Vladimir Lenin’s body remains on display in the mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow. However, his monuments are not preserved across all of Russia, let alone in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, where the process of de-Sovietization is unfolding at an uneven pace.
According to the Leninstatues.ru portal, a digital archive of Lenin statues across the former Soviet Union, a total of 14,290 Lenin monuments had been erected in the USSR by 1991. Of those, 7,194 are still standing today.
On the night of June 7, 2025, a monument to Lenin was dismantled in Osh, Kyrgyzstan’s second most populous city. Measuring roughly 25 meters in height, it was regarded as one of the tallest Lenin monuments in Central Asia.
The statue had been located in a central part of Osh, near the Park of Love and the park named after Toktogul Satylganov (1864-1933), a prominent Kyrgyz composer and poet.
City officials have not yet announced whether the monument will be relocated or permanently removed from public space. Possible options include transferring it to a museum or reinstalling it at another site.
Following a series of public discussions, the mayor’s office ultimately decided to dismantle the statue. The Lenin monument had long been a source of debate among residents: some viewed it as a relic of outdated ideology that should be removed, while others saw it as part of the city’s historical and cultural heritage.
A similar move took place in 2003 in the capital, Bishkek, where a Lenin statue erected in 1984 was moved from Ala-Too Square to a site behind the National Historical Museum.
Meanwhile, some municipal authorities in Kazakhstan have shown little urgency in removing Lenin monuments.
A 2021 study by Kazakh researcher Aruzhan Meirkhanova found that more than 300 Lenin statues have been demolished in Kazakhstan since the country gained independence in 1991. In addition to dismantling, Kazakhstani authorities have often employed a strategy of «displacement and replacement.» By relocating Lenin statues from central locations to less prominent areas, officials have diminished their symbolic significance while freeing up public space for new monuments. For example, in 1997, a Lenin statue in Almaty was removed from its central location and replaced with a monument honoring World War II heroes Manshuk Mametova and Aliya Moldagulova. The Lenin statue was relocated to a remote square and, in 2011, was removed from the list of state-protected monuments.
In June 2023, Serik Shapkenov, governor of the Atyrau region, explained why the Lenin monument in one of the city’s districts remained in place. He said the presence of a Soviet-era monument does not influence the beliefs of modern Kazakhstanis. According to Shapkenov, the monument has been preserved out of respect for those who lived and worked during the Soviet period.
In August 2023, a pretrial investigation was launched into the toppling of a Lenin monument in the town of Altai in the East Kazakhstan region. During renovation work on the city’s central square, construction crews planned to restore the monument’s pedestal. However, when the pedestal’s slabs were removed, the forklift caused the monument to shift and fall from its base.
Kursiv.media previously reported that in Verkhnyaya Pyshma, a city in Russia’s Sverdlovsk region, a Lenin monument was repurposed as a ramp for skateboarding.
