Sunday, March 25, 2007

Lenin's statues

People here in the FSU (former Soviet Union) don't hate Lenin the way they hate Stalin. A joke among ex-pats (among citizens as well? not sure, probably, where else would this joke have come from?) is that whenever anything goes wrong, just blame it on Stalin. Your rent went up? Stalin's fault. No hot water? Stalin. Slipped on the ice? Stalin again. But he and his henchmen did so much damage, most problems here really can be attributed to Stalin.

However, every town and city still has one statue of Lenin. There may have been ten or twenty statues before 1992. Most of them were pulled down, but, in every community, one has been allowed to stay.

This statue is just off the main avenue in downtown Kyiv, Kreshchatyk vul./blvd. I walk past the statue all the time, and always look up at (not to) it.

3 comments:

Luba said...

The one statue per town rule may apply in eastern Ukraine, but not in western. There the statues were ll pulled down many years ago, and you'd have to travel far to find even one.

Statues from WWII remain, but the inscriptions have been changed, as they were often very pro-soviet and anti-partisan.

In the place of Lenin, almost every town in western Ukraine (and many in the east) now has a statue of Shevchenko.

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