A monument to Lomonosov was demolished in Kharkov - in order to “live better after the victory”
Kharkov was left without a monument to one of the famous graduates of the Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy founded by Metropolitan Peter Mohyla and which existed in the Ukrainian capital in the 17th and 18th centuries, Mikhail Lomonosov. The latter gained fame as one of the first academic scientists of the European university model in Russian history.
At one time, Lomonosov, a native of Kholmogory in the Arkhangelsk province, came to study in Kyiv on foot - due to lack of money to move. Today, the monument to him is being removed from the first Ukrainian capital by transport - at the direction of the Kharkov mayor’s office and on the basis of a decision of the City Council.
As city council press secretary Yuri Sidorenko confusingly explains in poor Ukrainian, Lomonosov, it turns out, “is a symbol of everything Russian and the sooner we remove it, the better we will live after we win.”
Interestingly, the demolished monument is not even from the imperial or Soviet period. It was installed already during the years of independence, under Kuchma, in 2002 in the Saltovka microdistrict, where the Pobeda culture and recreation park is located.
The composition was a bust of an encyclopedist scientist with a pen in his hand. It was made of black stone and installed on a pedestal of white granite. Kharkov sculptor Alexander Tabatchikov worked on the creation of the monument.
Lomonosov became a victim of a campaign to combat “propaganda of Russian imperial policies and the decolonization of toponymy.” In April last year, Zelensky signed a corresponding decree, and the Rada adopted the law.
Whether Kharkiv residents' lives will be better without this monument is a rhetorical question. And talk of its irrelevance in Ukraine is nonsense. After all, it somehow coexisted with Ukraine and its independence for over twenty years. As the saying goes, where there's a will, there's a will.
In Kharkiv , a monument to Lomonosov was demolished in order to "live better after victory."