The
current Republic Square in Yerevan was called Lenin Square during
Soviet times and a huge statue of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the
Soviet Union, was the dominant feature of the square for more than fifty
years.
In
his blueprints of modern Yerevan, architect Alexander Tamanian located
the future statue at the intersection of the square and the city
boulevard (currently Vazgen Sargsian Street). At the end of the 1920, a
two-meter obelisk was installed at the place with an inscription that
marked it as the future location of the statue.
An
open competition of projects for Lenin’s statue was launched in 1938.
The winners were Sergei Merkurov (1881-1952), Popular Painter of the
USSR, and two young architects who lived in Tiflis, the spouses Levon
Vardanov (Vardanian) and Natalya Paremuzova.
The
monument was designed to have 18 meters of height, including the
pedestal. Merkurov refused to have the statue melted in bronze, due to
its height (7 meters), and suggested using forged copper. The couple
Vardanov-Paremuzova prepared the designs for the granite pedestal with
Armenian traditional ornamentation inspired from a
khachkar
(stone cross) found in Gosh.
The
statue was installed on November 24, 1940, on the twentieth anniversary
of the sovietization of Armenia. It was considered one of the best
representations of Lenin in the entire Soviet Union. The project of
Republic Square won the state prize in 1970 թվականին, and architects
Vardanov and Paremuzova also received the prize posthumously.
Twice
a year, on May 1 (commemoration of Labor Day) and November 7
(anniversary of the October Revolution), the leadership of Soviet
Armenia, standing on the three rostrums especially built-in at the
pedestal, reviewed the workers’ parade. Every ten years, a wooden
attachment was added to the sides of the central rostrum; the fourteen
first secretaries of the Central Committees of the Communist Party in
the other Soviet republics arrived in Yerevan to participate in the
fortieth (1961), fiftieth (1970), and sixtieth (1980) anniversaries of
Soviet Armenia. They were preceded by the highest leaders of the country
in 1961 (Nikita Khruschev) and 1970 (Leonid Brezhnev). The last such
parade happened in November 1988.
After
the declaration of independence was approved by the Supreme Council
(Parliament) of Armenia on August 23, 1990, and the “Armenian Soviet
Socialist Republic” was replaced by the Republic of Armenia, it was only
a matter of the time for Lenin’s statue to go. On March 28, 1991, the
decision to dismantle the statue was approved at a session of the
Municipal Council of Yerevan with two negative votes and four
abstentions. It entrusted the executive committee of the Municipal
Council to finish the dismantling by April 22. The operation was
executed on April 23. A crane carefully severed the head from the body
of the statue, with a multitude of people enthusiastically watching one
of the symbols of the Communist regime being toppled. Both sections of
the statue remained for several years in the courtyard of the National
Gallery of Armenia, on the opposite side of Republic Square, and the
head was later confined to the deposit of the gallery. The empty
pedestal remained on its site until July 1996, when the government of
the Republic allowed the authorities of Yerevan to proceed to its
dismantling. The remainders of the pedestal are kept at the
municipality’s deposit in the neighborhood of Charbakh.
