1. A long goodbye to Lenin: “Leninfall” in Ukraine
Quite surprisingly, the protests in Ukraine which began after Yanukovich (the now ex-Ukrainian President) refused to sign a trade agreement with the European Union in favor of a trade deal with Russia, reached its peak when a statue of Lenin was smashed down in Kiev on December 8, 2013.
Until this crucial moment, monuments of Lenin had survived all political turbulences in the country, in Kiev and particularly in Southern and Eastern Ukraine. Often abandoned and ignored, they fell into pieces in small cities thanks to total indifference and neglect. In big industrial cities, monuments are often used as a place to take wedding pictures.
The destruction of a monument of Lenin in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, triggered the symbolic Leninfall” around the country.The statue’s destruction was widely filmed, captured and commented on online. Pieces of the statue were even set aside for sale online: Lenin’s palm was estimated at 1000 hryvnia (100 euro), a part of his hand: 750 hryvnia, while the breast and legs are sold by weight: 50 hryvnia per kilo. The vacant place was used for protestors’ creativity and became a site of political artwork: from the golden toilet as a symbol of state corruption, to the recent art project "golden youth of the country" in the reference to the students, who initiated the protests.
During the mass protests, the monuments of Lenin around Ukraine have been either toppled or damaged over the course of a few months which reached its peak after the bloody riots in February 2014 when no less than 90 monuments were smashed down in the whole country. There have already been several attempts to dismantle the monuments during the years of 2009-2013 guided by the Presidential Decree of Ukraine № 432/2009. However despite the fact that this decree authorized local authorities to dismantle Soviet monuments, there were still plenty of Ukrainian Lenins left. Small, big, painted gold, often abandoned, Ukraine still counted hundreds of them.
If Central and Eastern parts of Ukraine only started to get rid of their Lenins during the protests, Western Ukraine went a step further by removing other Soviet monuments, such as monuments to Unknown Soldiers or other Soviet figures, such as Kirov, Karl Marx or Dzerzhinsky.
Why have we waited 25 years to remove the Lenins? Everything was triggered by the ex-Ukrainian president Yanukovych, when he refused to sign an agreement with the EU and suddenly turned towards a union with Russia. For many, Putin's Russia is the revival of the Soviet Union with the rehabilitation of Stalin as "a good manager", a threat which still exists next door.
All over the world attacking statues is a symbolic political gesture. Smashing Lenin has a strong symbolic gesture; it is to break with a corrupted government and with the Soviet past. Toppling Lenin is not about the Bolshevik leader at all. He is so symbolic of the Soviet Union, still and passive, standing in all of the smallest cities, he is just everywhere. Lenin, as the founder of the Soviet Union, stands as a symbol of authoritarianism, the old Soviet one and the new Russian one. It is also true that the angry crowds wanted to take revenge on their corrupted government and very often Lenin’s monument was the only monument to smash.
The communist party and some local activists still raise money to pay for other monuments or put to put old ones back, as in Mikolaiv. Sometimes, they station a round-the-clock vigil to protect a statue. However most probably the day will come when no one will care for them anymore and they will finish in some thematic park, as in Budapest. In Crimea, the underwater museum at Cape Tarkhankut was created and housands of busts of former Communist leaders found their shelter, including Lenin, Stalin and Marx.
The toppling of the Lenin statue in Kiev released a lot of creative ideas as to how to replace the monument, as well as the popular cartoons about Lenin’s “adventures” in Kiev. The internet was overflowing with comical pictures where Lenin escapes the people’s revenge, seeking another place to stand. Other cartoons display Lenin and Stalin monuments complaining about their stay in Ukraine and asking for international asylum. Internet users exchanged ideas about a possible monument to replace the Lenin in Kiev. These propositions included lipstick, the Void, Yoda from Star Wars, etc.
So, 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it seems that Ukrainians are finally ready to break with the Soviet past and Lenin, not as in 1991, where Ukraine became independent by default as the result of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Smashing Lenin was a strong symbolic gesture to say goodbye to the past, the long painful goodbye. “I was afraid”, said one of protesters, “that it will never happen. There’s nothing left of Lenin” he said “and thank God.”
Nataliya Borys, History, Ukraine
2. Response - The Other Side of ‘Leninfall’
In this context, successful epopee of tearing down the statues is a reverent gesture to far right groups and their symbolical victory in the public space. Moreover, the popular support of the Leninfall demonstrates not only how widespread the idea of “away from the USSR” is, but how receptive to nationalistic demands and unreflective about nationalism we sometimes are. As this popular support is also a tool legitimizing far right presence and deeds.
Once again, I am not advocating here for the Soviet Union or Lenin or whomever else, I want to warn against unquestioning support of Leninfall in order not to surrender public space and the realm of popular imagery to people and groups adhering to xenophobic and discriminatory agenda. In other words, it is not about whose monument is installed or torn down, it's about who shapes the agenda and decides what to erect or to demolish.
Dafna Rachok, Gender Studies, Ukraine
3. Who Is to Blame and Which Side to Take?
(Response to “The Other Side of Leninfall”)
Who is to blame – that’s the question that usually arises on the pages of history. Managing to find and punish an individual or a group that is guilty solves a lot of problems. This actually disguises much more complex problems that are behind social and political processes. Those issues concern societal grievances, popular mobilizations, violence which are, in fact, hard to explain through causal relationships and actions of particular communities exclusively. Students of social movements like Bert Klandemans state that in order for societal mobilization to takeplace, a set of action-oriented common beliefs should be present. Those beliefs during Euromaidan were obviously resignation and incarceration of the regime leaders, European integration which in Ukrainian society was reflected partly in negative terms – move away from soviet mentality and soviet symbolism in Ukraine. This also implies that monuments to Soviet leadership have no place there.
In her comment “The Other Side of Leninfall” to Natalya’s article Dafna Rachok rises the question of the role of far right in Leninofall, demolishing of monuments to Lenin in Ukraine during Euromaidan revolution. I attempt to point that that mass campaign says something more important about the Ukrainian society beyond far right discourse and though dismantling was probably done by the hands of right forces it was supported by wider public present in Euromaidan. Judging it in moral terms seems to me unacceptable from an academic point of view.
A lot of questions can be asked beyond “Who did it?” For example, why did monuments to Lenin and other communist guys stay in Ukraine till this time? If they still keep on standing in some cities by now does it mean that this country has not yet said good-bye to its communist past? Why weren’t they demolished quietly in a peaceful manner by the authorities even after the decree to dismantle them issued by the President in 2009? Why, at last, Ukrainian people did not demand them being demolished by the municipalities or central government?
People in Ukraine irrespectively to their political views had enough reasons to be offended by the presence of Lenin in the center of their cities. Those people who were not personally involved in demolishing but who actually approved of this campaign – should they be called the far right or just conscious less masses? Should supporters of Euromaidan who after 2004 once again called for the breaking up with communist symbols be called the far right? Obviously not. Moreover, people represented these campaigns in humorous manner in social media rather than in the manner of calls for violence and distortion.
Ukrainian philosopher and the head of Institute of Philosophy of the academy of Sciences Myroslav Popovych claims that dismantling should have taken place much earlier and in much more peaceful manner by the local authorities. In fact, only in Mykolaiv city those measures were initiated by local authorities.
So, why were they not demolished earlier? This is obviously not a secret that previous Ukrainian governments and top political elites were relying on many Soviet and pan-Slavic symbols in order to justify their rule. This usage of Soviet symbols that pointed on common Russian and Ukrainian past in fact aimed at disguising the ties of Ukrainian and Russian business-political clans and corruption schemes of Putin-Yanukovych.
Russian propaganda covered in Soviet symbolism and “common past” and supported by previous Ukrainian government produced painful consequences for Ukraine. If your city is used to having a monument to Lenin in the central square you might kind of stop questioning its presence some time. You might also not question whether it is okay that Russian troops invade the territory of your country because of the “common things” that are in fact not common any more. Inability of Ukrainian state to set a discourse in Crimea as the alternative to the dominant Russian one actively propagated by Russian media is just one of the factors why Crimean population did not rebel when it was cynically and hypocritically invaded by the Russian troops. Nobody touched Lenin in Sevastopol and as we can observe the whole peninsula is driving into cheerful communist past right now.
Process of formation of new Ukrainian identity after Maidan-2 is hardly connected with far right ideas. Far right were not dominant in Maidan. This is evinced by the fact that most of far right representatives were not allowed to speak publicly in Maidan because of their extremist rhetoric. Therefore, blaming 2-5% of people present in Maidan for mass rejection of communist symbolism, in their grievances and dissatisfactions revealed in brutal demolition of the monuments is very similar to blaming of 2-5% of LGBT in the destruction of the values of traditional family. Regarding LGBTQ people, they should have nothing to do with Soviet propaganda because Soviet ideology actually prohibited LGBTQ way of life and ideas. Therefore, connecting new left ideas with symbolism of Soviet times seems counterintuitive and mistaken. If the new left ideas fight against ideologies, soviet time is the time of total propaganda framing, hypocrisy introduced when the things were named in the other ways from what they really were by people like Lenin in the first place.
There are two kinds of danger in overemphasis of the role of right radicals in Ukrainian politics. First: raising the rankings of Svoboda supporters which is a far right party and a catalyst of split in Ukrainian society. Members of Svoboda publicly boast of monuments dismantling because they believe that will raise their electoral support – probably this is the only one thing they could be proud of done during Euromaidan. They also believe in their role of rewriters of history. This in fact is not true because despite that Svoboda members claim that they were the only ones involved in this campaign, many of the monuments were dissolved by activists without party affiliation and membership in far right organizations. This threat of raising support of far right, however, is not so dreadful. Presence of right forces in Ukrainian politics is quite marginalized at the moment. In his interview on the conference of far right Andreas Umland, a specialist in Eastern European nationalism stated that “Ukrainian far rights are not a danger right now”. It is information campaign by Russian media that exaggerated this threat in order to split Ukrainian society. Therefore, the threat of deepening the discourse of cleavage in Ukrainian society by overemphasizing the role of far right is a much bigger danger. In addition, claiming that revolution was inspired by the far right Ukrainian intellectuals just help Russian media do their job.
Demolishing of the monuments was not an attempt to rewrite history either. Historical narratives in the school manuals and university discourse simply have already changed since the collapse of Soviet Union. Unfortunately, it has not been changed in the minds of many people all over the country and presence of monuments to communist leaders definitely slows down this process. Therefore, not surprising is the positive correlation between presence of Lenin and expansion of separatist movement in the South-Eastern Ukraine. At the same time, no contemporary history of Ukraine contains the narratives about Lenin or Stalin calling them heroes worth having monuments in the central square of Ukrainian cities. Nor granting heroes to the “Right Sector” is what should follow the demolishing of the monuments and it definitely does not. Therefore, we face cognitive dissonance when state that Lenin was a bloody dictator but still have monuments to him in our cities. At the same time, Soviet occupation is also a part of our history, either we want it to be ours or not and should not just be put in the dust bin. I think like all historical artifacts it should be collected and put into the museum. “Museum of Soviet history and heritage” I suppose.
Having said this, I definitely condemn exculpation of violence, vandal deconstruction of the public space. It is not okay if far right takes the rule of the city, occupies the hotels, demolishes and burns buildings.
Khrystyna Rybachok
Photo 1: www.peoplescube.com
Photo 2: Lenin hiding in the backyard - “Hey, comrade, have the Ukrainians left?” Source: Best Caricatures.
Photo 3: Map of Lenin's statues toppled or removed, dated 23.02.2014, Source: Ukrainska Pravda.
Photo 4: The broken monument in Vinnitsia. Source : www.vinnitsaok.com.ua.
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