The graves of a few hundred soldiers of the Soviet Union, killed in the brief period of fighting that preceded the Red Army's march into Bucharest in 1944 are found beside a typically Soviet statue of a brave soldier carrying the red flag towards a bright socialist future. According to Alexandru Gussi, Professor at the University of Bucharest, Faculty of Political Science “The monument was inaugurated in 1946, with a ceremony attended by King Michael I, Petru Groza – President of the Council of Ministers, General Mayor of General Victor Dombrowski, General Ivan Susaikov and other Romanian and Soviet officials.
On a 12 m marble obelisk on which a 3 m bronze statue used to stand to honor Soviet soldiers, the monument of the Soviet soldier was placed in Victory Square until the 1980s when it was moved on the Kiseleff Boulevard and after 1989 was removed. Today, the monument is in the Soviet Cemetery in the Pipera neighborhood of northern Bucharest.
The memorial complex to the Soviet soldiers was created in 1947 and is the largest Soviet military cemetery in Romania. Here are buried the remains of more than 600 people. In total, on the territory of Romania in World War II, about 65,000 Soviet soldiers were killed and buried.”
These photos were taken in March 2019 during the visit to the Soviet cemetery in Bucharest organized by the EUROM / European Observatory of Memories and the Faculty of Political Sciences of the University of Bucharest. These two institutions organized the travelling seminar “Romania’s entangled traumatic pasts”.
According to the official website of EUROM this travelling seminar “dealed with the memories of the Holocaust and the communist past in Romania and consisted of a series of speeches and guided visits to some of the most emblematic places of commemoration and memorialization in Bucharest and Jilava. It was co-organized by the EUROM and the Faculty of Political Sciences of the University of Bucharest and included the participation of master students and experts from the University of Bucharest and the University of Barcelona.”
