Tallinn Trip – Soviet Statue Graveyard (Statue of Joseph Stalin)

The timeline of this sculpture is different to the ones that I’ve wittered on about so far on this blog. It’s a statue of Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) and it was unveiled in Tallinn on 20 July 1950 in a green area opposite the Baltic Station. The bronze statue was designed by Nikolai Tomski and used metal that had been melted down from a statue of Martin Luther. When Stalin died the Soviet authorities thought that they might rethink things somewhat and so the statue was removed and put into long-term storage at the Department of Roadbuildings and Repairs, barely lasting ten years. It was nearly sold for scrap metal, but following Estonia’s independence it was brought to the museum.

There’s no nuance needed here really when writing about Joseph Stalin. Google AI puts it as succinctly as I could….. “Joseph Stalin is widely regarded as one of history’s most brutal and tyrannical dictators. His actions caused immense suffering and death, and his legacy is overwhelmingly negative.” It’s thought that there might have been tens of thousands of statues of Stalin in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and a few of them are still standing, mainly in Georgia and remote areas still heavily under communist influence.