Ukraine sculptor transforms a statue of Lenin into Darth Vader.

"I wish to save the monuments of history. I’m trying to clean up the operating system and keep them on the hard drive of memory."

Said Alexander Milov, who shouldn't be considered a vandal, since his transformation preserves the statute, which was slated to be removed after the Ukrainian parliament passed a "de-Communisation" law.

"We are gathering all these statues – like Lenin – and we would like to make a park of forlorn heroes of the epoch,” says Milov. “I want to take the statues out of the central squares of cities and put them in a different place like Disneyland, where they can be visited. It seems to me that if these statues are destroyed, people coming after us will have no possibility to make conclusions for themselves as to whether people needed them or not."

That would be like Grutas Park in Lithuania, which we talked about here and here last winter. But Milov prefers to keep the statues where they are and to "turn them into characters from Soviet cartoons."

As for the Darth Vader Lenin: "I wanted to make a symbol of American pop culture which appears to be more durable than the Soviet ideal." Interestingly, aptly, he put a Wi-Fi router in its head.

By the way, in the second of the 2 linked posts from last winter, we talked about the controversy about whether some aesthetically pleasing statues on The Green Bridge (in Vilnius, Lithuania) should be relocated to Grutas Park. I expressed concern about moving high-quality sculpture that "was designed for a particular site" because it "is partly destroyed when it is moved, even though it is otherwise preserved," and I asked: "If something is artistically good, but a remnant of an earlier time that the people who control the place now wish to reject completely, what should they do?"

The bridge sculptures were removed this past July, to be replaced by flowers.