The Genius Design of Communist Memorials

0:02 You're looking at a memorial for the second world war.

0:06 This is one too.

0:08 And this.

0:09 They look different from other memorials.

0:11 They don't show flags, heroes or victims.

0:14 These abstract shapes and geometric forms seem to come from another planet.

0:19 The communist party that built these monuments no longer exists.

0:23 In fact, the country they're in no longer exists.

0:26 Why do these monuments look so weird?

0:30 Why were many abandoned and some even destroyed?

0:36 Monuments sometimes seem invisible.

0:38 Do you really know who the local man on the horse is?

0:42 But monuments matter.

0:43 They show us our values.

0:45 And how values can change.

0:48 The second world war was the greatest conflict of all time.

0:54 Most define how we should remember this war.

0:56 The battle for Stalingrad in the Soviet Union cost

0:59 more lives than the entire English and American losses combined.

1:02 On the last day of September,

1:04 Hitler announced that the fall of the city was only a matter of a few days.

1:08 When the memorial park to this battle opened,

1:11 this was the biggest statue in the world.

1:14 It's mother Russia pointing the way with open mouth and a big sword.

1:18 It shows the power of the unified nation.

1:20 To the west in Germany, the message of another mother is different.

1:25 This time she is not victorious but grieving over the loss of her son.

1:29 Warning for the tragedy of the loss of life war brings.

1:34 In America, this world war two memorial shows their identity as victors.

1:39 The atmosphere is uplifting.

1:41 People take pictures of their home state.

1:43 But in the former socialist state of Yugoslavia,

1:46 world war two memorials look completely different.

1:49 I traveled all across the western Balkans to show

1:55 you these amazing structures and tell their story.

2:01 This is Tjentiste.

2:03 In a field, two roads lead to two concrete shapes.

2:08 If you pass the monument, you can see it resembles wings.

2:13 A sign resembling victory.

2:15 Shapes in the stone show abstract faces.

2:19 This place was the location of a brave escape.

2:21 In the second world war many people resisted the Axis forces.

2:25 But the most successful resistance group could be found in the western Balkans.

2:37 In this valley in 1943,

2:40 Tito and 22.000 partisans were surrounded by 127.000 Axis forces.

2:45 They made an unbelievable escape but lost many soldiers.

2:50 This monument remembers the fallen.

2:52 It's an amazing work of art.

2:55 But its design tells a geopolitical story.

2:58 The war in Yugoslavia was very bloody.

3:01 An estimated 6 to 11 percent of the population died.

3:04 That's almost as much as the Soviet Union.

3:07 So after the war, countless families needed to remember their dead.

3:11 But the first memorials don't look like the later abstract versions.

3:14 They're just simple slabs.

3:16 This is because just after the war

3:18 it was local communities that made simple memorials.

3:21 But even the bigger ones built by the state don't look abstract at all.

3:25 Why is this?

3:26 The Yugoslav Communist Party looked up to the Soviet Union as a big brother.

3:31 So they follow the Soviet style of socialist realism.

3:34 A style idolizing the life of the people.

3:37 I mean, look at these veins.

3:39 But they soon find out that big brother is also a big bully.

3:43 They distance themselves from the Soviets.

3:45 So instead of showing workers that never skip leg day,

3:49 they take inspiration from Western art forms and develop their own style.

3:54 You get abstract monuments, organic shapes.

3:56 These have become known as Spomenik

3:58 in the West after the Serbo-Croat for monument.

4:02 But the split with the Soviets is not

4:04 the only reason why they look so different.

4:08 Yugoslavia had a problem.

4:09 World War II in Yugoslavia was not

4:12 a simple story of partisan winners and German losers.

4:15 The Yugoslav state was full of different ethnicities and different religions.

4:20 During the Axis invasion, many clashed in a bloody civil war.

4:33 Nazi Germany installed a puppet regime in Yugoslavia.

4:36 This concrete flower is a monument at Jasenovac, Croatia's Auschwitz.

4:41 The Croatian fascist Ustasa killed an estimated 83,000 Serbs,

4:46 Jews and Roma in this death camp and many more outside.

4:54 But after the war, former enemies now have to live together.

5:00 The partisans want to forget this divisive past and look to the future.

5:04 A revolutionary socialist future where ethnic

5:07 and religious identities are not important.

5:10 So when a first design for a memorial focused on the suffering of victims,

5:15 the leader Tito was afraid this would stoke ethnic tensions.

5:18 So instead he chose this flower, a symbol of life, rebirth and forgiveness.

5:23 The communist party used monuments to create

5:27 an official interpretation of the past

5:30 in order to gain control of its society in the given present.

5:34 It is not just the party though.

5:37 Many monuments were initiated by local communities.

5:40 Instead of religious symbols,

5:41 you get monuments that celebrate the socialist revolution.

5:47 This is the Kosmai monument.

5:52 It can be interpreted as a five-pointed star,

5:58 the same star you can find in the Yugoslav flag,

6:00 resembling the five fingers of the worker's hand.

6:03 This monument is to the Kosmai partisans that were fighting the Germans.

6:07 If you look closer, you see that the structure has five individual points,

6:11 as if gravity does not exist.

6:13 This sculpture looks futuristic.

6:16 It almost looks ready to take off.

6:20 This is not by coincidence.

6:23 Yugoslav society was an optimistic society focused on the future.

6:27 But this future would only be real

6:30 if new generations learned about socialist ideology.

6:32 So the monuments also become teaching grounds.

6:35 This monument in Croatia became one of the most important memorial places.

6:40 Around three million people came to visit.

6:43 And this is still just one of an estimated

6:46 20 to 40 thousand monuments to the second world war.

6:51 But in the end, the monuments did not succeed in their goal.

7:02 This is the Petrova Gora monument in Croatia.

7:05 It has been erected to remember the execution of thousands of Serbian peasants.

7:10 It is now completely abandoned.

7:13 Looters took many aluminium plates.

7:15 A radio antenna now sits on the structure.

7:19 This once proud monument is literally a shell of itself.

7:22 But other monuments have suffered an even worse fate.

7:25 This is the Makljen monument in Bosnia Herzegovina.

7:28 Unknown people destroyed it with dynamite.

7:31 It's just one of many that did not survive.

7:39 Why were these monuments demolished?

7:43 In the beginning of the 1990s Yugoslavia came to a violent end.

7:46 I made a video that covers this topic.

7:48 The nation broke apart and the fragments that emerged

7:51 quickly needed to decide what their own story was.

7:54 For some that meant a total break with everything that Yugoslavia stood for.

8:02 Destroying the monuments that were once meant to unite.

8:06 In other places, monuments were more easily

8:09 reimagined to fit into the new national identity.

8:12 But this history was completely ignored

8:14 when the West discovered these structures.

8:18 Their alien looks are great for dystopian fantasies.

8:26 They can be found in artwork, in games, set pieces in Netflix series.

8:30 But by focusing on their looks alone you lose important context.

8:34 This leads to some interesting use cases.

8:38 The Croatian Auschwitz becomes a petty backdrop to promote sunglasses.

8:43 Monuments to massacres are perfect for parkour.

8:47 And although the appeal of these places is understandable,

8:50 they are important memorials made to remember thousands

8:52 of casualties and with a specific socialist goal in mind.

8:56 They rejected the Soviet example and made their own unique style,

9:00 in what is arguably the biggest public art project in the world.

9:04 With the goal to shape different ethnicities into one Yugoslav people.

9:08 A goal that ultimately failed.

9:12 Knowing that context makes them all the more interesting.

9:17 The people designing these memorials were really artistic.

9:21 But to make their dreams a reality, they needed to know math.

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