Ackermann Niels

What happened to the Lenin statue that fell in the very center of Kyiv in the early days of Maidan revolution? French journalist Sebastien Gobert and I started looking for it. We quickly came to the conclusion that nobody cared about what happened to the first of the many statues that fell in a viral movement called Leninopad.

In April 2015, this movement got the official support of a law making illegal the glorification of communist symbols.
Our quest for this first statue led us to discover dozens of other fallen idols and their pieces. In garbage dumps. In gardens. Hidden behind walls. In private collections. It does not go without twists and turns. Yet it makes up a thrilling project. Even more fascinating are our encounters with Ukrainians. Do they miss Lenin or not? Do they even care? Some privatise the bolshevik leader and transform “their” Lenin into a new idol, be it Darth Vador or Cossack leaders. Why? How do Ukrainians understand decommunisation? How much of the Soviet legacy do they want gone?
With more than 5’500 statues in the public space at the moment of independence, Ukraine had by far the highest density of Lenins per square kilometers. Far ahead of Russia where "only" 7’000 monuments were spread over a territory 28 times bigger. Ukrainian authorities announced at the end of 2016 that all the monuments were removed. Through this project, our aim is to document the large variability and the lack of consensus surrounding this process of decommunisation.