up there

Hammer and sickle
I think we found this one in GUM department store

Wall mural
In one metro station they had several of these nationalistic murals. They often show heroic soldiers heading off into battle to protect the fatherland or proud strong workers

Wall mural
Another of these murals in the metro station

Lenin statue
Pretty much every town in Belarus has a Lenin Statue

Lenin statue
Minsk being the capital of Belarus and the largest city in the country has several Lenin Statues of course

Lenin bust
This Lenin bust can be seen in one of the metro stations in Minsk.

Big wall mural
In one of the suburbs, near Minsk main library, we found four or five high-rise buildings with large murals on them. We have windows on our high-rise buildings...

Felix Dzerzhinsky
Felix Dzerzhinsky is the founder of the predecessor of the KGB

Vulitsa Leninskaja
Lenin Street

Vulitsa Sovietskaja
Soviet Street

Vulitsa Karla Marksa
Karl Marx Street

Vulitsa Lenina
Lenin Street

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Tack för fina bilder Åke
God fortsättning på julen Åke. Hoppas på ett nytt lite lugnare år år 2013. Ha de gott. Svante