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Poetrypairing1 1
Poetrypairing1 1
also stands for contemporary Russia, whose effort to pull Ukraine more firmly into its sphere of
influence by forcing Mr. Yanukovich not to sign a political and free trade agreement with the
European Union was the spark for the current protests.
But if you consider that Ukraine has been an independent country for more than two decades, the
toppling of Lenins statue carries many more meanings still including a warning about letting the
euphoria of symbolic gestures stand in for substantive changes in governance and collective mind-sets.
In August 1991, during a failed coup by Soviet hard-liners in Russia, the monument to Felix
Dzerzhinsky, the founder of Communist Russias secret police, in front of Moscows K.G.B.
headquarters was dismantled. That seemed to signal the end of the Soviet regime. The Iron Felix now
rests among other deposed statues in a special park in Moscow. But the security apparatus created by
Dzerzhinsky remains firmly in place, exemplified by President Vladimir Putin and his cronies.
Online, commentators from around the world have been quick to liken the fall of Lenin in Kiev on
Sunday to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989; now, like then, the protesters chipped at both symbolic
structures and hauled away bits as souvenirs. But nearly a quarter-century after that event, the
comparison seems anachronistically nostalgic. If the promise of a unified Europe rang true in 1989, it
seems rather misguided today, given the current economic troubles and rise of right-wing nationalism.
A better parallel may be to the collapse of Saddam Husseins statue in Baghdad in April 2003. In
footage shown around the world, an American soldier placed the star-spangled banner on Saddams
iron face as it came down; the gesture was greeted as a harbinger of Iraqs transition from dictatorship
to democracy. On Sunday, protesters in Kiev placed flags of Ukraine and the European Union on
Lenins empty pedestal.
But what exactly did America win in Iraq in 2003? The intervening years tell a far more complicated
story. And what kind of symbolic victory has Europe, its flag replacing Lenin, won in Ukraine today?
Ukraines awkward position between Russias neo-imperial influence and Europes pull promises more
complications ahead. Would closer ties with the European Union or even Union membership, which
wasnt promised in the agreement that Mr. Yanukovich failed to sign bring a democratic and
transparent style of governance and end corruption and oligarchy, as the protesters hope, or would it
turn Ukraine into Europes service economy, as some critics have cautioned?
Destroying statues to shed a cumbersome historical legacy often simply opens the way for the creation
of new symbols. A more effective way for a nation to emancipate itself from the past may be to subvert
existing symbols that are already integrated into the fabric of urban life.
In July 1967, the artists Leonid Lamm and Igor Gelbakh threw bottles of red paint at the statue of the
poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in one of Moscows central squares. Mayakovsky was an avant-garde poet,
and the two artists felt that the Soviet state had wrongly appropriated his legacy, in part by erecting a
monument to him in the style of Socialist Realism. For a few hours that summer morning, as
municipal workers scrubbed away at the red paint, the public space of a Moscow square became a site
for re-evaluating the states aesthetic and political practices.
The granite Lenin of Kiev was already on its way to representing the complexities of both the past and
today: It was a reminder of the failure of the Soviet project and of the failure of the liberal economic
policies that followed. Having survived two decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, the statue was
treated by many residents of Kiev as a potent visual pun. It stood in front of the Besarabsky covered
food hall a structure plastered with glitzy ads for European banks and merchandise and was
dubbed the Lenin who shows the way to the market.
TEXT #2
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