Gagarin and Gleb Zheglov are no longer honoured: Kyiv City Council updates list of monuments to be demolished
1 May 2024 16:44
The Kyiv City Council has updated the list of monuments scheduled for demolition in the city. Another 66 objects will be removed, "Komersant Ukrainian" reports
The document containing the list of monuments to be demolished is titled “List of monuments related to the history and culture of Russia and the USSR, which reflect Soviet and Russian historical and propaganda narratives or contain inaccurate historical information to be removed from the public space of Kyiv”. It was adopted on 13 July 2023 and initially contained 69 items. Now the list contains 215 items.
Among the objects that Kyiv decided to demolish are monuments to Yuri Gagarin and Maxim Gorky, monuments to Soviet prosecutors and policemen, liberating tankers and internationalist soldiers. The bust of Lenin at the Teatralna metro station and even the monument to Gleb Zheglov and Vladimir Sharapov from the Soviet film The Place of Meeting Cannot Be Changed, which stands near the Ministry of Internal Affairs, were also demolished.
The vast majority of the objects on the full list were dismantled earlier.
Since April 2015, Ukraine has been undergoing a process of decommunisation, which involves getting rid of the effects of communist ideology and removing Soviet cultural objects and narratives from public space. Monument removal is part of this process, which began on 8 December 2013 with the demolition of the Lenin monument on Bessarabska Square in Kyiv. In early 2017, the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance reported that 1,320 Lenin monuments had been dismantled during the decommunisation process.
TheMinistry of Culture allowed the dismantling of the Arch of Friendship of Peoples in Kyiv, but the Kyiv City State Administration said it would not do so.
