The limits of iconoclasm: The fate of tsarist monuments in revolutionary Moscow and Petrograd, 1917–1918

Abstract

Urban fallism in early revolutionary Russia was a political and aesthetic struggle rooted in imperial Russian civic culture. Few tsarist monuments were taken down in Moscow and Petrograd in 1917 and 1918 despite the violence of the social revolution and near universal hatred for the old regime. This selective iconoclasm occurred because the criteria for removal of statues in those cities reflected the aesthetic agenda of artists, critics, and campaigners from late imperial Russia who convinced Bolshevik politicians to accept their authority in art matters. After the February Revolution in 1917, public proposals for the large-scale dismantling of tsarist monuments received pushback from art professionals who argued that monuments should be protected according to their artistic value, not destroyed for their political representations. The Bolsheviks who took over in October 1917 deferred to such art experts on issues regarding monument demolition. The most recent monuments associated with official narratives and realist aesthetics of the deposed Nicholas II were removed, whilst others were protected as aesthetically desirable. Preservationists thus successfully changed the definition of political art from narrative content to aesthetic form and preserved some statues that political revolutionaries wanted to destroy. Today the Putin government seeks to protect Lenin monuments through a similar depoliticisation of revolutionary content inside a framework of historic preservation.