1 “Present Struggles with the Heroes of the Soviet Past. ‘Alyosha’ Monuments in Tallinn, Vienna, Plovdiv, and the PostCommunist Space” Felix Münch (Ph.D. student, Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), Lecturer, Institute for Political Science, Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany) < felix.muench@sowi.unigiessen.de > Paper presented at the ASN World Convention Columbia University, 1820 April 2013 Please do not cite without the author’s permission © Felix Münch  After the end of the »Great Patriotic War« in 1945, statues of Red Army soldiers were erected in the entire sphere of influence of the Soviet Union. Mostly as monuments to the »Liberators from German Fascism« or the »Unknown Soldier«, they were to remember the heroic deeds of the soldiers during the liberation of Europe from the Third Reich. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the newly independent states in Central and Eastern Europe re-interpreted the historical narrative of the »Liberation of Europe« and added suffering and loss under the Soviet occupation during and after WWII to their national historiographies, therewith challenging both the former Soviet interpretation of the 20th century history and the Russian interpretation of the past. Some of these statues of Red Army soldiers, relics of Soviet iconography in stone and metal, still have their place in the urban landscapes of the post-Communist space. These monuments are surprisingly often called »Alyosha« by the local, mostly Russophone population – a broad phenomenon in many countries which the author traces back to a popular Soviet song from the 1960ies. Beside the best- known and most conflict-laden case in the Estonian capital Tallinn, »Alyosha« monuments exist, for example, in Rēzekne (Latvia), in the Russian cities of