Russian city to get Lenin square

A new square in the Russian city of Kaliningrad will be named after Vladimir Lenin, complete with a restored statue of the Bolshevik Revolution leader, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported today.

Yuri Savenko, mayor of the capital of the Baltic Sea exclave, told reporters that a square being created in the centre of the city will be called Lenin Square, and a statue that had been taken down from another square for restoration will be erected there, ITAR-Tass reported.

“Opinion polls demonstrate that 18% of the city’s people respect Lenin, and we have no right to ignore that,” the agency quoted Savenko as saying.

He said the statue could not be returned to its former place in Victory Square because of architectural considerations following a renovation of the square.

Most Russian cities had squares or streets named after Lenin during the Soviet era.

The names have been changed in some cases since the 1991 Soviet collapse but left unchanged in many others, such as Moscow’s Lenin Avenue.