Кеңес Одағындағы ескерткіштер мен олардың тарихы

Aspect of art in the Soviet Union
Soviet era statues are statuary art that figured prominently in the art of the Soviet Union. Typically made in the style of Socialist Realism, they frequently depicted significant state and party leaders, such as Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin. The construction of large monumental statues was a key part of Lenin's strategy of "Monumental propaganda" which proposed the use visual art to propagate revolutionary ideas. Such symbolism included other statues that were portrayals of realist allegorical figures in motion, figuratively striding forward into the new Soviet age, as well as Soviet role models, such as Nurkhon Yuldasheva. Statues of prominent socialist figures particularly of Lenin were mass produced and installed in villages, towns and cities across the Soviet Union. After World War Two, the socialist states of the Eastern Bloc similarly produced a large number of statues.

After the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, his successor Nikita Khrushchev began to relax the repressive policies of Stalin's government in a period known as the Khrushchev Thaw. This culminated in Khrushchev's 1956 Secret Speech denouncing Stalinism. Statues that represented Stalin's cult of personality were subsequently removed from most public spaces in the Soviet Union and its satellite states as part of a process of "De Stalinization". The only statue of Stalin in Budapest, Hungary, was destroyed by citizens during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution; no replacement was ever made.

The Euromaidan protests in Ukraine saw a wave of Soviet era monuments being destroyed by protesters; a notable example being the Vladimir Lenin monument in Kyiv, the destruction of which by ultranationalists was opposed by the majority of Kyiv's residents. The Statue of Lenin in Kharkiv the largest statue of Lenin in Ukraine was also toppled in 2014 by protesters including members of the Azov Battalion. In 2015 Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko approved laws that required the removal of all socialist symbolism in public places, with the exception of World War Two memorials. As of 2016, 1,320 Lenin monuments and 1,069 monuments to other socialist figures have been removed, with the last remaining monuments being either within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone or in areas under Russian occupation. In August 2023 in the midst of the Russo Ukrainian War, the Soviet state emblem on the shield of the Mother Ukraine Monument was replaced with the Ukrainian trident emblem.