Strategic Monuments: Zurab Tsereteli’s Gift Sculptures to the United States in the Eras of Détente, Perestroika, and Anti-Terrorism, 1979-2006

Experiment ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 264-296
Author(s):  
Stephen M. Woodburn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Host Community ◽  
Peter The Great ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Permanent Home ◽  
The Look

Abstract Best known for transforming the look of Moscow in the 1990s, sculptor and artist Zurab Tsereteli has also donated gift monuments abroad to coincide with diplomatic initiatives of the Soviet Union and Russia. This article examines Tsereteli’s gift monuments to the United States, spanning from the era of détente in the late-1970s to the brief window of anti-terrorist solidarity after 11 September 2001. The monuments are located mostly in or near New York City, although the unfortunate Columbus monument still awaits a permanent home (contrary to rumor, however, it did not return to Moscow as Peter the Great). While the motives and intentions informing the gifts provide the initial footing for the reception of the works, they fade to obscurity as the monuments accrue a legacy within the host community over time.

On Other Shores: When is Separate Inherently Unequal?,

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha Minow
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
United Nations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Academic Scholarship ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
The U.S

Even before it was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, Brown v. Board of Education had a global profile. Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal in a work that the Carnegie Corporation commissioned in 1944 in search of an unbiased view of American race relations, supplied a searing indictment of America’s treatment of the “Negro,” and his work, An American Dilemma, became a key citation in the Court’s famous footnote eleven. Initially, President Dwight D. Eisenhower showed no sympathy for the school integration project and expressed suspicion that the United Nations and international economic and social rights activists were betraying socialist or even communist leanings in supporting the brief. But as the United States tried to position itself as a leader in human rights and supporter of the United Nations, the Cold War orientation of President Eisenhower’s Republican administration gave rise to interest in ending official segregation, lynchings, and cross burnings in order to elevate the American image internationally. The Department of Justice consulted with the State Department on the drafting of an amicus brief in Brown that argued that ending racially segregated schools would halt the Soviet critique of racial abuses tolerated by the U.S. system of government and thereby help combat global communism. Ending segregation emerged as part of a strategy to win more influence than the Soviet Union in the “Third World.” African-American civil rights leader and journalist Roger Wilkins later recalled that ending official segregation became urgent as black ambassadors started to visit Washington, D.C., and the United Nations in New York City. Tracking the influence of Brown in other countries is thornier than tracking its influence inside the United States where the topic has motivated a cottage industry in academic scholarship. As this book has considered, the litigation has by now a well-known and complicated relationship to actual racial integration within American schools. Some argue that the case exacerbated tensions and slowed gradual reform that was already under way.

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