‘Russophobic gesture’: Communists denounce plans to remove Seattle Lenin statue

“The war of monuments is under way, but there are a lot of Lenin monuments all over the Earth. We denounce vandalism because different monuments must exist,” the secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Sergey Obukhov, was quoted as saying on Friday by RIA Novosti.

“I understand that the mayor of Seattle is doing this to please the kind of leftists whose activities, I would say, included the organization of clashes in Seattle,” he added.

Russian Communist Party MP Dmitry Novikov stated that the plans to remove the statue were just another manifestation of the anti-Soviet, anti-Communist and anti-Russian mood.

“If the mayor of Seattle tries to connect the campaign against Confederate monuments and the campaign against Lenin’s statue it looks rather strange, because Lenin was in strong opposition to all forms of slavery and all forms of social violence. He was for justice and personal freedom, he had created a party that was steadily fighting against the absolute monarchy in our country,” Novikov said. 

“This cannot be called anything else but an attempt to remain in some political trend,” the Russian lawmaker added.

The 5-meter-high bronze statue of Bolshevik leader Lenin installed in Seattle is privately owned, after being bought from the Slovakian authorities in the early 1990s. The owner says that he put the statue on display because he is looking to sell it.

On Thursday, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray called for the statue to be removed because it allegedly represented historic injustice as well as hate and violence.

In the same statement, the mayor said he wanted to remove a memorial to Confederate soldiers for the same reasons.

Shortly before that, a group of activists supporting President Donald Trump protested against the Lenin statue in Seattle with posters reading “Lenin is Hitler” and “Tear it down.” The protest was apparently a reply to the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, where authorities had ordered the removal of the monument to Confederate commander Robert E. Lee, sparking a major standoff between leftist and rightist groups that ended in violence and one death.