The Bolshevik Revolution took place over 100 years ago, but visit the Arman Cinema and it could have happened yesterday. Before you step inside, gaze up at the bas-relief on the building’s flank, here in Almaty’s petrol-soaked heart. You’ll see rows of hardy Kazakh horsemen, clad in medieval armour, spears and flags in hand and ready for a nomadic revolution. Leading them is a woman, a personification of the Motherland, honouring the Revolution of 1917, and a stunning example of historical art in the otherwise modern Kazakh capital.

Yet if “October” is a socialist epic, chiseled in soft grey stone to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Lenin’s putsch, it barely receives any attention. Locals mostly seem to ignore it, instead keen only on busting through the cinema’s doors to watch the latest action flick, or grabbing a bite to eat at the Burger King on its corner–or even stopping for a coffee at the adjacent Starbucks. That’s surprising, not least given the revolution “October” commemorates would soon travel from Petrograd to the steppe and grasp Kazakhstan’s people, choking the country and killing millions.

It might seem reasonable, then, to assume that locals would prefer this and other such Soviet monuments to disappear. In fact, the opposite is true. “I’m proud of it,” a Kazakh local told me when I asked her about its place in the city. “It represents a bad time, but that time has gone. It needs to be saved because it is art — and art is beautiful.”

It is a sentiment that has found a home on social media in the last decade, where you will find no end of accounts with thousands of followers and millions of likes and views, each sharing the curious beauty of art and architecture from across the former communist world. From dazzling mosaics to statues of long-dead revolutionaries, these span a bewildering range of styles, from the faux classicism of the Stalin-era Central Academic Theatre of the Russian Army in Moscow to the brutalism of Belgrade’s Eastern and Western City Gates — and indeed the bas-relief style of the “October” mural in Almaty.

Each of these pieces has been able to reinvent itself by doing little more than existing. With the passage of time, the ideologies and messages forged into them have almost disappeared. And, witnessing such a radical change in historical perception got me thinking about Britain’s architectural legacy. Since 2020, after all, debates have raged over whether we should or shouldn’t remove physical history from our public spaces, particularly colonial-era figures who supported despicable racist policies and engaged in the barbaric slave trade.

These debates existed before, of course, but the Rhodes Must Fall campaign against the British imperial legacy in South Africa, together with the Black Lives Matter movement in America, sparked a new wave of anti-colonialism and historical reframing across the UK. In practice, this manifested itself as anger towards statues of historical figures. These figures, who in some cases lived hundreds of years ago, were seen to have abetted present-day racism.

There’s no need, here, to recapitulate everything that followed — from the Colston debacle to the damage visited against statues of everyone from Robert the Bruce to Queen Victoria. Suffice to say that such actions were popular: multiple 2020 surveys found that the majority of Brits supported removing the statues, with one YouGov survey suggesting 53% of people wanted Colston gone from Bristol. Though grumbles about colonial-era architecture had long existed in academic and activist circles, 2020 marked the time the general public became collectively aware of, and indeed vocal about, the physical heritage around them.

It’s not hard to understand why this might happen. You can see, certainly, why people would want to destroy a statue of a man who made his riches by crushing the potential of countless black lives. Why would we want to celebrate a man who enslaved people? After many years of extensive travel across the former communist world, I began to see the historical parallels. The context is wildly different, of course, but in both Britain and, say, Kazakhstan, there are people who have suffered long histories of subjugation and oppression who must now see that celebrated in public spaces.

Why, then, the wildly different public reactions — especially when the Soviet nightmare happened so much more recently than the Atlantic slave trade, and when murderous despots like Hoxha and Ceauşescu ruled their countries deep into living memory? Perhaps the answer begins with all those Instagram accounts, and how they’ve helped turn communist art from a political symbol, whether good or bad, into a thoroughgoing cultural aesthetic. With the political messages gone, mosaics and murals — which Stalin intended to exude colourful utopian visions — have transformed into pure works of art to be enjoyed by everyone for free. And with communist architecture, its popularity appears to stem from its genuinely unique and alien appearance, which in turn has sparked curiosity over an historical period in which such aesthetics were prized and pursued.

As for an example of this trend in practice, few stand out better than @easternblocgirl, the Instagram account of a young Serbian woman who shares gloomy photographs and videos of Yugoslav architecture and communist memes, simultaneously questioning and reimagining ways in which the world might view these pieces and their history. She even has a Spomenik tattooed to her arm: referring to the futuristic monuments that sprung up across the former Yugoslavia from the Sixties through to the Eighties, and which commemorate victims of the Second World War.

The account is only one of several communist architecture accounts — @travelproof_tjark, @sovietvisuals, @socialistmodernism, @balkan.stories — which have well over a million followers between them. But even more striking is how this digital fame is increasingly jumping from screens into the real world. With online videos often showing crumbling monuments and damaged mosaics, a new generation of art lovers are working to save them, from Kazakhstan to Georgia, Poland to Azerbaijan.

There is perhaps no better example than the Buzludzha monument. Built in 1981, it’s an enormous saucer-like structure, sitting on a dynamited Bulgarian mountain peak of the same name. Inside, no less are no fewer than 937 square metres of mosaics, created by 60 artists using millions of cobalt tiles, each dedicated to the history of the Bulgarian Communist Party, with yet more venerating Marx and Lenin. In the ceremonial hall, you will find depictions of workers, peasants, soldiers and partisans alongside scenes of industrial and agricultural labour; the panoramic corridors retell episodes from Bulgarian social and political history.

When communism fell in 1989, so did the monument’s maintenance. But rather than letting the decay continue, Bulgarian architect Dora Ivanova in 2015 launched the Buzludzha Project Foundation. She was aware that there was a structure on a mountain in central Bulgaria that resembled a UFO — but wasn’t entirely sure about what that thing was. After seeing photographs of the monument online, she became convinced that something beautiful lay beneath the ruins of Buzludzha, and embarked on a simple mission: to restore the relic to its former glory. “We believe that it is important to save Buzludzha not only because it is a masterpiece of architecture, engineering, and art,” she wrote after launching the project, “but because we should remember our past, especially if it is traumatic or difficult.”

“We believe that it is important to save Buzludzha not only because it is a masterpiece of architecture, engineering, and art, but because we should remember our past, especially if it is traumatic or difficult.”

The sentiment echoes far beyond Bulgaria’s artsy elite. When I visited the monument earlier this year, I found that many local people also wanted it protected. My taxi driver, who had grown up in the nearby town of Kazanlak, even told me about his hopes for it to become a museum for tourists to visit. As he put it: “Imagine how good that would be for Kazanlak.”

Polling shows that Bulgarians overwhelmingly support the preservation of their communist architectural legacy. As researchers at Cardiff University found, over two thirds of them regard such monuments as important to national identity, while 58% support EU involvement to help fund preservation efforts. Most interestingly, a majority of people, including those under the age of 34, recognise the monuments as being part of Bulgarian national identity, even if they didn’t experience the brutal realities of communism themselves.

It is a stark contrast with opinions in Britain, where a 2020 government poll found that only 16% of people aged 16-24 were interested in heritage and its importance. And while separate polling three years later found that 64% of Britons felt proud of Britain’s history, this was down from 86% just a decade earlier. Taken together, these numbers reflect a disturbing trend towards civic disengagement, reflected in growing distrust of other institutions like the police and, most worryingly, education.

There is no doubt that young people across the UK who came out to topple and vandalise statues were vigorously and actively engaging in history, vital for any functioning society. But their acts seemed rash and worlds away from the approaches seen across the former communist world. It is here where the people appear to be aware of the past in a way that escapes those in Britain.

The problem, then, may lie in a lack of historical awareness, or perhaps a lack of desire to be aware. History as a subject is only mandatory in UK schools up until the age of 14, while religious education is (by law, at least) compulsory up to the age of 18. Many young people now use alternative sources of historical education like YouTube (which in 2025 became the second-most watched service in the UK) and podcasts, which aren’t always factually watertight, not to mention dubious in their sources and potentially hidden agendas.

In fact, social media is a hotbed of ill-informed “takes” and eroded critical thinking. Many of the young people seen protesting on the UK’s streets wholeheartedly agreed with BLM statements that Britain had grown rich solely off the back of slavery, and of course, it is partly true. But none seemed to pay heed to the other ways in which the country grew into an imperial titan — not least through its indigenous natural resources and entrepreneurial culture. Viewing history through a single lens inevitably warps the whole world.

Polish journalist and cultural critic Agata Pyzik believes all this is clearing the ground for dangerously misconstrued historical understanding. Writing shortly after statues of Lenin were being pulled down in eastern Ukraine, in 2014, before Russia launched its first invasion of the country, she noted that more people were beginning to wrongly conflate dissatisfaction and anger with modern-day politics with historical monuments. To do so, she said, is to pair things from very “different historical orders”. Sometimes, this conflation has missed the mark entirely. Only this year, multiple statues in Parliament Square, including that of prominent suffragette Dame Millicent Fawcett, were vandalised with graffiti related to trans rights.

The anger is misplaced. It is far easier to target statues than it is the real reasons behind the inadequacies of your present-day society, whether Britain or Bulgaria, or any post-communist country for that matter. Yes, these monuments represent periods in which historical ills occurred. But is it really Lenin’s fault that corruption in Hungary is at an all-time high? Or Colston’s fault that the UK government is failing to address systemic racism in 2025?

Germany is all too aware of how easy it is to blame the past, remove it, and blindly move on. The country is second only to Russia in the number of Red Army and communist memorials on its soil. Indeed, one sits just moments away from the Bundestag, the parliament building in Berlin. Yet rather than tear down public art erected by the communist German Democratic Republic (DDR), its democratic successor has actively protected over 4,000 such fixtures. Why? In the decades following the fall of the Nazi regime, Germany adopted “Erinnerungskultur” or a “Culture of Remembrance”: an unspoken, nationwide acknowledgement that it is the duty of citizens to remember and learn from their country’s past — not erase it.

Other countries have also navigated this difficult path successfully. In Tallinn, the Estonian capital, a plaque sits at the heart of the city’s Old Town celebrating Juhan Smuul, a Soviet-era writer whose works are loved in the 21st century. Only recently did Estonia discover that Smuul helped authorities in the mass deportation of Estonians to Siberia during the Stalinist terror. Many of Smuul’s countrymen were worked to death in gulags, never to see their families again.

Clearly, then, Smuul participated in evil, just as Colston happily destroyed the lives of the innocent. But rather than remove and destroy the plaque altogether, the city council installed a small QR code which, when I scanned it, linked to his sins and placed his historical role in context. It all suggests that, by balancing aesthetics with action, even the nastiest of people can be memorialised fairly. And while it may be said that monuments in the post-communist world are easier on the eye (an imposing and colourful Bulgarian mosaic commemorating Marx and Lenin is, I think, more impressive than a statue of a long-dead slaver), Britain’s architectural legacy is one that is beautiful in its own artistic right: the Royal Albert Hall, Wellington Arch, Marble Arch, Manchester Town Hall, Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, Belfast City Hall — the list goes on.

And so the same can be said of the “October” bas-relief in Almaty. The uninspiring and bleak road that runs parallel to it is in almost constant use by businessmen and students of the nearby university, elderly women heading to the market, and elderly men who sit idly in the adjacent square. People are forced to see and remember the violent past on a daily basis. But rather than rage and protest and call for its removal, they have chosen another path. A path of remembrance, recognition, reconciliation and, most importantly, reinterpretation. Perhaps it is time for the people of Britain to see the sense in this movement too.

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Joel Day is a features and travel writer. His work has featured in the Daily Telegraph, the* Independent*, the i Paper, the Daily Mirror, and The Critic. He was previously deputy special projects editor at the Daily Express.

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