Twenty-six years ago, on September 16, 1990, a statue to Vladimir Lenin was dismantled in Lviv by the local authorities.
During the two weeks stretching from September 5 through 19, Lenin statues across Ukraine were being targeted for removal or destruction.
“On the one hand, the movement to expose the ‘real’ Lenin and to remove his monuments has been growing and has spread from western Ukraine to Kyiv, Chernihiv and Donetsk,” Bohdan Nahaylo wrote. “On the other hand, the Communist Party of Ukraine has organized meetings in Lviv, Kyiv and Chernihiv to protest against the ‘defamation’ of Lenin and ‘acts of vandalism’ against his monuments, and the new ideological secretary in Kyiv, Valentyn Ostrozhynsky, has spoken out at length in this vein in the pages of Radianska Ukraina.”
Other towns in Ukraine where the authorities had ordered the dismantling of the Lenin monuments included Drohobych and Stryi. Other monuments to Lenin were destroyed in early August 1990, including the first Lenin to fall in Ukraine – that in Chervonohrad (Lviv Oblast), followed by Ternopil and Kolomiya.
When the Lenin statue in Lviv was dismantled, it was discovered that the base of the statue was made up of gravestones from desecrated Ukrainian, Polish and Jewish cemeteries.
In Kolomiya, it was discovered that the statue’s base was filled with Polish and Jewish gravestones.
The trend of falling Lenins in Ukraine during those final days of Communist rule continued, including in the towns of Mykolayiv and Boryslav, both in the Lviv Oblast. The Ukrainian Weekly in its September 16, 1990, issue ran photos of the monument’s destruction in Mykolayiv, with local residents cheering its dismantling.
Today, statues of Lenin and Communist monuments continue to fall across Ukraine, as the country sheds its Soviet legacy. Since the Euro-Maidan of 2014, this trend has been dubbed “Leninopad” and has become more widespread. Many of these monuments were still standing more than 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It has been claimed that more than 700 Lenin monuments were removed or destroyed between February 2014 and December 2015. Since 1991 until December 2015, nearly 4,200 Lenin monuments have been removed. This is also inline with Ukraine legislation on the removal of Communist monuments and the renaming of towns and streets.
This year, 159 statues of Lenin have been taken down across Ukraine with the most recent happening in Peschana, Odesa Oblast (September 4), Kachkarivka, Kherson Oblast (August 11), Klembivka, Vinnytsia Oblast (August 8), Berdiansk, Zaporizhia Oblast (July 16), and Andriyivka, Khmelnytsky Oblast (July 15).
Source: “Lenin monuments’ sordid secret revealed,” by Bohdan Nahaylo (RFE/RL), The Ukrainian Weekly, September 23, 1990; Leninopad website, Leninstatues.ru/leninopad.