A massive statue of Vladimir Lenin was torn down Thursday in Ukraine after a days-long struggle by authorities and workers to execute the maneuver.

The removal of the statue, part of an ongoing push by Ukrainian leaders take down remnants of its Soviet past, was streamed live on YouTube, attracting thousands of viewers, Reuters reported. 

Authorities said they were careful not to destroy the 66-foot statue when removing it, in part to shield themselves from criticism that they were erasing history.

The statue removed Thursday didn’t go without a fight. It is particularly large by Lenin statue standards, which meant days of figuring out just how to separate the statue from its plinth. Workers finally succeeded Thursday. 

“It would be easy to demolish it: place an explosive, blow it up and everything, but to take it down carefully and transport it to a storage place for totalitarian statues needs more care,” a spokeswoman for the local mayor’s office tells Reuters.

“The papers on how it was built are all in Moscow, so it’s being taken down with a method of trial and error,” she added.

The statue, in the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhya, is around 60 years old, and is one of almost 1,000 Lenin statues that have been removed in the country since political upheaval began in late 2013.