The article analyses the influence of the desovietization of Ukrainian public space (known as Leninopad), which started in 2014 as part of the “second wave” of the dismantling of Soviet monuments in Lithuania. Two well-known cases that have sparked the most debate among experts and the public are discussed in detail: the removal of the socialist-realist sculptures from the Green Bridge in Vilnius in 2015, and the removal of a monument to the writer Petras Cvirka in 2021. The conclusion is that in the post-Soviet and post-socialist region, in response to Russia’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy, shifts in the politics of history have become a pretext not only for attempts to cleanse public spaces of the remnants of the Soviet symbolic landscape, but also for solving local political problems, or for the need for decommunization as a pretext for the economic development of vacant urban areas.