By Tengo Gogotishvili and AFP | 2024-02-15

LVIV/TBILISI -- In Ukraine's westernmost city of Lviv, a statue of the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, sprawls on the ground, red paint splashed around her helmet.

The region bordering the European Union claims it was the first in Ukraine to topple all its Soviet monuments, in a nationwide ouster of symbols glorifying Kremlin rule.

But the removal of hundreds of statues has raised the difficult question of what to do with their remains, at a time when Russia's invasion has sparked a cultural and historical reckoning.

"In Ukrainian society, there's an ongoing debate: if we should preserve these monuments, what we should do with them," said Liana Blikharska, a historian and researcher at the Territory of Terror Memorial Museum in Lviv.

Outside the museum, which features accounts of Soviet repressions and deportations of Jews, lie several downed statues -- stylized metal figures and severed body parts.

Staff relented when local authorities asked them to house the relics since there was little other choice, Blikharska said.

"There's no other museum or place to store them, so we said yes."

Decommunization

Downing statues is not new in Ukraine. The country toppled thousands honoring the Bolshevik revolutionary Vladimir Lenin and other Soviet monuments in the 1990s.

A new wave of removals began in 2014 after Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula, and then redoubled after the 2022 invasion.

Then last year, Ukraine passed a "decolonization" law on renaming streets and removing monuments linked to Moscow.

Lviv Province Governor Maksym Kozytsky announced last month that the province had taken down 312 monuments, crossing the finish line first in the race to "de-communize."

One among them was that of Tereshkova, now an 86-year-old pro-Kremlin lawmaker. It was installed in 1983 and removed in November from a Lviv street formerly named after her.

For Andriy Godyk, director of the provincial working group on monuments, the campaign represents the "ideological front" of the war with Russia.

"Our generation is doing the work of our parents, which should have been done in the early 1990s," the 35-year-old said.

Anna Gerych, a journalist and co-founder of a group called Decommunization of the Lviv Region, backed the campaign because she considered it unacceptable for the monuments to remain when "people are dying at the hands of these same occupiers."

Ukraine should have started systematically removing Soviet statues earlier because it would have undermined the Kremlin's argument that its troops were defending "Russian history or our common history," said Godyk.

"We have common history, but we don't have a common future," he said.

Conflicting sentiment in Georgia

Neighboring Georgia, 20% of which is occupied by Russia, also has a law that bans Soviet symbols in public places.

But in practice, mixed feelings exist about what history should be protected.

The Tbilisi City Court on February 2 sentenced Nata Peradze, a civic activist and founder of the "Talgha" (Wave) movement, for splattering paint on an icon depicting late Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

In an act of protest on January 9, Peradze threw blue paint on the St. Matrona of Moscow icon in Tbilisi's Holy Trinity (Sameba) Cathedral. Stalin appeared in a smaller panel beside the main panel.

After she posted a video of her actions on social media, an angry mob of right-wing protesters swarmed her home, threatening to "carry out what the state and law failed to," Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL)'s Georgian Service reported February 2.

Police prevented a possible attack on Peradze, but then the court later sentenced her in absentia to five days in jail, in what rights activists said is an excessively harsh punishment for a nonviolent crime.

Stalin's 'Red Church'

Icons with images of St. Matrona and Stalin began cropping up in Russia in the 1990s.

They were based on a book about Matrona Nikonova, a prominent Moscow fortune teller during the first half of the 20th century who later was said to have the gift of prophecy. She was canonized in 2004.

Stalin, an avowed atheist, visited Nikonova following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and took her counsel, legend holds. But the Moscow Patriarchate completely rejected the story.

"It is true that in 1943 Stalin authorized the establishment of the Moscow Patriarchate," said Georgian Archpriest Ilia Chigladze, explaining the origin of the myth about the "great Christian" Stalin.

"But in so doing he created the so called 'Red Church,' whose main function was to monitor the faithful and even spy abroad," he told Kontur.

The appearance of the Soviet dictator inside Tbilisi's main cathedral "promotes the spread of agony-causing lies within the Georgian church that the bloody, godless tyrant Stalin was a deeply faithful Orthodox Christian who listened to the saints and acted on their instructions," Chigladze posted on Facebook January 6.

Other commentators point out Stalin's brutal persecution of the church in his native Georgia.

"There's a huge number of clergymen who were victimized in the 1920s and 1930s whose names we don't know," theologian Giorgi Tiginashvili told Kontur. "A minimum of 3,100 priests were exiled [to imprisonment elsewhere in the USSR], and half of them didn't come back. About 1,000 churches were destroyed or remade into barns, clubs or gyms."

"Before Sovietization, in March 1921, there were 1,450 churches and monasteries operating in Georgia," said Paata Gigauri, a blogger. "In 1939, there were just five functioning churches."

Overcoming ignorance

In Georgia, the public approval rating of Patriarch Ilia II surpasses that of all politicians at more than 90%, according to media reports, while respondents trust the Georgian Orthodox Church more than any other institution.

But then Peradze did the unimaginable in that devout country -- entering a church and splattering paint on an icon depicting Russian communist mythology.

The Georgian Patriarchate ultimately retreated and asked the donors to take the icon back and repaint it in accordance with church canon.

The icon will be repainted to replace Stalin with a woman cured of cancer, Davit Tarkhan-Mouravi, Kremlin ally, leader of the right-wing populist Alliance of Patriots of Georgia, and donor of the icon, told RFE/RL on January 17.

"Our problem is ignorance. Matrona's canonization was grounded in the people's love for her in Russia. But few people know that the story with Stalin is a lie," said Georgian Orthodox Church Metropolitan Nikoloz (Pachuashvili) of Kumurdo in a YouTube video posted in mid-January.

Giorgi Kandelaki, a former Georgian member of parliament whose Soviet Past Research Laboratory (Sovlab) NGO studies the crimes of the Soviet regime, sees the issue from a larger, geopolitical lens.

"Everything is embedded much more deeply," he told Kontur. "In Russia using the [public's] memory of the USSR has paid off. This icon, as well as the 12 monuments to Stalin that have been built in the last few years in Georgia, is the result of the Russian propaganda war against the West and against our integration [with the European Union]."