Kate Moss: Old charm

Moscow, Nov. 2: Russia’s western-most city has bucked the revisionist trend by naming a square after Lenin and re-erecting a statue of the Bolshevik leader.

Kaliningrad dismantled the 12-ft bronze statue last year when its central Victory Square was re-landscaped. But the city has yielded to pressure from elderly communist diehards who do not want to see the Soviet-era monument vanish.

“Polls show that 18 per cent of the population regard Lenin with respect and we have no right to ignore that,” mayor Yury Savchenko said.

A small square off the appropriately-named Lenin Avenue will be the statue’s new home.

Typical of the hundreds of such monuments which were dotted across the old Soviet Union, it portrays Lenin standing with his arm flexed, coat flapping in the wind.

Hundreds were pulled down after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Some were abandoned but others were sold to the West, with one now gracing the lobby of a Las Vegas casino.

Kaliningrad’s decision to rehabilitate the founder of the Soviet state is surprising, however, as the city prides itself on its western outlook.

The Lenin cult was one of the last remnants of the Soviet system to survive the revision of the USSR’s history in the 1980s.

Officials close to the Kremlin have urged the removal of Lenin’s mummified remains from his mausoleum on Red Square, and Russia spends ?850,000 a year maintaining and guarding them in the communist shrine.