Kyiv authorities are going to choose one of the parks in the Ukrainian capital, where monuments of the Soviet era will be placed. For this purpose they offer a park of Alexander Pushkin. It is suggested to place monuments in sectors, which will display different periods of the Soviet history. There also will be a number of booths with stylized posters, leaflets, newspapers and magazines of those years, as well as stands where souvenirs will be sold. The initiators of this park are hoping that it will become another tourist attraction spot. Before the park is created, monuments and sculptures of the USSR times will be stored at the Kyiv city cemetery Berkovtsy.

A little bit earlier Kyiv City Administration initiated the dismantling of 27 monuments to Soviet figures, located throughout the city. Among those are 17 monuments to Vladimir Lenin, two monuments to Nadiya Krups’ka (Lenin’s wife), two to Felix Dzerzhyns’ky, one to Stanislav Kosior, Grygory Petrovs’ky and Mykhail Kalinin.

This idea to use obsolete monuments to attract tourists is not new: there is already a collection of monuments of the Soviet Union times under an open air in Lithuania and it is very popular. Soon, Latvia will create its own “Park of the Soviet period” as well.

Right now authorities is going to dismantle the monument to Grygoriy Petrovsky (Dnipropetrovsk city was named in his honour). This monument is located in Pechersky district at the corner of Grushevs’kogo Street (during Soviet Union it was Kirova Street) and Petrovsky alley since May 1970. Petrovsky fell into disfavor because of “involvement in the organization of Holodomor in Ukraine”. In December 2008 the monument suffered from vandalism. Similiar to the monument to Vladimir Lenin on Bessarabka, vandals beat ears, nose and hands of the sculpture. At the mayor’s office they say there probably were no money for the restoration of the monument, so they decided to dismantle it. Communists got angry about it, but didn;t start to collect the money, as it is not so prominent as the monument to Vladimir Lenin oposit Besarabsky market. As to the monument to Lenin, communists managed to achieve the beginning of its restoration.

“Petrovsky got a stamp of the enemy, but it was him, who created in 1930s first Palaces of Pioneers in the Soviet Union, and also workers’ canteens, where they were feeding all those in need free of charge. All this information is in the archives “, told Alla Alexandrovs’ka, the deputy of the Communists party.
Sculptors say that the monument has got some value. “It is made very professionally. If you look at this monument without ideology, it is made at a high artistic level. Therefore, the main thing is to preserve it and not to destroy”, says a sculptor Oleg Pinchuk.

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