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 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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