“Lenin City” as an alternative to Lenin monuments throughout Ukrainian cities

The Shevchenko District Court of Kyiv found five members of na­tio­na­list organizations, accused of chipping away the nose and right hand of the statue of Lenin in Kyiv on June 30, 2009, guilty as charged. Mykola Kokha­niv­sky was sentenced to three years’ im­pri­sonment suspended for two years for damaging the statue’s pedestal, and the rest – Oleksandr Zadorozhnii, Andrii Tarasenko, Bohdan Frant, and Ivan Sribny – received sentences of two years’ im­pri­sonment sus­pen­ded for two years, Ukrainska Pravda re­ports citing the All-Uk­rainian Union Svo­bo­da’s press service. All con­victs will chal­lenge the sentences be­fore the Court of Appeal.

It is no secret that a statue of Lenin can be found in almost every district center today, while streets and ave­nues honoring the re­vo­lutionary lea­dership or important dates of the Soviet history are too numerous to count. The predominance of Soviet place names is another confirmation that Ukraine has yet to say goodbye to its communist past and never cleansed itself of the regime’s stains. However, not all of us still live in the post-communist paradigm. Thus, it comes naturally that patriotic youth cannot tolerate presence of monuments to exterminators of the Uk­rai­nians in their hometown.

Umberto Eco wrote that heresy is an attempt to achieve through one’s own efforts what God’s saints promised, while patient waiting for fulfillment of promises would serve one better. The situation of the convicted natio­nalists fits this pattern well. The government, which had to remove the offensive symbols from Ukrainian cities but never bothered to do so, actually provoked the youths to commit the act of vandalism, only to have them convicted by a branch of the same go­vernment.

Of course, we should not sanitize our his­tory. Even so, would not it be a great idea to create a histo­rical theme park and preserve monuments of the Soviet era there, creating a city of identical Lenins, Shchorses, sickles and hammers? As artifacts of the past, they have a right to exist, but their continued existence should not harm the society’s spiritual health.