The ironic take on the Russian revolutionary stands in Nowa Huta, a working class suburb of Krakow, to offer a bit of comic closure with its often difficult communist past.

"Are we capable of ascribing a funnier, surrealist meaning to this past, of bursting the bubble, of showing that we're able to let go of the trauma through laughter and distance?" asks artist Bartosz Szydlowski who created the piece with his wife Malgorzata.

It was put up as part of an arts festival that displayed works around this city of more than 200,000 residents.

Called the "Fountain of the Future", the statue aims to subvert the ideological symbolism of the larger-than-life original, which was erected after World War II when Poland was a Soviet satellite then taken down when the regime fell in 1989.