Monument to Stalin to be set up in Minsk

• 14.10.2009, 9:07

The Belarusian left-wing started to raise fund to erect a monument to Joseph Stalin in Minsk.

RIA Novosti learnt this from Leanid Shkolnikau, the coordinator of the republican public association “For Union and Communist Party of the Union”.

“On the 130th anniversary of Joseph Stalin’s birth we started a raising fund campaign to set up a monument in Minsk,” Shkolnikau said. According to the official version, Stalin was born on December 21, 1879.

“We need to restore historical justice, collect money to erect the monument on a Minsk square,” Shkolnikau said explaining the reasons for the initiative.

The head of department of historical and cultural heritage and restoration of the Ministry of Culture of Belarus Ihar Charnyauski doesn’t welcome an idea of setting up a monument to Stalin in Minsk.

“This person is controversial and ambiguous. To set up any monument, moreover like this one, we need historical justification,” Charnyauski said.

He noted that the question of setting monuments in Belarus lied beyond the competence of public associations. “There is a regulation of the Council of Ministers on monumental objects, which says a decision on setting monuments can be made on a republican level or by municipal authorities,” the head of the department noted.

As the Republican expert council on monuments says, all sculptural and graphic representation of the former Soviet leaders possessing artistic value are kept in museum reserve stocks. The biggest collection of sculptures of Lenin and Stalin is kept in workshop-museum of sculptor Zair Azgur. The collection also includes monuments to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, constructed n front f the entrance to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belarus in Soviet times.