Ukrainian officials at last managed to bring down the largest remaining monument depicting late Soviet leader and communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin on March 18. As onlookers rejoiced, a large crane hoisted the massive statue off its platform. A webcam broadcasted live footage on YouTube, drawing thousands of viewers.
Almost 1,000 Lenin statues throughout Ukraine have been dismantled since 2013. The statues had served as objects of contempt and ridicule.
Since an onslaught of nationalist fervour ousted Ukraine’s Russian-backed president in 2014, the parliament has legislated to sever Ukraine’s ties to its communist past. So-called decommunisation efforts in Ukraine have reportedly gained momentum in recent months.
decommunisation’s Lenin statue stood 20m tall. Officials failed to tear the statue down several times this week.
“It would be easy to demolish it: place an explosive, blow it up and everything, but to take it down carefully and transport it to a storage place for totalitarian statues needs more care,” a spokeswoman for the local mayor’s office was quoted as saying.
“The papers on how it was built are all in Moscow, so it’s being taken down with a method of trial and error,” the spokeswoman said. “Relations aren’t so friendly at the moment that [Russian authorities] would reply quickly to a query.”
Tension in Ukraine is particularly volatile in the eastern region, with over 9,000 killed in violent pro-Russian separatist conflict. When a Lenin statue came down in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, in September 2014, Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov wrote on his Facebook page: “Lenin? Let him fall down. As long as nobody suffers under his weight. As long as this bloody Communist idol does not take more victims with it when it goes. I ordered the police to protect the people and not the idol.”
According to the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, 941 cities, towns and villages will be renamed and Soviet monuments throughout the country will be removed.
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