Emily Katzenstein: You describe your own work in terms of ‘decolonising urban spaces’ through artistic interventions. Can you tell us what that decolonisation means in this context? What projects are you currently working on?

Yolanda Gutiérrez: At the moment, I have two different kinds of projects. One is the Urban Bodies Projects. That’s a project that deals with the colonial past of European cities. I am working with local dancers in each city. The next one will be in Mexico City, and then one, next year, in Kigali. My second project is the Decolonycities Project. That’s a project about dealing with the German colonial past in the city of Hamburg, through the eyes of those who were colonised. I am planning to do five projects in five countries—Togo, Cameroon, Tanzania, Namibia, and Rwanda [countries Germany colonised in the late 19th and early 20th century—eds.]

And then I have the Bismarck-Dekolonial Project, which I started when this Bismarck controversy arose. In Hamburg, they are renovating the Bismarck monument for €9 million. It became a big controversy and overlapped with the Black Lives Matter protests in the U.S., and here in Germany. Here in Hamburg, activists started to paint or graffiti all kinds of colonial monuments and symbols of white supremacy. Suddenly, overnight, these monuments had been altered. But you can’t really do that with the Bismarck statue because they’re currently renovating it and it’s surrounded by protective walls. So, we’ve been having a two year long discussion about what should happen with the Bismarck monument.

The discussion in Hamburg was driven by a lot of activists, especially people of colour. For me, however, it was important to see what would happen if we brought in the perspectives of artists from former German colonies (Namibia, Cameroon, Togo, Burundi, Rwanda and Tanzania—eds.) who are living with the consequences of Bismarck’s role in Germany’s colonial past. So I acted as a producer and curator, and I invited artists from the countries that Germany colonised in Africa to stage their own performances in Hamburg, at historical sites that are linked to Germany’s colonial past. The artists who participated were Isack Peter Abeneko[1], Dolph Banza, Vitjitua Ndjiharine, Stone, Moussa Issiaka, Fabian Villasana aka Calavera, Sarah Lasaki, Faizel Browny, Samwel Japhet, and Shabani Mugado.

That’s a political statement. When the invited artists put themselves in the spaces that have some significance in Germany’s colonial history, they appropriate those spaces. The artists put on performances that reinterpreted the meaning of the places in which they performed. During the International Summer Festival, when the invited artists from Bismarck-Dekolonial put on their performances, for example, the audience could participate in what I call a decolonising audio-walk: you could see the artists’ performance while simultaneously listening to an audio track that plays the sounds of German troops leaving the Hamburg port, for example—a huge event at the time. So, the audio of German troops leaving from the Hamburg port is juxtaposed with the performance of the artists from Namibia, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Cameroon. You are listening to an audio track about the event of German colonial troops leaving from the Hamburg port, and, simultaneously, you see the performances of artists who are descendants of those who were most directly affected by Germany’s colonial policy.

We often tend to think of history as something stale, dead—something that belongs in the past, that we don’t care about. In discussions of Germany’s colonial past, that is a reaction that you encounter quite often. People say: That’s in the past and there is nothing that we can do about it. The past cannot be undone. And my reaction is: Yes, the past cannot be undone but we can change the perspective of how we look at history.

EK That is something that brings the different contributions of this series together—the sense that the past is, in a sense, contemporaneous, and that the stories that we tell about the past are crucial to our sense of who we are today. Can I come back to the question I asked earlier? What does decolonisation mean when it comes to artistic interventions? How do you conceive of decolonisation in your own work?

YG: Yes, my work reflects on the fact that history has been written by the colonisers. For hundreds of years, the colonial gaze has shaped our understanding of the societies that Europeans colonised. For example, during the Spanish conquest of Latin America, Spanish priests often took on the role of historians. Their impressions of the societies they encountered was heavily influenced by the own cultural presuppositions. For example, they had certain notions about the role of women in society, notions about gender roles, etc. That coloured and distorted their view of the societies they tried to describe. In the case of women in Aztec society, for example, they confused expectation and reality, and described what they expected to find—they portrayed Aztec women as unemancipated and occupying a predominantly domestic role, because that’s the way they saw the role of women in Catholic Spain. But now there are new histories of indigenous societies. There was an amazing exhibition in the Linden Museum Stuttgart on Aztecs culture, for example, that reflected very critically on the ways of seeing that have shaped European impressions of Aztec society over generations. That is what I am trying to do in terms of my artistic interventions—to publicise and communicate ‘unwritten’ histories, untold stories, and marginalised historical perspectives.

To do that, I work closely with historians. For example, my most recent project is situated in Namibia, which was colonised by Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century. From the beginning, I’ve collaborated with Jan Kawlath, a doctoral student in history at the University of Hamburg. His PhD investigates how the departure of German colonial troops was publicly celebrated to performatively construct images of Germany as a colonial power. And when we visit the historical sites at which we will stage performances, we listen to his writings about events that took place there, and his writing about these places and sites informs our choreography.

In that sense, my work is influenced by Gloria Wekker’s work on the cultural archive.[2] Wekker writes so powerfully about the importance of the cultural archive. There’s also a James Baldwin quote that captures it well: “History is not the past, it is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we literally are criminals.”[3]

EK: In your work, you’ve experimented with different modes of presentation and media to stage decolonising artistic interventions. You already mentioned the ‘decolonising audio-walk’. Can you explain the concept of a decolonising audio walk?

YG: Yes, I use the concept of decolonising audio walks in all my projects. The audience has head-phones, and walks to historical sites that have some significance in the colonial past of the city. When you arrive at a site, you see the performance while listening to the audio soundtrack. It is a combination of different types of information, historical facts, interviews with experts, statements by artists, music, etc. etc. Afterwards, you walk to the next site, and so on. It is a way to incorporate a lot of different elements: Dance, audio—it’s an embodied experience for the audience because they walk through the city. Walking through the city allows you to see familiar places with new eyes. I mean, normally, once you’ve lived in a city for a while, you assume you know the place and you’re not going to go on a tour of the city. But then, during the decolonising audio walk, you experience yourself not knowing the city that you assumed you knew, and that allows you to uncover the histories that are normally not talked about.

EK On the website of the Bismarck-Dekolonial Project, you raise a question that I found fascinating, and that I wanted to put to you: namely, what kinds of artistic interventions are effective in contributing to decolonising urban spaces? How do you think about the different artistic strategies and interventions one can stage, and about the differences in the impact they have? With regards to the ‘decolonising audio-walk’, is there a tension between this momentary performative intervention and the monuments that embody permanence? Can performances effectively contest the built environment?

YG: Performances in urban spaces are a way to reach people easily. By contrast, universities have, for a couple of years, been doing a lot of “Ringvorlesungen” (series of lectures by different speakers), where you have artists and academics talk to each other about decolonisation. I have been following all these discussions, and I think that’s also an interesting approach, but they don’t reach a broad audience. Similarly, in the arts, there are many exhibitions that deal with decolonisation, but they are framed in a very particular way, and it’s for a particular audience; they don’t reach as many people. And what I really love about dance is that it allows me to juxtapose different temporalities and sensory impressions—historical accounts or sounds from the past are juxtaposed with a performance that’s very much in the moment. You can connect the history to which you are listening to what you see. In that sense, it’s a way to demonstrate the contemporaneity of the past. It’s like puzzle pieces coming together.

But audio walks, and performances more generally, are ephemeral, and that is my big challenge. You can put on as many performances as you like—for example, during the International Summer Festival 2021 in Hamburg, we put on five performances every day, which was already a lot. But even if you do a hundred performances per day, it doesn’t change the fact that it is ephemeral. So right now, my big question is how we can turn this into something more permanent. Because it’s all about memory, right? It’s about memorials and historical sites that need to be decolonised. And the challenge for me is: How can I, as an artist in the performing arts, leave a print that’s permanent? I am trying to get ‘into memory’ and I am still trying to figure out how far we can go with these performances and audio-walks in historical sites, what their impact is.

So that’s my big next challenge. I always say that the fact that the artists who participated in the Bismarck-Dekolonial Project—Isack Peter Abeneko, Dolph Banza, Vitjitua Ndjiharine, Stone, Moussa Issiaka, Fabian Villasana aka Calave, Sarah Lasaki, Faizel Browny, Samwel Japhet, and Shabani Mugado—put on these performances around the Bismarck monument means that the space has been altered. It is no longer the same space, no longer holds the same meaning. The traces they left are ephemeral but they are there, nonetheless. There is a trace. That’s why I want to work on putting up a QR code or something similar. At the moment, my idea is to combine it with a visually appealing sculpture or something else that attracts passers-by, so that they say: “What’s that? I want to know more.” And then they can use the QR code to watch the performance that happened in the space.

EK: One of the questions that always structures debates about contested monuments, it seems to me, is how we should think about the relationship between meaning and monuments. As an artist, how do you think about this relationship between monuments and meaning? Can we speak of a ‘hegemonic’ meaning of particular monuments or should we think about a multiplicity of meanings? Should we oppose hegemonic meanings with counter-hegemonic meanings, or prioritise showcasing the diversity and multiplicity of possible interpretations and meanings? What’s your approach to this?

YG: In Germany, we haven’t spent enough time reflecting Germany’s colonial past. The Second World War is obviously a horrific part of Germany’s history, and it tends to overshadow everything else, including Germany’s colonial past. But that means that you miss crucial connections, and that people don’t know Germany’s colonial past. For example, that the idea of the concentration camps was first developed during the genocide of the Herero and Nama in Namibia, camps that were built in the beginning of the 20th century. For me, the representation of Bismarck is a symbol of the power that Germany had in the world at that time. In the case of Bismarck, this is dangerous, because it works as a magnet for the right-wing, and we experienced that in a very, very bad way. During the performance of Vitjitua Ndjiharine, a visual artist from Namibia, one person in the audience suddenly went up to her and gave the Hitlergruß. He was facing the Bismarck monument, and stood in front of her, and gave the Hitlergruß.

So, trying to deal with this statue and with what it represents is exactly where the power is, for me. I mean, just look at it. The sheer measure of the monument is so imposing. And I think that’s the way that Germans were feeling when they colonised Namibia. If you read the writings of German colonial officials at the time, there is this feeling of supremacy. And that’s difficult to deal with, especially now, when they are polishing the Bismarck monument and literally making it whiter.

EK: There have been many proposals as to what should happen with the Bismarck monument. Some have argued that the monument should be removed altogether, others have argued that it should be turned on its head, and yet others propose letting it crumble. I assume letting it crumble is not really an option for safety reasons, but I’ve always liked the symbolism of it. What do you think should happen with the monument?

YG: I think if you vanish the Bismarck monument that doesn’t mean that you’ve vanished the meaning of Bismarck in the minds of people; what his figure means for people. And you can’t simply let the monument crumble—the size of the monument means that that is unfeasible. There were issues with the static of the monument, that’s why they’re renovating it. I mean with some monuments, you can let them crumble, no problem, but given the size of the Bismarck monument that’s not feasible.

But you know what? I could see it happening in a video, a video that’s then projected unto the Bismarck monument. That’s something that we have experimented with, too. We didn’t pull the statue down but we did what we call ‘video mapping.’ We did it at night, and that’s when I really felt like an activist. I had a generator, and it was midnight, and we had to set everything up. That’s the first time where I had to inform the municipality and said: Hey, I'm going to do this at the Bismarck monument. And they said, OK, that’s fine. You're going to destroy it. Nothing is going to happen. But I mean, you could see the change—suddenly the Bismarck monument became the canvas instead of the symbol it usually represents.

Of course, that’s a temporary intervention. But I am also convinced that we need a permanent artistic intervention. I think we need an open space for discussions. For example, I could imagine a garden around the monument, a place where we can keep this dialogue and this discussion going once the renovation is done.

I am not a visual artist, obviously, but I was on a podium discussion[4] about decolonising and recontextualising the Bismarck statue with several other artists. There were two very interesting women, Dior Thiam, a visual artist from Berlin, and Joiri Minaya, a Dominican- American artist based in New York. Joiri Minaya has already covered two colonial statues at the port of Hamburg, a statue of Vasco da Gama and a statue of Christopher Columbus, with printed fabrics of her own design[5]—it’s very interesting work. As I said, I am not a visual artist, but I think that a permanent art intervention is necessary. Because what I do is so ephemeral, and I have the sense that we need to reach as broad an audience as possible.

EK: The discussions about what to do with the Bismarck monument have been ongoing for the last two years. What impact has the debate had? Do you get the sense that the debate has contributed to a broader political awareness of Bismarck’s role in Germany’s colonial past in Hamburg? Or is this largely a debate amongst a relatively narrow set of actors?

YG: Yes, the question about impact. What I got tired of were all these discussions on advisory boards, and advisory committees: People discuss a lot. I am a maker, and I sat at a lot of these discussions and said, yes, we can keep discussing but we also need to do something now. And people had a lot of reasons for why we couldn’t do anything until later. But to me it seemed wrong to wait until the renovations are finished. It seemed like a strange idea to stage an intervention once Bismarck’s shining in all his glory, you know. The discussions are good and all, but they are not enough. They don’t reach enough people; they don’t reach communities. I think it would be fantastic to have something like the project Monument Lab in the United States here in Germany. Monument Lab is combination of different layers of communities—they bring together artists, activists, municipal agencies, cultural institutions, and young people. That’s precisely what we need to do around the Bismarck statue. We need a multilayered participatory process that includes different groups in society.



[1] Due to pandemic-related travel restrictions, Isack Peter Abeneko could only participate remotely from Dar es Salaam.

[2] Gloria Wekker, White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Durham, 2016.

[3] As cited in I Am Not Your Negro, directed by Raoul Peck (2016; New York: Magnolia Pictures, 2017), Netflix. (1:26:32).

[4] Behörde für Kultur und Medien Hamburg, “(Post) colonial Deconstruction: Artistic interventions towards a multilayered monument”, 16.09.2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6215&v=hRFzASv_ea4&feature=emb_logo

[5] For images of the covered statues and an explanation about the symbolism of the printed fabrics, see the link above at 1:25-1:30.

Questions of how we relate to our history have been at the forefront of U.S. national discourse as debates about school curricula, the renaming of military bases and public institutions, and other topics seem to be represented in online fora and the pages of newspapers every week. In these debates, we argue not only about how to represent the past, but whether the past is really past at all. Not least among the arguments that touch on these issues is the debate around Confederate monuments and other public commemorations of historical figures who have participated in oppression in various forms. Cities such as Richmond, Chicago, and New York have commissioned studies of their monuments, inviting comment and, in the case of Chicago and New York, issuing reports on the state of their urban representation of historical figures and events. While the last ten years have seen two waves of monument removals—the first in 2015-2017, and the second in 2020—controversies around the appropriateness of public monuments are no new phenomenon. In this essay, I outline a history of the debates around the removal of monuments to illustrate how our current debates about monuments have a past of their own that we have forgotten. Inherent in these debates and the suggestions for what to do with problematic monuments are diverse and sometimes contradictory understandings of our relationship to history. Take, for example, the removal of four Confederate monuments in New Orleans almost six years ago.

The removal began around 2 a.m. on April 24, 2017. While the police and onlookers watched, and snipers stood guard, workers with covered faces began to dismantle the monument to the Battle of Liberty Place. Despite worries to the contrary, there was little disruption, and around 5 a.m. the monument was loaded onto a flatbed and driven away. For the third and perhaps last time in 126 years, the monument was removed from public sight. Amid protests that sometimes turned violent, the city of New Orleans removed three more monuments over the next 25 days. By May 5th, a bright Friday afternoon, the last of the monuments, that of Robert E. Lee, was hauled away, leaving Lee Circle without a statue of its namesake for the first time in 133 years.

At first glance, it might seem as if the events leading to the removal of these monuments began in June 2015, when then-mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu, called for the removal of four monuments: the statues of Robert E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard, Jefferson Davis, and the monument to the Battle at Liberty Place. Or one might assume that these events were sparked by contemporary events, such as the shooting of nine Black worshipers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina by a White man and the subsequent removal of the Confederate flag from that state’s capitol building. Indeed, as New Orleans newspapers such as the Times-Picayune and the Advocate, and national newspapers such as the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Washington Post covered the story, coverage of the monuments frequently referenced these events. As in subsequent waves of monument removals, public commentary linked controversies surrounding the monuments to broader contemporary issues of racial justice and racial violence, making questions about the future of Confederate monuments all the more salient.

However, as I will show, the contestation—and eventual removal—of confederate monuments in New Orleans cannot be understood simply in terms of contemporary events, or as the actions of a single politician. Instead, the removal of these monuments must be understood as part of a much longer history of contesting confederate monuments in New Orleans. In the words of a local councilman, “I am the descendant of slaves. Before I knew there was a person called Mitch Landrieu, the people I cared about were talking about the need to take those statues down.”[1] Indeed, in the case of these four monuments in New Orleans, very public contestations had occurred since at least the 1960s. For example, groups such as the NAACP, Concerned Clergy, and Black Lives Matter held protests in 1974, 2000, and 2014 respectively, seeking the removal of the monument to the Battle of Liberty Place, and later, to Robert E. Lee.

Throughout these controversies, monuments were sometimes temporarily removed or were amended with the addition of explanatory or exculpatory plaques; however, they were always returned, until 2017. As support for monument removal in public discourse grew over the decades—from being expressed primarily in the pages of newspapers such at the Louisiana Weekly, which began by serving predominantly the African American community, to being outspoken in the pages of the Times Picayune, a newspaper that has struggled with issues of race—the arguments both for and against the monuments themselves have remained remarkably stable, with both sides articulating their desires in terms that reflect distinct and divergent understandings of the relationship between the past and the present. It seems our disagreements about the past have their own past.
 
***
 
The monuments that were eventually removed in 2017 honoured three important figures of the Civil War and one event during the post-war Reconstruction period: Robert E. Lee, the commander of the confederate army; P.G.T. Beauregard, a confederate general and native son of New Orleans; Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy; and the Battle of Liberty Place. This battle, or really skirmish, took place on September 14th, 1874, when the integrated Metropolitan Police attempted to block the White League, a paramilitary organisation associated with anti-Black and anti-Republican violence, from receiving a shipment of arms. The Metropolitan Police were quickly overwhelmed, and the White League overthrew the government of Republican Governor William Kellogg. Although the city came back under Republican and Union control, the “battle” has been characterised by some as a fight for liberty from the rule of Republican “carpetbaggers.”

The monuments were all erected in the post-Reconstruction years between 1884, with the unveiling of the R.E. Lee monument, and 1915, with the unveiling of the P.G.T. Beauregard monument. They were part of an attempt to romanticise and valorise the Civil War, known as the Lost Cause, and were erected in a political climate that saw the rolling back of civil liberties and voting rights for African Americans.[2] The Lee monument was unveiled on January 22, 1884—George Washington’s birthday. In the dedication speech given at the unveiling[3] and articles written at the time, attempts were made to link the two historical figures as men equally dedicated to honour and country, thereby attempting to lift Lee to the status of Washington in the pantheon of national heroes. In one opinion piece written at the time, the author remarks that they “were both charged with rebellion”[4] (emphasis in the original). After these monuments were unveiled, commemorative activities, often organised by the United Daughters of the Confederacy or the Sons of Confederate Veterans, were held annually into the 1970s, with speeches, organised laying of wreaths, and musical performances.

However, beginning in the 1960s and 70s, public protest surrounding the monuments began to arise in New Orleans. Perhaps first among the four monuments to be the subject of this attention was the monument to the Battle of Liberty Place. This monument had become a rallying place for white supremacist groups including the Ku Klux Klan,[5] and a site at which speakers at commemorative events in the 1960s decried federal interventions impinging on ‘school choice’ (read desegregation) and other areas as akin to those of the Reconstruction era.[6] In 1964, the monument was put into storage for approximately five years to make way for the construction of the International Trade Mart. Groups that supported the monument extracted a promise from the mayor at the time that it would be returned to its original site and that the removal would be handled “just as was the repair and restoration of the Robert E. Lee statue on St. Charles.”[7] While the monument was in storage, commemorative activities continued to take place without the monument itself, and after the monument was returned in 1970, the speeches at subsequent commemorations included reference to the idea that it was not only White Leaguers who were against the “carpetbaggers,” but that Black New Orleanians also rallied against Reconstruction “interlopers.” These narratives, which explained the monument not in terms of race, but in terms of liberty, ran directly counter to a plaque that had been added to the monument by the Crescent White League in 1932 that “recognised white supremacy in the South.”

In 1974, the NAACP New Orleans College Chapter and the New Orleans NAACP Youth Council organised protests against the monument. In a page of letters to a local newspaper, the Times Picayune, about the Battle of Liberty Place monument, readers began to voice tropes that continue to resonate in contemporary debates about the fate of contested monuments. These letters are predominantly supportive of the monument. They range from arguments about the destruction of history and assertions that “slavery was never truly the issue behind the Civil War,”[8] to fears of a ripple effect:

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People must be embarked upon a movement to destroy everything related to history. Should they continue, and be successful with their asinine efforts to remove the Liberty Monument… probably their next move would be to destroy the Coliseum in Rome.[9]
 
The single opposition to the monument came in a letter written by a self-identified young Black man who, nevertheless, did not want the monument to come down. He explained:

[as someone] opposed to white supremacy… [I] cannot accept the views that the plaque proclaims. But the monument should be allowed to stand, for it is a constant reminder of what can happen if blacks should become zeal-less in their efforts to gain and keep the rights that so many have paid the price for.[10]
 
This movement was seemingly put to rest by the installation of an additional plaque that read: “Although the Battle of Liberty Place and this monument are important parts of New Orleans’s history, the sentiments in favour of White supremacy expressed thereon are contrary to the philosophy and beliefs of present-day New Orleans.”        

By 1981 the controversy began anew. Then-Mayor Dutch Morial was accused of having tried quietly to remove the monument without public notice. However, by this time, opposition to the monument had a clear voice in the pages of the Times-Picayune. Comparing a page of letters called “Your Opinions” in 1981 to a similar page mentioned above in 1974, an almost complete reversal can be seen. Instead of almost all letters being in support of the monument, almost all were in favour of taking it down. Letters in opposition to the monument draw attention to the continued injustices taking place in New Orleans at the time: “The doctrine of white supremacy is alive and well, waiting for the right political climate to re-release itself. This is evident in the popular upsurge of the Klan.”[11] Others applauded the mayor for initiating a symbolic “decision to further King’s vision of peace, love, and brotherhood.”[12]

As in recent controversies, contemporary events sharpened the debate. Police shootings of four Black New Orleanians in the Algiers neighbourhood as well as KKK activities were cited, not as precipitating forces, but as events that made the issue of the monument all the more pressing. Former KKK grand wizard David Duke tried unsuccessfully to obtain a restraining order preventing the removal of the monument and claimed equivalency between the monument to Martin Luther King, Jr. and the monument to the Battle of Liberty Place. However, these claims are vehemently contradicted in opinion pieces appearing around the same time. In the end, the matter was left unresolved. The City Council of New Orleans voted to retain for itself the final say in the removal of any monument, statue, or plaque in the city of New Orleans and planned to remove the inscription referencing white supremacy.[13] Instead of removing the inscription, it was, in the end, simply covered over.

In 1989 it was reported that the monument was to be moved due to “traffic engineering” and to improve access to the Canal Street ferry and the Aquarium and that city officials did not know if the monument would be returned when the work was finished.[14]  This set off the largest and most protracted controversy until the monument’s removal. Lasting four years, it involved state and federal preservationists, a suit by a local pharmacist against the city for emotional damages caused by the absence of the monument, and federal Housing and Urban Development officials demanding repayment of funds used for the traffic improvement if the monument was not returned.

Despite the fact that the monument was not on the National Register of Historic Places, the idea that it might be eligible, its being considered historically significant by the Louisiana Landmarks Society and other groups, and the fact that the roadway, sidewalk, and traffic-signal improvements were in part federally funded, led to the necessity of an agreement being negotiated with the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. This agreement stipulated that the monument be re-erected by May 1, 1991. Whether or not there were underlying reasons for the monument’s initial removal, it became clear that the city administration was loath to return it to its initial location. In April of 1991, a four-month extension was granted to the city, and while the city attempted to give the monument to the Louisiana State Museum, their offer was refused. Having missed a September deadline as well, federal historic preservation officials began action to coerce repayment of funds, and a private citizen brought a suit against the city and the mayor’s office. After missing three deadlines, the city was, in the end, forced to re-erect the monument, although in a slightly less prominent position, but protests broke out at the re-dedication ceremony, which was marked by speeches by David Duke, among others, as well as by the very public, forceful arrest of a respected civil rights leader, Avery Alexander.

Public discourse regarding the monument was more negative at this time than during any of the previous incidents. Opposition to the monument and to arguments that it was not connected to racism used David Duke’s involvement to illustrate their points. One staff writer argued:

First supporters of the Liberty Monument tried to tell us that the controversial piece of stone that sits at the foot of Iberville Street has absolutely nothing to do with race. Then, they brought in former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke for the monument’s rededication ceremony last Sunday and obliterated that argument.[15]
 
Others leveraged analogies between Hitler and the Holocaust to express disagreement with a previously published article calling for a nuanced understanding of the Battle of Liberty Place:

If a citizens’ group in Munich, Germany, attempted to dedicate a memorial to commemorate Adolph Hitler's futile effort in 1923 to take over the German government—what we now call the Munich Beer Hall Putsch—surely Mr. Gill would understand if the Jewish citizens of that city were a bit nervous about any such attempt. Certainly, Mr. Gill’s support of these Jews would not waver, even if the citizens’ group argued that the memorial did not celebrate Hitler’s later persecution of the Jews and other minorities (after all, no Jews were killed in Hitler’s putsch) and was only meant to commemorate the Fuehrer’s wonderful record of German economic recovery and his all too successful establishment of the Third Reich.[16]
 
The tide of sentiment had clearly turned. Despite this, supporters of the monument continued to advance arguments in favour of preserving the monument that would sound familiar to observers of today’s monument controversies, citing a need to honour history and fear of a ripple effect (that is, the argument that if one is removed, many or all will be removed). During public hearings on the monument held in 1993, Rev. Henry McEnery asked: “Should we demand the Egyptian pyramids be destroyed because they were built by slaves?”[17]

Like the 1981 conflict, this controversy was also left somewhat unresolved. It left the monument under a federal protection order but with a new law that enabled the New Orleans City Council to remove monuments that are considered nuisances[18] and a new amendment to the monument with the addition of a plaque honouring “Americans on both sides.” The plaque listed the names of the members of the Black and White members of the metropolitan police who died in the skirmish and concluded with a missive that it was “[a] conflict of the past that should teach us lessons for the future.”

In the most recent controversy, the office of the New Orleans Mayor, Mitch Landrieu, spoke of discussions surrounding the 2018 tricentennial of New Orleans, saying:

Part of this process should include a close examination of the historical symbols throughout our city and what changes could be made as we approach 2018, including the Robert E. Lee statue in Lee Circle. These symbols say who we were in a particular time, but times change. Yet these symbols—statues, monuments, street names, and more—still influence who we are and how we are perceived by the world.[19]
 
The statements of the mayor and the mayor’s office set off another round of controversy, and in this controversy, ultimately opposition to the monuments succeeded. In the months after June of 2015, there were at least three opportunities for public commentary at City Council meetings, heated public discourse in newspapers and online, and the creation of several committees and organisations with the purpose of either taking down or retaining this and other confederate monuments. While the shooting of nine people in a Charleston, SC, church and the subsequent removal of the confederate flag from that state’s capitol in Columbia may have preceded and even given greater urgency to the issue of the monuments in New Orleans, both the Mayor and citizens who fought to take them down insisted that the movement is not a response to these other actions, but something with deeper roots.

Despite a 6-1 resolution of the New Orleans City Council in December 2015 to remove the monument to the Battle of Liberty Place as well as those to Lee, Davis, and Beauregard, the process faced numerous obstacles. A lawsuit to keep the monuments, which stayed the city’s hand for a number of months, was resolved in favour of the City Council’s resolution; however, the city was not able to immediately remove the monuments. At first there was difficulty finding a contractor to do the actual work, the first contractor having rescinded his bid due to death threats and his Lamborghini having been set on fire; later, continuing lawsuits stymied the removal. It was only two years later that the monuments were finally removed.

In this most recent example, a culmination of both narrative style and legal precedent can be seen. Opponents of the monuments declare that these monuments were erected to propagate the ideology of the Lost Cause and that they reflect and perpetuate a history of pervasive inequality in the United States. If David Duke and Hitler are considered anathema to the supporters of the monuments, then they must also consider the monuments and their symbolism to be highly inappropriate in the public sphere. In leveraging these narrative tropes, a memorial and moral dissonance is asserted which attempts to put supporters of Confederate monuments in a difficult position. By drawing these connections, monuments are burdened with additional memorial frameworks—most strikingly, that of the holocaust—and ostensibly supporters of the monuments would then have difficulty maintaining that they support the monuments simply as representations of military figures or objects of the past that have no bearing on the present.

Supporters of Confederate monuments use their own well-established narrative tropes: one might be characterised by the separation of history and current social problems; another might be characterised as predicting a ripple effect that would generate an overwhelming number of similar claims. These tropes are remarkably similar to those expressed almost twenty-five years earlier. After Mayor Landrieu called out a local businessman for his support of the monuments (for which he later apologised), the man in question responded with a two-page ad in The Advocate in which he addressed Mayor Landrieu directly:

I ask you, Mitch, should the Pyramids in Egypt be destroyed since they were built entirely from slave labour? We all have learned about the power and abuses of the Pharaohs and the plight of the slaves since the Pyramids are still with us today. What about the Roman Coliseum? It was built by slaves, who lived horrible lives under Roman oppression, but it still stands today and we learn so much from seeing it. Egypt and Italy should be grateful they had no Mitch Landrieu in power or these magnificent structures would not exist for the world to see today.[20]
 
When supporters of the monuments use the tactic of ripple effect or bring out the example of the Colosseum or the pyramids of Egypt, they argue for a moral and historical equivalence between these objects and those like Confederate monuments: they are part of a difficult past, but it is a past from which we can learn.
 
***
 
As these comments by supporters and opponents of confederate monuments demonstrate, there exist radically different views on what monuments have to do with history, and the role that history plays and ought to play in present-day life. Opponents of the monuments see an incongruence between the values represented by the monuments and the values of equality and justice that should characterise present-day society. They assert that it is because injustice continues in the present that the past is not really past, and that the monuments themselves should be understood as destructive, reflecting and participating in a continuing legacy of racism in the United States. Supporters of Confederate monuments take different views. While most agree that the past associated with these monuments diverges from our understandings of what society ought to be today, they argue that the monuments themselves are not problematic precisely because they should be understood as historical rather than contemporary objects and protected for their historical value. Another group of participants in the debate call for a process of “fixing” or contextualising the monuments by adding plaques or explanatory material in order to present them “in the context of their time.” Thus, the three distinct temporal relationships to the monuments emerge in the narrative tropes that are used to support varying positions as well as in the suggestions for how to respond to the monuments themselves. 

Over the last five decades during which it was in public view, the Battle of Liberty Place monument was removed, returned, amended, and re-amended. Yet, it continued to be site through which struggles over the role of history in the present took place. If monuments such as the Battle of Liberty Place can be materially amended or even removed while the narratives surrounding them remain relatively stable, how are we to think about the past and the possibility of reshaping our public spaces? The choice between keeping or toppling monuments seems inadequate to the task of bridging divergent understandings of the role of history in the present, and yet the presence of heavy material symbols such as Confederate monuments cannot be ignored. It is time, then, to radically rethink the role, form, and lifespan of monuments in our public spaces.



[1] Quoted in Robert McClendon in the Times Picayune, December 18, 2015, “Charges May Not End with Four Statues - Liberty Place Under Protective Order”

[2] For more information on the construction of Confederate monuments, see Winberry, John. “‘Lest We
Forget’: The Confederate Monument and the Southern Townscape.” Southeastern Geographer 23, no. 2 (November 1983): 107–21, and Fahs, Alice., and Joan. Waugh, eds. The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

[3] R.E. Lee Monumental Association (New Orleans), and Charles E. Fenner. Ceremonies
Connected with the Unveiling of the Statue of General Robert E. Lee, at Lee Circle, New Orleans,
La., Feb. 22, 1884: Oration. 46 p. New Orleans: W.B. Stansbury & Co., Print., 1884.

[4] 1884. “Washington and Lee” Times Picayune, January 22.

[5] C.f. Fealing, Ken. 1981. “Mayor Takes Steps to Remove Liberty Monument from Canal Street” Louisiana Weekly, January 24.

[6] C.f. 1963. “Tribute Paid to Liberty Battle Heroes by Herbert” Times Picayune, September 14 and 1967. “Herbert Says U.S. Courts Hurt Freedom of Choice” Times Picayune, September 15.

[7] 1964. “Mayor Pledges Obelisk to Stay: Move from Canal Street Site Opposed” Times-Picayune, December 19.  The removal of Robert E. Lee referred to in this piece occurred in 1954 when the wood of the pedestal had dry-rotted and had to be replaced. As far as I can tell, the only outcry was from the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which did not want the statue to be removed from the pedestal at all. 

[8] Theodore, William. 1974. “Against Despotism” Times-Picayune, February 19.

[9] Sloan, L. 1974. “Coliseum Next?” Times-Picayune, February 19.

[10] Hunter, Joe. 1974. “Meaning for Blacks” Times-Picayune, February 19.

[11] Marcelia, Vanward. 1981. Times-Picayune, January 26

[12] Smith, M.D. 1981. “Pulverize Monument” Times-Picayune, January 26

[13] DuBos, Clancy., & Massa, Joe. 1981. “Monument inscription will be removed by city” Times-Picayune, February 27

[14] C.f. Eggler, Bruce. 1989. “Monument to whites is canned on Canal”. Times-Picayune, October 11.

[15] Frazier, Lisa. 1993. “Celebrating Old Divides” Times-Picayune, March 12.

[16] Epstein, James. 1993. “Liberty Monument - How to satisfy everybody” Times Picayune, April 6.

[17] Finch, Susan. 1993. “Monument Hearing Is Divided - History Invoked for And Against” Times-Picayune, June 30. Incidentally, there is now broad consensus among Egyptologists that the pyramids were built with paid labour.

[18] Section 146-611 of the Code of the City of New Orleans.

[19] Barry, Jarvis. 2015. “Statue of Lee and issue for N.O. - Mayor concerned how symbol fits in city’s future” Times-Picayune, June 24.

[20] Stewart, Frank. 20176. “An Open Letter from Frank Stewart to Mayor Mitch Landrieu.” The Advocate, May 3.

The roots of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine are to be found in the elevation of Tsarist imperial nationalist and White Russian émigré views, which deny the existence of Ukraine and Ukrainians.[1] The Soviet Union recognised Ukrainians as a people separate but close to Russians. Russian imperial nationalists hold a Jekyll-and-Hyde view of Ukraine. While denigrating Ukraine in a colonial manner that would make even Soviet-era Communist Party leaders blush, Russian leaders at the same time claim to hold warm feelings towards Ukrainians, whom they see as the closest people to them. In this light, ‘bad’ Ukrainians are nationalists and neo-Nazis who want their country to be part of Europe; ‘good’ Ukrainians are obedient Little Russians who know their place in the east Slavic hierarchy and want to align themselves with Mother Russia. In other words, ‘good’ Ukrainians are those who wish their country to emulate Belarus. In practice, during the invasion, cities such as Kharkiv and Mariupol that have resisted the Russian incursion have been pulverised irrespective of the fact they are majority Russian-speaking. In turn, the fact of this resistance means to Russia’s leaders that these cities are inhabited by ‘Nazis’, not Little Russians who would have greeted Russian troops—and who should therefore be destroyed. 

Without an understanding of the deepening influence of Tsarist imperial nationalism in Russia since 2012, and especially following Crimea’s annexation in 2014, scholars will be unable to grasp or explain why Putin has been so obsessed with returning Ukraine to the Russian World—a concept created as long ago as 2007 as a body to unite the three eastern Slavs, which underpinned his invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Putin’s invasion did not come out of nowhere, but had been nurtured, discussed, and raised by Putin and Russian officials since the mid-2000s in derogatory dismissals of Ukrainians, and in territorial claims advanced against Ukraine. Unfortunately, few scholars took these at face value until summer 2021, when Putin published a long 6,000-word article[2] detailing his thesis about Russians and Ukrainians constituting one people with a single language, culture, and common history.[3] Ukrainians were a ‘brotherly nation’ who were ‘part of the Russian people.’ ‘Reunification’ would inevitably take place, Putin told the Valdai Club in 2017.[4]

The overwhelming majority of scholarly books and journals have dismissed, ignored, or downplayed Russian nationalism as a temporary phenomenon.[5] Richard Sakwa claimed Putin was not dependent upon Russian nationalism, ‘and it is debatable whether the word is even applicable to him.’[6] Other scholars described it as a temporary phenomenon that had disappeared by 2015–16.[7] A major book on Russian nationalism published after the 2014 crisis included nothing on the incorporation of Tsarist imperial nationalist and White Russian émigré discourse that dismissed the existence of Ukraine and Ukrainians.[8]

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine backed by Russian nationalist rhetoric has led to many Western academics suggesting that the Russian forces have ended up—or will end up—with egg on their faces. Why they felt the need to take this angle has varied, ranging from elaborate political science theories popular in North America about the nature of the Russian regime to the traditional Russophilia found among a significant number of Euro-American scholars writing about Russia.[9] As Petro Kuzyk pointed out, in writing extensively about Ukrainian regionalism, scholars have tended to exaggerate intra-Ukrainian regional divisions. [10] This has clearly been seen during the invasion, when Russia has found no support among Russian-speakers in cities such as Kharkiv, Mariupol, Odesa, and elsewhere. Furthermore, the prevailing consensus prior to the invasion among scholars and think tankers was eerily similar to that in Moscow; namely, that Ukraine would be quickly occupied, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would flee, and Kyiv would be captured by Russian troops. That this did not happen again shows a a serious scholarly miscalculation about the strength of Ukrainian identity, and an overestimation of the strength of Russian military power.[11]

Nationalism in Putin’s Russia has integrated Tsarist imperial and Soviet nationalisms into an eclectic ruling ideology that drives the invasion. Putin, traditionally viewed as nostalgic for the Soviet Union, has also exhibited some pronounced anti-Soviet tendencies, above all in criticising Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin for creating a federal union of republics that included ‘Russian lands’ in the south-east, and artificially creating a ‘fake’ Ukrainian people. Putin’s invasion goal of ‘denazification’[12] aimed to correct this mistake by destroying the ‘anti-Russia’ nurtured by the West.[13]

Both scholars and Russian leaders have been baffled as to how to understand and explain the tenacity of Ukrainian identity that has fought the Russian army to a standstill, and is now in the position of launching counterattacks. What is particularly difficult for Russian political leaders and media journalists to explain is how a people that supposedly does not exist (Ukrainians) could greet the ‘special military operation’ (Putin’s dystopian term for the invasion of Ukraine) not with bouquets of flowers but met it with armed resistance.
 
Instrumentalism: Russian Nationalism as a Temporary Phenomenon

Sakwa[14] writes that ‘the genie of Russian nationalism was firmly back in the bottle’ by 2016. Pal Kolstø and Marlene Laruelle, along similar lines, write that the nationalist rhetoric of 2014 was novel and subsequently declined.[15] Meanwhile, Henry Hale[16] also believes Putin was only a nationalist in 2014, not prior to the annexation of the Crimea or since 2015. Laruelle[17] concurs, writing that by 2016, Putin’s regime had ‘circled back to a more classic and pragmatic conservative vision’. Laruelle describes Putin’s regime as nationalistic only in the period 2013–16, arguing that ‘since then [it] has been curtailing any type of ideological inflation and has adopted a low profile, focusing on much more pragmatic and Realpolitik agendas at home and abroad.’[18] Paul Chaisty and Stephen Whitefield write, ‘Putin is not a natural nationalist’ and ‘[w]e do not see the man and the regime as defined by principled ideological nationalism.’[19] Sakwa[20] is among the foremost authors who deny that Putin is a nationalist, describing him as not an ideologue because he remains rational and pragmatic—which sharply contrasts with an invasion that most commentators view as irrational. Allegedly, moreover, there has been a ‘crisis’ in Russian nationalism.[21] Other scholars, meanwhile, believed that Putin ‘lost’ nationalist support.[22] 

In reality, the opposite took place. Russian imperial nationalism deepened, penetrated even further into Russian society and became dominant in Putin’s regime during the eight years between the invasions of Crimea and Ukraine. Russian imperial nationalist denials of the existence of Ukraine and Ukrainians became entrenched and have driven the invasion of Ukraine.
 
Patriots and Conservatives - Not Nationalists

Scholars described Russian nationalists as ‘patriots’ and western-style ‘conservatives.’ In the same year that the constitution was changed to allow Putin to remain president until 2036,  Laruelle writes ‘the Putin regime still embodies a moderate centrist conservatism.’[23] Petro, Sakwa, and Robinson analogously describe a ‘conservative turn’ in Russian foreign policy.[24]

If contemporary British conservatives annexed part of Ireland and denied the existence of the Irish people, “conservatism” would no longer fully capture the ideology they represented. By the same token, the Putin regime’s annexation of Crimea and denial of the existence of Ukraine and Ukrainians has sharply steered Russian conservatism towards the conceptual centrality of imperial nationalism.

In their analyses, Sakwa and Anna Matveeva could only identify ‘militarised patriotism’ or elites divided into ‘westerners’ and ‘patriots.’[25] Following his 2012 re-election, Sakwa writes that Putin only spoke of ‘Russian identity discourse’ and Putin’s ‘conservative values’ which he believes should be not confused with a Russian nationalist agenda.[26]

Sakwa has generally avoided using the term ‘nationalist’ when discussing Russian politicians. This created problems in explaining why a ‘non-nationalist’ Putin might choose to support a wide range of far-right and a smaller number of extreme left political movements in Europe and the US, ranging from national-conservatives, populist-nationalists, irredentist imperialists to neo-Nazis in Europe. Sakwa[27] attempts to circumvent this conundrum by relying on a portfolio of euphemistic alternatives, describing these far-right and extreme left movements as ‘anti-systemic forces,’ ‘radical left,’ ‘movements of the far right,’ ‘European populists,’ ‘traditional sovereigntists, peaceniks, anti-imperialists, critics of globalisation,’ ‘populists of left and right,’ and ‘values coalition.’
 
Putin’s Imperial Nationalist Obsession with Ukraine

The Soviet regime recognised a separate Ukrainian people, albeit one that always retained close ties to Russians. The Ukrainian SSR was a ‘sovereign’ republic within the Soviet Union. In 1945, Joseph Stalin negotiated three seats at the UN for the USSR (representing the Russian SFSR), Ukrainian SSR, and Belarusian SSR. In the USSR, there was a Ukrainian lobby in Moscow, while this has been wholly absent under Putin.[28]

Soviet nationality policy defined Ukrainians and Russians as related, but nevertheless separate peoples; this was no longer the case in Putin’s Russia. In the USSR, Ukraine, and the Ukrainian language ‘always had robust defenders at the very top. Under Putin, however, the idea of Ukrainian national statehood was discouraged.’[29] Although the USSR promoted Russification, it nevertheless recognised the existence of the Ukrainian language. For a decade prior to the invasion, the Ukrainian language was disparaged by the Russian media and political leaders as a dialect that was artificially made a language in the Soviet Union.[30]

Russian nationalist myths and stereotypes underpinning the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine had been raised, discussed, and threatened for over a decade prior to the ‘special military operation’. When Putin returned as president in 2012, he portrayed himself as the ‘gatherer of Russian [i.e., eastern Slavic] lands.’ Ukraine’s return to the Russian World, alongside Crimea and Belarus, was Putin’s unfinished business that he needed to accomplish before entering Russia’s history books. Ukraine, as a ‘Russian land’, should fall within the Russian World and remain closely aligned to Russia. Ukrainians, on this account, had no right to decide their own future.  

Russia sought to accomplish Ukraine’s return to the Russian World through the two Minsk peace agreements signed in 2014–15. Ukrainian leaders resisted Russian pressure to implement the agreements because they would have created a weak central government and federalised state where Russia would have inordinate influence through its proxy Donetsk Peoples Republic and Luhansk Peoples Republic.

The failure of Russia’s diplomatic and military pressure led to a change in tactics in October 2021. Early that month, former President Dmitri Medvedev, now deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, penned a vitriolic attack on Ukrainian identity as well as an anti-Semitic attack on Jewish-Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, ruling out further negotiations with Kyiv.[31] Medvedev claimed Ukrainian leaders were US puppets, and that therefore the Kremlin needed to negotiate directly with their alleged ‘puppet master’—Washington. Meanwhile, Russia would ‘wait for the emergence of a sane leadership in Ukraine,’ ‘who aims not at a total confrontation with Russia on the brink of war…but at building equal and mutually beneficial relations with Russia.’[32] Medvedev was revealing that Russia’s goal in any future military operation would be regime change, replacing an ‘anti-Russia’ leadership with a pro-Kremlin leader.[33]

In early November 2021, Russia’s foreign policy machine mobilised and made stridently false accusations about threats from Ukraine and its ‘Western puppet masters.’ Russia began building up its military forces on the Ukrainian border and in Belarus. In December 2021, Russia issued two ultimatums to the West, demanding a re-working of European security architecture.

The consensus within Euro-American commentary on the invasion has been that this crisis was completely artificial. NATO was not about to offer Ukraine membership, even though Ukraine had held periodic military exercises with NATO members for nearly three decades, while the US and NATO at no point planned to install offensive missiles in Ukraine. The real cause of the crisis was the failure of the Minsk peace process to achieve Ukraine’s capitulation to Russian demands that would have placed Ukraine within the Russian sphere of influence. After being elected president in April 2019, Zelenskyy had sought a compromise with Putin, but he had come round to understanding that this was not on offer. The failure of the Minsk peace process meant Ukraine’s submission would now be undertaken, in Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s words, by ‘military-technical means’—that is, the ‘special military operation’ that began on 24 February 2022.
 
Russian Imperial and White Émigré Nationalism Captures Putin’s Russia

Downplaying, marginalising, and ignoring Russian nationalism led to the ignoring of Russian nationalism’s incorporation of Tsarist and White Russian émigré denials of the existence of Ukraine and Ukrainians. Marginal nationalism in the 1990s became mainstream nationalism in Russia in the 2000s under Putin when the ‘emergence of a virulent nationalist opposition movement took the mainstream hostage.’[34] The 1993 coup d’état against President Boris Yeltsin was led by a ‘red-brown’ coalition of pro-Soviet and far-right nationalists and fascists. The failure of the coup d’état and the electoral defeat of the Communist Party leader Gennadiy Zyuganov in the 1996 elections condemned these groups to the margins of Russian political life. At the same time, from the mid 1990s, the Yeltsin presidency moved away from a liberal to a nationalist foreign and security approach within Eurasia and towards the West. This evolution was discernible in the support given to a Russian-Belarusian union during the 1996 elections and in the appointment of Yevgeny Primakov as foreign minister. Therefore, the capture of Russia by the Soviet siloviki began with the Chairman of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Primakov, four years before the chairman of the Federal Security Service (FSB), Putin, was elected president. Under Primakov, Russia moved from defining itself as part of the ‘common European home’ to the country at the centre of Eurasia.

Under Putin, the marginalised ‘red-brown’ coalition gradually increased its influence and broadened to include ‘whites’ (i.e., nostalgic supporters of the Tsarist Empire). Prominent among the ideologists of the ‘red-white-brown’ coalition was the fascist and Ukrainophobe Alexander Dugin, who has nurtured national-Bolshevik and Eurasianist political projects.[35] In the 2014 crisis, Dugin, then a professor at Moscow State University, stated: ‘We should clean up Ukraine from the idiots,’ and ‘The genocide of these cretins is due and inevitable… I can’t believe these are Ukrainians. Ukrainians are wonderful Slavonic people. And this is a race of bastards that emerged from the sewer manholes.’[36]

During the 2000s the ‘red-white-brown’ coalition came to prominence and Putin increasingly identified with its denial of Ukraine and Ukrainians.  Tsarist imperial nationalism was integrated with Soviet nostalgia, Soviet traditions and symbols and historical myths, such as the Great Patriotic War. Since the mid 2000s, only five years into his rule, Putin spearheaded the rehabilitation of the White Russian émigré movement and reburial of its military officers, writers, and philosophers in Russia. These reburials took place at the same time as the formation of the Russian World Foundation (April 2007) and unification of the Russian Orthodox Church with the émigré Russian Orthodox Church (May 2007). These developments supercharged nationalism in Putin’s Russia, reinforced the Tsarist element in the ‘red-white-brown’ coalition and fuelled the growing disdain of, and antipathy towards Ukraine and Ukrainians that was given state support in the media throughout the two decades before the invasion.[37]

Putin personally paid for the re-burial of White Russian émigré nationalists and fascists Ivan Ilyin, Ivan Shmelev, and General Anton Deniken, who called Ukraine ‘Little Russia’ and denied the existence of a separate Ukrainian nation. These chauvinistic views of Ukraine and Ukrainians were typical of White Russian émigrés. Serhy Plokhy[38] writes, ‘Russia was taking back its long-lost children and reconnecting with their ideas.’ Little wonder, one hundred descendants of White Russian émigré aristocrats living in Western Europe signed an open letter of support for Russia during the 2014 crisis.

Putin was ‘particularly impressed’ with Ilyin, whom he first cited in an address to the Russian State Duma as long ago as 2006. Putin recommended Ilyin to be read by his governors, senior adviser Vladislav Surkov, and Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev. The intention was to use Ilyin’s publications in the Russian state programme to inculcate ‘patriotism’ and ‘conservative values’ in Russian children. Ilyin was integrated into Putin’s ideology during his re-election campaign in 2012 and influenced Putin’s re-thinking of himself as the ‘gatherer of Russian lands;’ that is, integrating Belarus and Ukraine into the Russian World, and specifically his belief that the three eastern Slavs constituted a pan-Russian nation.[39]
​
Laruelle has downplayed the importance of Ilyin’s ideology, writing that he did not always propagate fascism, and that Putin only quoted him five times.[40] Yet Putin has not only cited Ilyin, but also asked Russian journalists whether they had read Deniken’s diaries, especially the parts where ‘Deniken discusses Great and Little Russia, Ukraine.’[41] Deniken wrote in his diaries, ‘No Russian, reactionary or democrat, republican or authoritarian, will ever allow Ukraine to be torn away.’[42]

In turn, Tsarist imperial nationalist and White Russian émigré denials of Ukraine and Ukrainians were amplified in the Russian media and in its information warfare for over a decade prior to the invasion. Ukraine and Ukrainians were mocked in the Russian media in a manner ‘typical in coloniser-colonised relationships.’[43] Russia and Russians were cast as superior, modern, and advanced, while Ukraine and Ukrainians were portrayed as backward, uneducated, ‘or at least unsophisticated, lazy, unreliable, cunning, and prone to thievery.’ As a result of nearly two decades of Russian officials and media denigrating Ukraine and Ukrainians these Russian attitudes towards Ukraine and Ukrainians ‘are widely shared across the Russian elite and populace.’[44] This is confirmed by a March 2022 survey conducted by Russia’s last remaining polling organisation, the Levada Centre, which found that an astronomical 81% of Russians supporting Russian military actions in Ukraine. Among these supporters, 43% believe the ‘special military operation’ was undertaken to protect Russophones, 43% to protect civilians in Russian-occupied Donbas, 25% to halt an attack on Russia, and 21% to remove ‘nationalists’ and ‘restore order.’[45]
 
Russian Imperial Nationalist Denigration and Denial of Ukraine and Ukrainians

Russian imperial nationalist views of Ukraine began to reappear as far back as the 2004 Ukrainian presidential elections, when Russian political technologists worked for pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych’s election campaign, producing election posters designed to scare Russian speakers in south-eastern Ukraine about the prospect of an electoral victory by ‘fascist’ and ‘nationalist’ Viktor Yushchenko. This was when Russia revived Soviet ideological propaganda attacks against Ukrainian nationalists as ‘Nazi collaborators.’

Putin’s cult of the Great Patriotic War has been intricately linked to the promotion of Russia as the country that defeated Nazism in World War II (this is not true as all the Soviet nations contributed to the defeat) and which today is fighting contemporary Nazis in Ukraine, Poland, the three Baltic states, and beyond. Ukraine’s four de-communisation laws adopted in 2015 were despised in Moscow for many reasons. The most pertinent to this discussion was one law that equated Nazi and Soviet crimes against humanity (which contradicted Putin’s cult of Stalin[46]) and another law that moved the terminology of Ukraine’s wartime commemorations from the 1941–45 ‘Great Patriotic War’ to ‘World War II’ of 1939–45.[47]

One of the 2004 election posters, reproduced below, imagines Ukraine in typical Russian imperial nationalist discourse as divided into three parts, with west Ukraine as ‘First Class’ (that is, the top of the pack), central Ukraine as ‘Second Class’ and south-eastern Ukraine as ‘Third Class’ (showing Russian speakers living in this region to be at the bottom of the hierarchy).
 
Poster Prepared by Russian Political Technologists for Viktor Yanukovych’s 2004 Election Campaign

John-Erik Hansson: Let us now talk about the French and European contexts and turn to the First World War and to the relationship between anarchism and the French Third Republic. You discuss at length Jean Grave’s u-turn regarding the war and what leads him to draft and sign the Manifesto of the Sixteen, condemning him to oblivion, because he was one of the apostates—although other signatories like Kropotkin managed to remain in the good graces of a lot of people in the anarchist movement. There's an ongoing revision of our understanding of what exactly led to the split in the anarchist movement between the defencists, who were in favour of participating in the war, and those who simply opposed the First World War, exemplified by the recent edited collection Anarchism 1914-18: Internationalism, Anti-Militarism and War.[1] For a long time being defencism was considered to be a betrayal of anarchist principles, but that view has changed over the last couple of years. What was Grave’s role in this debate? How does studying Grave help us rethink anarchism at that historical juncture?
 
Constance Bantman: The first thing to say is that the revision is very much an academic thing; that’s important to highlight when you talk about anarchism, which is of course a social movement with a very strong historical culture. The war will come up when you're talking to the activists who really know their history when you mention Grave. On France’s leading anarchist radio channel, Radio Libertaire, a few years ago, I heard him called a “social traître” [traitor to the cause]—I couldn't believe it! But within academic circles, the revision is underway and a great deal has come out: the volume that you mentioned and Ruth Kinna’s work on Kropotkin as well, all of which have been very important to revising this history. That’s courageous work as well, given all we’ve said about the enduringly sensitive nature of this discussion.
 
Concerning Grave’s role in this, the first aspect to consider is the importance of daily interactions in people's lives. That’s an angle you get from a biography. So much has been said about Kropotkin’s own story and intellectual positions, and how this informed his stance during the war. Of course, that doesn't explain everything, especially if you look to the opponents to the war. Grave was initially really opposed to the war, his transition was really gradual but it was a U-turn, connected to his friendship with Kropotkin, who told him off quite fiercely for being opposed to the war. One thing we do see through Grave is this sense that some anarchists clearly predicted what would later be known revanchisme, the idea that there was so much militarism in French society that when the Entente won the war, there would be really brutal terms imposed on Germany, which would lead to another war. That’s something that Peter Ryley has written about in Anarchism 1914-18. Some anarchists were pretty lucid actually in their analysis and you do found traces of that in Grave. He really clearly understood the depth of the militarism of French society, and that's when he did a bit of a U-turn.
 
He was also in Britain at the time, and didn't quite realise how difficult the situation was. He had left Les Temps Nouveaux and the paper was looked after by colleagues. They were receiving lots of letters from the front, from soldiers and, as has been analysed by other historians, this was crucial in the growth of an anti-war sentiment for them. They could see directly the horrors happening in the trenches, whereas Grave was immersed in upper-class British circles and had no clear sense of the brutality of the war. So, again, it's a mixture of ideas, ideology, and the contingencies of personal and activist lives when you try to assess positions that such complicated times.
 
JEH: Again, this highlights the importance of personal connections in the formulation of political and ideological positions. While these positions might be influenced by personal connections, they then become rationalised into arguments that become part of the ideological vocabulary and the ideological fault lines in the movement itself… and that leads to the Manifesto of the Sixteen, in a sense.
 
CB: Yes, absolutely that's very true. The manifesto was written as a document published initially in the press; it was not a placard. Arguments in favour of defencism as well as arguments by anti-war groups were published in the press in the form of letters meant to influence people. Grave once referred to the Manifesto of the Sixteen as the manifesto he wrote in 1917, whereas it had actually been written in 1916. This just shows that what is now regarded as this landmark document, this watershed moment in the history of Western anarchism was, for Grave, just one of the many articles that he had written. I think it took some time, maybe a decade or two, you can see that through Grave, for the Manifesto to be consolidated into the historical monument that it now is. Looking at this period through Grave brings out a degree of fluidity which is otherwise not apparent.
 
JEH: This is very interesting point. In a way, anarchists built their own historical narrative and created a landmark out of something that was, as you mentioned, initially just another set of arguments between people who are connected and often knew one another personally. But this particular argument became much more important because of the way in which the anarchist movement memorialised itself.
 
CB: Yes, absolutely and I think tracing it would be interested to trace how national historiographies and activist memories sort of converge to establish versions of history. In France, I would be really interested to see when exactly the Manifesto of the Sixteen congealed into this historic landmark. I wonder if it's Maitron and a mixture of activist circles and discussions. I haven't studied so much the period around the Second World War, but really, with activist memories in this period we may have a missing link here to understand the formation and how the 19th century was memorialised.
 
JEH: From the First World War to the Third Republic, I would like to relate your book to a recent article by Danny Evans.[2] Evans argues that anarchism could or should be seen as “the movement and imaginary that opposed the national integration of working classes”. Grave is interesting in this respect because he becomes domesticated by the Third Republic. Would you say that anarchism and French republicanism are in a kind of dialectical relationship from 1870 until the Second World War, moving from hard-hitting repression to the domestication of a certain strand of anarchism seen as respectable or acceptable by French republicanism?
 
CB: Now that's a very good point, and an important contribution by Danny Evans. Grave always had these links with progressive Republican figures and organisations like the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, Freethinkers, academics etc.… One of his assets as well among his networks is his ability to get on with people, to mobilise them, for instance, in protest again repression in Spain and the Hispanic world. Many progressive figures were involved in that. And when Grave himself fell foul of the law during the highly repressive episode of 1892–94, many Republicans supported him, which suggests that a degree of republican integration was always latent for Grave. Then the war happened and he picked the right side from the Republicans’ perspective, and by then you're right, domestication is indeed a good term. I would also add that many of these Republicans considered that anarchism had been an important episode in the history of the young Third Republic, which might have made more favourably inclined towards it.
 
Now if we look at domestication, Grave is an example of a sort of willing domestication, as you might say that perhaps he does age into conservative anarchism. But a classic example is that of Louise Michel. Sidonie Verhaeghe has just written a really interesting book about this[3], because if you think about Louise Michel having her entry into the Pantheon being discussed in recent years, she would be absolutely horrified at the suggestion. Having a square named after her at the foot of the Sacré Coeur, that’s almost trolling! But anarchism really reflects the history of the Third Republic from the early days, when the Republic was very unstable. You had the Boulangiste episode, and anarchism was perceived to be such a threat initially, until the strand represented by Grave ceases to be seen in that way. After the war, we enter the phase of memorialisation and reinterpretation; Michel and Grave represent two slightly different facets of that process.
 
Regarding the point about the integration of the working classes, the flip side of Danny’s argument has often been used by historians—I'm thinking about Wayne Thorpe,[4] in particular—to explain why everything fell apart for French anarchists at the start of the First World War. The war just revealed how integrated the French working classes were, beyond the rhetoric of defiance they displayed. It's an argument you find to explain the lack of numerical strength of the CGT too. The working classes had integrated and the Republic had taken root, and Thorpe explains what happens with the First World War in the anarchist and syndicalist movements across Europe by looking at the prism of integration. That's a very fruitful way of looking at it. That's also great explanation because it encompasses so many different factors—economics, political control, and the rise of the big socialist parties which was of course crucial at the time.
 
JEH: Actually, I was also thinking of the historical memory of socialists, as mass party socialism becomes dominant in the 20th century. In the late 19th century in the early 20th century when socialism was formulated, anarchism was an important part of that broad ideological conversation. But by the end of the First World War, from the socialists’ perspective, that debate is over. The socialists have won the ideological battle, and they are able to mobilise in a way that the anarchists aren't able to anymore. And at that point, the socialists can look back and try to bring anarchists into the fold, paying a form of respect to anarchism as an important part of socialist history.
 
CB: Yes, I think there is probably an element of that, perhaps even an element of nostalgia. Many of these socialist leaders had dabbled with anarchism themselves before the war, so there is this dimension of personal experience and sometimes affinity. And it was still fairly recent history for them, I suppose, which plays out in a number of ways. There’s also the question of what happens with revolutionary ideas—for us the revolution is a fairly distant event, but for them the Commune was not such a distant memory. So, there is also this question of what do you do with a genuine revolutionary movement, like anarchism, and I think it was probably something they had to consider.



[1] Ruth Kinna and Matthew S. Adams, eds., Anarchism, 1914-18: Internationalism, Anti-Militarism and War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020); see also Matthew S. Adams, “Anarchism and the First World War,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism, ed. Carl Levy and Matthew S. Adams (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 389–407, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75620-2_23.

[2] https://abcwithdannyandjim.substack.com/p/anarchism-as-non-integration

[3] Sidonie Verhaeghe, Vive Louise Michel! Célébrité et postérité d’une figure anarchiste (Vulaines sur Seine: Editions du Croquant, 2021).

[4] Wayne Thorpe, “The European Syndicalists and the War, 1914-1918”, Contemporary European History 10(1) (2001), 1–24; J.-J. Becker and A. Kriegel, 1914: La Guerre et le mouvement ouvrier français (Paris: Armand Colin, 1964).