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Yuriy Lukanov cannot hide his amusement over the recent vandalism of the monument to Vladimir Lenin on Taras Shevchenko Boulevard.

I was amused by the news that, right in the center of Kyiv on June 30, the monument to the leader of the proletarian revolution Vladimir Lenin had a nose chipped and an arm broken off. Are you offended by my opening sentence? Well, you’re right there. I agree with you that vandalizing monuments is disgraceful. I even agree that the hooligans who did that have to be punished. But still, I am amused. I am terribly sorry.

You see, the attitude of a Soviet person to Lenin is illustrated by this joke:

A Ukrainian Cossack is galloping on a horse. Towards him comes the next-door girl by the name of Marusya, whom he quite liked and flirted with. She says: “Mykola, dear…” She had no time to finish because he slashed her apart with his saber. Next, his nephew runs towards him, shouting: “Uncle Mykola!” But he, too, is slashed with a saber. He rides into his yard and out runs his sister, only to meet the same fate. Mykola jumps off the horse and runs into the house. His elderly mother is there. He looks at her and shouts in ecstasy: “Mother, I’ve seen Lenin!”

If you don’t understand the joke, you’re not a Soviet person. In Soviet society, Lenin was the greatest of them all – the holiest of all saints, the most pious of all living. He made you dizzy like a drug. He had to evoke the kind of ecstasy that in this state you could do anything – even axe the woman you love, although this, of course, is a hyperbole typical for jokes.

Once in a small town of Kurakhove in Donetsk Oblast, I found out that they never had a Lenin street there. I could not believe my ears. This simply could not be, because it was impossible. In Donbas, the absence of a street named after the proletarian leader looked like science fiction. Suddenly, I and my guide around town came to a largish square, with – guess what! – a monument of Lenin at the center. “This is Lenin Square,” said my companion.

I laughed. It was one way or another. If it’s not a street, it’s a square. Lenin is still living. Reminders of him are standing in all towns of Ukraine, with the exception of western regions where the communist idol had been knocked off his pedestals immediately after independence.

When we joined the October Children, the communist wing for the smallest schoolchildren, we were given a star with the curly-haired picture in the middle of Volodya Ulianov – that’s the real name of Lenin. The October Children were named after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution that took place in Russia in October.

The Komsomol, a younger wing of the Communist Party, also had Lenin’s name incorporated into its full name. When the Communist Party decided to upgrade party tickets during the rule of Leonid Brezhnev, the symbolic ticket number one was set aside for Lenin, long dead by then. The second ticket was given to the ossified leader of the Soviet state, Brezhnev.

Any scientific research, even if it was to do with breeding carps in a river, had to include quotes from Lenin. There is no need to mention that all our towns and villages were covered with wise expressions from our leader.

And now the leader of several generations stands there and looks upon the central street of the Ukrainian capital with a sad expression. His nose looks like that of a dissolute syphilitic who had never learned to use a condom. Isn’t it funny?

A few months before this, the leader of the proletariat, united two cities, Russia’s St. Petersburg and Ukraine’s Luhansk. In both of these cities, a part of Lenin’s bottom was blown up with explosives. The front remained intact. But, thankfully, monuments cannot breed by themselves, but only through the will of people. Our problem is that despite the diminishing number of monuments, Lenin still remains in many people’s heads.

After one of the parliamentary elections, a people’s deputy of the anti-communist camp was rubbing his hands happily and saying: “We’re going to get rid of the stone and cement idols.” I told him a story – either from a book or from a film – of a man in the early 20th century in a Ukrainian town where power shifted constantly from one rival army to another. One cunning resident collected flags of them all, and put out the appropriate one as was needed. But one day he made a mistake and was shot.

In the context of our conversation, the moral of this story is: Those in power can do whatever they like, but it does not mean that the people’s consciousness will change. They can pretend to support initiatives of those in power while considering them to be half-witted whims. It’s a lot more difficult not to remove monuments, but rather create the kind of conditions for life that would affect citizens and inspire them to remove communist symbols. In response, the deputy called me “red-bellied.” It seems that some people want to fight against the Soviet mentality using the same old Soviet methods.

Just over two years ago in Paris, a Ukrainian lady who has traveled the world boasted in front of me that her native Zaporizhya has the longest avenue in Europe. When I asked her what the name of it was, she said it’s named after Lenin. “So, what are you proud of?” I asked. “You could just as well have named it after Hitler or Stalin.”

She attacked me as if I offended her most sacred feelings. Her arguments were: No matter whether we change the name of the street or knock down monuments, our lives will not get better. It seems that Lenin is still alive and well in our heads. But, thankfully, not in the heads of everyone.


Yuriy Lukanov is a freelance Kyiv journalist who can be reached at lukanov@ukr.net.