Watching the toppling of Bristol’s Edward Colston monument, I was struck by echoes of the fate of another dubious statue: Kyiv’s Lenin monument. The Bolshevik leader was pulled down in 2013 amid anti-government protests sparked first by the decision to cancel an EU trade deal in favour of closer ties to Russia, but later by police brutality against demonstrators. As with Colston, the toppling of Lenin was inspired by violence from above, but also provided a focal point for larger grievances. The destruction in both cases was relatively spontaneous, but in neither case was it a mindless act: the destructions were targeted, symbolically charged performances.
In both cases, discussion over the historical achievements and crimes of the respective figures ensued. But these discussions, while important, do not explain why the monuments fell when they did. Both figures had long been the focus of controversy, but they had also gone largely unnoticed. So why the sudden jump from specialised debate to jubilant destruction?
A public monument is, of course, never a straightforward representation of an individual. It is a symbol of whatever the monument’s initiators believed that individual represented. Soviet monuments were planted throughout the USSR and post-WWII Eastern Europe as markers of geopolitical and ideological dominance, rather than as explicit tributes to figures like Lenin. Monuments like that to Colston, erected in the Victorian era, express the persistence of imperial might and the putatively benevolent dominance of a certain class. In both cases, they are about power. And in both cases, protesters were not, as some have argued, naively attempting to “erase” history: they were challenging manipulated versions of history that reinforce power relations.
