Opinion: a temporary installation around a plinth that once hosted an infamous statue of Lenin in Ukraine accidentally highlights a deeper problem facing the city than what to do with the relics of Soviet rule, finds Owen Hatherley.

This month, the Mexican artist Cynthia Gutierrez staged an "intervention" in a public space in Kiev, Ukraine.
Called Inhabiting Shadows, it was one of several alterations, additions and engagements that have been made upon the city's former Lenin statue. The statue was erected in the 1950s in a prominent spot at the end of the tree-lined Taras Shevchenko Boulevard ? facing the late 19th-century Bessarabian Market across the city's Broadway or Oxford Street, the Khreschatyk ? and pulled down in 2013. Before the artwork was placed there, the plinth, still in place, was smeared randomly with blue and yellow paint; of the two quotations from Lenin embossed with gold, the one on "Soviet power" was scribbled out, the other, on how "a free Ukraine can be built only with unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers", was untouched. An impromptu plaque was nailed to the plinth, commemorating Sashko Bily, a fascist who was shot in suspicious circumstances in 2014.
Gutierrez's project replaced all that with a lightweight construction that enabled members of the public to climb up to take the place formerly occupied by the bronze likeliness of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
For the time you were up there, you were the monument
You could t...