At 5:36 p.m. Tuesday in Kiev’s historic Pecherskyi district, an imposing Soviet-era bronze monument symbolizing friendship between Russia and Ukraine was accidentally beheaded and then deliberately dismantled amid applause from hundreds of people.
As local officials explained, their friendship is over when one country invades and bombs another, killing its people.
The 40-year-old statue, which depicts a Ukrainian and a Russian worker on a pedestal, was torn down by order of local authorities in Kyiv. It is one of the first steps in a plan to demolish about 60 monuments and rename dozens of streets associated with the Soviet Union, Russia and Russian figures including writers Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Pushkin, as a result of the war between the two countries.
Serhii Myrhorodskyi, 86, an architect from Kyiv, watched excitedly as the Russian worker’s head accidentally detached from his body and fell to the ground during transport. It didn’t seem to bother him, although he was the one who designed the monument, which was erected in 1982 as a gift from the Soviet regime to the Ukrainian government.
“It’s the right thing,” he told the Guardian. “There is no friendship with Russia and there will be no friendship for a long time as long as Putin and his gang are in this world. After they drop dead, maybe 30 years from now, something will change.
A woman cheers as the Soviet-era monument symbolizing the former friendship between Russia and Ukraine is dismantled in Kyiv. Photo: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian“The presence of the monument depicting friendship with Russia is a sin. Removing it is the only correct decision. And we could use the bronze that makes up the monument. We could melt it down and form a new monument to Ukraine, the motherland, that would symbolize the unity of all Ukrainian countries.”
“As for my feelings,” he added, “I’m just happy to see that people are happy that this whole thing is being taken away.”
As the monument began to fall, the crowd shouted, “Glory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes, glory to the nation of Ukraine.”
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko, who led the dismantling, said the removal of Russian symbols from the city is now underway. “You’re not killing your brother. You don’t rape your sister. You don’t destroy your friend’s country. That’s why today we dismantled this monument, which was once erected as a sign of friendship between Ukraine and Russia,” he said.
Other cities in Ukraine have started renaming streets associated with Russian figures or dismantling monuments related to the Soviet Union in recent days.
Plaques commemorating Soviet “hero cities” that resisted the Nazis were replaced with the names of Ukrainian cities under Russian occupation or attack. Photo: Alessio Mamo/The GuardianThe city of Ternopil in western Ukraine has renamed a street dedicated to Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, and removed a Soviet tank and plane. The plane is to be replaced by a “Heroes of Ukraine” monument.
Fontanka, a village near Odessa, decided to convert a street dedicated to poet Vladimir Mayakovsky into Boris Johnson Street after the UK promised to send a £100m arms package to Ukraine.
And Dnipro Mayor Borys Filatov said that streets named after Russian cities would be rededicated to Ukrainian cities and symbols: Abkhazia Street became Irpin, while the street of the 30th Irkutsk Division is now called Ukrainian Soldiers.
Officials in Kyiv are set to pass a law to rename 60 streets, meaning Russian writers and Ukrainians who have written in Russian – or even adopted a Russian identity – are among those who may be expunged from the city’s public life . A metro station named after Tolstoy is on the list.
The entrance to Leo Tolstoy Square metro station in central Kyiv. Photo: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian“The war changed everything and times have accelerated,” wrote Alina Mykhailova, one of the two Kyiv city deputies who introduced the law, on Facebook. “Eventually there is an understanding of it [our] The colonial legacy must be destroyed.”
Mykhailova and her colleague Ksenia Semenova have campaigned for the removal of the People’s Friendship Monument, which was dismantled on Tuesday. There had been plans to remove the statue as part of Ukraine’s decommunization laws passed in 2015, but at the time they were pushed back by other members of Kyiv City Council, Mykhailova wrote.
The Ukrainian language and national identity were suppressed by Tsarist Russia and its Soviet successor. Russian was considered the language of high culture and official business, and many Ukrainians, especially peasants who moved to the big cities after World War II, adopted Russian to distance themselves from their rural origins.
Perhaps more controversially, the de-Russification list includes Ukrainian-born writers such as Mikhail – or Mykhailo, in Ukrainian – Bulgakov, who was born in Ukraine and wrote about Kyiv but held derogatory views of the Ukrainian language and national identity. His statue stands next to his former home on one of Kiev’s most famous streets, which is now the Bulgakov Museum and is popular with tourists.
“Only idiots could do that because Leo Tolstoy is a world-famous writer, not just a Russian or a Ukrainian,” said Ihor Serhiivych, a Kyiv resident, at the Leo Tolstoy Square metro station.
“There are many [ethnic] Russians living in Kyiv are probably doing more to protect Ukraine right now than western Ukrainians, who consider themselves elite,” Serhiivych said. He said there was a gap in understanding between Ukrainians who lived under Soviet and Tsarist rule for a long period of time and those in western Ukraine who did not.
“If it were a Putin statue, I would understand, but you have to distinguish between enemies and world-famous literature.”
A Soviet memorial to the armored divisions that fought against Nazi Germany is adorned with a Ukrainian flag. Photo: Alessio Mamo/The GuardianAnother person at the station, Valetyna Hryhoryvycha, said: “I think people need to think a bit more about it. I don’t understand how they relate to what is happening now. It’s part of our history.”
Ivan Andreiev, who works near the Bulgakov Museum, said: “I am in favor of removing the Friendship Monument because there can be no friendship between enemies. But I think it’s fake that they want to tear down Bulgakov’s monument. What Russian or Ukrainian would vote for something like that? It’s just history.”
While the Ukrainian authorities are working hard to dismantle the Russian monuments in their country, Moscow is doing the opposite in the Ukrainian territories it occupies, restoring Soviet-era statues and symbols.
Two weeks ago, a well-known figure returned to the main square in the coastal city of Henichesk in the Russian-held Kherson region. A statue of Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, with his well-known goatee and mustache, once again stood on its pedestal erected by Russian soldiers.