Tag: USSR

Ukraine Tears Down Last Lenin Statue

On August 24, 1991, Ukraine officially declared its independence from the Soviet Union. In 2015, the Ukrainian parliament passed, and then-president Petro Poroshenko signed a series of decommunization laws that, among other things, called for the removal of all remaining communist monuments in the country and the renaming of places with names related to Communism.

Russian-language Radio Svoboda reports that the last monument to Vladimir Lenin in Ukraine–other than in territories currently occupied by Russian-backed separatists–had been removed.

Wikipedia notes that as of 1991, there were an estimated 5,500 monuments to Lenin in Ukraine, with 3,200 of those removed by November 2015.

Natalya Gorbanevskaya RIP

The BBC notes that Soviet-era dissident and poet Natalya Gorbanevskaya recently died.

Gorbanevskaya was one of eight dissidents arrested for a demonstration in Moscow’s Red Square protesting the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. She was subsequently held in a psychiatric hospital until 1972. In 1975 she was allowed to emigrate to France.

The sad thing is that even with the end of the Cold War, some things change in degree but not kind,

Earlier this year she and others held another protest in Red Square making the 45th anniversary of the invasion.

They were briefly detained by authorities for holding an unauthorised protest.