Pronksöö (The Bronze Night)
Posted by eestifilmid on 2. Oct 2009
The Bronze Night (Estonian: Pronksiöö), also known as the April Unrest and April Events refer to the riots and controversy surrounding the 2007 relocation of the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn, the Soviet World War II memorial in Tallinn, Estonia.
Many Estonians considered the Bronze Soldier in the city centre a symbol of Soviet occupation and repression. At the same time the monument has significant symbolic value to Estonia’s community of mostly ethnic Russian post-World War II immigrants, symbolising not only Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War, but also their claim to rights in Estonia.
Amid political controversy, in April 2007 the Government of Estonia started final preparations for the reburial of the remains and relocation of the statue, according to the political mandate received from the last elections (held in March 2007). Disagreement over the appropriateness of the action led to mass protests and riots (accompanied by looting), lasting for two nights, the worst Estonia has seen since the Soviet reoccupation in 1944, which included the still unsolved murder of one Russian. In the early morning hours of April 27, 2007, after the first night’s rioting, the Government of Estonia decided, at an emergency meeting, to relocate the monument immediately, referring to security concerns. By the following afternoon the stone structure had been dismantled as well. As of the afternoon of April 30, the statue without the stone structure had been placed at the Cemetery of the Estonian Defence Forces in Tallinn. An opening ceremony for the relocated statue was held on May 8, VE Day. (Soviet Army veterans celebrate Victory Day a day later, on May 9.) During June 2007 the stone structure was rebuilt. Relatives have made claims to bodies of four of the war dead. Unclaimed remains were reburied at the military cemetery, next to the relocated monument, on July 3, 2007
Carol said
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Jorein Versteege said
I understand the hate many people have against the Stalinist government of the Soviet Union.
But you cannot blame the soviet soldiers for the crimes of Stalin. They believed that they were liberating the people of the Baltic from Nazism. The soviet troops were not evil and it is wrong to destroy their monuments.
Stalinism used Marxism Leninism as a tool against the workers of the world. In the name of Marx and Lenin, Stalin created totalitarian states and forced all to worship him as a god. Many people still think that communism is pure evil and that communists are dictatorial in nature.
Stalin was a golden price for the anticommunists. Win out him their anticommunism would be very weaker.
just_tinkering said
I know a lot of people dislike this comparison, but the exact same reasoning applies to nazi soldiers. They too weren’t evil, they just wanted to have enough space for living and less problems… all which, as one charismatic guy told them, could be achieved by invading neighbouring countries and execute non-German people residing in their land.
The average person identifying him-/herself as “Estonian” didn’t see in the sculpture a liberator, but another opressor. One that managed to carry on it’s deeds for 50 more years after the earlier opressor had been destroyed and it’s remains internationally condemned. One that didn’t shoot that many Estonian people point blank in the face, but did ship quite a number of them so Siberia to, basically, die. Having the sculpture yearly being turned into a drinking ground where people would lament on the “good old” days (having completelly forgotten that life during the war/in Soviet Estonia wasn’t “good” regardless from which angle you look at it) and how bad the life in Republic of Estonian is now didn’t really help anybody. Moving the sculpture from a bus station to a cemetary was the only right thing to do. What was wrong was waiting with it close to 2 decades.