Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 11 – The Ukrainian
government will “encourage any public initiatives connected with cleansing
Ukraine from monuments” to officials and others from the communist past,
according to Ukrainian Culture Minister Vyacheslav Kirilenko. His words likely
open the way for a new wave of dismantling and demolishing statues of Lenin and
other Soviet figures.
Ukrainian officials, from President
Petro Poroshenko on down have supported such initiatives but typically after
the fact. Kirilenko’s statement, carried on the website of his ministry (mincult.kmu.gov.ua/mincult/uk/publish/article/386347)
and picked up by various news outlets suggests a more pro-active stance.
The minister declared that the
numerous monuments “to odious figures of the totalitarian regime are not
objects of the cultural heritage of either national or local significance,” are
not on the State Registry of monuments, and in the future will not be protected
and preserved by the Ukrainian government.
Thus, Kirilenko continued, “the
state will not oppose but on the contrary will do everything it can to assist
any social initiative which will struggle for the cleansing of Ukraine from
these relics of the totalitarian past.” And he added that his ministry will
ensure that none of these monuments are considered to be under state protection.
Over the last year, Ukrainians have
torn down many of the more than 4,000 statues of Lenin that the Soviets had
erected there, but both angry reaction from Moscow and concerns about how such
steps might play out with ethnic Russians in Ukraine had kept the government
from promoting such actions.
Now, apparently, Kyiv has decided
that it has little to lose and everything to gain by eliminating such monuments
to a totalitarian regime that Ukrainians and others had hoped had died more
than two decades ago.
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