The widespread decommunization of Soviet-era symbols across Eastern Europe hasn’t spared famous political figures. Statues of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, aka Vladimir Lenin, once standing in every city, town and village across the USSR, are now an extremely rare sight outside of museums.
The process of removing all references to communism from public spaces was already in full swing in Ukraine since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but a set of laws signed by President Petro Poroshenko in 2015 put a final nail in their coffin.
Very few statues of Vladimir Lenin remained in Ukraine. The removal process was already happening shortly after the dissolution of the USSR, and it was a very common procedure in most ex-soviet countries. Ukraine kept a few of those monuments for some reason. Two were in Chornobyl, the remains of one of them you can see here. The statue was located by the famous “alley of dead settlements”, and was removed after the invading Russian army decided that Kyiv is a bit too much for them and retreated to Belarus via the Chornobyl zone.
The second Lenin statue was near the river port, but I haven’t had a chance to see whether it’s still standing.
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That is good news. Contrary to the countries in Western Europe, the countries in the Eastern part of Europe were in fact occupied (and superficcially rules by puppet regimes) for 45 more years by the communist dictatorship of russia. There is no need to display any remnant of hteir atrocious regimes on any other spot than a museum erected to remember the crimes by the russian empire in its various disguises.
It is sad that a country which has given us some of the best literature and music, is otherwise only known for destruction, death, coruption, greed and disturbance of the civilised world.