Monumental events: Imaginaries,materialities,and temporalities in Latvia’s monument removal

Abstract

Through the case of the Victory Monument in Latvia, in this article I explore how symbolic reorderings take place at specific historical moments. This article investigates how monuments can become epitomes of contemporary political and societal ills and explores how processes of their resignification engage both ‘material’ and ‘imaginary’ realms through which politics is animated. The article also reflects on how such monuments can be infused with various temporal values and assemblages – injustices of the past, uncertainties of the present, and fears of a possible future. By tracing how the material intertwines with the imaginary, and how layered temporalities are entangled, the article illustrates how monuments evolve into an oversaturated locus of contestation – misfits – that consequently leads to their obliteration. Such acts of unmaking and erasure represent intense vernacular political commentaries and performances of sovereign agency that actively aim to reconfigure public, social, and physical landscapes of everyday lives against the insurmountable material and imaginary powers of such elements.

On a warm summer afternoon, on 25 August 2022, Latvian broadcasters were covering a major event that took place in the capital city of Riga – the demolition of one of the most visible and prominent monuments in the city skyline – the Victory Monument (Uzvaras piemineklis). This massive concrete monument, officially entitled The Monument to the Liberators of Soviet Latvia and Riga from the German Fascist Invaders, was erected back in 1985. This was the largest Soviet monument in the Baltics and the assemblage consisted of three sculptural elements: two smaller sculptures, one portraying a female motherland figure and the other depicting three Soviet soldiers, were positioned on opposite sides of the monument’s central piece – a 79-metre-tall concrete obelisk. The dismantling of the monument complex had started two days earlier, with the smaller sculptures already removed. Now, it was the turn of the pillar, the most pivotal and central element, to tumble.

High-calibre heavy machinery had been working on the pillar since the early hours of the morning. Throughout the day increasing number of spectators and media outlets arrived on the site to follow the ongoing work, waiting for the pillar to fall. News agencies started livestreams from the scene and the public broadcaster, Latvian Television (LTV), was running a special news edition for almost six consecutive hours, providing live updates on the demolition process and featuring interviews with prominent politicians, including ministers and Latvia’s president, as well as cultural figures who shared their views and sentiments on the monument’s removal. As the reporting stretched out for hours while waiting for the pillar to fall, the livestream would sometimes switch from interviews to static images of the monument, accompanied by the loud sound of hammering, as the power tools struck against the pillar’s hard concrete material. After almost seven hours of work, this culminated in the late afternoon, as the tall obelisk came down, falling into the surrounding water basin and creating enormous splashes of water, several metres high. The fall was accompanied by applause and the shouts of people who had gathered around the site. An LTV journalist on the ground announced: ‘Finally, we have reached the long-awaited moment when the Russian propaganda weapon is gone’, and the spectators by her side proclaimed ‘Latvia is finally free! We have gotten rid of the occupation ghosts that followed us for 50 years.’

This article examines the removal of the Victory Monument as a revealing case of how symbolic reordering takes place at pivotal historical moments. Building on Katherine Verdery’s (1999) work on the political symbolism of dead bodies and the reordering of worlds of meaning in post-socialist contexts, the article illustrates how, under current geopolitical tensions, the dismantling of Soviet monuments is part of a new wave of a broader symbolic reconfiguration of public, social, and physical landscapes. Drawing on Sewell’s (1996) approach to historical events as significant occurrences that carry forward accelerated changes of social and political life, this article situates the removal of the Victory Monument within broader processes of change. Monuments, symbolic markers of time, space, and moral order, are also powerful vehicles for political symbolism. In times of uncertainty and upheaval, they can come to epitomize contemporary tensions and struggles. As the above mentioned comment by LTV journalist suggests, such symbolic objects can even be perceived as weapons and thereby deemed threatening, misfitting and erasable. The consequent acts of their removal then serve both as an affirmation of power and as an enactment of sovereign agency in times of uncertainty. This article directly adresses these dynamics by investigating how particular sites come to epitomize of contemporary political and societal ills, and explores how processes of their resignification engage both ‘material’ and ‘imaginary’ realms. Adding to the ‘material’ and ‘imaginary’ work, the article also highlights how new temporal assemblages are a part of such transformative processes. Through a microscopic examination of the removal of Victory Monument, the article traces in real time how the material intertwines with the imaginary, and how layered temporalities are entangled, turning the monument into an oversaturated locus of contestation – a misfit. The article illustrates the significance of tracing not only how things come into being but also how they unravel, become undone, and ultimately ‘unmatter’. In doing so, it also illuminates what Sahlins (1985) called the ‘structure of the conjuncture’, revealing how, through the interplay of both structural and contingent elements, change unfolds within particular historical moments.

Monument fever

Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022 ignited new discussions in the wider Eastern European region about its historical and contemporary connections to Russia. Among them, material historical legacies associated with the Soviet past came under the utmost scrutiny. Given Russia’s instrumentalization and weaponization of historical narratives, and particularly memories of the Second World War for its current new imperialistic political and military goals, special attention in these discussions was given to historical sites, monuments, and commemorative practices related to the Second World War. As these cultural and historical sites became saturated with new political meanings in the context of an unfolding war, they became symbolic battlegrounds for competing political narratives and geopolitical alignments. Consequently, a new wave of removal of Soviet-related memorials and monuments took place across the wider region, from Estonia in the north to Bulgaria in the south. Latvia was one of the countries where Soviet monument removal took place at an extraordinary speed and scale.

Russia’s attack on a sovereign neighbouring state shook many of the region’s inhabitants to the core, including those of Latvia. While bringing about an unprecedented mobilization of solidarity and support efforts for Ukraine on behalf of Latvia’s state and population, the war also raised paramount fears about the future of the state of Latvia. Russia’s war came to be perceived as an existential threat, not only for Ukraine but also for Latvia’s statehood and sovereignty. As these concerns grew, the public gaze turned increasingly towards the domestic political situation and internal affairs, where these fears manifested themselves.

Latvia is home to a large group of Russian-speakers, with about 23 per cent of the country’s population being ethnically Russian (Central Statistical Bureau of Latvia, 2025). Although this group is not homogeneous and consists of individuals with diverse political views, senses of belonging, identification practices, as well as geopolitical orientations, the state’s failure to fully integrate Russian-speakers into its body politic has given rise to the perception that today Latvia has two parallel societies – Latvians and Russian-speakers. Some of the core differences between them concern perceptions and evaluations of Soviet history and geopolitical alignment (Zelče, 2018). While Latvia’s Russian-speaking community was already subjected to securitization – framed as a threat to Latvia’s state by Latvian politicians and eventually by the general public following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 (Kaprāns and Juzefovičs, 2019) – in the context of the daunting new realities of war in Ukraine questions regarding their loyalties and geopolitical orientations became even more prominent.

One of the most notable occasions at which differences among Russian-speakers and Latvians visibly manifest themselves is the 9 May (or Victory Day) celebrations, which mark the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany. While for many Russian-speakers this day is celebrated as victory in the Second World War, for Latvians this day is associated with loss of sovereignty and Soviet occupation. Ločmele et al. (2011), in their study of commemoration days in Latvia, contend that 9 May symbolically embodies differences between Latvian and Russian-speaking communities and is a site of polarization in which diverging understandings and evaluations of the past are made publicly visible. In Riga, these celebrations unfolded around the Victory Monument and, in recent years, they had turned into the largest political and social gathering for the Russian-speaking community, with concerts, political speeches and livestreams from Moscow. The scale, reach and organized character of 9 May celebrations had turned it into a central commemorative and ritual event for the Russian-speaking community (Iljina, 2023; Ločmele et al., 2011). In the new context where the loyalties of the Russian-speaking community increasingly came into question, the idea that the Victory Monument should be dismantled gained new attention. ¹

In the weeks leading up to 9 May 2022, public calls were made by government representatives for people to refrain from attending the celebrations, which were deemed inappropriate given the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Some politicians openly referred to them as ‘Russia’s state celebrations’, or as an ‘imperial feast’ (LSM, 2022a), equating the celebrations at the Victory Monument with glorification of Russia – the aggressor in the war. Meanwhile, Riga’s municipality was preparing to pre-empt and contain the celebrations that usually took place at the monument. For example, in April, the municipality declared the Victory Monument complex to be unsafe due to its crumbling infrastructure and bad technical state, and announced that it would be fenced off due to safety concerns. In the days before 9 May, a photo exhibition ‘Glory to Ukraine! Glory to heroes!’ was installed around the monument with large images depicting war devastation and atrocities committed by the Russian army in Ukraine along with information about the war. Also, Latvian and Ukrainian flags were raised next to the monument and placed on the fences surrounding the closed-off area. Other preventive measures included new legislation prohibiting public events being organized within 200 metres of any monument celebrating Soviet history, Soviet soldiers, or their memory. The new legislation also banned the use of any symbols implying support for Russia’s war, such as the letters Z or V. ²

The newly introduced restrictions – openly framed as curtailing 9 May celebrations – targeted both the physical presence of the symbolic site for these celebrations, that is the Victory Monument, as well as the ideological and political connotations of these celebrations. These efforts included attempts to close, seal off, and frame the monument as materially disintegrating and thus physically inaccessible, thereby aiming to neutralize the monument’s material presence in the city’s landscape. At the same time, visual demonstrations of Ukrainian suffering and destruction caused by Russia’s war, as well as expressions of solidarity with Ukraine through the display of flags were attempts to reframe the site, inscribing the new political realities onto this already symbolically saturated space. These extensive efforts were aimed at preventing the monument’s problematic symbolism from leaking into society and resignifying this symbolically charged space.

Despite these efforts, on 9 May 2022, a steady stream of people, although fewer than in previous years, visited the site and, under heavy police surveillance, laid flowers beside the fenced-off monument. The following day, videos began to circulate on social media, showing municipal workers removing the neatly arranged flowers from the monument square with a tractor. These images sparked outrage among those who had visited the monument, leading to calls for the flowers to be replaced. Throughout the day, several hundred people visited the monument to place new flowers. By evening, a new blanket of flowers covered the square in front of the monument and a sizeable crowd had gathered, singing Soviet war songs. Several confrontations occurred on the site that evening, between the police, individuals displaying forbidden symbols linked to Russia, and people who had arrived on the scene holding Ukrainian and Latvian flags. Latvian media outlets reporting from the ground interviewed attendees and some of them aggressively and openly expressed support for Putin’s regime, Russia’s war in Ukraine and made threats against Latvians and the Latvian state.

In this highly charged atmosphere, efforts to eliminate legal barriers to the monument’s eventual dismantling progressed swiftly through various parliamentary task groups and committees. ³ Alongside these political initiatives, several civic actions also emerged. For example, a public fundraiser collecting money ‘for the demolition of the occupation monument’ was initiated, collecting over 260,000 euros (Ziedot, 2022), and a public civic movement organized a march under the banner ‘For Liberation from Soviet Legacies’ (Par atbrīvošanos no padomju mantojuma). One of the demands made by the organizers of the march was the removal of the Victory Monument and all other remaining Soviet monuments in Latvia. Several thousand people gathered for the march, displaying slogans such as: ‘We won’t be silent in our own land’, ‘Remove the Soviet stones’, ‘Let’s protect the rights of free Latvia to exist without the ghosts of occupation’, among others (TV3, 2022). The march started at the most pivotal monument of independent Latvia, the Freedom Monument, and ended at the Victory Monument, juxtaposing these monuments and their contrasting implications for freedom, statehood, independence, and sovereignty versus occupation and subjugation.

Following the political and civic mobilizations around the monument, Latvia’s parliament passed a new law in June 2022 ‘On the Prohibition of Exhibiting Objects Glorifying the Soviet and Nazi Regimes and the Dismantling Thereof in the Territory of the Republic of Latvia’ (Saeima, 2022). This legislation paved the way for the removal of the Victory Monument and over 300 additional monuments across Latvia. In the subsequent months, more than 120 monuments were dismantled across Latvia, with discussions ongoing about the potential removal or relocation of other Soviet-related monuments (Ozola-Balode, 2022).

Animating monuments through the imaginary and the material

Monuments, like other objects, extend beyond their tangible qualities and physical attributes, encompassing also abstract, imaginary and affective potentialities. Scholars across various fields have explored monuments’ material and immaterial capacities, reflecting on their role in nation-building, collective identity construction, representations and legitimization of political regimes, social order, memory politics and commemoration practices (Brüggemann and Kasekamp, 2008; Fryer et al., 2021; Martínez, 2017, 2022; Melchior and Visser, 2011; Verdery, 1999; Wanner, 2019; Yampolsky, 1995). Monuments are among the most visible and tangible manifestations of political and historical narratives, where certain aspects and events of the past are manifested materially and physically inscribed in the landscapes of cities. Simultaneously, monuments also produce vast landscapes of ‘political and civic imaginations’ (Fryer et al., 2021: 376). Thus, while appearing static in their physical expressions, monuments are more unstable, malleable and dynamic than their material appearance might suggest. Monuments possess a complex and dynamic nature; as political contexts change, they can be imbued with new meanings, contestations, interpretations, and imaginaries, sometimes even leading to their own obliteration.

One of the most noticeable intensifications in the ascription of meanings to the Victory Monument was evident in the vocabulary that emerged in the public conversations about the monument in the spring and summer of 2022. Some of this terminology aimed to diminish the monument’s prominence, such as the demeaning reference to it as a pole (stabs), while other terms infused it with strong political connotations, like the monument of occupiers (okupantu piemineklis), the finger of Moscow (Maskavas pirksts), or, a more figurative term, the nail of Stalin (Staļina nagla). A completely new term was coined – okupeklis – combining the Latvian words okupācija (occupation) and piemineklis (monument). The word okupeklis became so popular that it even gained the title ‘the word of the year 2022’ (LSM, 2023). Other descriptions of the monument increasingly framed it as a source of suffering for the Latvian community, with phrases like ‘a purulent scab in the finger’ and ‘pillar of shame’.

While this terminology reflects conceptions of the monument present in Latvian society already before 2022, the context of war also assigned new meanings to it. The monument increasingly became narrated as a symbol of Russia’s renewed hunger for imperial status. As public spaces were scrutinized for elements representing Russia’s imperialism that needed to be ‘removed from our territory’, the Victory Monument, with its massive presence and pivotal role in the Russian-speaking community, became even more controversial. Moreover, the monument came to be seen as an explicit symbol of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Consider, for example, the following comments made by some members of the Saeima (Latvian parliament) during the debates on legislative amendments for removal of the Victory Monument: ‘Since 24 February, when Russia started the war in Ukraine, it [the Victory Monument] has become a symbol of the war crimes committed by the USSR heir – Russia – in Ukraine’ and ‘The image and symbolism of the Soviet Army is now inextricably linked to Russia’s aggression and the crimes committed by its armed forces in Ukraine’ (LSM, 2022b). This illustrates how further layers of meaning were attached to the monument as, in addition to representing the period of Soviet occupation, it was also inscribed with imaginaries of Russia’s current military attempts at expansion, significantly extending and accumulating its repugnant embodiments to the Latvian audience.

While historical discourses have been securitized – that is, framed as a matter of security in Latvia and the Baltics in general – the war led to a further escalation of securitization and weaponization of both historical narratives and sites. Within these discourses, the Victory Monument was increasingly portrayed as a part of Russia’s military arsenal; depicted as a specific tool of Russia’s new imperialism and it was explicitly defined as a security threat. The security concerns were framed around the monument’s potential to undermine national values and morality, to serve as a foundation for Russia’s imperial expansion, and to act as a site of polarization, division, and conflict. Even discussion of the possible removal of the monument included assessing potential security risks. The Constitution Protection Bureau of Latvia (Satversmes Aizsardzības Birojs), the state security service, issued a security brief stating that if the Victory Monument was demolished, repercussions from Russia must be taken into account, with cyberattacks on critical infrastructure, increased risks of physical provocations, and provocations against Latvian officials abroad named as the most likely risks (Diena, 2022).

To address these potential threats, Latvia’s State Police coordinated with their Estonian colleagues, arranging for support on monument's demolition day, and borrowing crowd-control equipment, such as water cannons. This interstate collaboration underscores the high stakes surrounding affairs concerning monuments in the region. Apparently this collaboration was not unprecedented as Latvia had previously lent its water cannons to Estonia in 2007 for riot control in the capital city, Tallinn, following the relocation of one of Tallinn’s most central Soviet army monuments, The Bronze Soldier. The so-called ‘war of monuments’ erupted in Tallinn when the monument, which was where the 9 May celebrations by the Russian community in Tallinn used to be held, was to be relocated, triggering violent unrest, looting, and vandalism that left one person dead and the whole country in shock (Brüggemann and Kasekamp, 2008; Melchior and Visser, 2011).

Estonia’s war of monuments was widely covered in Latvia and was a dreadful example of what even a relocation of a Soviet monument might evolve into. Estonian experiences and the state security service threat evaluations painted a picture of monument removal as a rather risky and potentially potent process, contributing to fears and anxieties among the general public. As one of my friends questioningly commented: ‘I am not sure that it [the Victory Monument] should be removed as it might annoy Russia and then you can never know what will happen.’ The fear of potential provocations was also noticeable in the security measures that surrounded the demolition of the monument. A journalist covering the events described the monument’s removal as one of the most secretive operations in the history of independent Latvia, noting the lack of precise information on the demolition works beforehand, and strict regulations on where journalists were allowed to be; for example, filming from rooftops was strictly forbidden. Even the name of the company in charge of the demolition works or those of the people involved in the process have never been revealed due to security concerns.

The idea of Russia as a threat is not new for Latvia. Discussing the predicament of Eastern Europe as besieged borderlands, Dace Dzenovska and Taras Fedirko assert that ‘in Latvia, embattlement – in the form of a permanent threat of Russia and Russians within the borders of the country – is the existential condition that constitutes the nation and its founding documents’ (2021: 202). The Victory Monument brilliantly exemplifies these anxieties, embodying the evidence of Russia’s realized threat to the nation through the Soviet occupation period, the threat of Russia’s contemporary imperialistic agenda, as well as the uncertainty presented by the Russian-speaking community gathering around this symbolic site in these uncertain times. The increasingly nationalistic public discourse contributed to further cementing these ideas and right-wing political forces, such as the National Alliance party, which ran the Ministry of Culture in 2022, played an important role in shaping public discourse and opinion on the Victory Monument issue (Rudovska, 2024). Various political parties have always played on the ethnic divide in search for voters in Latvia’s political landscape and the Victory Monument case played neatly into many party-political agendas prior to the elections in autumn 2022, which also increased politicians’ engagement with it, contributing to heightening tensions around the issue.

As the monument was inscribed with new imaginaries and absorbed the tropes of occupation, imperialism, war and threats, its presence seemed more and more unwelcome. While the initial discussions on the monument in the early days of the war included the possibilities of renaming, recontextualizing or relocating it, so as to thereby transform the symbolism embedded in it, the monument was soon deemed to be unsalvageable and un-preservable. Some art and culture professionals tried to critically engage with the questions of the artistic value of the monument, but these voices were easily drowned in the highly politicized context (Rudovska, 2024). At the same time, other art experts framed the monument as too difficult to decontextualize or resignify, given that it was so infected by its insuperable associations with Russia's imperial expansionism and occupation, thus directly and indirectly promoting the idea of its removal. For example, one Latvian art scholar, in a public debate on the monument, contended that ‘its aggressiveness is insurmountable. [Its] humanization is not possible’ (Latvijas Radio 3, 2022). The notion of aggressiveness was linked both to the idea that the monument was infected with an ideology of occupation, imperialism, and war, and to its material form – the size and style of the monument’s sculptures. Accounts of its material appearance included such descriptions as ‘pompous’, ‘massive’, ‘multifaceted’, and with ‘sharp edges’, ‘ridged forms and rhythm’. Specific elements of the monument, such as the group of Soviet soldiers holding weapons, were directly linked to the monument conveying a message of violence. The monument’s physical features were framed as expressing an aggressiveness inherent to its material form, which was impossible to overcome and counteract, and thereby it was defined as being beyond salvation, making its elimination the only possibility.

However, even when the material traces of such tangible symbolic elements are erased, this does not mean that the imaginary ‘work’ comes to an end. Analysing recent developments in memory politics in Latvia, Deniss Hanovs (2022) examines how the toppled monument has become a sacred site in the imaginations of Russian-speakers. Hanovs notes how the two water splashes that appeared on the sides of the falling obelisk as it fell into the water basin were described by some as ‘wings of an angel’. According to Hanovs, this points to the sacralization of the monument as it was now being reproduced in a different realm, beyond the material one. This demonstrates how the imaginary dimension can transcend material constructs, reaching into the divine and sacred realms, even when the physical elements are no longer present.

The possibility of monuments facilitating and holding within themselves such a huge and diverse amount of symbolic capital, as outlined above, makes them particularly illuminating sites for illustrating the interplay between the material and the imaginary realms. The imaginaries surrounding the Victory Monument loomed larger than the monument itself, inflating its political symbolic significance to unprecedented levels, thereby illustrating how politics becomes animated, enchanted, and enlivened. While new narratives and imaginaries are created and produced, people strive to reorder and to rectify their worlds through material engagements, including by acts of erasure. Indeed, as the monument was being reproduced and redefined as misfitting in so many ways, its removal was construed as necessary in order to affirm and secure Latvia’s sovereignty and statehood, its geopolitical allegiances, and even its moral order. Moreover, the very act of erasure and destruction or ‘deconstruction’ served as a declaration of state power and sovereign agency at a time when sovereignty itself was perceived to be under threat.

The removal of the monument also became a spectacular act, a monumental event, that signified broader societal changes, specifically a new wave of de-Russification policies promoted by the state Mieriņa, 2024). The political landscape changed considerably with the war and Latvia’s political centre moved noticeably to the right, as many of the policies promoted by the radical right before the war had now become mainstream (Auers, 2023). This included educational reforms phasing out the Russian language, new migration regulations affecting people with permanent residence in Latvia, and limiting access to Russian state media. While some of the newly introduced policies had been debated for decades and were welcomed by the majority of the population, others were quite controversial and were criticized for being short-sighted and hasty. The introduction of wider reforms in autumn 2022 and throughout 2023 also opened up more space for critical discussions and engagements with these processes, including the ongoing removal of Soviet monuments. The process of removing other Soviet-related monuments proved contentious and difficult, illuminating the complex and contested meanings absorbed by monuments in each locality. A striking example is that of the monument for Andrejs Upītis, an esteemed Latvian writer who was also a collaborator with the Soviet government. Already, in winter 2022, I heard a joke being retold by a friend while discussing the Victory Monument removal that maybe the Upīts monument should be divided in half – to remove the bad (Soviet) part and leave the good (writer) part. The joke soon became a reality as in autumn 2024, Riga City Council supported a plan put forward by sculptor Ivars Drulle to cut the several-metres-high bronze sculpture of Andrejs Upīts in half vertically, where one half would represent the positive – the writer and the other, the negative – the Soviet collaborator (Demidovs, 2024). Although it seems that the plan will not be carried out after all, it highlights the complexities involved in erasing awkward, complicated and ‘misfitting’ legacies from a previous era in attempts to fix and purify social and national landscapes.

New assemblages of past, present, and future

Monuments are powerful vehicles not only for interpreting past and present: as Yampolsky (1995) underscores, they also contain various temporal values, allow time to flow differently at their sites, and even infuse the surrounding space with different temporalities. The case of the Victory Monument illustrates that its meanings were significantly reshaped not only by new interpretations of the past and new understandings of the present, but also by new imaginations and anticipations of the future. While contradictory understandings and interpretations of the Soviet past were able to coexist within the monument, even if uncomfortably, this tolerated coexistence was disrupted by Russia’s war on Ukraine. In the process, the monument began to symbolize new imaginations of the future that included diverging political loyalties and allegiances, implying different alternatives for the future, some of which were perceived as direct threats to Latvia’s very existence. Building on Catherine Wanner’s (2019) work on relational aspects of commemorative spaces, I argue that the monument’s removal signifies not only an articulation of new understandings of how things, people, and events relate to one another, but also how different temporalities relate to one another.

Scholars working on the wider region of Eastern Europe have already noted the specific ways in which past and present are interwoven in region’s societies. For example, Francisco Martínez (2017) points to a cyclic temporal pattern of replacement–rejection–restoration, in which ruptures such as wars and occupation produce ‘continuous discontinuities’. This resonates with Neringa Klumbytė’s (2022) argument that people in this part of the world understand sovereignty as fluid and unstable, and therefore vulnerable. These works indicate a specific temporal understanding in Eastern Europe, in which a linear time scale is challenged by elements of instability, fragility, interruptions, and repetitions, indicating the more cyclical features of time, fusing past, present, and future together in various assemblages.

An important aspect in analysing the removal of the Victory Monument is how this specific historical moment was perceived by the Latvian public. The war had introduced a different time measurement and a new reference point, and it was narrated as a fundamental change in how people apprehended the world, expressed through phrases like ‘on 24 February [2022] we woke up in a different world’. The current moment was defined and narrated as a time of war, and the public debates on the monument were saturated with expressions like ‘everything has changed’ and ‘we live in wartime’. The present and the current moment were thereby portrayed and understood as a profoundly different timescape, reshaping the temporal consciousness in which the past, present, and future intertwined in new ways.

The monument came to represent not only the collective past of the Latvian people, through its representation of the Soviet occupation period and all it entailed, but also a difficult present through the ongoing war in Ukraine. This profoundly new conceptualization of the present also added a new temporal dimension to the monument. As one of the Latvian art experts asserted:

this monument is not embodying our past […]. This monument actually symbolizes the present. This still aggressive ideology and army that attempts to realize this ideology. Russia’s attack on Ukraine in reality shows that our city’s public space has no place for this monument due to its symbolic content, due to its aggressivity that is in this sculpture. (Šteimane, 2022)

This specific framing of the present bolstered calls to remove the monument as it was no longer only about the past, but its symbolism was embedded and activated in the present. Likewise, an anticipated and feared future became associated with the monument. A future that entailed a potential of war, collapsed in the present. This specific alternative future came to reside in the Victory Monument – ‘The Finger of Moscow’. As these new imaginaries associated with the monument became too threatening to bear, the monument became increasingly misfitting in the context of the evolving geopolitical realities, along with threats that it implied and the profound uncertainty and fear that penetrated Latvian society. That is, the monument’s removal can be viewed as an attempt to fix both the ‘wrongs’ of the past and the unacceptable realities of the present, and to prevent a feared future from unfolding.

This fearful anticipation of a violent future inserted itself distinctly within the past–present relations already inherent within the monument, becoming a central temporal imagination through which the monument’s removal was initiated. Much of scholarly work on monument removal frames such processes as erasures of a problematic past – the rewriting of historical and civic narratives, rupture with former social orders, and shifts in power hierarchies (Fryer et al., 2021; Martínez, 2017, 2022). I have demonstrated how monument removal can be as much about future-making as it is about past, as it attempts to generate specific futures through its efforts to prevent certain other futures from unfolding.

Interestingly, the act of the monument’s demolition itself became inscribed in the Latvian state’s narrative of liberation from the Soviet occupation through specific time markers. The demolition work of the monument complex started on 23 August 2023, a date that carries a deep historical significance for Latvia. It was on 23 August 1939 that a non-aggression pact was signed between the German Reich and the Soviet Union – the so-called Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. ⁴ The treaty is particularly notorious in the Baltics for its secret protocol that divided the region into Soviet and German zones of influence and thereby sealed the fate of Latvia (Sajadova, n.d.). Given the historical significance of the date, pro-independence movements across the Baltic states organized one of the most significant public mobilizations against the Soviet regime on this date in 1989. A demonstration called the Baltic Way succeeded in gathering around 2 million people, who joined hands creating a human chain almost 700 km long, stretching across all the three states and becoming one of the cornerstones in the restoration of Latvia’s independence. That the removal of the Victory Monument started on 23 August shows how this act is situated within the narrative of Latvia’s struggle for sovereignty. After the last piece of the monument, the tall obelisk, had fallen, the mayor of Riga described the moment as ‘getting rid of the last symbol of Soviet occupation’, giving the liberation narrative an ending worthy of a Hollywood plot – the last remnants of the occupation regime being removed on the date that symbolized the start of the occupation. By being placed in this narrative, the removal of the monument was also made into a central element in the Latvian nation-building process in the newest times (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Instagram post by Riga’s Mayor Mārtiņš Staķis commenting on the fall of the Victory Monument on 25 August 2022. Source: Photo by the author.

Monumental events

Processes of monument removals or iconoclasm are often a part of larger political shifts and reorderings of society – the fall of a political regime, the coming of new ideological frameworks, or rearrangements of hierarchical, social, or moral order. They are monumental events, signifying and carrying within them the wider changes taking place. As one of the most monumental and spectacular events in recent Latvian history, the removal of the Victory Monument certainly signalled transformations in and for Latvia. It signified both the geopolitical shifts in the region and the start of wider transformative rearticulations of elements structuring Latvia’s society, particularly with regard to its large Russian-speaking minority.

While fitting into different sequences, depending on the scale of the analyses, the transformative power and scope of the removal of the monument cannot be completely apprehended in the current moment, as its reverberations are still ongoing. In 2025, for example, the Victory Monument experienced a kind of resurrection when a thematic park called ‘Saved Europe’ was opened in the Russian city of Kaliningrad, featuring miniature replicas of Soviet monuments that had been removed across Eastern Europe, including a small-scale copy of the Victory Monument (LSM, 2025). Nevertheless, given how the removal of monuments in Latvia happened in parallel with other similar cases across Eastern Europe, it offers a valuable insight into how societal ruptures and geopolitical transformations reverberate in various localities. It also illustrates how local responses feed back into the larger geopolitical shifts unfolding, and attempt to reshape, reimagine, and rearticulate the region without the stamp of its Soviet past. Moreover, this recent widespread removal of monuments and landmarks associated with the Soviet period across Eastern Europe illustrates not only a change of geopolitical paradigm in the region and an active dissociation from a certain past, but also, as I argue, an attempt to forestall a certain future that would entail a return of Russia’s dominance within these contexts. While the first wave of Soviet monument removal in the region that took place in the 1990s is often perceived as rejection of the totalitarian Soviet regime and the restoration of statehood, this new wave of monument removals, I assert, entails a specific effort to prevent a particular future from unfolding in the context of geopolitical crises.

Conclusion

The removal of the Victory Monument represents a relevant case that illustrates how symbolic reordering takes place at historical junctures. The article demonstrates how everyday public artefacts can become the epitomes and embodiments of wider political and societal concerns, and how their removal signals wider transformations. By focusing on the inscription and inflation of meanings surrounding the Victory Monument, the article sketches a ‘structure of conjuncture’, exploring some of the elements contributing to the epitomization of the monument. Attending to the mobilization of material and imaginary realms, as well as a new constellation of temporal trajectories inscribed in the monument, the article traces the metamorphosis of the material, imaginary, and temporal capacities of the monument. The article illustrates how these resignifications and transformations ultimately led to the removal of the monument, as it was deemed a misfit for and within contemporary political realities. This analysis also underscores the value of methodologically tracing not only how things come into being, but also how they unravel and are obliterated. Such acts of unmaking and erasure illustrate how symbolic reordering unfolds, and represent intense vernacular political commentaries and performances of sovereign agency that actively aim to reconfigure public, social, and physical landscapes of everyday lives.