Dictator Art (ctd.)
May 9 2022
Picture: Euromaidan Press
The emptiness of a political regime can be measured by the statues it erects. In Ukraine, the Russians are putting up statues of Lenin wherever they can, as if a bad likeness of the first - if not the most - brutally murderous Soviet leader might somehow persuade the people of 'liberated' Ukraine of the benevolence of their new rulers. Meanwhile, in free Ukraine, they're just as busily taking down Soviet era monuments. Questions of the war aside, it's all a reminder that (further to the hoo ha in the West over monuments of slave owners and the like) statues are political acts first, artworks second.
