Monument dispute in Bulgaria: Sofia disposes of its Red Army soldiers

A monument to the Soviet army is being dismantled in Sofia after a decades-long debate. The new city leaders no longer want to honor them as “liberators”. Other cities are still cautious.

ALyosha is still standing. From a hill above Plovdiv, he constantly watches over Bulgaria's second largest city. The granite statue of a Soviet soldier rises almost eleven meters high, and the base measures another six meters. The builders wanted to make sure that Alyosha could be seen from far away in the city of around 340,000 inhabitants, and they achieved that. Inscriptions on the monument proclaim “Honor to the invincible Soviet liberation army.”

But Alyosha no longer has it as easy as it once did. In 2007, on his fiftieth birthday, his city celebrated him with fireworks and concerts. Three years later, the former Red Army soldier Aleksei Skurlatov, whose photo served as a template for Bulgarian sculptors in the 1950s, was honored by the then President of Bulgaria. Skurlatov died in his homeland in Altai in 2013 and no longer had to experience what happened to the larger-than-life image of his younger years in distant Europe. Because Putin's wars have not left Plovdiv's Alyosha unscathed. In November 2017, the monument was daubed with red paint and anti-Semitic slogans. The perpetrators were never caught. If it hadn't existed, the Russian embassy in Moscow would have had to invent it. Moscow's diplomats were effectively able to express their outrage that the image of the Russian fight against fascism in Plovdiv was being tarnished by Bulgarian fascists.