In April a law was passed in Ukraine banning all communist propaganda, including monuments, place and street names. Naturally, hundreds of statues will be demolished and the statues of Vladimir Lenin across the country would have to be destroyed.
However, Ukrainian sculptor, Alexander Milov thought it would be wiser to convert a statue of Lenin into a world's first monument for the Sith lord, Anakin Skywalker, or the Darth Vader than having it destroyed. According to a report from The Guardian, the statue emits a force from the head in a form of Wi-fi and made more stable by a helmet and cape made of titanium alloy. The artist hoped that the monument will have millions of Star wars fans from all over the world to come and visit the spot.
In an exclusive interview with BBC via a telephone from Ukraine, Milov said that having born in the USSR, it is now tantamount in saying that he is a child of a country that does not exist anymore. "I wish to save the monuments of history," Milov said using a metaphor of how in doing so, it is like he is saving a memory of his country inside a computer's system.
Milov explained that in as much as he wants to obey the new Ukrainian law requiring the destruction of communists symbols, he did not want the statue of Lenin to be vandalized. "I decided to take a monument to Lenin and transform it into a monument to Darth Vader because at this moment Darth Vader is a political figure in Ukraine," the artist said. In order to save the Lenin monument but at the same time hide it from plain view and keep it safe from the new law, he transformed it to what he described as "a new art piece with a new sense."
The new Darth Vader monument will actually be the first to many statues of its kind that Milov plans to do. He is thinking of a park of Communist monuments transformed into characters like Darth Vader.
"We are gathering all these statues - like Lenin - and we would like to make a park of forlorn heroes of the epoch. I want to take the statues out of the central squares of cities and put them in a different place like Disneyland, where they can be visited," he said.
Ukrainians seemed to have this amusing obsession of Star Wars. During the country's 2014 election, the Internet Party of Ukraine had Darth Vader run as prime minister. Other candidates of the party were Chewbacca, Padme Amidala and Yoda, BBC said in a separate report.