Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Lenin Is Down and Out in Ukraine. Is Government Next?

In Ukraine, the chess game between protesters and the government could yet turn violent.

December 9, 2013 at 7:03 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

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The toppling of KGB founder Felix Dzerzhinsky's statue in Moscow in 1991 sent a powerful signal that the end of Communist rule was nigh. It's less certain what the destruction of Vladimir Lenin's statue in Kiev last night means for the future of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

After three weeks of protests, both sides now find themselves playing a positional chess game, unsure that they can afford serious violence.