In a letter to the Ventspils City Council, the Center of Public Memory, referring to the law prohibiting the display of objects glorifying military aggression and war ideology in public outdoor space and stressing that this man's work was directed against independent Latvia, calls on the local authorities to dismantle the Jānis Fabriciuss statue by November 11 this year. The letter is, however, a recommendation.
"The sculpture can be placed in a museum or in a museum complex where totalitarian regime objects are located. Military aggression is the only thing that this historical figure has essentially done in his life," said historian Didzis Šēnbergs, a member of the Council of the Center for Public Memory.
On Wednesday, October 2, the Center for Public Memory also sent a similar letter to Culture Minister Agnese Lāce (Progressives).
Ventspils City Council said that the monuments glorifying Soviet rule were dismantled 30 years ago, but Fabriciuss remains because he is a local man with high achievements in the military field and is a testimony to the times.
To date, there have been no requests from official authorities, nor was it included in the list of 69 monuments to be dismantled in 2022, when after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Latvia began a large-scale dismantling of monuments praising occupation. The Council does not consider the letter received from the Center of Public Memory to be relevant.
"November 11 is not a realistic deadline at all, because any dismantling needs a project. For our part, given that the idea has been raised again, we have calculated how much it would cost to dismantle the monument if it were decided on a national scale and we were given such a task. It is about 50,000 euros, together with the landscaping of the area," said Aldis Ābele, Executive Director of Ventspils City Council.
He said out that the monument should be preserved in its current location, but it should be supplemented with high-quality explanatory material about Fabriciuss' personality. Armands Vijups, senior researcher at the Ventspils Museum, also agreed:
"I think that for many monuments, not only Fabriciuss, we need the younger generation, children, young people to ask - but why? Then there is the opportunity to tell it all so that it doesn't happen again."
Meanwhile, Aiga Bērziņa-Kite, a senior researcher at the Latvian National Archives said that more needs to be explained. Today's explanations are often uncritically taken over from the Soviet years. She stressed that history should not be destroyed and ignored, but should be done in a different way:
"It doesn't have to be in a public space where both citizens and visitors see it and accept it as the norm. It should not be the norm that this communist is still standing with all the Soviet paraphernalia - the star, the hat - in which our occupiers entered this country in 1940. There should be quality information."
