Monuments and Memory: Immortalizing Count M. N. Muraviev in Vilna, 1898
Ernest Renan argued over a century ago that belonging to a nation entails forgetting just as much as it required remembering past events. Certainly this is the case in East Central Europe, where not infrequently different nationalities create out of a single historical event utterly opposing historical memories. In the western borderlands of the Russian Empire, one historical event that has been variously interpreted by different nationalities is the Insurrection of 1863. To simplify somewhat, prerevolutionary Russian historians generally interpreted this key event as a mutiny against the established legal order—the term miatezh (mutiny) was always used in such accounts—while the Poles interpreted the uprising as perhaps naive and foolish, but in any case a noble attempt to regain rights usurped by the Russian occupiers. With such a sharply opposed memory of the uprising as a whole, it comes as no surprise that the figure who did the most to crush the insurrection in the Northwest (Lithuanian and Belarusian) provinces, Count M. N. Muraviev, should also be a controversial figure, praised by conservative Russians and demonized by Poles, Lithuanians, and liberals of all nationalities.