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Ukraine Kicks Lenin to the Curb

Ukraine Kicks Lenin to the Curb

Has anyone told Bernie?

In a move symbolic of the nation’s rejection of Communism and the Soviet era, Ukraine has removed one of the last large statues of Vladimir Lenin from public view.

The Guardian reported:

Ukraine topples biggest remaining Lenin statue

It took two days and a giant crane, but Ukraine has finally managed to lift its biggest remaining statue of the Soviet founder Lenin off its pedestal and consign it to the dustbin of history.

The 20m tall (65ft) bronze and granite monument fell victim on Thursday to a Ukrainian ban on Soviet symbols that was imposed in May 2015.

The statue, in the south-eastern city of Zaporizhia, weighed 40 tonnes and was one of about 2,500 similar ones scattered across the country since its Soviet days.

Most of those have since been toppled, with Ukraine’s tallest Lenin in the city of Kharkiv falling in September 2014, seven months after the removal of a pro-Russian leadership in Kiev…

Russia often accuses Ukraine of violating international law by banning the Communist party, which it also did shortly after the 2014 pro-EU revolt.

Here’s a video of the statue coming down. You’ll notice no one in the crowd seems very sad to see him go.

In September of 2014, Rick Noack of the Washington Post explained the anti-Lenin sentiment in Ukraine:

What toppled Lenin statues tell us about Ukraine’s crisis

In an incident reflecting growing Ukrainian anger toward the Kremlin, anti-Russian protesters pulled down a massive Vladimir Lenin statue in Ukraine’s second-largest city late Sunday. To many Ukrainians, Lenin is a symbol of the Soviet Union and Russia’s aggressive support for the separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine.

Despite the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union which resulted in the split between Russia and Ukraine, hundreds of monuments to the founder of modern Russia survived the transition. Over the last months, however, many have been toppled…

“To many Ukrainians, Lenin represents not only the communist regime, but also radical separation from Europe and Western civilization more broadly,” Steven Fish, a Russian studies professor at University of California Berkeley, told the Los Angeles Times last December after a statue had been toppled in Kiev.

Other scholars view the toppling in a more modern light. Sasha Senderovich, assistant professor of Russian Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder who wrote a New York Times op-ed on this issue last December, considers Sunday’s event not to be connected to Lenin specifically. “At this point, after Putin’s assault on Ukraine’s territorial integrity, the statue has become more symbolic of Russia’s continued attempt to exercise imperial dominance over Ukraine rather than solely the historical legacy of the Soviet Union,” he told The Post on Monday.

It’s ironic that as former Soviet states reject the failed policies of their past, American progressives are embracing them.

Chalk that up to the ongoing failure of our education system.

Featured image via YouTube.

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Comments

Vlad is relocating to Vermont.

There should be nice, modest, life-sized statues of Reagan, Thatcher, and Pope John Paul all over the former Soviet Union.

MaggotAtBroadAndWall | March 18, 2016 at 9:14 am

As far as I know, Seattle still pays tribute to Lenin by honoring him with a statue on public property.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Lenin,_Seattle

    There’s a great argument for public urination, rat thar…

    That’s Fremont and it’s always been weird. Misspent a fair amount of time there as a youth. It’s changed now and SJWs have replaced the bikers, hippies, and bums but it’s still weird. Weirder than the rest of the city.

    Used to have it’s own mayor, ‘Tiny’ Freeman. At ‘five foot and eighteen inches’ nobody wanted to tell him he wasn’t really mayor.

    No more statues of bloody dictators in America.

American Human | March 18, 2016 at 10:05 am

I am not surprised to see this happen. I disagree with the esteemed professor Senderovich about this not being Anti-Lenin. I used to believe that Russia and Ukraine were joined at the hip, barely any difference in the language, both former Soviet Union etc.
Lenin and then Stalin believed Ukrainian were lesser people and did not support the revolution. Both tried to not only suppress the people but they forced all to speak Russian, they tried to erase every trace of former Ukrainian culture and tradition songs, festivals, forbid the flying of the flag and etc. All of this led to the force famines in the late 1920s and early 30s and the deaths of more than 10 million people from starvation.
These are reasons Ukraine wants to join NATO and be closer to the EU and such.
IMHO, removing Lenin statues from the country has EVERYTHING to do with anti-Soviet, anti-Lenin, Anti-Stalin feelings.

    They are still joined at the hip with 70% of Ukrainians having relatives in Russia and 35% of Russians having relatives in Ukraine. Putin’s chief of stuff is a Ukrainian from Lviv and nobody blinks an eye. A marriage between a Russian and a Ukrainian is not considered an intermarriage in either Russia or Ukraine.
    After Maidan, the new media consolidated, telling people that they will, some day soon, join EU and NATO. Ukrainians still think it’s a reachable goal; I guess one has to believe in something.
    Lenin and especially Stalin believed everyone was inferior to Russians. Neither one was an ethnic Russian. Brezhnev and Khrushchev were, but thought of themselves as Ukrainians. USSR had something akin to affirmative action for Ukrainians and Belorussians.

Melt it down and recast into sewer pipes.

The Democrat Party could find a spot for it in DC….replacing one of those racist bigoted white guy’s monument if Bernie wins. After all V I Lenin is one of their patron “saints”.

Russia is roundly hated by the people of its former satellites, because the Russians stripped them of their wealth and their right of self-determination. One could think of it as a kind of reverse-Marshall Plan.

Slightly OT: did anybody see the article in Daily Mail on Stalin’s Granddaughter?

She’s a tattooed up, blue skrillex haired SJW living in Portland.

In other words, she’s a lot like her grandfather.

With all due respect, this is so wrong.
The Lenin statue in Kharkov was removed by the neo-Nazi out-of-towners, for instance, who then put neo-Nazi graffiti on the pedestal. One guy got his eye punctuated in the process. Woo-hoo! Europe here we come!
This is not merely about removing Lenin statues. The de-communization (or whatever you call it) law passed by Ukraine is so far-reaching, it requires taking down every communist symbol, every red star, everywhere, in the process vandalizing great many works of art. I recommend following independent Russian journalist Leonid Ragozin on this and other topics re Russia and its “near abroad”. He calls this neo-Bolshevik vandalism.
Is it possible to erase history? Does it matter that for most of its existence Ukraine was more Soviet than Russia? Does it matter that one could find more dissent (and sophistication) in Moscow or Leningrad than Kiev of Kharkov? That, in the Soviet Union, Ukrainians were model honorary Russians?
There is a monument to Peter the Great in St. Petersburg; it survived the Bolsheviks. Communists don’t like tzars, and Peter the Great was a tyrant, but the monument stands, because it’s history.
And while the Ukrainian government removes monuments, Ukraine remains as corrupt of a country as ever. This is merely a bone they threw to the ideologically-minded.