Down with hammer and sickle: Workers removed Soviet symbols from a giant statue in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv on Tuesday as part of a campaign to remove symbols of the former USSR.
62 meters high and placed on a 40-meter high pedestal, the steel sculpture represents a woman brandishing a sword in one hand and a shield on the other with a sickle and a hammer, the Soviet emblem. Known in Ukrainian as Batkivchtchyna Maty, literally “Mother of the Fatherland”, it was erected in 1981 in memory of the Soviet victory in World War II. The giant statue turns its back on the capital and dominates the Dnieper river.
In a basket suspended from a rail at the top of the shield, workers removed one by one the elements of the Soviet emblem, before lowering them using ropes. On Tuesday, they sliced through the central disc and lowered it to the ground, repeatedly stopping due to sirens warning of air raids. The statue is to receive a new shield which this time will bear a trident, the emblem of Ukraine. It is part of the Museum of the History of Ukraine in World War II, whose director, Yuri Savchuk, asked that the statue be renamed “Mother of Ukraine”.
“We are obliged to proceed with decommunization and the replacement of the shield is one of the main stages of this work”, justifies Yuri Savtchouk, standing under the statue. For him, it is also a question of ideological war, at a time when kyiv is displaying its desire to join NATO and the European Union as quickly as possible. “The war obviously continues on the cultural and informational front as well: it’s a war for identity, for people’s consciousness,” he continues.
Yuri Savchuk would have even wanted to remove these emblems before the Russian invasion, but “today, the war brings up to date a large number of questions which had been pushed back in the past”. The cost of replacing the shield is estimated at 28 million hryvnia (691,000 euros), financed by private donations and not public money, assured the Ukrainian authorities. Culture Minister Oleksandre Tkatchenko, who had supported the project, resigned at the end of July after criticism of the use of public funds for cultural projects in a country in the midst of war. According to a survey commissioned by the Ministry of Culture last year, 85% of Ukrainians favored the removal of the hammer and sickle. Mr Tkatchenko’s acting replacement, Rostislav Karandeev, hailed the project as an “essential part of our resistance in the ideological battle with our enemy”, as he observed the works from the ground. The new shield should be in place before the national holidays in August: 23rd, Ukrainian Flag Day, and 24th, Independence Day.
Since the Russian invasion in February 2022, Ukraine has amplified the dismantling of Soviet-era monuments and the renaming of places and streets, begun since Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and the Donbass war in 2014. Other cities, including Volgograd in Russia and Brest in Belarus, have similar gigantic sculptures near Soviet-era war memorials.
Sculptor Oleksiy Pergamenchchyk created the trident emblem for the new Ukrainian shield. “We can finally get rid of this Soviet symbol,” he asserts. For him, it is a question of “proving that we are a great nation and that we are not afraid of anything”. The new trident is 7.60 meters long and 4.56 meters wide. The statue, facing outside the capital, “looks at the enemy, holds the shield, holds the sword, it’s very symbolic”, notes the artist.
