Dushanbe, April 23: Workers began pulling down the largest statue of Vladimir Lenin in ex-Soviet Central Asia from its place of honour on Friday, earning outrage from die-hard communists celebrating the Russian revolutionary’s 141st birthday.
A significant but waning number of people in former Soviet countries remain faithful to the iconic founder of the Soviet state even twenty years after the collapse of Communism. Lenin statues were demolished as Communist regimes crumbled two decades ago, but the monuments remain ubiquitous — and sometimes controversial — across parts of the former Soviet Union still ambivalent about the era.
As hundreds of Communists laid flowers at Lenin’s Red Square tomb in Moscow, workers in Tajikistan were dismantling the 22.5-meter (74-foot ) Lenin monument in the city center of Khujand, once known as Leninabad in honour of the Soviet founder.
-Agencies