Vitaly Portnikov: "Without statues"

“The director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, Vladimir Vyatrovich, announced the final demolition of monuments to Lenin throughout the country,” recalls a columnist in a column on the Grani.ru website.

“You shouldn’t reassure yourself that Lenin is just the past. No, this is exactly the present. If in the first decade after the collapse of the USSR, endless bronze Lenins were perceived as symbols of a bankrupt ideology, then with the beginning of the 2000s, Lenin suddenly became an attribute of returning imperialism, another sign of the “Russian world,” along with Mikhalkov’s Soviet anthem, St. George’s ribbon and other visible attempts to cross a snake with a turtle and prove that the Bolshevik Soviet Union, which destroyed Russia, was a remarkable reincarnation of a devastated country.”

“Lenin always adhered to the position of denying any freedom of the oppressed peoples without “interaction” with the “Great Russian”. Stalin adhered to the same position. Putin adheres to the same position. Therefore, in the new millennium, the monument to Lenin turned into a monument to Putin. And is it any wonder that “Are there no more such monuments in Ukraine?”