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Rallies celebrating Russian revolution's centenary held in Ukraine

Rallies were held in Odessa, Kherson, Chernigov, Vinnitsa, Nikolayev, Zaporozhye, and the cities and towns in Donbass

KIEV, November 8. /TASS/. Rallies on occasion of the centenary of the November 1917 Socialist Revolution in Russia were held on Tuesday in Odessa, Kherson, Chernigov, Vinnitsa, Nikolayev, Zaporozhye, and the cities and towns in Donbass, Ukrainian mass media said.

In Zaporozhye, law enforcers detained two people for using Communist symbols - something that is strictly forbidden in Ukraine under law. "Participants in a rally devoted to the anniversary of the October revolution unfolded the flags containing the Communist symbols, which are banned in Ukraine."

"The police detained two local residents, a 78-year-old man and a 58-year-old woman, and took them to a district police station," Golos Zaporozhya publication said. "They will be obliged to pay an administrative penalty."

About a hundred residents of Zaporozhye came to a rally in the vicinity of Svoboda [Freedom] Square. They waved red banners and were encircled by the police. Then they moved in a column to a monument at a communal grave of the fighters killed in struggle for the establishing of Soviet power.

Several dozen Odessans and activists of the Antimaidan movement laid flowers at a communal grave of victims of the Civil War and at the former House of the Trade Unions where ultra-right Ukrainian nationalists and neo-Nazis organized a massacre of unarmed civilians on May 2, 2014.

A total of four police crews guarded law and order. Overnight to November 7, a pasteboard figure holding a hammer in hand and trampling on a swastika was installed on Kulikovo Pole square near the House of the Trade Unions. The authorities removed it on Tuesday morning.

Pro-Socialism organizations and members of the banned Communist Party of Ukraine "held a picket against the government’s antisocial policies and the devastating reforms of the pension system, education and healthcare" in the northern city of Chernigov, the press center of the Communist Party said.

It also said the residents of Nikolayev, Kherson and Krasnoarmeisk in the Donetsk region marked the former Soviet holiday with "the laying of flowers to the still standing and the already dismantled monuments of the Soviet era."

In April 2015, the Ukrainian authorities passed a package of laws on de-Communization that envision a ban on Soviet symbols, renaming of populated localities and streets named after outstanding personalities of the Soviet period, and a pulling down of Soviet monuments. The utilization of Soviet and Communist emblems brings on fines.

In practical terms, de-Communization in Ukraine has resulted in the erasing of everything that might remind people of the Soviet period and, on top of that, of the recent close ties with Russia.

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