Monuments to victims of Soviet repression removed from Russian-occupied Luhansk

The Russian-installed authorities in the occupied Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine, have had two memorials commemorating the victims of Stalin’s Terror and the many millions of lives lost during the Holodomor removed from the regional capital, Luhansk’s unrecognised government announced on Wednesday.

Both the monument dedicated to the victims of Stalin’s repressions and the monument dedicated to the victims of the Holodomor, the commonly used term for the Soviet-made famine that killed roughly 4 million people in Ukraine between 1932–1933, were erected during what the region’s Russian-installed government now refers to as the “Ukrainian period”, which began with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and lasted until 2014, when much of Donbas fell into the hands of pro-Russian separatists.

The Luhansk city authorities said on Telegram that the “fake monuments” had been built on the initiative of Ukrainian nationalists and that “veteran organisations” in the region had repeatedly demanded that they be demolished as they had “no historical and cultural significance and offended the patriotic feelings of Luhansk residents”.

“Today, due to numerous requests, the memorials, that were installed on the initiative of Ukrainian nationalists, were dismantled,” the Kremlin-appointed mayor of the city of Luhansk, Yana Pashchenko said. She added that the government “could not help but respond to the aspirations of our residents”.

While it’s generally accepted that the Soviet famine of 1930–1933 was deliberately engineered, some historians reject the idea that it was aimed specifically at Ukrainians in an attempt by Stalin to wipe out a growing independence movement.

In 2023, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) joined 16 other countries in recognising the Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine in the early 1930s as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people.