Ukraine tore down its Lenin statues. The hard part is filling the spaces left behind.
By Anton Troianovski, Washington Post, November 16, 2018
HRYHORIVKA, Ukraine--Four angels and the Virgin Mary mark the spot where the Communist used to stand.
“We used to get drunk next to the Lenin,” a 45-year-old mechanic named Volodymyr said as he passed by.
“Now it’s a sin to drink there, I guess,” his friend Yulia said.
Five years after the start of Ukraine’s pro-Western revolution, the once-ubiquitous figure of Vladimir Lenin has been eradicated by law. So have other symbols of the Soviet era--gone from the country’s squares, streets and buildings.
But Ukrainians are still searching for meaning--and identity--in the spaces left behind.
Depending on where you look, those spaces are now an empty pedestal. Or replaced by a wooden cross. Or a new plaque on a rock. Or fresh tiles. Or just a circle of bare earth.
As elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, the likeness of the Bolshevik leader Lenin remained the focal point of hundreds of towns and villages for years in Ukraine after Communism’s demise.
Then came the protests, starting in November 2013, that toppled Ukraine’s Moscow-friendly government--touching off Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the war in eastern Ukraine and a race by the new authorities in Kiev to erase all vestiges of Soviet rule.
The ensuing “decommunization” laws spelled out scores of historical figures, mottos and symbols to be deleted from public spaces. But they didn’t say how toppled statues should be replaced.
Volodymyr Viatrovych, head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, which helped write and implement those laws, says all known Lenin statues on Ukrainian government-controlled territory have now been dismantled--more than 1,300 in total since the decommunization laws were passed in 2015. One exception: monuments near the site of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
What remains, he acknowledges, are hundreds of empty spaces and pedestals, often in towns’ central squares. In the institute’s internal jargon, the vacancies are known as “stumps.”
“The fact is, the question of how to fill these spaces will remain the subject of discussion among Ukrainians for some time,” Viatrovych said. “Our views of our history are still being formed.”
Ukraine’s search for new symbols to replace its Lenins reflects the country’s larger struggle to reorient itself toward the West amid economic turbulence and the continuing war with Russian-backed separatists in the east.
Ukraine’s rapid push also draws parallels to other pressing debates around the world on how to deal with history and memory--such as whether to preserve statues of Confederate figures in the United States or reinterpreting Columbus Day to acknowledge the decimation of Native Americans by European settlement.
Government proponents say Ukraine needs to free itself from Russia’s sway by embracing and developing a national narrative and national heroes. Critics say that the government is ceding too much power to far-right nationalist groups and enforcing an official ideology just as the Soviets did.
“It’s not a condemnation of propaganda, but it’s the exchange of one propaganda for another,” said Ievgeniia Moliar, a Kiev activist and art historian critical of the government’s hard-line approach to decommunization. She sees an unflattering parallel in Ukraine’s new monuments rising on the very spots--sometimes on the very same pedestals--where Lenin used to stand.
As they replace their Lenins, some villages are considering the fragility of Ukrainian politics and hedging their bets.
In Kodaky, south of Kiev, one villager wanted to erect a monument to the people killed in the 2014 protests in Kiev, referred to as the Heavenly Hundred.
The village authorities instead put up a more neutral monument “to the heroes of independent Ukraine” in the park next to Lenin’s former spot.
“You never know which way history will go in the future,” village council secretary Oksana Sivovna, 46, explained. “You never know when it’ll be time to topple the Heavenly Hundred.”
Kodaky’s Lenin statue sold to collectors for roughly $5,000, money that officials say went toward new windows for the school. All that marks the spot is a 7-by-7 grid of gray paving stones that are less weathered than the rest.
“Getting rid of pedestals doesn’t change anything,” said Veronika Protsenko, a 28-year-old villager who works in marketing, as she passed by. “If they had knocked him down and pay went up and pensions went up, then it would have meant something.”
