WARSAW, Poland (HPD) — Poland on Thursday dismantled four communist-era monuments to Red Army soldiers in a renewed effort to remove symbols of Moscow’s post-World War II dominance and reinforce its condemnation of the Kremlin’s war. in neighboring Ukraine.
The workers used drills and heavy machinery to destroy the 1945 monuments in four different parts of the country, most of them in the form of concrete obelisks.
The head of the National Memory Institute, Karol Nawrocki, who called for the works to be removed, said they represented a system guilty of enslaving and murdering its own people and other nations, including the Poles.
“This is a monument to disgrace, a monument to the victors’ contempt for the victims,” Nawrocki said in Glubczyce, in the south of the country, as workers prepared to dismantle the piece of the city.
“The Soviets did not bring the liberation but the captivity of Poland,” Nawrocki added in an emotional speech.
Similar operations were carried out in Byczynam, in the southwest; in Bobolice, in the northwest, and in the vicinity of Staszow, in the south.
Since the fall of the communist regime in 1989, Poland has taken steps to remove symbols of Soviet rule from public places, removing monuments and plaques. The initiative does not affect cemeteries or burial sites.