What is left when the statues are brought down? As recurring as incendiary, the debate on whether or not to keep monuments to the glory of more or less controversial personalities in public space is once again on the table, thanks to an international movement to denounce police violence and racism. On Wednesday, the president of the American House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi spoke in favor of the withdrawal of Congress from the statues representing the Confederates. Monuments to Christopher Columbus have been vandalized in Boston, Miami, and Virginia. In the United Kingdom, the statue of Edward Colston, a 17th-century slave trader, was brought down during a demonstration in Bristol.
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From 2013 to 2015, Ukraine experienced what is certainly the most significant overthrow of statues in history. In the space of two years, more than a thousand sculptures of Lenin were brought to the ground in the wake of the so-called Maidan revolution, which saw the overthrow of the Prorussian regime by Viktor Yanukovych. An independent journalist based in Kiev, Sébastien Gobert went in search of these missing statues with the Swiss photojournalist Niels Ackermann. Published in 2017, their book Looking for Lenin explores the reasons behind this unprecedented movement, and explores in an explosive way the void left by these statues once they have fallen from their pedestals.
LE FIGARO. - In what context did this phenomenon known as Leninopad (“ fall of Lenin ”, editor's note) take place in Ukraine?
Sébastien GOBERT. - This impetus took place in parallel with the Maidan revolution, the annexation of Crimea, and the war in the Donbas region. It begins precisely on December 8, 2013, with the fall of the statue of Lenin which sat enthroned on Bessarabska Square, in Kiev. Its overthrow, at a time when the revolution was in full swing, had enormous symbolic significance in demonstrating that the Yanukovich regime no longer held the street. But it had other meanings as well. Why had they attacked this statue, rather than any other building or monument? Was it the present or the past that they attacked? What future did they want to get rid of Lenin?
A decapitated statue of Lenin in the Odessa region. Niels Ackermann / Monday13
At the time of its independence in 1991, Ukraine had 5,500, the largest number of all the former Soviet republics, apart from Russia. A number were overthrown at independence, many others during the Orange Revolution of 2004. The fall of Lenin from Bessarabska Square opened a sequence that caused the disappearance of more than a thousand statues. With the exception of Crimea and the areas in the hands of the Prorussians, there remains today only one statue of Lenin standing in Ukraine: in Chernobyl.
How does Leninopad fit into the broader effort of "decommunization" led after the fall of the Yanukovich regime?
Four decommunisation laws were passed in spring 2015, framing a redefinition of national historiography. It should be understood that these laws are not the cause, but the concretization of the popular and spontaneous phenomenon of the fall of the statues. It was individuals, groups and local authorities who decided to destroy the statues of Lenin.
Overall, Leninopad is part of a process of redefining the conception that Ukrainians have of themselves and their place in history. It is the fruit of a gradual reversal, of liberation from Soviet and Russian historiography. The Ukrainians denounced Russian imperialism, some speak of "colonization" of Ukraine by Russia, several historians have studied the internalization by the Ukrainians of the way in which the Russians look at them. The goal is to put Ukraine at the center of its own history. The Russian Civil War (1917-1921) was renamed "Ukraine's War of Independence". The hundredth anniversary of the October 1917 revolution was not celebrated as the advent of Bolshevism, but celebrated as the centenary of the struggle for independence of Ukraine.
Was this overthrow of Lenin's statues resisted in Ukraine?
We found that Leninopad was far from achieving consensus. Some considered that it is not by unbolting statues that one changes a country. Others wanted to show that the communist regime also had good sides. The fault lines were geographic, political, economic, social, generational. Some people remembered the happy days of their Soviet youth, and did not understand the hatred that aroused statues. A man we interviewed did not care about Lenin and recognized the atrocities for which he was responsible, but was attached to the statue in his village, because it was there that, 30 years earlier, he had kissed the one who had become his wife .
A statue found in a collector of Kharkiv. Niels Ackermann / Monday13
In short, neither Lenin's statues nor their fall have any unequivocal meaning. Some condemned Lenin but denounced what they saw as vandalism. Others found the violence, the cries, the humiliation suffered by the statues deplorable. Others saw it as a symbol of a revolution that they opposed. Some people did not want Lenin to be replaced on the pedestal by fighters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army [ Ukrainian Nationalist Resistance Movement of World War II, whose memory is divided by accusations of collusion with the Third Reich , editor's note ].
This last point poses a fundamental question in this debate: what is the nature of the vacuum created by the fall of these statues, and what to put in their place?
Many of Lenin's statues have been replaced by crosses or Virgins, others by statues of nationalist heroes, some with flowers. Elsewhere, the pedestals were razed and replaced by public benches. In Kiev, residents voted on a poll not to put anything in place of Lenin in Bessarabska square. This opened up the possibility of reinventing the space around the pedestal. Not to freeze in a new ideology but to invent.
Several artistic experiments were therefore carried out there. A large staircase was built so that people could climb on the pedestal and see the world from where Lenin saw it. Holograms have been projected. A green wall was installed to make the stone disappear. The pedestal, by raising a statue, make it gain height, importance. It gives the impression that we have an authority that looks at us, that contemplates us, like Napoleon on the Vendôme column. The fact of not putting anything in the place of the statue makes it possible to take authoritarianism, or at least the concept of authority, against the foot.
What does the movement at work in the United States and in several European countries inspire in you, where voices are raised to bring down statues of historical figures?
Personalities and contexts cannot be compared: there is no question of putting Lenin, Churchill and Leopold II on the same level. Nevertheless, there are great similarities, starting with the aesthetics of the fall itself. All these scenes are alike, the rage expressed is the same. How to explain that we spend so much energy and testosterone on inanimate monuments that represent people who died 200 years ago? These moments of fury speak volumes about the importance of iconography for political communities.
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The reactions of support or disapproval of the act are also the same. Already in 2017, Donald Trump deplored an act of vandalism towards History. There was a notion of respect. This is something you find in Ukraine and everywhere else. Finally, the question of the future haunts absolutely everyone. Once the statue is on the ground, what do we do? Who won ? Besides, what does it mean to "win"? What are we going to put in place? Is it really necessary to put something in place? Do we still need these heroic landmarks of the nation state imagined in the 19th century? Is it really around these icons that we should continue to define a sense of belonging, or are we moving on to something else?