About 30 nationalists gathered Thursday night at the foot of a statue of Vladimir Lenin in a Ukrainian city for a candlelight vigil to denounce 72 years of ``red terror,'' the Tass news agency reported. The demonstrators in Donetsk placed a garland of barbed wire around the base of the statue to the founder of the Soviet state, Tass reported. A ribbon attached to the wire said ``To V.I. Lenin _ on the 72nd Anniversary of Red Terror,'' the news agency said. Another streamer reportedly bore the words: ``100 million victims.'' Tass said the demonstrators, all members of a Ukrainian nationalist movement, held lighted candles in the vigil, which lasted about an hour. The Tass account was headlined ``Insulting Vigil at Lenin Monument in Donetsk,'' and said passers-by expressed anger and bewilderment at the protest. Police asked the demonstrators to disperse, and one of the participants tried to slash his veins to protest what he called illegal police actions, Tass reported. He received medical assistance, and the demonstrators dispersed, the news agency added. Donetsk, the center of the eastern Ukraine's Don River coal basin, was the site this summer of a one-day strike by miners demanding less interference from the Communist Party. Miners in Donetsk also joined a long, bitter coal strike in the summer of 1989 over low wages and consumer goods shortages. Statues of Lenin have been vandalized with increasing frequency across the Soviet Union in recent months, and some have been dismantled on the orders of local authorities, to the dismay of the Soviet leadership.
