Dismantling
And yet, Lenin's legacy also symbolizes the repression and destruction that would be the USSR. In the past years particularly, the act of toppling over statues of such Soviet leaders represents a larger rejection of this history in what used to be the satellite republics of Soviet Russia. The practice of dismantling and desecrating Communist monuments is so common that it has come to be called Leninopad, or literally "Lenin-fall" (1).
These acts of resistance take place all over the world, such as in this remarkable photograph of students in Accra, Ghana, celebrating the overthrow of the pro-communist President in 1966 (2). In the past few years, however, there has been a concentrated occurrence of Leninopad in Ukraine, where the parliament passed a series of de-communization laws in April 2015 including the banning of Soviet symbols (3). Hundreds of statues across the country were chiseled, hammered, and torn down in the span of months. Watch a video here of the event: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2567388/Stunning-map-reveals-100-statues-Lenin-toppled-Ukraine.html#v-3255296544001.
Ukraine is facing a common problem nations across the world must confront; monuments are brick-and-mortar preservations of particular moments in time that later generations may seek to forget, erase, or destroy. A number of creative solutions have been proposed, such as this replacement of a Lenin statue with a memorial for Star Wars' Darth Vader in Odessa just a week ago (4). Lenin's presence may linger, but it has also become transmuted into a popular culture that cannot ignore a complicated history but must reckon with it as part of the process of healing.
