Oleksandra Gaidai. Harvard Ukrainian Studies. Volume 38, Annual 2021.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, there were approximately 5,500 Lenin monuments on the territory of Ukraine; only Russia had more. This article explores the factors and meanings that enabled the preservation of Lenin statues for more than two decades after the collapse of the Soviet state, and that then contributed to their mass—and often violent—destruction in Ukraine. Ukraine’s case is unique. Like Russia and Belarus, Ukraine was in no rush to remove the Soviet monuments, and most of the Lenin statues survived in Ukraine until 2014. But, unlike its two neighbors, Ukraine preserved political and historical memory-based pluralism and did not fall into autocracy during the post-Soviet period. Ukraine remains underrepresented in research on post-Soviet transformations, despite the fact that the study of this former Soviet republic is key to understanding Eastern Europe. Developments in Ukraine (including in the memory sphere) have influenced processes in other post-Soviet countries. This paper aims to contribute to the current discussion about the relationship between memory and politics, which goes beyond the debate on the Soviet cultural and historical heritage and addresses the challenges of nation building in the post-Soviet space.
Almost three decades after the collapse of the USSR, Western media continues to use the former Soviet state as a point of reference when speaking about its former republics. While the Soviet legacy is a lens through which all the former Soviet republics are explored, this legacy is in no way differentiated. Ukraine has its own particular history of communist rule that cannot be explained in exclusively colonial terms; hence its process of dealing with its Soviet heritage is extraordinarily complex, nuanced, and enduring. Indeed, the way Lenin monuments disappeared from the country reflects the difficulties in narrating both the Soviet experience and the nation-building process in independent Ukraine. During his time in office, President Leonid Kuchma published a book rejecting the similarities between Ukraine and Russia and notably titled it Ukraine Is Not Russia. However, the question of what Ukraine is remains, and in this discussion the Soviet past is under the spotlight. Today’s Ukraine is, in many respects, a successor to Soviet Ukraine, but this legacy can neither be easily denied nor easily integrated into the contemporary historical narrative.
The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic occupied a prominent place in the USSR owing to its economic and political potential. In terms of ideology, the cult of Lenin was no less robust in Ukraine than in Russia. Of all the Soviet republics, the Ukrainian SSR had the highest number of Lenin monuments after the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic: 5,500 monuments as of 1991. At the same time, it was the alliance between Leonid Kravchuk, leader of the Ukrainian SSR, and Boris Yeltsin, leader of the Russian SFSR, against Mikhail Gorbachev, the then president of the USSR, that was a decisive factor in the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
This paper focuses on the political decisions regarding Soviet monuments and also on the question of how Lenin statues were perceived in independent Ukraine due to the activities of official and unofficial actors, who aimed to impose a certain interpretation of the Soviet past. Thus, it can help shed light on a significant part of post-Soviet identity building in Ukraine, where it took more than two decades and two seismic political events (2004 and 2013) for changes to occur in Ukrainian memory politics regarding the Soviet heritage. The dismantling of Lenin statues, a phenomenon dubbed Leninfall (Leninopad)—that is, the mass removal of Lenin monuments at the end of 2013 and in 2014—became the most notable event not only in the process of eradication of Soviet heritage, but also in the construction of memory politics regarding the Soviet past.
Developments in Ukraine present a permanent threat to Russia, which continues to rely heavily on Soviet narratives, the primary one being the heroic narrative of World War II. As Andreas Kappeler noted, “the outcome of the struggle over Ukraine [between the European Union and Russia—OG] will have a decisive impact on the future development of the post-Soviet space and of Eastern Europe.” In this struggle the interpretation of the Soviet period plays a crucial role and creates the need to analyze more closely the complexity of the Ukrainian way of dealing with its Soviet heritage—in particular, with Lenin statues, which embodied a part of that experience.
Whereas communist heritage in Central Europe and the Baltic states has been studied extensively by Western scholars, the case of Ukraine has not garnered the same degree of attention. Communist rule was imposed after World War II in those countries, and for them, its symbols were, in many ways, external, while the belief of belonging to Europe continued to be present in public discourse. This notion was generally absent in Ukraine; in large measure, only the western regions of Ukraine shared a European vision of their past. Ukraine belongs to both Central European and Russian history, and this explains its ambiguous relations with both communism and the Soviet state.
Literature and Sources
During the Soviet period, every book or article began with a quotation from a work by Lenin, because his writings (Leninism) were considered a necessary primary source of inspiration. Moreover, the cult of Lenin penetrated every aspect of citizens’ lives, while his image, in the form of portraits and monuments, dominated the public spaces of Soviet urban centers and even villages. Canonical research on the Lenin cult includes a monograph by the American historian Nina Tumarkin, which has been reissued several times since its publication in 1997. Step by step, she tracks the way his cult was invented and established in the 1920s. By analyzing the hidden power struggle after Lenin’s death, Tumarkin reveals the complexity of the cult and its legitimizing function. More importantly, she shows that it was not something predetermined but, rather, a process that arose organically and was influenced by the actions of various actors and events.
In the Soviet Union, Lenin’s Mausoleum at Red Square, where the Soviet leader’s preserved body is on public display, functioned as a site of memory of the October Revolution, as well as a meeting place for the Soviet people with their leader. Boris Groys and Alexei Yurchak each have studied the symbolic meaning of the mausoleum, including in post-Soviet Russia. Yurchak focuses on the body-preservation methods developed by Russian scientists, which helped the Soviet government transform Lenin’s body into a Soviet icon. He reveals that, even after the collapse of the Soviet state, Lenin’s body remains important, serving, for example, as a symbol of scientific achievement. Jonathan Platt compares Lenin to Snow White, the main character of the fairytale and Disney movie, as both Lenin and Snow White are in a state between life and death. After Lenin became a source of power for the Communist Party, he lost the characteristics of a real person and became a political symbol. To signify this shift, two names were always used in reference to the Soviet leader: Lenin (his political pseudonym) and Il’ich (his patronymic). The first pointed to the revolutionary struggle against capitalism, and the second, to the man who embodied that struggle. Indeed, the mausoleum, as well as numerous monuments, bears only one inscription, “Lenin,” referring to the political regime and the Bolshevik Revolution, not to the real person. The ideological meanings of Lenin monuments were reinforced by numerous official rituals and ceremonies, such as laying flowers, raising the flag, and delivering public speeches in front of the monument.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, Lenin monuments, the most vivid symbol of the former regime, came under intense scrutiny. The substantial body of literature on communism and the Soviet heritage in Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic states presents a diversity of approaches. Among them is a noteworthy study by the economic geographer Mariusz Czepczynski, in which he analyzes the spatial arrangement of a place and the way individuals live in it, seeing the cultural landscape of postsocialist cities as “an entity reflecting relationships.” Indeed, a person physically and symbolically transforms the cultural landscape, ascribing certain meanings to it, but the symbolic sphere also influences the mindset of a person, fostering a certain system of values, beliefs, and interpretations of the past. According to Czepczynski, cultural landscape is a changeable and complex phenomenon in which the perception of a place, past experience, government interventions, and social and economic changes all matter.
Cleansing the landscape of postsocialist cities began in 1989 with the idea of a “return to Europe.” Among other things, it defined the way countries interpreted their years of communist rule and developed new commemorative traditions. Notably, Czepczynski does not discuss the Ukrainian case. Recognizing certain similarities in reinterpretations of communist icons and the revival of religious and nationalistic landscapes, he states that the transformation practices of the former Soviet Union were not the same as in Central Europe. I would argue that this approach reflects mental mapping, which separates the countries of the former Socialist Bloc from their Soviet neighbors, and that Ukraine is a missing link between them. It presents a variety of ways in dealing with the Soviet heritage: from elimination and a recontextualizing of monuments, to preservation and a continuation of the Soviet tradition.
At the same time, there is no cohesive body of research on the Soviet legacy in Ukraine. With the development of memory studies in Ukraine in the 2000s, Ukrainian scholars started to examine different aspects of the Soviet legacy and its impact on Ukraine’s self-identification after 1991. Georgiy Kasianov investigates the discourse on the Holodomor and how history is being (mis)used in contemporary Ukraine and the Russo-Ukrainian war. Yaroslav Hrytsak, David Marples, and Yuliya Yurchuk focus on the legacy of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), and Vladyslav Hrynevych investigates the discourse on World War II in contemporary Ukraine. However, no solid research has been done on Ukraine’s Soviet heritage as a whole, and the first study of Lenin monuments came out only in 2018. Although it focuses mostly on central Ukraine, it includes data on other regions. Leninfall and the subsequent decommunization process contributed to the rise of interest in the topic of the Soviet heritage. Andriy Liubarets studies the issue of vandalism against Soviet monuments and the eradication of the Soviet cultural legacy in the aftermath of the Euromaidan, while a number of scholars have discussed in detail the implications of the memory laws of 2015. Tatiana Zhurzhenko launched an important discussion on the change in the narrative of the 1917 Revolution and the dissolution of the Soviet Union stemming from the changes introduced by the Ukrainian government during the post-Maidan period. She points out that the war with Russia began to define both narratives, while Ukraine’s struggle for independence, with its focus on the mass protests of the 1990s-2000s, was placed at the center of it. The Soviet experience began to be described, more than ever before, in terms of “occupation,” and this approach provided political arguments for the decommunization policy.
The issue of Lenin statues came under the spotlight of public discussions on the Soviet heritage because of their numbers and visibility in the public space. Importantly, in this discussion the voices of artists and civic activists became more audible. Relying on more moderate and inclusive approaches to the heritage question, they pushed for a rethinking of the impact of Leninfall and the preservation of objects of artistic value. Photographer Niels Ackermann and journalist Sebastien Gobert traveled across Ukraine searching for toppled Lenin statues. Speaking with local residents, they noticed that the difference in the perception of these monuments changed not only as a result of geography, but also largely according to generational and socioeconomic criteria. Photographer Yevgen Nikiforov visited Ukrainian cities and villages to find Soviet mosaics, the best of which were featured in his book. At the same time, these works remain albums—collections of images with no substantial research underpinning them.
Apart from analyzing the politics of memory in Ukraine starting in 1991, this article includes the data of three nationwide surveys (2013, 2015, and 2017). Designed as part of the project “Region, Nation and Beyond: An Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Reconceptualization of Ukraine,” the surveys included questions about the most important figures in Ukraine’s history and attitudes toward the removal of Lenin statues, which are of primary importance for my study.
In contrast to other studies, which rely on data collected separately by sociological agencies, this paper is based on surveys designed in close cooperation with historians, including this author. Their advantages include: large sample sizes (six thousand respondents from all Ukrainian regions), comparative data (the first survey was conducted before the antigovernment protests of 2014, the second, immediately after the protests, and the third, after the adoption of the memory laws), and a wide range of questions devoted to issues of historical memory (allowing one to track certain attitudes or evaluations in progress). The surveys were conducted in the form of face-to-face interviews on paper in households, using a standard questionnaire in Ukrainian or Russian that included questions about identity, historical memory, reading preferences, language, religious practices, civic activism, democratic values, and anticorruption attitudes. The project has managed to transcend national paradigms and the “East-West” regional divide, revealing a complexity of legacies, affiliations, and public attitudes, all of which cannot be described within any macroregional framework, with the exception of Galicia. Those findings are reflected in the title of the collective volume that was published as a result of the project.
The Politics of Memory, 1991-2016
Dealing with the Soviet/communist legacy has been a challenge for all the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Although they shared similar patterns in approaching a conflicted past, each of them ultimately followed its own path. Ukraine is a more complex case, owing to its higher level of integration into the Soviet Union and cultural proximity to Russia, coupled with an unfixed national identity. The other problem is a lack of understanding of what makes something “Soviet” or “Ukrainian.” In other words, how does one differentiate Ukraine from its Soviet predecessor? Every practice or idea that existed in the Soviet Union is frequently labeled as Soviet, but this approach is too general and misleading.
After Ukraine became independent, Ukrainian politicians and bureaucrats, most of whom started their careers in Soviet institutions, joined forces to nationalize a historical narrative. Ukrainian symbols were adopted, and topics that had been suppressed during the Soviet period were introduced into history textbooks. Moreover, the dissolution of the USSR was framed in the context of Ukraine’s everlasting struggle for independence. Headed by the former Soviet apparatchik Leonid Kravchuk (president of Ukraine, 1991-1994), the Ukrainian political elite started to build its legacy upon the brief period of Ukraine’s independence during the 1917-1921 period, promoting the image of Ukraine as a revived nation. The promotion of a marginal historical narrative as the official one complicated understanding of what happened in 1991; namely, how Ukraine became independent and how the Soviet Union collapsed.
In August 1991 different groups in Ukraine opposed the coup d’etat attempt in Moscow, seeing it as a dangerous prelude to the restoration of totalitarian rule, but this union against a common enemy did not mean the existence of a shared vision of the Ukrainian state. This is partly reflected in a concept formulated by Mykola Riabchuk, first in 1992, and reconsidered and differentiated since. The concept defines two types of identity projects in Ukraine that are manifested in different narratives, cultural codes, symbols, and values, yet support the Ukrainian state in equal measure. The first one is oriented toward Europe and embodied politically in the EU, while the second one sees Ukraine as a successor of the Soviet state and part of the East Slavic community. The Ukrainian identity palette can be even more complicated and changeable due to many variables, but, indeed, the Ukrainian political project emerged out of different motives and expectations on the part of Ukrainian citizens, while decades of Soviet rule, including its nationality policy, fostered the perception of Ukraine as a separate political entity.
It must be kept in mind that Ukraine in the 1990s endured economic hardship and a sharp decline in living standards; therefore, ideological issues were shunted to the margins of public discussions. In the 1994 presidential election Ukrainians voted for the former director of a Soviet enterprise, Leonid Kuchma, whose primary focus was on economic and social issues without a clear ideological stance. Kuchma was more concerned with the formation of a system of balance between the state and oligarchs and the redistribution of state property than with a national identity policy. After coming to power, he pursued a policy of ambivalence in the memory sphere, supporting the canonization of a standard and nonconflictual national narrative, while incorporating Soviet elements and not allowing the radicalization of historical discussions. This tactic thereby contributed to the further differentiation of regions, whose residents revered different heroes and events. However, owing to the absence of visible conflicts, the policy was perceived as successful. In 1999 Kuchma was reelected for a second term. In the 1990s the issue of Soviet heritage was neither raised nor discussed, and it seemed that everyone had chosen to forget about Soviet-era monuments. In the early 1990s Lenin statues were removed almost exclusively only in western Ukraine, where the anti-Soviet and anticommunist movement was especially strong, and people were more determined to destroy symbols of Soviet power. In the rest of Ukraine’s regions, however, the majority of monuments remained standing on main city squares before the Euromaidan happened in 2013-2014.
Kuchma’s successor, Viktor Yushchenko, who came to power as a result of mass protests during the so-called Orange Revolution of 2004, adopted a clear anti-Soviet and pronationalist stance. Yushchenko worked hard to institutionalize Ukrainian national memory, focusing on the Holodomor, the man-made famine of 1932-1933 as a genocide of the Ukrainian people, and on the Ukrainian liberation movement of the first half of the twentieth century. His vigorous historical policies, especially as compared to those pursued by his predecessors, led to ambiguous results. According to Hrytsak, they “ended in a catastrophe both for him and for Ukraine: the number of people ready for reconciliation around their history fell from a majority (65.3 percent) in 2003 to less than half (46.2 percent) in 2009.” Indeed, Yushchenko promoted the most divisive and contradictory historical topics of the Ukrainian past. Moreover, he radicalized certain components of its narrative of memory, which hitherto had not played a clearly articulated ideological role in public discourse. History became an element of a fierce political and electoral struggle, and Ukraine was presented as a divided nation (the nationalistic, pro-European “West” versus the pro-Russian “East”). The political confrontation over history even turned into a so-called war of symbols or war of monuments focused on contested political monuments dedicated, first and foremost, to Stepan Bandera, leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, and Lenin. Monuments to the latter were frequently vandalized because they were the most ubiquitous and visible part of Soviet cultural heritage in Ukraine.
Although Yushchenko promoted a national Ukrainian narrative, he was not free to deal with the Soviet heritage. As president of Ukraine, he had to consider certain regional interpretations of the past, including variations in the evaluation of the Soviet period. The policy of removing monuments honoring Soviet statesmen was only half-successful, as was the creation of the Museum of Soviet Occupation in 2007. Established following the example of similar museums in the Baltic states and Georgia, this Ukrainian institution has remained a small and poorly funded local museum, the main obstacles to its development being a lack of consistent political will and substantial funding. To complicate matters further, Soviet heritage remained a matter of foreign relations. With the Russian Federation as the self-proclaimed, sole successor of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian leadership wanted to preserve close political, economic, and cultural ties with Russia, including in the memory sphere. For some time, this was perceived as an advantage because the common Soviet past created a basis for special relations between the two nations. An active promoter of this policy was President Viktor Yanukovych (2010-2014), who aimed to minimize the differences between Ukrainians and Russians, referring to their common history and culture. As Timothy Snyder notes, Yanukovych took a more forgiving approach to Stalinism than his predecessor, Yushchenko, and he began his presidency by denying that the Famine of 1932-1933 was genocide.
Yanukovych supported the preservation of Lenin statues, and his preservationist stance contributed to the mass destruction of statues during antigovernment protests that began in Kyiv in November 2013. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets to protest Yanukovych’s decision not to sign the Association Agreement with the European Union. Instead, he announced his intention to join the Customs Union with Russia, which many saw as an attempt to restore the Soviet Union. By toppling Lenin monuments, protesters declared that the president had lost his power over the country. On 8 December 2013 protesters tore down the most prominent statue still standing in downtown Kyiv. The initiative came from activists of the nationalist political party Svoboda, and they publicly claimed responsibility for this act. This event was rich with symbolism, and Washington Post foreign reporter Adam Taylor even called it a key point in Ukraine’s political crisis. It was the first time since the beginning of the 1990s that a statue of Lenin was pulled down in front of a large crowd of people and the first dismantling that took such a destructive form.
The largest number of monuments was toppled from 21 to 23 February 2014, just a few days after nearly a hundred people died in Kyiv in clashes with special police forces. According to the weekly magazine Ukrainian Week, an estimated 376 Lenin monuments were removed by the end of February. By destroying Lenin monuments, protesters undermined government authority and declared their support for the Euromaidan in the capital of Ukraine. Importantly, a law legalizing the toppling of Soviet monuments was adopted only in 2015, so the protesters’ actions at the time were illegal. Leninfall was closely tied to the Euromaidan protest movement, including in terms of geography. It began in central Ukraine, which played a decisive role in the confrontation with the government. However, Leninfall developed as a part of the Euromaidan protests; thus, these two events cannot be conflated, as the protests were also about Ukraine’s political orientation, and not only about deciding the fate of Soviet heritage.
At the same time, it is difficult to distinguish to what extent Leninfall was a top-down or bottom-up process; it was likely both. Nationalist political forces, such as the Svoboda party, defined the struggle against the Soviet legacy as a principal element of its political program long before the Euromaidan, and they contributed greatly to the way Lenin statues were perceived, promoting a vision in which Soviet-era monuments had no place in the public space of Ukraine. In a time of political uncertainty, nationalist political forces were ready to take the initiative in erasing Soviet monumental heritage in Ukraine during February and March 2014. Indeed, many cases of the removal of Lenin monuments in 2014 were orchestrated by nationalist groups, but individuals who did not belong to any political party also took an active stance in the antigovernment protest movement, including toward Lenin statues. Local authorities either tried to catch up with Leninfall or stayed outside of the process.
The meanings attached to the Lenin statues (as a result of the previous contested policy of the Party of Regions) contributed to their brutal and radical removal in 2014. To many Ukrainians, the Lenin monuments symbolized the so-called unbreakable ties between Russia and the political regime of Yanukovych and his Party of Regions, which championed the preservation of Soviet-era monuments. With the annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of war in eastern Ukraine, monuments to Lenin became even more strongly interpreted via Russia’s continued attempts to exercise imperial dominance over Ukraine. History remains a tool in the contemporary political and military struggles for both Ukraine and Russia. The latter uses certain interpretations of the radical Ukrainian nationalist movement to demonize the current Ukrainian authorities, while the former has adopted the narrative of the Soviet occupation of Ukraine in 1917, in which the term “Soviet” is reduced to “Russian.” The Russian government officially supports the preservation of Lenin monuments and condemns their mass destruction in Ukraine. One of the most prominent Ukrainian prisoners held by Russia was the filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, who was accused of terrorism because of his alleged intention to blow up a Lenin statue in Simferopol. On the basis of this and other allegations, he was sentenced to twenty years in prison in Russia, but was released in a Ukraine-Russia prisoner swap in September 2019. As Agata Pyzik notes, “in conflating the past and present, we run the risk of re-enacting old battles, not properly assessing what our problems are today.”
As a symbol of Ukraine’s affiliation with the post-Soviet space, hence its separation from the rest of Europe, the removal of Lenin statues was perceived by the Ukrainian government as an important step in the process of the country’s integration into the European Union. As Vitalii Ohiienko notes, EU integration served as a major push for the countries of Central and Eastern Europe to deal with their conflicted past. These countries believed that the complete eradication of the communist heritage and acceptance of Western values (as they imagined them) and symbols would signal their return to Europe. Pursuing this line of thought, in 2014 Ukraine’s political elite opted for a policy of distancing from the Soviet experience and introducing Western commemorative practices in an attempt to join the European culture of memory.
In addition, it was believed that nationalization of memory (public) space is an important part of post-Euromaidan politics. The Ukrainian government turned to a more nationalized vision of the past with an emphasis on Ukraine’s fighters, and opted for the decommunization process. Started as an act of protest against the Yanukovych regime, the removal of Lenin monuments became a matter of government policy in 2015 and an aspect of Ukraine’s decommunization efforts.
In April 2015 four memory laws were adopted by the Ukrainian parliament. The Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, headed by the historian Volodymyr V’iatrovych, strongly advocated for decommunization and lobbied for the adoption of memory laws by the Verkhovna Rada. Newly elected Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko supported the institute and its policy. Taking office in a time of crisis, Poroshenko focused on the exclusive national model of historical memory which he believed to be a tool for mobilizing society in the face of external aggression. Thus, even though the decommunization laws sparked heated debates among academics as to whether the state should interfere in historical research, it was the Euromaidan and especially the war in the Donbas that made possible the adoption of memory laws. Groups that had once opposed such actions (the Communist Party and the Party of Regions) were banned or had collapsed. Furthermore, when Soviet symbols were used for pro-Russian mobilization during the annexation of Crimea and Russian military aggression in eastern Ukraine, decommunization was legitimized in the eyes of the public. Indeed, with the need to resist Russian influence permanently, including in the memory sphere, it was difficult to organize public dialogue on the Soviet heritage.
One of the main provisions of the memory laws is recognition of the Soviet Union as a criminal political regime. Seeking to justify the process of decommunization, post-Euromaidan politicians have used arguments related to the ideological hostility of communism to the Ukrainian national state or called for the restoration of historical truth and justice. Communism is thus presented as something external to the Ukrainian nation that should be defeated. Citing the statements issued by the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, Tadeusz A. Olszanski points out that from mid-2015 to the end of 2016, 1,320 monuments and busts of Lenin were removed from the territory of Ukraine. At the same time, the failure to develop an inclusive approach in the memory sphere, combined with political and corruption scandals, contributed to the political crisis that beset the Poroshenko presidency in 2019 and to his electoral loss in the presidential election, in which Volodymyr Zelensky won 73.22 percent of the vote.
The American scholar Oxana Shevel notes the absence of any sizable protests or mobilization against the memory laws, as well as the lack of widespread support for decommunization. This suggests indifference of the population, although silence might also mean that people could not make up their minds at the time, and it is important to note that acceptance and approval of a policy are two different things. In numerous cases, the authorities failed to justify their decisions fully or did not allow enough time for unbiased discussions. Decommunization was a more complex issue than the government was willing to acknowledge, and the continuation of the war in eastern Ukraine heavily influenced the framework of public discussions. Ukrainians spoke out openly against policies that had financial costs and those that simply caused inconvenience, like renaming streets or cities, but they did not protest against the removal of Soviet-era statues. It may simply be the case that Ukrainians supported decommunization as an idea but disagreed with the way it was implemented. In the next section, based on sociological data, I present a detailed account of public attitudes toward Lenin statues before and after Leninfall, in my view a more nuanced approach to the implications of the government policy.
In the 1990s the Soviet legacy in Ukraine had not been rethought or reevaluated. Instead, national/nationalistic and Soviet narratives were combined to satisfy the interests of different groups and to provide local elites with a space for political maneuvering. Educated in the Soviet Union, Ukrainian political elites perceived the past in utilitarian and pragmatic terms. Furthermore, they preserved Soviet practices of implementing memory policies.
Analyzing the effect of communism on the political preferences of the population of East Germany, Alberto Alesina and Nicola Fuchs-Schundeln concluded that it takes up to two generations to overcome the communist legacy and to develop different preferences and attitudes toward fundamental questions about the role of government in society. Accordingly, it might be that the Euromaidan movement, as a rejection of Soviet political and social legacy, became possible not because disparities within Ukrainian society were eliminated, but because of the rise of a generation of young Ukrainians who espouse a different set of values. This group named Soviet practices as well as the oligarchic political regime and corruption to be among the main obstacles to the democratic and prosperous development of Ukraine as a European country.
The case of Ukraine falls partly into a pattern of the destruction of political monuments that follows the defeat of the regime that installed them. However, the difference is that the mass destruction of Lenin statues began long after the collapse of that regime. The fact that these monuments survived in independent Ukraine reveals the complexity of the Soviet Ukrainian experience and its relationship with its Soviet past. Soviet heritage did not vanish as it did in the Baltic states; rather, it was incorporated into the cultural landscape of post-Soviet Ukraine, along with a new national narrative. Hence, Lenin monuments did not become meaningless landmarks after Ukraine regained its independence. Instead, they acquired a new meaning that allowed, at first, for their preservation, and then this meaning contributed to their mass destruction.
Attitudes toward Lenin monuments in contemporary Ukraine transcend historical attitudes toward the Soviet regime, becoming an element of contemporary politics and even geopolitics. Therefore, the toppling of Lenin statues in 2013-2014 known as Leninfall should be analyzed in the wider context of political and social transformations in Ukraine, and not just as a struggle against the unwanted Soviet past or communism.
Attitudes to Lenin Monuments and Leninfall
Politicians, journalists, and public intellectuals play active roles in the construction of public discourse on Soviet heritage in Ukraine. As memory entrepreneurs, they define the problem and explain it in a certain way to the public; in other words, they create the social and political context in which the issue is perceived by citizens. Usually, the discussion of historical monuments is arranged around such questions as the artistic and economic value of the monument, its historicity, and the legal grounds for its removal. It should be emphasized that public attitudes are not fixed. Memory entrepreneurs can influence them, although the effectiveness of such interference depends on what a person already knows or feels about a certain issue, whether s/he is ready to discuss it, and whether the person recognizes the authority of memory actors to define the discourse. In the course of the Euromaidan, patriotically oriented protesters managed to rekindle the debate on Soviet symbols in Ukraine, primarily Lenin statues. However, as we can see from the sociological data collected in 2013, 2015, and 2017 and offered below, people’s opinions of Leninfall changed between 2015 and 2017. The process of decommunization had a noticeable impact on respondents’ attitudes, which was different from the intentions of policymakers.
The data reveal that the pantheon of Ukrainian heroes had much to do with Soviet traditions. The highest rankings are given to the poet and painter Taras Shevchenko and to the leader of the Cossack uprising of 1648, Hetman Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi, both of whom were honored by the Soviet authorities. The Soviet regime sought to eliminate all events and heroes from Ukrainian collective memory that did not fit into its revolutionary narrative or those which could signify differences between Ukrainians and Russians. Within the policy of Sovietization, the three Eastern Slavic republics (Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia) became the core of a new historical community—the Soviet people. In this context, Khmel’nyts’kyi was celebrated for his actions to unite Ukrainians and Russians by concluding the Pereiaslav Treaty of 1654 with Muscovy. In turn, Shevchenko, Ukraine’s national poet, was celebrated during the Soviet period for his revolutionary, antitsarist ideas. These two luminaries were supported in 2013 and 2015 only by approximately half of all respondents, whereas in the 2017 survey support for Khmel’nyts’kyi and Shevchenko increased notably, to 52.8 percent and 71.1 percent, respectively.
Soviet-era figures were less important compared to other historical figures in Ukrainian collective memory. In the 2013 and 2015 surveys, respondents were asked to choose the three most important historical figures in the history of Ukraine. Lenin came in at sixth place in both surveys: 19.4 and 16.4 percent of respondents in 2013 and 2015, respectively, named him among the most important figures, ranking him higher than such Soviet figures as Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev, but lower than Stalin. While most respondents viewed Stalin negatively, they did not perceive Lenin this way. In 2013, 31.1 percent of those who agreed that Lenin was an important figure in Ukraine’s history evaluated him somewhat positively and 19.3 percent very positively. In 2015 the negative ratings increased, with 35.4 percent of respondents evaluating Lenin very negatively and 13.8 percent somewhat negatively. The percentage of “undecided” respondents remained almost the same as in 2013 at 15.2 percent. Thus, one year after Leninfall, attitudes toward Lenin became more negative, while his relevance as a historical figure declined only slightly. The only Soviet figure that gained some public support in 2015 compared to 2013 was Khrushchev, whose rating rose from 51 percent to 63.3 percent (“somewhat positive” and “very positive”). Situational positive change could have been the result of Russian claims to Crimea and Russia’s repudiation of Khrushchev’s decision to transfer the peninsula to Soviet Ukraine in 1954. At the same time, Khrushchev was considered to be the least important of all the Soviet figures in this list.
In 2017 substantial changes appeared in the evaluation of Soviet figures, reflecting the impact of decommunization. It was not Leninfall itself—the dismantling of statues was done relatively easily—but rather the government’s attempt to promote a “correct” version of the past, which sparked mixed reactions among Ukrainians and increased uncertainty. All four figures under discussion (Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and Gorbachev) substantially lost their relevance to the population within the context of Ukrainian history, and only 4.3 percent viewed Stalin as an important figure. The denial of the importance of Soviet political figures reflects the attempt on the part of the respondents to downgrade the significance of this period of Ukraine’s history. Every Soviet figure gained more negative evaluations, and the participants of the 2017 survey chose the option “don’t know” more often than before. This is especially noticeable in connection with Khrushchev (whose “don’t know” rating increased from 13.6 percent in 2015 to 39.8 percent in 2017) and Gorbachev (from 9.7 percent in 2015 to 33.8 percent in 2017). Both have mixed legacies in Ukraine, owing to the fact that Ukrainians gained certain political benefits from their decisions as Soviet leaders and their reformist actions.
Additionally, respondents were asked if they would like to preserve a Lenin statue in their city. In 2013, 59.8 percent of respondents did not support the idea of preserving Lenin monuments, 24.8 percent said “yes” to preserving them, and 15.4 percent were undecided. As the survey data show, respondents did not see Lenin as an especially important historical figure, and they mostly supported the idea of removing his statues. However, this attitude did not result in widespread actions to remove them. Only the residents of Ukraine’s western regions were persistent in their intention to eliminate Soviet heritage, while in other regions Lenin statues continued to stand on central squares in Ukrainian cities for more than two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union. One explanation for this might be that the respondents did not see the Lenin statues as something harmful or did not consider them an urgent issue, although they were not emotionally or culturally attached to it. This reflects the official government policy of the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s not to have a comprehensive discussion of Ukraine’s Soviet heritage, except in certain cases where there were time limits.
In 2015 the number of those who were against the preservation of Lenin statues was the highest—68.4 percent—while 18.9 percent of respondents said it would be better to leave the Lenin statues untouched. That year, a direct question about Leninfall was added to the questionnaire. Respondents were asked about their attitude to the mass removal of Lenin monuments in 2014. The results were different from the responses to the question about removing Lenin statues. The number of respondents who supported the removal of Lenin statues was lower—39.2 percent (31.4 percent fully supported, and 7.8 percent mostly supported), 21.1 percent were undecided, 13.7 percent were mostly against, and 26 percent were definitely against it. This discrepancy reflects the fact that respondents did not support the arbitrary destruction of the monuments during Leninfall; that is, the way it was handled. The same can be seen in the results of the 2017 survey, in which the number of respondents who supported the removal of Lenin statues declined, and the number of those against increased. The responses reflected their attitude to the way the decommunization policy was implemented.
For most respondents, Lenin and the monuments erected in his honor lost their significance a long time ago; already in 2013 they saw no sense in keeping them. Those who agreed to preserve Lenin statues might have done so because of their artistic or historic value, not because they revered Lenin. The sociological data say nothing about the motives and arguments of respondents but, judging by media reports, the most common argument for saving a Lenin monument was its historical value, with the destruction of the monument being framed as an attempt to “erase the past” Since there was no shared vision on the government level of what to remove and what to preserve from the Soviet heritage, this policy uncertainty led to a situation where, despite the population’s readiness to remove Lenin statues (in 2013, 59.8 percent of respondents supported their removal), the monuments remained in place. The legal process of removing Lenin statues could have taken decades, if not for the intervention of political forces and activists. Indeed, the protest movement brought the issue of Soviet heritage into the spotlight and contributed to its often brutal removal.
Initially, European integration was the primary driving factor in the protests of 2013-2014, which were triggered when the Yanukovych government refused to sign the Association Agreement with the European Union, a decision that many Ukrainians saw as a return to the Russian sphere of influence. Later, the movement also acquired the meaning of a break with the Soviet past, which was embodied in the destruction of Lenin statues. Is there a correlation between support for the removal of Lenin statues and joining the EU? Indeed, in Ukraine’s western regions higher support for toppling Lenin statues was followed by higher support for EU integration, but respondents from central Ukraine (Sumy, Cherkasy, and Poltava regions) revealed uncertainty about the question of Lenin statues, even though they supported EU integration for Ukraine. In turn, strong support for the preservation of Lenin monuments in the regions of Odesa, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Zaporizhzhia, and Donetsk was accompanied by a negative attitude toward EU integration. Thus, even if the protest movement of 2013-2014 could not be reduced solely to the issue of EU integration and stood more broadly as a “citizens’ purposeful struggle for their rights”—the definition supported by 46.5 percent of respondents—historical references had a role in mobilizing certain segments of Ukrainian society. In the western regions, historical references mobilized people in support of the European course, and in the southern and eastern regions, against it.
Conclusion
Starting in 1991, various political actors tried to come to grips with Ukraine’s Soviet heritage, but their actions were sporadic and halfhearted. The Ukrainian government was unable to develop a united, coherent vision of Soviet heritage in independent Ukraine because of the lack of an established national identity and the population’s ambivalent evaluations of the Soviet past. As a result, most Lenin monuments remained intact until 2014, with the exception of those in western Ukraine, where they were removed back in the 1990s. Lenin statues were generally abandoned, and only leftist political parties maintained certain Soviet commemorative practices. At the same time, frequent clashes in the vicinity of Lenin statues between right-wing and left-wing political forces (including forces backed by the Party of Regions) made this heritage particularly conflicted and visible.
During the Euromaidan, the question of Lenin monuments was raised by nationalist forces, whose members brought up historical issues in political debates with greater frequency than others. As the protests became radicalized and violence toward the protesters escalated, antigovernment activists chose Lenin monuments as their primary target for destruction. Since Lenin statues served as ideological remnants of the Soviet Union, they also became a symbol of post-Soviet Ukraine, represented by Yanukovych’s undemocratic and Russia-oriented regime. The statues were imbued with power and meaning, and by toppling them protesters were revolting against Yanukovych’s regime as well.
Before 2014 Ukrainians, with the notable exception of the residents of the western regions, had mixed feelings about Lenin statues. Some associated them with the Soviet occupation of Ukraine in 1917, others tolerated them as reminders of a period of relative economic security and Soviet military might, and still others simply viewed them as memorable centerpieces of their cities. Leninfall did not eliminate these opinions, but made them less relevant in discussions about Soviet heritage. Sociological data show that even before 2014 most Ukrainians were in favor of removing Lenin statues, and did not perceive them as important.
Leninfall is inseparable from the political events of 2013-2014, which actualized the contested meanings of Lenin monuments and, following the collapse of state institutions, also provided a moment where assumptions, voids, and political (ideological) alignments could be remade, and statues torn down. Later, after the Russian seizure of Crimea and the onset of war in the Donbas region, the removal of Lenin statues continued, and relatively quickly. Legislation banning Lenin monuments was adopted in 2015, and today, the Lenin statues that remain standing are in the Ukrainian territories temporarily occupied as a result of Russia’s military intervention of 2014.
Decommunization policies targeting Soviet heritage and symbols revealed, on the one hand, the complexity and ambiguity of the Soviet Ukrainian experience and, on the other, exposed the continuation of a profoundly Soviet way of governing and dealing with the past. The Soviet state had readily engaged in a “controlled” remembrance of the past, developing successful political techniques that were inherited by Ukrainian policymakers. During his presidency and with the help of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, Poroshenko tried to frame the antigovernment protests of 2013-2014 and the war with Russia as a national liberation struggle that began in the early twentieth century, during the war against the Bolsheviks. This approach both simplifies and overlooks important aspects of the Euromaidan protest movement. What began as a movement for integration into Europe expanded into a struggle against corruption, nepotism, and economic dependency on Russia. As Zhurzhenko notes, “the politics of decommunization reduces the Maidan—a broad mass movement which included anti-oligarchic, egalitarian and left liberal agendas—to merely a conservative revolution in the name of the Volk and the church.” As a result, this approach was one of the factors that contributed to Poroshenko losing the presidential elections in 2019.
In analyzing the way Lenin monuments disappeared in Ukraine, we see peculiarities in Ukraine’s post-Soviet memory politics, which are rooted in different regional Soviet legacies and the uncertainty of the transition of the 1990s. The total removal of the majority of Lenin statues happened two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union and was driven by huge political transformations and Russian imperial claims to Ukraine. Lenin statues were interpreted less by the Soviet past and more by the post-Soviet Ukrainian present—first and foremost, by Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine, making Ukrainians far more supportive of their state and sovereignty than ever before.
With the collapse of communism, many Central and Eastern European countries removed communist symbols from their cities’ landscapes without much public discussion. Rethinking this step only came later, with the acknowledgment that something had been lost. We see a similar trend in Ukraine. As Soviet heritage continues to disappear, Ukrainian scholars and artists are starting to think through and contemplate this heritage within Ukrainian history. At the same time, Russia’s use of the Soviet victory discourse, together with the promotion of a nationalist discourse by some prominent Ukrainian politicians and civic activists, made much-needed discussions on the Soviet Ukrainian experience particularly challenging. Sociological data show that respondents continue to support the removal of Lenin statues but have difficulties in approaching the Soviet period and its political figures from the perspectives of today’s Ukraine. Lenin’s name is widely known, but he remains more of a symbol of the Soviet regime than a historical figure that can be discussed and evaluated.