Ukrainian city dismantles monument to iconic Soviet poet & singer
A monument to the renowned Soviet poet, singer and actor Vladimir Vysotsky has been removed in Odessa overnight, the city’s film studio said on Tuesday. The statue was located near its premises.
The Odessa Film Studio received “numerous inquiries” from locals in the wake of the monument’s “disappearance,” a statement published on Facebook said. It then said that the statue had been dismantled on the orders of local authorities on Monday evening and handed over to “our company for storage.”
The statue is currently on the premises of the film studio, which will ensure its proper preservation, the statement said, adding that it plans to install the tribute near one of its facilities within its territory and is currently going through the approval procedure with the authorities.
The monument to Vysotsky was unveiled in front of the Odessa Film Studio in a ceremony attended by his son, Nikita, back in 2012. A popular Soviet detective TV series, ‘The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed’, was filmed there. In that series, Vysotsky played one of his iconic screen parts — that of major crimes detective Gleb Zheglov, who was basically a Soviet version of ‘Dirty Harry’.
The Odessa city council put the statue on a list of almost two dozen monuments that supposedly symbolize “Russian imperial policy” back in September. The list also included a 19th century monument to Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, which was designated a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site; it was demolished earlier in December.
The idea of removing the monuments was pushed by the regional governor, Oleg Kiper. In September, he claimed the government in Kiev had excluded monuments to Soviet and Russian figures from the national register of cultural sites, automatically removing them from UNESCO protection.
Since the start of Moscow’s military operation in 2022, the campaign to remove historical links to Russia and its culture has intensified in Ukraine. As part of the push, Kiev passed a law on what it called the “decolonization” of street signs, monuments, memorials, and inscriptions. In December 2022, a statue of Catherine the Great was torn down in Odessa, even though she’d founded the city in 1794.
The drive was opposed by Odessa Mayor Gennady Trukhanov, who insisted this summer that tributes erected by “our great-great-great-grandfathers and grandmothers” should remain in place.
