WORLD
Mongolia’s last Lenin Statue goes on auction
Baku, January 11 (AZERTAC). The last bronze statue of Vladimir Lenin was dismantled in the Mongolian capital, Ulan Bator in October. The monument was hoisted off its plinth in a park and dropped on to a flat-bed lorry at a ceremony attended by the Mayor, Bat-Uul Erdene.
The statue would be auctioned off with a starting price of about $33.000. During the Cold War, Mongolia was effectively a Soviet satellite state. Mongolia had suffered at the hands of the communists but had moved on to create an open society. For decades Vladimir Lenin was worshipped by Mongolian schoolchildren as Teacher Lenin, the BBC's Michael Kohn reports from Ulan-Bator. In 1990 the country abandoned its one-party state system and embraced political and economic reforms. A crowd of around 300 people gathered to watch the statue being taken down. A few threw old shoes at it to display their distaste at the former Soviet leader. Many statues of Lenin, who died in 1924, remain standing around Russia and other countries once under Soviet control.
