As I was photographing Soviet-era monuments in the Lithuanian port city of Klaipėda in May 2022, I heard a woman shout at me: “You are a young Nazi who wants to remove and destroy everything”. She was triggered by my presence, taking notes around the monuments and carrying a couple of professional-looking cameras.
I was in the middle of a research trip to document Soviet monuments in the Baltic states. The past few years had seen some former Soviet bloc countries debate the future of these monuments, many of which were originally erected to mark the role of Soviet forces in the second world war.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began earlier in 2022, had accelerated these debates in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The debates were not new – questions about the presence of Soviet-era monuments had surfaced for decades. But concrete actions to remove them had been rare due to divided opinions over their meaning.
