Tale of Two Icons: Engels & General Kalashnikov

Manchester & Moscow Monuments: From Engels to
Lt. Gen. Mikhail T. Kalashnikov, designer of the AK-47

WITHIN two months of each other two statues have been unveiled,; one in Manchester of Fredrich Engels, and the other in Moscow of General Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov.

At the unveiling of the Engels statue event on the 16th, July, at the NCP Bridgewater Hall Car Park, with the statue being placed in Tony Wilson Place near HOME in Manchester, Salford Trades Council ended up walking out when they found they were confronted by Showsec Security, an 'anti-trade union body'.

The statue originally situated in Maryanivka, Ukraine, 12 feet tall, had been cut in half and dumped.  But on May 15, the halves were hauled onto a truck and sent on their way to Manchester.  On its travels through Europe, captured on film, the truck stopped in Engels’s birthplace, Barmen, now part of the city of Wuppertal in northwestern Germany.

The Engels resurrection in Manchester, where he conducted research on the working class in the 1840s, is thanks to Phil Collins — the acclaimed artist who has made Engels the centrepiece of his most recent project, 'Ceremony'.

Meanwhile, less than two months later on the 19th, September 2017,  a towering monument to Lt. Gen. Mikhail T. Kalashnikov, designer of the AK-47, the Soviet rifle that has become the world’s most widespread assault weapon, was unveiled on Tuesday in the middle of one of central Moscow’s busiest thoroughfares.

The ceremony took place to the sounds of Russian military folk music, the Soviet anthem, Orthodox prayers and words about how his creation had ensured Russia’s safety and peace in the world.

While the Manchester monument was financed in part by Manchester City Council controlled by the Labour Party,the Moscow monument to Kalashnikov was financed in part by Rostec, the Russian state-owned corporation that owns the Kalashnikov Concern, the weapons manufacturer in Izhevsk where General Kalashnikov worked for decades (and which was renamed for him in 2013).

Sergey V. Chemezov, the chief executive of Rostec, who reportedly became close to Mr. Putin in Germany in the 1980s when Mr. Putin worked for the K.G.B., praised General Kalashnikov as an “example of unwavering devotion to one’s profession and one’s motherland” that should serve as “an example to our younger generation.”

The 'New York Times' reported that the General Kalashnikov’s legacy at the event was also cast in religious terms, in line with the Russian government’s depiction of itself as a protector of the Orthodox Church and of Christianity more broadly.

General Kalashnikov in 2007 with a prototype of his AK-47. Credit Misha Japaridze/Associated Press