City to get Lenin square

A new square in the Baltic city of Kaliningrad will be named after Vladimir Lenin, complete with a restored statue of Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution leader.

Mayor Yuri Savenko said a square being created in the centre of the city would be called Lenin Square and a statue that had been taken down from another square for restoration would be erected there, ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

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

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.