You're reading: Viatrovych: Decommunization in Ukraine almost completed, about 1,000 towns, villages renamed

Director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance Volodymyr Viatrovych has said that decommunization in Ukraine has actually been completed.

“Decommunization has actually been completed in the context of the removal of symbols of the totalitarian regime. We renamed about a thousand populated localities. This is almost everything,” he said in the February 10 Interview program on Radio Liberty.

At the same time, Viatrovych noted that there were still nine or ten non-obvious Communist names that “nevertheless fall under the effect of the decommunization law.”

According to him, almost all monuments to Vladimir Lenin were dismantled in Ukraine.

“About 2,500 monuments, not only to [Lenin], but also to other Communist leaders, [were dismantled]. However, we cannot say that this is exactly everything, because a significant part of these monuments is simply not on any records. This can be a monument on the territory of a plant that no one remembers, on the territory of a village that no one remembers. So we can react once these monuments are found. The monuments that we knew, the communist ones, in particular to Lenin, no longer exist,” Viatrovych said.

As reported, in April 2015, the Verkhovna Rada adopted the law “on condemning the communist and Nazi totalitarian regimes,” banning their propaganda and symbols.