Lina Mackonyte takes a break from sightseeing in Gruto Park to write emails to friends beside a statue of Soviet Union founder Vladimir Lenin in Druskininkai, Lithuania, on August 9, 2001. #

In Seattle's Fremont neighborhood, a statue of Lenin, relocated from Czechoslovakia in 1993. Washington resident Lewis Carpenter, teaching English abroad, saw artistic value in the monument and rescued it from a scrapyard, paid for it, plus shipping costs, and had it moved to Seattle. The following year, Carpenter was killed in a car accident and ownership of the statue moved to his family, who arranged to have it placed in Fremont. The placement is temporary, as the family is still seeking a buyer. #

A student swings a club at a bust of Lenin in front of a pile of communist and Pro-Nkrumah literature that was burned outside the Congress Hall in Accra, Ghana, on February 28, 1966. Destruction of the communist effects took place following a coup which ousted Ghana's President Kwame Nkrumah, during the week February 20. #

Armed pro-Russian militants guard a checkpoint, on which is placed a bust of Lenin, in the village of Semenovka, near the eastern Ukrainian city of Slavyansk, on May 22, 2014. #

A Cuban soldier stands guard in front of a monument to the Soviet Union's founder, Vladimir Lenin, in Havana, Cuba, Thursday, April 22, 1999, on the 129th anniversary of his birth. Lenin, who led Russia's 1917 Bolshevik revolution, died of a stroke in 1924 at the age of 53. #

A crumbling bust of Soviet state founder Vladimir Lenin stands in the center of the town of Sviyazhsk, some 750 km (400 miles) east of Moscow, on July 4, 1994, used as a pasture for cows and goats by local residents. #

A worker sorts hundreds of busts of Russian Bolshevik revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin in a factory built in 1934 on the outskirts of Moscow on November 24, 1993. The factory was one of the most important producers of communist monuments (about 5,000 per year) for the former Soviet Union. #

Russian forensic experts examine the holes from a bomb blast in a monument of Vladimir Lenin in St. Petersburg on April 1, 2009. Vandals set off an explosion that damaged one of the last Soviet-era monuments to the Communist leader in Russia's former imperial capital. #

At a depth of 14 meters, an amateur scuba diver shines a light at a bust of Lenin while viewing an underwater museum of monuments to communist leaders of the former Soviet Union on Monday August 19, 1996, in the Black sea resort Cape Tarkhankut on the Crimean Penninsula, 200 kilometers west of Simferopol. #

In this picture taken on December 11, 2009, a child walks on the statue of Vladimir Lenin, abandoned in the backyard of the Mogosoaia Palace, Romania, after being removed from a Bucharest square in 1990 as work to restore the church of the Mogosoaia Palace takes place. #

A frozen monument to Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin, covered in ice, as the temperature dropped below -30 degrees Celsius (-22 degrees Fahrenheit)in downtown Yakutsk on December 28, 2009. #

Left: Two Russian soldiers, now prisoners of war, inspect a giant statue of Lenin, somewhere in Russia, on August 9, 1941, torn from its pedestal and smashed by the Nazis in their advance. Note the rope round the neck of the statue, left there by the Nazis. Right: Seventy-year-old militiaman Fazleh Khoda aims his AK-47 automatic rifle at a strangled bust of the founder of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin, outside the Afghan Foreign Minister building on May 13, 1992 in Kabul, Afghanistan. #

Protesters pull down a statue of Lenin during a mass rally called "The March of a Million" in Kiev's Independence Square on December 8, 2013. Ukrainians protesting against the government's rejection of a key pact with the European Union today toppled the statue in central Kiev, police said. #

Russian Nobel prize winner in physics, Zhores Alferov (right) and members of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist party applaud in front of Lenin's bust during the XIII party's congress in Moscow on November 29, 2008. #

A Lithuanian girl sits on a toppled statue of Vladimir Lenin on September 1, 1991 in Vilnius, after the monument was removed from the center of the Lithuanian capital in the aftermath of the failed coup in the Soviet Union. #

A gardener works next to a statue of Lenin in downtown Hanoi, Vietnam on April 22, 2010 where Vietnamese authorities commemorate the 140th anniversary of the Russian communist leader Vladimir Lenin while reaffirming the pursuing of the socialist path in the Southeast Asian communist nation. #

Romanian citizens strike the head of a Lenin statue, after two cranes lifted it from the base in front of the State Publishing House in Bucharest, Romania, on March 5, 1990. #

Georgian soldiers participating in NATO training exercises walk near a broken statue of the Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin, foreground, at Vaziani military base, a former Soviet military facility, outside Tbilisi, Georgia, on May 31, 2009. #

An activist dismantles Ukraine's biggest monument to Lenin at a pro-Ukrainian rally in the central square of the eastern city of Kharkiv, Ukraine, on September 28, 2014. #

A man walks past a bust of Lenin in the Russian village of Barentsburg on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard on April 26, 2007. Only Russia, among many countries, has exercised a right to settle on the remote islands under an international treaty. #

Finnish Embassy representative Antero Inkari checks the radiation level in front of a vandalized monument to Lenin in the deserted town of Pripyat, Ukraine, near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on April 24, 1999. #

The 12.5 meter (41 foot) high statue of Lenin is lifted from its pedestal in Tajikistan's second largest city of Khujand on May 30, 2011. Tajikistan pulled down Central Asia's tallest statue of revolutionary Russian leader Vladimir Lenin as it sought to distance itself from its Soviet past. The statue was moved to a park on the outskirts of the city. #

Ethiopian youths chant as they stand on a toppled statue of Russian Bolshevik revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin on May 23, 1991 in Addis Ababa, two days after the departure in exile of Ethiopian pro-communist strongman Mengistu Haile Mariam. Mengistu, who, after a coup in 1977, set out to create a socialist state in Ethiopia aligned with the communist bloc, was overthrown in 1991 by the Ethiopian People's Democratic Front. #

Workers try to put together parts of a statue of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin that was found in a Jewish mass grave in Jedwabne, Poland, on Thursday May 31, 2001. Exhumation works are taking place at the site where, in 1941, Jews from the northeastern Polish town of Jedwabne were massacred by their Polish neighbors. According to witnesses, the massacred Jews were made to haul the Lenin statue to the place where they were killed. #

Crane operator Howard Standley checks the progress of a five-ton bust of Vladimir Lenin as it arrives at Sotheby's in Billinghurst on October 29, 1997. The 2.6 meter bronze bust was shipped from Latvia where it had stood in the town square until the fall of Communism. #

The famous statue of the Vladimir Lenin is photographed as it lies in the back of a truck after being dismantled on October 14, 2012 in Ulan Bator, Mongolia. The Soviet-era statue was neglected and a decision was made by the mayor of Ulan Bator to have it removed because it represented the repression of the Soviet years. #

A Bulgarian cleaning lady sweeps the head of a giant monument of Vladimir Lenin in the Black Sea city of Varna on January 21, 1999. The monument, which was based in the center of the city, was removed in 1992 and was stored in the garden of the local history museum. #