Dozens of European lawmakers have backed a drive to get a French city to remove a statue of Lenin erected last year, saying it insults the memory of the Soviet Union’s victims.

Vytautas Landsbergis, who steered Lithuania’s split with Moscow in 1990, said raising a monument to the communist revolutionary two decades after the fall of the Iron Curtain was deeply wrong.

Mr Landsbergis was one of 70 members of the European Parliament who signed an appeal to authorities in Montpellier, southern France, to take the monument down.

He warned against commemorating leaders simply due to their historical importance.

“An important role played in certain areas cannot overshadow crimes,” Mr Landsbergis said. “Genghis Khan was also very important, but they haven’t built a statue to him”.The 3.3-metre bronze of Lenin was among several of historical figures unveiled last August by controversial local leader Georges Freche, who died in October.

Mr Landsbergisalso erected monuments to Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle and Franklin Roosevelt, and had one to Mao Zedong in the pipeline.

Mr Freche had defended the decision to honour Lenin and Mao, insisting their political legacy outweighed the bloodshed associated with the communist regime.

But that stance rankles in the Baltic.

Lenin whose real name was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, led Russia’s October Revolution in 1917 and remained leader of the Soviet state until his death in 1924, a period of civil war and violent political repression.