One of the first major laws that Ukrainian wartime President Petro Poroshenko passed upon election was a wide ranging “decommunization” bill. Signed into law in April of 2015, the new law represented a serious attempt to deal with the trauma of the communist past. The KGB archives would be opened to historians, researchers, and descendants of the repressed. Streets glorifying the memory of communist-era heroes would be renamed. Tens of thousands of communist monuments and statues, including every single statue of Vladimir Lenin, would be removed. A moment of great iconoclasm was upon us. Ideologically inappropriate statues were being torn down, from Izmail to Chernihiv. To the collective joy of political reformers and publishers of deluxe coffee table books the world over, the phenomenon known as “Leninfall” had commenced.
As a serious businessman from northern Europe, Sillesen was totally unprepared for a culture of such florid and empty promising.…
Perched atop pedestals across the country, the statues of the Bolshevik leader met varied fates. The majority were simply knocked over. Others wound up in private museums or collections. Fragments of Lenin’s broken visage and limbs were arranged, often with a touch of languid great poetry, in barns, attics and storerooms. The southern port town of Odessa commissioned a local sculptor to convert a statue of Lenin statue standing in a city park into one of Darth Vader and then to install a Wi-Fi router inside the Sith Lord’s helmet. The international media flocked to this easy story, and hipster photographers from the four corners of the globe made pilgrimages to pay homage to the statue.
