Friday, October 30, 2009

Dialectical Grave Digging

Paul Sonne does a bit of Tomb Travel in today's Wall Street Journal providing us with some haunting views of the "vexed social topography of the past."

Nikita Khrushchev's tomb, in particular, provides a stark and odd visual aid for those of us interested in the subject of this blog.  As the story goes, back in 1962, Khrushchev strutted into a modern art show at one of Moscow's famous exhibition halls finding, according to his esteemed, occasionally shoe-banging opinion, the avant-garde art on display to be "like dog droppings."  A particularly offensive epithet (?!) was hurled at sculptor Ernst Neizvestny, who responded with a few choice, but careful words then, but surely in substance more than a decade later (after the two men reportedly reached a truce). Neizvestny became the sculptor for Khrushchev's tombstone.


Dog Droppings?

Further, writes Sonne:
"The design represents the conflicted yin-and-yang of Khrushchev's character -- the bright, progressive reformer who denounced Josef Stalin and closed the Gulag, intertwined painfully with the dark, shoe-banging man who stuck to retrograde tactics and encouraged building the Berlin Wall. Visitors took to the candid monument, which became, so to speak, dog-doo de rigueur. The Soviet authorities closed Novodevichy Cemetery to the public in the 1970s soon after Khrushchev was interred there, only reopening it in 1987 during Perestroika."

The treasures of other famous and not-so-famous tombs across old Europe are briefly mentioned or exhumed (so to speak) as well, including the memorial at Paris's Père Lachaise to 147 combatants of the 1871 Paris Commune [who] died in firing-squad execution.

Cemetery tours, etc. across the world might just lead to deep (and possibly), sober reflection.
Perhaps even, this All Hallows Eve can be a time of redemption, as Catholic free-lance writer Page McKean Zyromski shares it:

"The same way people gather today at the site of a tragedy on its anniversary to talk to each other and to reporters, the first Christians gathered on the anniversary of a martyr’s death to remember it [them] the way they knew best: with the "breaking of the bread." They retold the stories to inspire each other at a time when faith meant persecution and more martyrdom. Not even death could break the unity in Jesus which Paul had named "the Body of Christ."

Meanwhile, in Modern Russia, President Dmitry Medvedev had a few words to share from his video blog (via ITAR-TASS) in regards to Remembrance Day:

“I am convinced that no development of the country, no successes and ambitions can be achieved at the expense of human grief and losses. Nothing can treasure more than human life.
"There is no justification to repressions.
Let’s only think that millions of people died because of terror and false accusations.
"Millions were deforced of their rights, even of the right for decent burial,
and for long years their names were deleted from history.
“It is even impossible to comprehend the scope of terror,
from which all peoples of the country suffered.
“For 20 pre-war years the whole strata and estates of our people were exterminated. Cossacks were nearly liquidated. “Kulak” peasants were dispossessed and bled white.
Intellectuals, workers and the military were subject to political repressions.
"Representatives of absolutely all religious confessions were persecuted.
I am convinced that remembrance of national tragedies is as sacred as commemoration of victories. It is extremely important for young people to have both historic knowledge and public spirit and be able to emotionally empathize one of the greatest tragedies in Russian history.
“We are paying much attention to the fight against falsification of our history. But we sometimes believe the talk is only about inadmissibility of revision of the results of the Great Patriotic War. But it is no less important to prevent under the pretext of historic justice exoneration of those who exterminated their own people.

"Russia has to accept its past as it was.
It is important to study the past, to overcome indifference and intention to forget its tragic sides.
Nobody but us can do that."
 

A memorial service will take place today in Lubyanka Square, Moscow in front of the former KGB building.

Remembrance Day was instituted in Russia in 1991 after the breakup (or "disintegration") of the Soviet Union (USSR).

According to the latest (Russian) data, in the 1920s-1950s, 52 million people were sentenced for political reasons, six million were exiled without any court sentence and one million [were] executed.

 
One need not be a chamber to be haunted;
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.
~Emily Dickinson



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