This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

The night of December 8th, 2013, a huge crowd appeared on a tree-line boulevard in downtown Kiev, the capital of Ukraine.

The crowd was there to watch as a statue in the boulevard was pulled down by a crane.

That's producer Julia Barton.

It's a pretty large statue, a little more than 11 feet tall.

And as it topples to the ground, the crowd goes wild.

The toppled statue was of Vladimir Lenin, the communist leader who started the revolution that created the Soviet Union,

of which Ukraine was once apart.

The sculpture had shown Lenin's striding into a breezy future, one that just barely

rippled his marble suitcoat. But on the night of December 8th, 2013, this linen was no longer striding into a breezy future.

He was lying on the cold concrete as protesters continued to abuse him.

They was just shouting that, you know, that this monument need to be ruined.

And that he's a killer and that it's not the place for Soviet shit here anymore and Ukrainians are owners of this land.

Ukrainian photojournalist Alexander Ticinski rushed to the scene that night. He and his colleagues kept their cameras steady as the drama unfolded around them.

Their footage ended up in a documentary they later made called All Things Ab Blaze. It shows people taking sledge hammers to

Lenin's torso.

The camera lingers on one man in a shiny track suit who spits on his hand, crosses himself three times, and starts whacking away with all of his might.

But at some point, a thin old guy in a black coat emerges from the crowd and just wraps himself around Lenin's chest.

Yeah, he was trying to protect Lenin with his own body.

And did he say anything this whole time?

Yeah, he was saying that it's it's not right, it's not correct, please don't do that.

It's a barbarism. Barberism, yeah.

...