The downtown Kyiv monument to Vladimir Lenin, the greatest communist of them all, looks new and shiny, but a bit weird all the same.
The left hand of the Bolshevik Revolution leader is slightly bigger than it should be. His head is much darker than the rest of the body.
“That’s what we’ve got after the reconstruction,” said comrade Aleksey, a Communist Party member who is among the diehards who guard the monument around the clock. “This is a real architectural jewel. Do you know that it was created by Fedor Merkulov, a follower of the famous French sculptor [Aguste] Rodin?”
The statue of Nadezhda Krupskaya (top), Lenin’s wife, stands outside Darnytsia railway station in Kyiv. It was damaged by vandals on June 16. (Olena Bilozerska, Oleksiy Boyko)
“We have 12-hour day-and-night shifts [to guard the downtown Kyiv monument to Vladimir Lenin], two men take a shift.”
– Aleksey, a Communist Party member who is among the diehards who guard the monument.
Aleksey, who categorically refused to disclose his last name, takes it as a personal mission in his life to protect the monument from possible destruction from vandals, like the ones who attacked the statue a year ago in June.
He is one of eight men assigned by the Communist Party of Ukraine to guard Lenin. “We have 12-hour day-and-night shifts, two men take a shift,” Aleksey said. “At first, the party wanted to hire a private security agency in order to protect the monument from possible acts of vandalism, but the agency charged $50 per hour,” the guard complained. “So the party sought for help among its own members.”
He said they are not paid a lot for guarding Lenin, whose mummified corpse remains on display on the Kremlin’s Red Square 86 years after his death.
The per diem is enough to buy them lunch, but money is not important for these true believers. They withstand snow, rain and heat for ideological reasons.
Aleksey, who refused to give his surname, is among the diehard communists guarding Lenin to prevent more attacks.
“I did realize I wouldn’t be physically able to destroy the whole monument, and it wasn’t my goal. I just wanted to draw attention to this problem.”
– Mykola Kokhanivsky, who used a sledgehammer to smash Lenin’s granite face on June 30, 2009
“Now everybody defames Lenin for his totalitarian rule and for destroying the Ukrainian nation. But there is nothing wrong with totalitarian rule, I think,” Aleksey said. “Besides, if not for Lenin, Ukraine wouldn’t exist within its current borders. It would be split among Poland, Romania, Hungary and other countries.”
Mykola Kokhanivsky, who used a sledgehammer to smash Lenin’s granite face on June 30, 2009, has a different take on the communist legacy. He got tired of Ukraine disobeying former President Viktor Yushchenko’s order to dismantle remnants of the totalitarian regime.
“I did realize I wouldn’t be physically able to destroy the whole monument, and it wasn’t my goal,” Kohanivsky said. “I just wanted to draw attention to this problem.”
Kokhanivsky’s call for historical justice was examined in Kyiv’s Shevchenkovsky district court on June 17. After almost a year of pre-trial investigation, official charges of hooliganism were brought against Kokhanivsky. Four alleged accomplices – Oleksandr Zadorozhny, Andriy Tarasenko, Ivan Sribny and Bohdan Frant — have a court hearing scheduled for July 14, along with Kokhanivsky.
“We insist the hooliganism charges be removed, as Kokhanivsky was driven by ideological motivation,” his lawyer, Sydir Kizin, said. “If we succeed in doing so, Kokhanivsky will be charged with ‘arbitrariness,’ which stipulates administrative punishment. As for Sribny and Frant, we insist all the charges shall be removed completely as they are just witnesses.”
Sribny hopes for acquittal. Otherwise, he will be expelled from Kyiv Polytechnic University six months before his expected graduation.
On June 4, Scribny was summoned to the institute by a faculty member. “I came and they told me they got a letter from the prosecutor general’s office notifying that I was under criminal investigation. A couple of hours later the faculty gathered for an ad hoc meeting and unanimously decided to expel me,” Scribny said. “I was standing in the corridor all this time while they were in session. They just let me in for a few minutes to answer their questions and then they told they would expel me ‘for actions discrediting a good student reputation.’’
The faculty, however, changed their decision a few days later after attorney Kizin, accompanied by two journalists for national channels, requested official explanations from the rector. “The rector pretended he never heard about this case and promised to examine this issue,” Sribny said. “Later on, I was told that I wasn’t kicked out from school, that the commission only recommended to expel me in case if the court finds me guilty.”
Sribny still wonders who sent the note to his school and why it’s happening now, almost a year after the incident. “I can’t tell for sure, but it looks very much like political pressure,” Sribny said. “Our rector is directly subordinate to the education minister, Dmytro Tabachnyk [who is known for his strong anti-Ukrainian stance] and I do not rule out that the minister gave our rector some recommendations on how to deal with my case.”
Kizin did not expect the trial to be easy. “It’s not a secret that the courts in Ukraine are under severe pressure,” he said. “If Ukraine’s courts fail to make an unbiased decision, we’ll have to seek for justice in European Court of Human Rights.”
Kokhanivsky does not expect much from the court either.
“The maximum punishment I can get is five years in prison, and I won’t be surprised if it happens. This country already treats me like an enemy,” Kokhanivsky said. “I should tell you one thing – my family suffered from the first Holodomor [in the 1920s] a great deal, and all our family gatherings would end up with telling stories of those horrible times and bursting into tears. So no matter what verdict I get, I won’t regret what I’ve done to the Lenin monument. Not a single minute.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Olesia Oleshko can be reached at [email protected].
