The Fall of Statues? Contested Heritage, Public Space and Urban Planning: Edited by Katie McClymont.

Stoney's Executive Order preceded a new state law taking effect which grants local governments the right to make decisions about the alteration or removal of their war memorials, and he acted without the authorization of the city council, though they ratified Stoney's order in early August. These Soviet artifacts were constructed to commemorate historical epochs in "Kyivan Rus", a medieval political conglomerate of the East Slavs, now believed to be a predecessor of the states of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus (Subtelny, [50], pp. 19-21). Instead, decommunization has been most effective as an antithesis to the Soviet state's "monumental propaganda", a Communist-era policy that was responsible for the countless Soviet toponyms and for the most ideologically charged architecture and monumental art that decommunization is addressing. There is currently no universal consensus on whether Ukraine is a post-colonial state, nor whether Russia and the Soviet Union were actual colonizers or just agents of modernization (see Hirsch, [39]; Hrytsak, [40]; Kuzjo, [43]; Martin, [44]; Slezkine, [49]). RMF: The Philosophical Project Whilst the fall of Rhodes' statue is a pivotal moment in the history of the RMF movement, the movement aims to have all statues, plaques and monuments at UCT that valorise figures like Rhodes, who is a "symbol of genocide, enslavement, conquest, colonization, apartheid, material dispossession and author of inequalities haunting South Africa today" (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, [19], p. 222), removed. [Extracted from the article]