Lugansk was left without two monuments – from the perestroika and Ukrainian periods
Lugansk media publishes a video of the dismantling of memorial signs “Victims of Stalinist repressions” and “Victims of the Holodomor” erected in the Soviet and Ukrainian periods there yesterday.
The monuments were installed in Lugansk in Memory Square not far from the main library of the LPR named after Maxim Gorky. It received this name due to the fact that the Gusinovskoe cemetery was located on its territory in the post-war period.
According to city authorities, the decision to dismantle the monuments was made by local deputies following appeals from veterans' organizations , which appealed to the administration and the City District Council demanding that they "tear down these fake monuments, which have no historical or cultural significance and offend the patriotic feelings of Luhansk residents."
“Today we have two such monuments and two are located nearby. There are no more like them in the city. Based on requests from residents, a decision was made at the session (on the demolition of monuments),” said acting head of Lugansk Yana Pashchenko.
A monument to the victims of Stalin's repressions appeared in Luhansk at the end of perestroika—a year before the collapse of the USSR— through the efforts and initiative of the then-Soviet Memorial Society (whose Russian successor would be added to the list of foreign agents in 2021).
The black granite stele with an engraved cross was unveiled on September 8, 1990, with the participation of former political prisoners from the Stalin era. In 1989, the Luhansk branch of the Memorial society explored this place and stated that it had found mass graves of repressed people there.
As for the second memorial sign – to the victims of the famine of 1932-1933 – it appeared in Luhansk already during the period of independence, in 2008, on the initiative of local Ukrainian nationalists during the time of President Yushchenko’s fascination with the “Holodomor campaign” , the purpose of which was to promote the idea that the famine of the 1930s, which, according to various estimates, took from several hundred thousand to several million lives, was supposedly a planned genocide of the Ukrainian people by Stalin’s Moscow.
The second sign was consecrated by representatives of Philaret’s “Kyiv Patriarchate,” which is unrecognized in the Orthodox world, and for a long time it served as a gathering point for the few Luhansk pro-Ukrainian nationalist activists who chose this place for their events, usually timed to coincide with certain memorable days.
English version :: Read in English Luhansk is left without two monuments – one from the perestroika and one from the Ukrainian period.