Clockwise from top left:

• A falling Lenin monument in Khmelnytskyi
• Statue of Lenin toppled near Stanytsia Luhanska
• The Lenin monument in Kyiv on 9 December 2013
• The statue of Lenin in Kharkiv on 29 September 2014

The demolition of monuments to Vladimir Lenin in Ukraine started during the fall of the Soviet Union and continued to a small extent throughout the 1990s, mostly in some western Ukrainian towns, though by 2013 most Lenin statues in Ukraine remained standing. During Euromaidan in 2013–2014, the destruction of statues of Lenin become a widespread phenomenon and became popularly known in Ukraine as Leninopad (Ukrainian: Ленінопад, Russian: Ленинопад), a pun literally translated as "Leninfall",^[1] with the coinage of "-пад" being akin to English words suffixed with "fall" as in "waterfall", "snowfall", etc.

History

The demolition of Lenin monuments in Ukraine happened in four stages. During the 1990s, more than 2,000 Lenin monuments were demolished in Galicia and Volyn, at the turn of the 1990–2000s more than 600 Lenin monuments were removed in western and central areas, in 2005–2008, more than 600 were demolished mainly in central areas, and in 2013–2014, 552 monuments were demolished.^[2]

The first wave of demolitions of Lenin monuments happened in Western Ukraine in 1990–1991. On 1 August 1990, in Chervonohrad a Lenin monument was demolished for the first time in the USSR.^[3] Under popular pressure the monument was dismantled, formally with the purpose of moving elsewhere. That same year, Lenin monuments were dismantled in Ternopil, Kolomyia, Nadvirna, Borislav, Drohobych, Lviv and other cities of Galicia.^[4]

In 1991, Ukraine had 5,500 Lenin monuments.^[5] In November 2015, approximately 1,300 Lenin monuments were still standing.^[5] More than 700 Lenin monuments were removed and/or destroyed between February 2014 and December 2015.^[5]

On 9 April 2015, the Ukrainian parliament passed legislation on decommunization.^[6] On 15 May 2015, President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko signed this bill into law that started a six-month period for the removal of communist monuments (excluding World War II monuments) and the mandatory renaming of settlements with names related to Communism.^[7] On 16 January 2017, the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance announced that 1,320 Lenin monuments were dismantled during decommunization.^[8]

A website "Raining Lenins"^[9] tracks the statistics of the fall of Lenin statues in Ukraine.^[4]

On 17 March 2016, the largest Lenin monument at the unoccupied territory of Ukraine, 19.8 meters high, was dismantled in Zaporizhzhia.^[10] In between the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula by the Russian Federation and 28 September 2014, the largest Lenin monument at the unoccupied territory was standing in Kharkiv (20.2 m high).^[11][12] This statue of Lenin in Kharkiv was toppled and destroyed on 28 September 2014.^[13]

During the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, many of these statues of Lenin, which had been taken down by Ukrainian activists, were re-erected by Russian occupiers in Russian-controlled areas.^{[14][15][16][17]}

Motivation

The start of the "Leninopad" in its mass was laid by the demolition of the Lenin monument in Kyiv on the Bessarabian Square. The event took place on 8 December 2013 at around 6:00 pm. Even more people began to massively destroy monuments of the Soviet past after reports about the Euromaidan activists who died during the protests in Kyiv.

In January 2015, the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine announced that it would encourage all public initiatives related to cleaning Ukraine of monuments to figures of the communist past. According to Minister Vyacheslav Kyrylenko, his department will initiate the removal from the State Register of Immovable Monuments of Ukraine of all monuments related to communist figures listed there. "The state will not oppose, but on the contrary, will in every possible way support all public initiatives that will fight for the cleansing of Ukraine from these relics of the totalitarian past," the minister emphasized.^[18]

In April 2015, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine voted in favor of the draft law "On the condemnation of the communist and national socialist (Nazi) totalitarian regimes in Ukraine and the prohibition of propaganda of their symbols", which, in particular, will oblige local authorities to dismantle monuments to communist figures on the territory of Ukraine.^[19]

Communist monuments toppled during Euromaidan

Euromaidan protesters toppled several statues of Vladimir Lenin in Ukrainian cities.^[20][21][22] Some estimates said that more than 90 statues were toppled.^[23] In December 2015, The Ukrainian Week calculated that 376 Lenin monuments were removed or destroyed in February 2014.^[5]

This is a partial list:

Landmark	Location	Date	Status	Notes	Image
Statue of Lenin	Andriievo-Ivanove	3 January 2014	Broken in two	Police launched an investigation based on a Criminal Code article entitled "Destruction of, or Damage to, Monuments of History or Culture".[24]
Statue of Lenin	Berdychiv	22 February 2014	Toppled and destroyed	[25][26]
Statue of Lenin	Bila Tserkva	2014	Toppled and destroyed	[20][27]
Statue of Lenin	Chernihiv	21 February 2014	Toppled	[28][29]
Statue of Lenin	Chervona Sloboda	8 July 2014	Toppled	According to the Ukrainian Communist Party "a criminal case has been opened over the act of vandalism".[30][31]
Statue of Lenin	Kharkiv	28 September 2014	Toppled and destroyed
Statue of Lenin	Kherson	7 February 2013	Destroyed	[32]
Statue of Lenin	Khmelnytskyi	21 February 2014	Toppled	[20][27][33]
Statue of Lenin	Korosten	5 October 2014	Toppled
Statue of Lenin	Kyiv	8 December 2013	Toppled and destroyed	[21]
Statue of Lenin	Melitopol	5 July 2015	Dismantled by the City Council
Statue of Lenin	Novomoskovsk	2 August 2015	Toppled	[34]
Statue of Lenin	"Pressmash" Factory, Odesa	23 October 2015	Transformed into a statue of Darth Vader	[35]
Statue of Lenin	Podilsk	8 December 2013	Broken into several pieces	[24]
Statue of Lenin	Pryluky		Dismantled
Bust of Lenin	Sievierodonetsk	1 October 2014	Set on fire and dismantled	[36]
Statue of Lenin	Stanytsia Luhanska	16 April 2015	Toppled
Statue of Lenin	Velyki Sorochyntsi		Dismantled
Statue of Lenin	Zaporizhzhia	17 March 2016	Dismantled	[37]
Statue of Lenin	Zhytomyr	21 February 2014	Toppled and destroyed	[20][27][38]

Reactions

The removal of the monuments evoked mixed feelings among the Ukrainian population.^[39] In some cases, like in Kharkiv in early 2014,^[40] pro-Russian Ukrainian crowds protected the monuments, including members of the communist and socialist parties, as well as veterans of World War II and the Afghan wars.^[41] The Statue of Lenin in Kharkiv was toppled on 28 September 2014.^[13] Late October 2014, then Kharkiv Governor Ihor Baluta admitted that he thought that the majority of Kharkiv residents had not wanted the statue removed, but said "there was hardly any protest afterward either, which is quite telling".^[42]

In January 2015, the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine announced that it would encourage any public initiatives related to the cleansing of Ukraine from monuments to figures of the totalitarian communist past.^[43]

"It is not by chance that the demonstrations that we saw after the annexation of Crimea in the east and southeast of Ukraine were organized in the squares around the monuments to Lenin, with red flags with a hammer and sickle. What is happening now in Ukraine, what was instigated by Russian aggression, is a clash between the new Ukraine and the old Soviet Union, to which the current Russia is trying to return with the help of Ukraine, seizing parts of its territories. It is not clear to me why monuments to Lenin are being demolished only now in various cities of Ukraine; why all these 24 years they continued to stand; why didn't the state administration of an independent country demolish them earlier?

— Yuriy Felshtynskyi^[44]