ABSTRACT
In post-1989 Poland, the official debate conducted at a national level on the country’s post-war past largely revolved around two competing narratives – one seeking to totally discredit the Polish communist state and the other looking to legitimise certain parts of Polish communist history. This has meant that the subject of Soviet symbols of power can be re-deployed at any time in debates surrounding the construction of a Polish collective identity, and that the country’s attitude to the Soviet sites has never ceased to provide a frame of reference for debating national values. How these frameworks have been activated and to what ends has depended on who has been controlling any particular debate. In Katharyne Mitchell’s words:
How this orchestration of a mythic history plays out is reflective of the particular configuration of power relations operative in society at a specific moment in time. These types of relations are constantly shifting, following the processual nature of hegemony, which is never complete, or predictable, but always (re)constituted in particular contexts. 1
