Thirty years ago, on September 16, 1990, The Ukrainian Weekly reported that two statues of Lenin were toppled and dismantled in the wake of Soviet policies of perebudova, when restrictions were lifted on politics and the press, Ukrainians debated the course toward independence and fear of the Soviet state began to wane.
The article, which originally appeared in Za Vilnu Ukrainu, the newspaper of the Lviv Oblast Council, noted that a number of Lenin monuments in western Ukraine had been taken down by the local population.
Citizens of Mykolaiv, Lviv Oblast, cheered as the Lenin monument in that city center was disassembled. At that time, another monument to Lenin was taken down in Boryslav, Lviv Oblast.
These were major milestones that went viral before social media existed, and it signaled the crumbling of the Soviet empire that had oppressed Ukraine and the other Soviet republics for more than seven decades.
Bohdan Nahaylo, a regular contributor to The Weekly, in a Radio Liberty story that was featured in the issue dated September 23, 1990, noted that the debate about Lenin monuments exposed a divide in Ukrainian society at the time – the need to expose the “real” Lenin that would foster the widespread removal of such monuments as the country asserted its national identity, and the Communist protests against the “defamation” and the “act of vandalism” of such action.
In 1990, local authorities in Drohobych, Lviv and Stryi in western Ukraine also ordered that Lenin monuments be taken down. As a result of the monument in Lviv being taken down during the week of September 16, 1990, it was discovered that the base of the monument was made up of gravestones from desecrated Ukrainian, Polish and Jewish cemeteries. In Kolomyia, a scandal erupted after a similar discovery of Polish and Jewish gravestones when locals dismantled the Lenin monument in that town.
Anne Applebaum, who was in Ukraine during 1990, noted in her op-ed for The Washington Post on August 25, 2017: “The removal of the Lenin statue was important not because it was political theater, but because it reflected real change, at least for some. In the space where the Lenin statue had stood, a lovely square in front of the opera house, people gathered to debate. …Nostalgia for the autocratic system that Lenin represented was still strong, and indeed many monuments to him remained all across Ukraine – at least until another wave of political change, sparked by a street revolution and a foreign invasion, inspired another wave of removals. Just this month, 26 years after the USSR ceased to exist, the Ukrainian government announced that it had finally removed every single remaining Lenin statue, all 1,320 of them.”
The only two remaining statues of Lenin in Ukraine are located in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. Ukraine’s adoption in 2015 of a de-communization law that prohibits Communist symbols, the Euro-Maidan (Revolution of Dignity), the annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbas, as well as the resulting awakening of national consciousness have made Ukrainians acutely aware of anything that could lead them back to a system of Russian domination.
There remain three statues to Lenin in the United States – in Seattle, Los Angeles and New York. They sit on private land and have not been defaced, damaged or removed. Shockingly, a new Lenin monument is to be erected outside the party headquarters of the Marxist-Leninist party of Germany in Gelsenkirchen, Germany.
Source: “Down with Lenin,” The Ukrainian Weekly, September 16, 1990.