Russia has a remarkable solution to our problem with Confederate monuments
Park of the Fallen Heroes
Where Soviet skeletons come out of the closet
Josef Stalin looms above me. More than ten feet tall, the fearsome ruler stands at ease, his right arm bent at the elbow, hand slipped into his vest beneath a massive pink-granite overcoat. His hair poufs up and back, nicely coiffed. His mustache — smooth, thick and luxurious — contrasts with a rough surface just above it, where Stalin’s nose has been smashed off. The right leg was broken and repaired. A tidy green lawn surrounds the statue.
Arcing behind Stalin is a curving concrete-and-metal-bar cage, perhaps forty feet wide and ten feet tall, filled with more than two hundred slightly-larger-than-life-sized heads sculpted from granite. Most are representational but crude, not meant to depict the actual head of any individual human being. They are metaphoric heads, piled six-high into a forty-foot metaphoric prison, staring silently out at all who pass. Rows of barbed wire and gulag-like lamps — poignant symbols of Soviet repression — run neatly along the top of the curving stacks of heads. The effect is chilling. This wrenching memorial is named for and dedicated to “Victims of Soviet-Era Prison Camps” — including the camps run by Stalin, notorious…
