A headless monster

From the distance it looks like a horde of Coca-Cola tents clustered around the foot of Kiev's last statue of Lenin, on the corner of Shevchenko and the Khreshchatyk. But on closer inspection these turn out to be a rare manifestation of the Ukrainian Communist Party, hoping to salvage the memorial to their idol which was damaged by (in their words) 'bourgeois Ukrainian nationalists'. I chatted with the faithful (about a dozen women and one man, all in their seventies) to find out what it was all about.

Apparently at 4 in the morning on the 30th June, a group of young people with a ladder scaled the statue, knocked off its head and damaged one of its hands before running off. According to my informant, the statue was a great masterpiece by a Ukrainian sculptor, and was created from the finest Korean marble, the same sort as used on Lenin's tomb in Moscow. Repairing it is therefore quite a costly enterprise and one to which the city of Kiev and the government of Ukraine is (unsurprisingly) not prepared to give any priority. So the die-hards of the Party have taken the job on themselves. To judge from the pitiful amount of money they had collected at the end of a busy weekend, they have quite a long haul ahead, although they assured me they had received promises of support from Spain and Italy.

'Look here' said my friend, pointing to a display board ,'there are statues of Lenin all over the world, in Cuba, Bulgaria, Mauritius, Finland, Hanoi and Dallas, Texas (sic). We deserve to have one ....'; and then followed a lengthy rant on how in Soviet times there was no unemployment, bread and rent cost only a few kopecks, etc. etc. I was interested to see that the Hanoi statue had a plaque giving the great man's name as 'Le Nin'. But it didn't seem tactful in the circumstances for me to raise questions about, for example, the millions of Ukranians who had died from hunger and oppression organised by the Soviet regime in the 1930s, and I wan't tempted to add to their collection. I recalled the excellent limerick of Robert Conquest:

There was an old monster called Lenin
Who once did a million men in.
But that's not unequalled -
For every one he killed,
The young monster Stalin did ten in.

The world's last remaining statue of Stalin, by the way, which I saw a couple of years ago in his birth-town of Gori, Georgia, is now just a few kilometres on the Georgian side of the Russian cease-fire line of 2008..........