A chain saw cut through a thin layer of aluminum alloy with much whining but little difficulty—the monument’s neck was hollow.

Then someone hit the top of the monument with a metal rod, and the head fell off, hitting the concrete floor. The rest of the monument remained intact. It was the dark winter evening of 28 December 2010.

The young men belonged to Tryzub (Trident), a Ukrainian nationalist organization named after Stepan Bandera, the leader of a faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) during World War II. The statue they beheaded was a monument to Joseph Stalin. On the following day, 29 December, Tryzub claimed responsibility for what had happened in Zaporizhzhia. The statement released by the organization read: “On 28 Decem­ber an unidentified mobile group belonging to the Stepan Bande­ra Tryzub in Zaporizhzhia successfully carried out a national de­fense action, liquidating the Stalin-Dzhugashvili illegally erected on the territory of the Zaporizhzhia Oblast committee of the CPU [Communist Party of Ukraine].” Although the communists denied that anything of that nature had befallen the monument, their bluff was soon called when a video appeared on YouTube documenting the decapitation. The young men from Tryzub had taped the whole procedure, which has now been viewed almost sixty thousand times (including a few times by this author).¹

This essay discusses the significance and broader implications of events that happened in Zaporizhzhia on the night of 28 De­cember 2010 and in the days and months preceding and following the event. Its immediate goal is to explain why a monument to Stalin appeared, of all places, in Ukraine, a recent poster child for the Western democratic project in Eastern Europe; why it was damaged by people associated with the name of Stepan Bandera, the leader of the most radical group of Ukrainian nationalists during World War II; and what this tells us about political and memory wars in contemporary Ukraine. The essay’s ultimate goal is to contribute to our understanding of the interrelation of pol­itics and memory in post-communist societies.