Giant Lenin Head Unearthed In Berlin 24 Years After Its Burial, For Exhibition On Disappeared Monuments

Nearly 25 years after the fall of the Berlin wall — which brought about the destruction of Lenin and Marx statues across the former Soviet Union — a giant statue of Vladimir Lenin’s head has been unearthed in Berlin.

The giant Lenin head was originally part of a 62-foot tall full body statue of Lenin that once stood on Lenin Square in communist East Berlin before the wall came down. When the wall fell, the giant statue of the Soviet dictator was removed from it’s spot and cut up into 100 pieces. Those pieces were then buried in a sand pit a forest outside of Berlin.

It has taken several years for historians and museum directors to get to the point of unearthing the giant Lenin head. Originally, city authorities were saying that they had no idea where the head was buried, but the problem was solved when an American film-maker living based in Berlin named Rick Minnich came forward to say he had filmed the giant head being buried 24 years ago, and knew exactly where it was to this day.

That wasn’t the end of the expected opposition to the unearthing of Lenin’s head, however, says Andrea Theissen, the Spandau Citadel museum curator, according tothe Telegraph.

“We had assumed people would see the story with different eyes after all this time. But it was not as simple as we expected.”

Opposition came from many different places. Some people, still scarred by Lenin’s dictatorship, didn’t want the head exhibited at all, while others claimed digging the head up would cost far too much.

Eventually, directors at the Spandau Citadel museum got the go ahead to unearth the head, but the excavation was halted once more while environmentalists removed and resettled an endangered species of sand lizard that had made their home near the head.

It wasn’t easy to get the giant Lenin head out of the sand where it’s lain for nearly a quarter of a century — the solid granite head weighs nearly four tons! A crane had to be used to lift the head once it had been dug up, and now Lenin’s colossal cranium will be put on permanent display at the Spadnau Citadel as part of a permanent exhibition showcasing Berlin’s disappeared monuments. The giant Lenin head will be the centerpiece of the display, among other monuments from the 18th century to the present that were once part of Berlin — including some Nazi statues. The museum permanent exhibition will allow museum visitors to follow the timeline of Berlin’s history through the viewing of monuments that once stood proud in the streets of Berlin, says Theissen.

[Image Credits: The Telegraph]