Ukraine protesters fell Lenin statue in challenge to Yanukovich

Reuters ^ | Sun Dec 8, 2013 | By Alissa de Carbonnel and Pavel Polityuk

[1rudeboy]

Anti-government protesters toppled a statue of Soviet state founder Vladimir Lenin in Ukraine's capital and attacked it with hammers on Sunday in a symbolic challenge to President Viktor Yanukovich and his plans for closer ties with Russia.

The gesture rejecting Moscow's historic influence over Ukraine came after opposition leaders told hundreds of thousands of demonstrators on Kiev's Independence Square to keep up pressure on Yanukovich to sack his government.

The protesters are furious that the government decided last month to ditch a landmark pact with the European Union in favour of closer economic cooperation with Moscow, Ukraine's Soviet-era overlord.

Yanukovich's sudden tack towards Russia has provoked the biggest street protests since the 2004-5 Orange Revolution, when people power forced a re-run of a fraud-tainted election and thwarted his first run for the presidency.

"Yanukovich, you are next!" chanted protesters as they took turns to hack at the prostrate - and now headless - red granite statue of Lenin, leader of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.

Cheered by the crowd, a young woman planted an EU flag on the pedestal where the 3-1/2 metre high statue had stood since 1946. Opposition leaders denied any link to its removal.

The authorities and protesters have confronted each other for weeks, raising fears for political and economic stability in the former Soviet republic of 46 million people.

"This is a decisive moment when all Ukrainians have gathered here because they do not want to live in a country where corruption rules and where there is no justice," said Vitaly Klitschko, a world heavyweight boxing champion-turned-politician.

Ukraine's opposition accuses Yanukovich, who met Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday, of preparing to take the country into a Moscow-led customs union, which they see as an attempt to recreate the Soviet Union.

[Revolting cat!]

https://scontent-b-lax.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/1474571_10151887653308337_1510107439_n.jpg

[Gritty]

The problem is these protestors can’t win an election... The Ukraine may end up splitting in two. If you look at the voting map it seems all to probable.

HaHa. You had me for a moment there. I thought you were taking about America!

[goldstategop]

Its primarily a thumb in your eyes to Russia.

But even the opposition understands that the West is not going to help Ukraine cover losses from whatever sanctions Russia might impose.

Ukraine has little choice but to join the Russian-led customs union because its economic survival and geography make closeness to Russia imperative.

The West is not going to prop up Ukraine any more than it came to the aid of the Hungarians in 1956 or the Czechs in 1968. Ukraine is on its own. There is better truth in the notion the EU wants the kind of partnership in which it will not really stand behind Ukraine.

That much is already clear.

[Revolting cat!]

Very well stated. Nevertheless, EU, and particularly Germany and France need markets for their products and will make investments in the Ukraine just as they have made them in other East European countries. There’s a lot of freebies that come to underdeveloped countries with EU membership.

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

-— Anti-government protesters toppled a statue of Soviet state founder Vladimir Lenin in Ukraine’s capital and attacked it with hammers -—

That’s beautiful, man.

Are you listening college professors?

[1rudeboy]

The sound you hear is American professors wailing, along with the anti-EU FReepers (who cannot get over their bromance with Putin).

[Revolting cat!]

If my sources are correct, to American proffessoriat Lenin is the Jesus of Marxism, pure, unsinned, uncorruptible, and it was only his successors (with notable exceptions whose identities we outsiders would never guess, and I won’t attempt, except to note that they keep changing, I mean Enver Hoxha was one of them once), only Saint Vladimir’s successors who perverted and in the end betrayed (the criminals Gorbachev and Yeltsin) his sacred scripture, and this destruction of the holy religious monument is, what can we say, sacreligious, outrageous, impermissible.

[wildandcrazyrussian]

Not to mention that there are millions of people inside Ukraine who strongly deny that they ARE "Ukrainians" as a separate group from "Russians". Especially the Crimea (originally in Russia, handed over to Ukraine in 1954 by the Ukrainian Khrushchev); the eastern half of Ukraine, which had been in the Russian Empire and where they have always thought of themselves as Russian; the Black Sea coast including Odessa; and the Carpathian region, stolen by Stalin in 1945 from Czechoslovakia.

This last region (Carpatho-Russia) is a land of about a million people who have resisted the separatist movement of political Ukrainianism since it started in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutionary times. Even now, bordering Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine, they would prefer to be part of Russia proper, even if it were an outpost like Kaliningrad. They have been loyal to a sense of Russianness and Orthodoxy for centuries under foreign domination.

The current events are of one faction of many in the country, and are seemingly not aware that they are being used by Germany and other Western powers.

[1rudeboy]

Oh, please. There are Mexicans in Texas, too.

[Honorary Serb]

See my post #34, on the origin of the “Ukrainian” identity:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3099596/posts?page=34#34

Besides all the Russian-speaking Ukrainians in our (OCA) parish, there are also many Carpatho-Russin-Americans.

On Friday, we shall celebrate the feast of St. Herman, patron saint of America. Holy Father Herman, pray to God for our poor country!!!

[lentulusgracchus]

...rejection of Russia is anathema in places like the Crimea, that are overwhelmingly ethnic Russian in composition.

This is what demographic overrunning by an alien population gets you. As the name suggests, the Crimea used to be the home and possession of the Krim Tatars. Not many of them around any more .....

[lentulusgracchus]

For a more serious take on life in a totalitarian state, The Lives of Others is highly recommended.

Saw it. Excellent primer. The Low-Informed have no idea what Osagyefo has in store for them.

In the GDR, even luminaries like Katerina Witt, the Olympic skating champion, were required to report on others, and others reported on them.

Under the spreading chestnut tree,
I sold you and you sold me ....

George Orwell, 1984

[lentulusgracchus]

Find the cockroaches, and eliminate them, so they’ll never be a threat again.

Ummmm..... that's what the Hutu radio stations broadcast in 1994, as the "go" signal for the extermination of the Tutsis. See the film Hotel Rwanda.

Just sayin'.

[dfwgator]

Goodbye, Lenin! One of my all-time favorite movies.

[cunning_fish]

>>>This is what demographic overrunning by an alien population gets you. As the name suggests, the Crimea used to be the home and possession of the Krim Tatars. Not many of them around any more ..... <<<

Bottomline is Crimea has much stronger ties to Russia than it is to Ukraine. With of without Tatars who are a historic Russian ethnicity too (some 95% of Tatars are living in different parts of Russia).

[lentulusgracchus]

Had I not been otherwise engaged, I'd have been happy to buy that cast-iron statue of Feliks Dzherzhinsky from the Russians and move it from Dzherzhinsky Square, right outside KGB headquarters, to MI-6 headquarters and leave it with them. (Not, of course, telling the Russians in advance where I was taking it.) One of my old fantasies.

[RginTN]

Given what I’ve read about the EU it is worse than Russia. Never thought that would be my opinion but it is now.

[itssme]

“I wish someone would do that to the Lenin statue in Seattle.” Or to the pictures of obama when they're posted. When this ahole starts to erect statues of himself, then it'll be our turn to smash that image of the devil in Our White House to smithereens. No false idols in OUR White House.

[itssme]

I remember as a child living in a neighborhood of Chicago called Bridgeport, which was populated by the largest contingent of Lithuanians immigrants, the Communist Party had the nerve to open a newspaper office, giving it the name of Vilnus, which is/was the capitol of Lithuania. This newspaper was going to provide a “public service” to the Lithuanian immigrants in Chicago by giving them information about their loved ones in this communist controlled country. Well, the rest of the neighborhood didn't take a liking to the pictures of Marx and Engels that hung from the walls of this joint, and so they broke windows, defaced the building, and I think there was a “fire” also, and then they, the commie newspaper, was gone. That's what you do to commies, you get rid of them by any and all means, Today, this same neighborhood in Chicago is home to a communist/marxist/socialist meeting hall call The Unity Center...there are others located in the USA. And the neighborhood is also now home to newly arrived commies, socialists, marxists and revolutionaries/anarchists. Like cockroaches the battle to rid yourself of this pest is never ending. Hey, Bridgeport, what are you going to do about your commie infestation?

[HiTech RedNeck]

Showing that destruction is never a permanent cure for evil in people. The only real cure is reconstruction, supplying what is spiritually lacking for the people who do evil. Evil is, ultimately, a deficiency in goodness. We can hate Satan to the uttermost. But not people.