Ukraine completes Lenin wipeout

No statues of Lenin remain in Ukraine, according to the head of the country’s Institute of National Memory, Vladimir Vyatrovich.

In an interview with news source Liga, Mr Vyatrovich announced that “a total of 2,389 monuments have been pulled down, including 1,320 statues of Lenin. As far as we know, there are no more (statues of) Lenin on the territory controlled by Ukraine.”

In May 2015, the Verkhovna Rada passed a decommunisation law banning any symbols, statues, flags, mosaics, imagery, anthems, street or city names associated with the Soviet Union, provoking an urban dismantling of epic proportions. While the legislation affects all objects of Soviet affiliation, the sheer number of monuments destroyed dedicated to Lenin resulted in a phenomenon known as Leninopad or “Lenin-fall”, and a country full of discarded fragments of the former, and now fallen, Soviet leader.

According to Mr Vyatrovich, Leninopad has seen statues made of plaster simply destroyed, while bronze monuments are either melted down or donated to museums. He also added that before the end of the year, an exhibition of “monumental propaganda of the USSR” may be showcased at Kiev’s Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy (VDNH), featuring statues of Lenin, among others.

Source: TASS