Oct 04, 2022
By Jeremy Logan
The country’s last publicly displayed statue of Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin has been removed from a city in southeastern Finland.
Residents of Kotka had lobbied local authorities to remove the statue in the aftermath of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
On Tuesday, a group of construction workers in the port city near Finland’s border with Russia hoisted the statue into a truck and drove it to a local museum warehouse.
According to the museum’s director, the bronze bust was created on Moscow’s orders and presented to Kotka in 1979.
Presenting such statues was a common practice by Moscow in the post-World War II era to emphasize the Finnish-Soviet friendship.
The Lenin statue was in a central Kotka park, next to a wooden house where the Bolshevik party founder and first Premier of the Soviet Union is said to have stayed.
The statue had been vandalized over the years, but it remained in the park until Kotka’s city council decided to remove it.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine more than seven months ago, other European countries have moved to demolish their remaining Soviet-era monuments.
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