John Lennon Monument in Mohyliv-Podilskyi, Ukraine

The John Lennon monument in Mohyliv-Podilskyi, a Ukrainian town on the Dniester facing Moldova, stands beside the entrance to the city park on Hetmana Sahaidachnoho Street. Sculptor Oleksiy Aloshkin carved it from granite around 1989 to 1990 after pupils of School No. 6 asked for a Lennon memorial and raised the money.

A request from School No. 6

The fullest version of the story comes from Aloshkin himself, as retold by the travel writer Halyna Zalutska in 2015. In 1988 a few pupils at the town's School No. 6 wanted a memorial to John Lennon. They wrote to a Beatles fan club in Moscow and heard nothing back. So they tried the local Komsomol committee, which, oddly enough, pointed them to Aloshkin, a sculptor living in the village of Bukatynka.

In the Balka quarry near Bukatynka he found a rock whose outline reminded him of a guitar, and he carved Lennon out of it. The finished stone then sat in the quarry for almost a year before it was brought to town.

One night by the park

The pupils set the stone up by what was then Gorky Park, where it stands today. Militia arrived and surrounded the teenagers and the statue, but so many townspeople came to watch that the cordon was lifted. Young people stayed all night, playing guitars by candlelight.

At about nine the next morning the town party committee ordered the statue removed, because a Lenin monument stood nearby. A truck took it to the local museum, and it was hidden there. A local guide quoted in 2026 tells it with more drama: police wanted the sculpture thrown into the Dniester, and Lenin stood only 20 metres away.

Museum, church, park

At the time the museum occupied St Nicholas Church. The pupils kept at it and raised money again for a pedestal. When the building went back to being a church, Lennon was put up in front of its entrance. Some years and several changes of local power later, he was moved back to the original spot by the park.

The Lenin monument is long gone. When Zalutska visited in 2015 she found the Lennon alone on a weedy plot, with a brightly painted bench left by volunteers from the United States. A December 2025 column in Ukrainskyi Interes says motorcyclists from elsewhere in Europe still stop to leave flowers and photographs.

The monument is not on the town council's list of local historic monuments.

First in the world?

Local writing about the statue rarely agrees on how special it is. One article calls it the first Lennon monument in the world, another the first in Ukraine and one of four worldwide, a third the only one in the former USSR. None of them backs this up, and the dates don't settle it. The Mohyliv stone dates from about 1989 to 1990, while Strawberry Fields in New York opened as a Lennon memorial in 1985. What is safe to say is that a Soviet town got a Lennon statue while Lenin still stood down the road, and that teenagers made it happen.

Russia has its own Lennon on a courtyard bench in Voronezh.