Filling or leaving Lenin’s void? Regime type and monument politics in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan

Abstract

The collapse of the Soviet Union left a symbolic void across post-Soviet public spaces, most visibly in the removal of Lenin statues. This article examines why Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan managed this void so differently. Kazakhstan, a personalist authoritarian regime, pursued a gradual, state-managed strategy of legal delisting and relocation. Kyrgyzstan, a competitive authoritarian regime, produced a contested, incoherent process: a 2000 law protected the central Lenin statue; a 2003 decree ordered its removal, triggering a parliamentary crisis; only in 2025 did local authorities in Osh dismantle the country’s largest statue. Drawing on government decrees from national legal databases and secondary literature, the study traces how each country handled its Lenin monuments. The article argues that regime type explains these divergent outcomes, conditioned by state capacity and relations with Russia. The findings demonstrate that monument substitution constitutes a fundamental act of post-Soviet nation-building.