The Art of the Impossible: Political Symbolism, and the Creation of National Identity andCollective Memory in Post-Soviet Turkmenistan, Michael Denison (2009)
"Official (de)monumentalisation and commemoration have emerged as important, and often bitterly contested, loci in the construction of post-socialist national identity":
- a proposal made in 2007 by the Estonian Ministry of Defence to remove the Soviet Soldier Liberator monument from central Tallinn has elicited a hostile reaction from the country's normally quiescent ethnic Russian community and prompted Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov to urge Russians to boycott Estonian products (Osborn 2007).
"The essay argues that Great Patriotic War commemoration during the post-Soviet era is an example of a rare site of genuine community sentiment in a state where civil society has been extremely circumscribed. In doing so, Great Patriotic War commemoration practices expose the apparent limitations of the post-Soviet nationalising project in Turkmenistan."
"Knauer and Walkowitz (2004, p. 4) argue that nations are constructed and bound together by 'imaginative, narrative and symbolic means'."
"Lewis Mumford (1938, p. 438) argued that national monuments were no longer relevant as long ago as 1938, while Gregory Pauleson's seminal article on monumentality, published in the aftermath of World War II, explicitly linked monuments to totalitarianism, declaring that 'monumentality is not desirable.."
"The visual forms of the Niyazov cult clearly draw from the imagery, texts and rituals of both Stalinist and Kemalist rule... The principal difference between Niyazov and Atatürk lies not only in the obvious disparity in the quality of their political leadership, but that the image of Atatürk symbolises a certain abstract developmental path of secular modernisation and national unity -it embodies a set of values beyond the personage of Atatürk- whereas in Turkmenistan, the cult has been really rather indissoluble from Niyazov's own predilections and idiosyncrasies -and, as a consequence, really only came to stand for little more than Niyazov himself."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/25/horse-turkmenistan-president-statute-berdymukhamedov
- a proposal made in 2007 by the Estonian Ministry of Defence to remove the Soviet Soldier Liberator monument from central Tallinn has elicited a hostile reaction from the country's normally quiescent ethnic Russian community and prompted Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov to urge Russians to boycott Estonian products (Osborn 2007).
"The essay argues that Great Patriotic War commemoration during the post-Soviet era is an example of a rare site of genuine community sentiment in a state where civil society has been extremely circumscribed. In doing so, Great Patriotic War commemoration practices expose the apparent limitations of the post-Soviet nationalising project in Turkmenistan."
"Knauer and Walkowitz (2004, p. 4) argue that nations are constructed and bound together by 'imaginative, narrative and symbolic means'."
"Lewis Mumford (1938, p. 438) argued that national monuments were no longer relevant as long ago as 1938, while Gregory Pauleson's seminal article on monumentality, published in the aftermath of World War II, explicitly linked monuments to totalitarianism, declaring that 'monumentality is not desirable.."
"The visual forms of the Niyazov cult clearly draw from the imagery, texts and rituals of both Stalinist and Kemalist rule... The principal difference between Niyazov and Atatürk lies not only in the obvious disparity in the quality of their political leadership, but that the image of Atatürk symbolises a certain abstract developmental path of secular modernisation and national unity -it embodies a set of values beyond the personage of Atatürk- whereas in Turkmenistan, the cult has been really rather indissoluble from Niyazov's own predilections and idiosyncrasies -and, as a consequence, really only came to stand for little more than Niyazov himself."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/25/horse-turkmenistan-president-statute-berdymukhamedov
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