Wind of change: Storm topples Lenin statue in Kazakhstan

A storm has toppled one of Central Asia's oldest Lenin statues and smashed it beyond repair, a local official in Kazakhstan said Friday.

"On the night of 7 to 8 November, the Lenin monument was destroyed by gusts of wind that toppled a nearby fir tree," a cultural official in the ex-Soviet country's Pavlodar region told AFP.

"As it fell from its pedestal, the statue was smashed into a thousand pieces and cannot be restored," said the official, Medet Alpysbaiuly.

The monument was unveiled on July 1, 1928. It was the only one in Kazakhstan to have Lenin's name written in the Kazakh language using Arabic characters, before the country switched to a Latin-based alphabet and then Cyrillic letters.

The statue was smashed on the symbolic date of November 7, the 107th anniversary of the 1917 revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power under Lenin's leadership.

Unlike some other ex-Soviet countries such as Ukraine and the Baltic states, the Central Asian states have not carried out a policy of large-scale de-Sovietisation and removal of statues from the era and retain close ties with Moscow.

But in recent years, officials in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have changed some Russian-sounding place names to ones that reflect national identity.

This has angered Russian politicians who have accused the countries of distancing themselves from Moscow, particularly after its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

In Russia's second city of Saint Petersburg, a Lenin statue was vandalised on Thursday with graffiti saying: "Judas and executioner."