
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, July 23, 1990                   TAG: 9007230240
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A/1   EDITION: EVENING 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: MOSCOW                                LENGTH: Medium

STATUES OF LENIN TOPPLED, DEFACED

In unprecedented attacks on the Soviet Union's most sacred icon, vandals are defacing and toppling statues of Vladimir Lenin, and one city is even relegating its statue to the ultimate capitalist fate: selling it to the highest bidder.

Weekend reports in the state-run media said statues of the Soviet founder have been toppled in two dozen towns in the southern republic of Georgia, "barbarously disfigured" in Lithuania and, to the outrage of local Communists, dismantled and put up for sale in the Ukraine city of Ternopol.

All the incidents came in republics that have active independence movements and growing nationalistic sentiment.

Under President Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, past Soviet leaders like Josef Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev have been denounced in the official press, and monuments and plaques in their honor have been taken down.

Lenin is still officially lionized. But that doesn't mean all Soviet citizens hold him sacred.

In the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, police are guarding the Lenin statue in the city's central square around the clock to keep it from suffering the same fate as a bronze monument that was toppled near the Zemo-Avchalskaya hydroelectric station in another part of town, the newspaper Soviet Culture reported Saturday.

"He was lying looking at me with his frightening, empty eyes, the creator of my motherland, U.S.S.R. - Vladimir Lenin," wrote correspondent S. Babayev of the toppled statue. He added that the plant's labor committee decided to destroy the statue.

In recent weeks, monuments to the Soviet founder were destroyed in the Georgian towns of Kodzhori, Kutaisi, Batumi and about two dozen others. Attempts were made to topple them in the Azerbaijan capital of Baku and the Armenian capital of Yerevan, Soviet Culture reported.

Official criticism of Lenin is not unheard of.

In the spring, a bust of him was removed from the chambers of the City Council in Moscow, where radical reformers won local elections earlier this year. And one critic suggested this year that his body be removed from its Red Square mausoleum and buried. But such attacks were rare.

In Ternopol, about 200 miles west of Kiev, the City Council voted 64-0 with 21 abstentions to remove the statues of Lenin and Karl Marx from the central square and sell them, according to the newspaper Rural Life. It quoted Ternopol's local party ideologist, Yelena Sosnitskaya.

by CNB