Demolition of monuments to Vladimir Lenin in Ukraine

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The demolition of monuments to Vladimir Lenin in Ukraine began during the collapse of the Soviet Union and continued on a smaller scale throughout the 1990s, primarily in some western towns of Ukraine. However, by 2013, most Lenin statues across Ukraine were still intact. During the 2013–2014 Euromaidan protests, the destruction of statues became widespread, a phenomenon that came to be popularly known as Leninopad (or Leninfall) in English. The use of "-пад" being akin to English words suffixed with "fall" as in "waterfall" and "snowfall".

The Monument of the Great October Revolution was dismantled in September 1991, shortly after Ukraine's Declaration of Independence (24 August 1991). The signs say: "In accordance with the decision of the City Executive Committee, preparatory work is underway for the dismantling of the monument," and: "We apologise for any temporary inconvenience caused."

In 1991, Ukraine had 5,500 Lenin monuments. More than 700 Lenin monuments were removed and/or destroyed between February 2014 and December 2015. In November 2015, approximately 1,300 Lenin monuments were still standing.

According to a December 2024 report by Radio Svoboda, the demolition of Lenin monuments in Ukraine had so far happened in three stages:

1. During the 1990s, more than 2,000 Lenin monuments were demolished in western Ukraine, mostly in Volhynia and Galicia west of the river Zbruch;
2. in 2005–2008, more than 600 were demolished mainly in central oblasts, and some western oblasts; and
3. in 2013–2014, during Euromaidan and the Revolution of Dignity, 552 monuments were demolished.

The first wave of demolitions of Lenin monuments happened in Western Ukraine in 1990–1991. On 1 August 1990 in Chervonohrad (renamed Sheptytskyi in 2024), a Lenin monument was demolished for the first time in the USSR. Under popular pressure the monument was dismantled, formally with the purpose of moving elsewhere. That same year, Lenin monuments were dismantled in Ternopil, Kolomyia, Nadvirna, Borislav, Drohobych, Lviv and other cities of Galicia.

Vandalisation of the Vladimir Lenin monument on Khreshchatyk (30 June 2009).

According to Radio Svoboda, about 600 Lenin monuments were dismantled or removed from 2005 to 2008, primarily in the central oblasts of Ukraine, as well as a few western ones. Unlike the wild wave of the early 1990s in Western Ukraine that was accompanied by waving national flags and shouting "Glory to Ukraine!", this was usually a rather formal and administrative process. It was marked by signs such as "taken away for repairs", "fallen apart due to age", "removed due to a state of emergency", and so on. There was no nationwide discussion on the topic of removing totalitarian symbols and toponymy in this period; the subject was usually limited to agitation in right-wing political circles, as well as representatives of the Ukrainian intelligentsia who reasoned it was time to get rid of these Lenin monuments.

When on 30 June 2009, a group of five young nationalist guys including Mykola Kokhanivskyi defaced the Vladimir Lenin monument on Khreshchatyk near the Bessarabska Square in a failed attempt to topple it, this caused widespread outrage; they were arrested and prosecuted, and even condemned by the nationalist organisation they were members of. While president Viktor Yushchenko had also previously asked for the statue to be removed, this proposal did not gain enough support at the time. The vandalised monument was eventually restored, and the decision postponed, marking the end of the second stage of Leninopad.

Video of the Kyiv Lenin monument being toppled on 8 December 2013

Lenin Square in Dnipro on 22 February 2014 with the demolished monuments to Vladimir Lenin.

Toppling of the Statue of Lenin in Kharkiv on 28 September 2014

Starting on 8 December 2013, Euromaidan protesters toppled several statues of Vladimir Lenin in Ukrainian cities. The first Lenin to fall was the Khreshchatyk monument near Bessarabska Square in Kyiv, the same one that was vandalised but restored in 2009. Some estimates said that more than a hundred statues were toppled. In December 2015, The Ukrainian Week calculated that 376 Lenin monuments were removed or destroyed in February 2014 alone, when the Revolution of Dignity occurred. Radio Svoboda stated that between December 2013 and December 2014, "552 monuments to Lenin and several dozen more monuments to other Bolshevik leaders have been dismantled in Ukraine."

This is a partial list:

On 9 April 2015, the Ukrainian parliament passed legislation on decommunization. On 15 May 2015, President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko signed this bill into law that started a six-month period for the removal of communist monuments (excluding World War II monuments) and the mandatory renaming of settlements with names related to Communism. On 16 January 2017, the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance announced that 1,320 Lenin monuments were dismantled during decommunization.

A website "Raining Lenins" tracks the statistics of the fall of Lenin statues in Ukraine.

On 17 March 2016, the largest Lenin monument at the unoccupied territory of Ukraine, 19.8 meters high, was dismantled in Zaporizhzhia. In between the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula by the Russian Federation and 28 September 2014, the largest Lenin monument at the unoccupied territory was standing in Kharkiv (20.2 m high). This statue of Lenin in Kharkiv was toppled and destroyed on 28 September 2014.

In February 2019, The Guardian reported that the two Lenin statues in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone were the only two remaining statues of Lenin in Ukraine, if not taking into account occupied territories of Ukraine. In January 2021 "Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty" located three more remaining Lenin statues in three (Ukrainian controlled) small villages. This increased the number of remaining Lenin statues to five.

During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, many of these statues of Lenin, which had been taken down by Ukrainian activists, were re-erected by Russian occupiers in Russian-controlled areas.

The start of the "Leninopad" in its mass was laid by the demolition of the Lenin monument in Kyiv on the Bessarabian Square. The event took place on 8 December 2013 at around 6:00 pm. Even more people began to massively destroy monuments of the Soviet past after reports about the Euromaidan activists who died during the protests in Kyiv.

In January 2015, the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine announced that it would encourage all public initiatives related to cleaning Ukraine of monuments to figures of the communist past. According to Minister Vyacheslav Kyrylenko, his department will initiate the removal from the State Register of Immovable Monuments of Ukraine of all monuments related to communist figures listed there. "The state will not oppose, but on the contrary, will in every possible way support all public initiatives that will fight for the cleansing of Ukraine from these relics of the totalitarian past," the minister emphasized.

In April 2015, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine voted in favor of the draft law "On the condemnation of the communist and national socialist (Nazi) totalitarian regimes in Ukraine and the prohibition of propaganda of their symbols", which, in particular, will oblige local authorities to dismantle monuments to communist figures on the territory of Ukraine.

The removal of the monuments evoked mixed feelings among the Ukrainian population. In some cases, like in Kharkiv in early 2014, pro-Russian Ukrainian crowds protected the monuments, including members of the communist and socialist parties, as well as veterans of World War II and the Afghan wars. The statue of Lenin in Kharkiv was toppled on 28 September 2014. Late October 2014, then Kharkiv Governor Ihor Baluta admitted that he thought that the majority of Kharkiv residents had not wanted the statue removed, but said "there was hardly any protest afterward either, which is quite telling".

In January 2015, the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine announced that it would encourage any public initiatives related to the cleansing of Ukraine from "relics of the totalitarian past".

"It is not by chance that the demonstrations that we saw after the annexation of Crimea in the east and southeast of Ukraine were organized in the squares around the monuments to Lenin, with red flags with a hammer and sickle. What is happening now in Ukraine, what was instigated by Russian aggression, is a clash between the new Ukraine and the old Soviet Union, to which the current Russia is trying to return with the help of Ukraine, seizing parts of its territories. It is not clear to me why monuments to Lenin are being demolished only now in various cities of Ukraine; why all these 24 years they continued to stand; why didn't the state administration of an independent country demolish them earlier?

• List of statues of Vladimir Lenin

• List of communist monuments in Ukraine

• Decommunization in Ukraine

• Derussification in Ukraine

• Lustration in Ukraine

• Demolition of monuments to Alexander Pushkin in Ukraine

• Removal of Confederate monuments and memorials

• Nikiforov, Yevhen (2017). Decommunized: Ukrainian Soviet Mosaics. Berlin: DOM publishers. ISBN 978-3-86922-583-8.

• Nikiforov, Yevhen (2020). Art for Architecture. Ukraine. Soviet Modernist Mosaics from 1960 to 1990. Kyiv: DOM Publishers. p. 300. ISBN 978-3-86922-601-9.

• Ackermann, Niels; Gobert, Sébastien (2017). Looking for Lenin. London: FUEL Publishing. p. 176. ISBN 978-0993191176.

• Map and lists of damaged monuments

• Raining Lenins Archived 20 August 2016 at the Wayback Machine