WHO IS AFRAID OF NATASHA?

   For thirty-seven years, a marching female figure with a flag was situated in the main urban artery of the Polish seaside city of Gdynia. Commonly known as Natasha, the woman was the most essential element of the Monument to the Polish-Soviet Brotherhood, erected there in 1953, at the height of Stalinism. The bronze figure sat atop a high column adorned with figurative reliefs and an inscription that preached “eternal glory to the liberators, the heroic soldiers of the Soviet Army.” Facing the West, Natasha was symbolically carrying the mission of Communism further into Europe. Simultaneously, like many public monuments erected in socialist Europe, this one also served as a stage for official state events—the ideological performances of the Soviet bloc’s might.

   A female body cast in bronze and positioned in a public space is, at best, an allegory. It stands for victory, it stands for heroic fight, or for other immaterial values that a society decides to immortalize in a monumental form. The last thing the body stands for is the actual person, the female subject that lent the sculpture its shape. Natasha’s body was given to her by a young female student of sculpture in Warsaw the early 1950s, Magdalena Więcek—later herself an established artist. Or, rather, it was given to Natasha by her male professor, Marian Wnuk, the author of the sculpture. He knew Więcek’s body well since the two were lovers.

   Wnuk’s monument was supposed to stand for the Polish-Soviet friendship, a common trope in Stalinist propaganda. As a result, to many in Gdynia, Natasha stood for Communism. Bottles of champagne were opened when the sculpture was removed on July 22, 1990 —the date specifically selected by the removal committee to symbolically undo the four decades of Soviet control in Poland, cemented with a Constitution singed on July 22, 1952. The sculpture found its resting place at the city’s Soviet cemetery. Natasza—nie nasza (“Natasha—not ours”), summarized one contemporary Gdynian combining the local anti-sentiment with an amusing rhyme, when asked by Joanna Malinowska and C.T. Jasper about his memory of the sculpture.

   Another of the artists’ interlocutors, a museum curator, suggested Natasha could be seen today as an allegory of a female migrant. Originally a figure of a woman who marched to Poland in 1944 with the Red Army, Natasha could now represent all those women who come to Poland from Ukraine and Belarus in order to escape violence or political turmoil. “Instead of removing an allegory, one can impose new meaning onto it.”

   Following that line of thinking, Malinowska and Jasper took a somewhat different route. The artists commissioned a copy of Natasha and adorned her with a red lightening, the symbol of Poland’s “Black Protests” that shook the country multiple times in the past few years. Millions of women and men took to the streets to protest planned restrictions to the country’s already restrictive abortion law and to voice their objection to the patriarchal system defined by the ultra-conservative politicians together with the ever-present Catholic Church. Equipped with the lightening, Malinowska and Jasper’s Natasha becomes one of those determined, strong-willed contemporary Polish women with their own independent subjectivity. Her placement inside the Beguinage, the place where for centuries women retreated to live their lives away from both the secular society and the constraints of monastic life, heightens this element of self-determination and constructive agency.

   Ultimately, Who is Afraid of Natasha? is a work as much about the past, as it is the present. The reconstructed Natasha lends her body once again, this time to the collective memory of contemporary Gdynians. Once intentionally repressed, the memory of Communism is now re-created in relation to the present. In Malinowska and Jasper’s reconstruction, Natasha is reclaimed to be nasza, ours. As she has, possibly, always been.

Magdalena Moskalewicz