BY JIM HEINTZ
January 20, 2024
Not long after the 1924 death of the founder of the Soviet Union, a popular poet soothed and thrilled the grieving country with these words: “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live.”
A century later, the once-omnipresent image of Vladimir Lenin is largely an afterthought in modern Russia, despite those famous lines by revolutionary writer Vladimir Mayakovsky.
The Red Square mausoleum where his embalmed corpse lies in an open sarcophagus is no longer a near-mandatory pilgrimage but a site of macabre kitsch, open only 15 hours a week. It draws far fewer visitors than the Moscow Zoo.
The goateed face with its intense glare that once seemed unavoidable still stares out from statues, but many of those have been the targets of pranksters and vandals. The one at St. Petersburg’s Finland Station commemorating his return from exile was hit by a bomb that left a huge hole in his posterior. Many streets and localities that bore his name have been rechristened.
Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, poses for a photographer in this 1922 photo in Gorky, outside Moscow. He died on Jan. 21, 1924. (AP Photo)
The ideology that Lenin championed and spread over a vast territory is something of a sideshow in modern Russia. The Communist Party, although the largest opposition grouping in parliament, holds only 16% of the seats, overwhelmed by President Vladimir Putin’s political power-base, United Russia.
Lenin “turned out to be completely superfluous and unnecessary in modern Russia,” historian Konstantin Morozov of the Russian Academy of Sciences told the AP.
Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov talks as if Lenin still was in charge: “100 years since the day when his big and kind heart stopped, the second century of Lenin’s immortality begins,” he said.
Russian Communists carry a portrait of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, and red flags after visiting his mausoleum marking the 152nd anniversary of his birth in Red Square in Moscow, Russia, on Friday, April 22, 2022
. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File)
Putin himself appears inclined to keep Lenin at arm’s length, even aiming some darts at him.
In a speech three days before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Putin dismissed its sovereign status as an illegitimate holdover from Lenin’s era, when it was a separate republic within the Soviet Union.
“As a result of Bolshevik policy, Soviet Ukraine arose, which even today can with good reason be called ‘Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s Ukraine.’ He is the author and the architect,” Putin said.
Putin himself appears inclined to keep Lenin at arm’s length, even aiming some darts at him.
In a speech three days before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Putin dismissed its sovereign status as an illegitimate holdover from Lenin’s era, when it was a separate republic within the Soviet Union.
“As a result of Bolshevik policy, Soviet Ukraine arose, which even today can with good reason be called ‘Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s Ukraine.’ He is the author and the architect,” Putin said.
In a speech a year earlier, Putin said that allowing Ukraine and other republics the nominal right to secede had planted “the most dangerous time bomb.”
Russian Communists and supporters walk with their flags and a portrait of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, to visit his mausoleum in Red Square in Moscow, Russia, to mark the 149th anniversary of his birth, on Monday, April 22, 2019.
(AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File)
Whatever objections to those policies, Putin also is clearly aware of the emotional hold that Lenin retains for many Russians, and he does not support initiatives that arise periodically to remove the body from the mausoleum.
“I believe it should be left as it is, at least for as long as there are those, and there are quite a few people, who link their lives, their fates as well as certain achievements ... of the Soviet era with that,” he said in 2019.
Such links may persist for decades. A 2022 opinion survey by state-run polling agency VTsIOM found that 29% of Russians believed Lenin’s influence would fade so much that in 50 years he would be remembered only by historians. But that response was only 10 percentage points lower than one to the same question a decade earlier, suggesting Lenin remains important.
Lenin’s hold on Russia’s heart is still strong enough that three years ago, the Union of Russian Architects succumbed to a public outcry and canceled a competition soliciting suggestions for how the Red Square mausoleum could be repurposed. That competition did not even specifically call for the removal of Lenin’s body.
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The embalmed corpse of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, lies behind glass in his mausoleum on Red Square outside the Kremlin wall in Moscow, Russia, in this photo taken on Nov. 30, 1994. (AP Photo, File)
Lenin died on Jan. 21, 1924, at age 53, severely weakened by three strokes. His widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, wanted him to be buried in a conventional grave.
Lenin’s close associates had feared his death for months. Artist Yuri Annenkov, summoned to do his portrait at the dacha where he was convalescing, said he had “the helpless, twisted, infantile smile of a man who had fallen into childhood.”
Amid those concerns, Josef Stalin told a Politburo meeting of a proposal by “some comrades” to preserve Lenin’s body for centuries, according to a history by Russian news agency Tass. The idea offended Leon Trotsky, Lenin’s closest lieutenant, who likened it to the holy relics displayed by the Russian Orthodox Church — a staunch opponent of the Bolsheviks— that had “nothing in common with the science of Marxism.”
But Stalin, once a divinity school student, understood the value of the secular analogue to a saint.
The first mausoleum of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, who died on Jan. 21, 1924, is seen in Red Square next to the Kremlin Wall in Moscow, Russia, on Feb. 25, 1924.
Whatever objections to those policies, Putin also is clearly aware of the emotional hold that Lenin retains for many Russians, and he does not support initiatives that arise periodically to remove the body from the mausoleum.
“I believe it should be left as it is, at least for as long as there are those, and there are quite a few people, who link their lives, their fates as well as certain achievements ... of the Soviet era with that,” he said in 2019.
Such links may persist for decades. A 2022 opinion survey by state-run polling agency VTsIOM found that 29% of Russians believed Lenin’s influence would fade so much that in 50 years he would be remembered only by historians. But that response was only 10 percentage points lower than one to the same question a decade earlier, suggesting Lenin remains important.
Lenin’s hold on Russia’s heart is still strong enough that three years ago, the Union of Russian Architects succumbed to a public outcry and canceled a competition soliciting suggestions for how the Red Square mausoleum could be repurposed. That competition did not even specifically call for the removal of Lenin’s body.
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The embalmed corpse of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, lies behind glass in his mausoleum on Red Square outside the Kremlin wall in Moscow, Russia, in this photo taken on Nov. 30, 1994. (AP Photo, File)
Lenin died on Jan. 21, 1924, at age 53, severely weakened by three strokes. His widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, wanted him to be buried in a conventional grave.
Lenin’s close associates had feared his death for months. Artist Yuri Annenkov, summoned to do his portrait at the dacha where he was convalescing, said he had “the helpless, twisted, infantile smile of a man who had fallen into childhood.”
Amid those concerns, Josef Stalin told a Politburo meeting of a proposal by “some comrades” to preserve Lenin’s body for centuries, according to a history by Russian news agency Tass. The idea offended Leon Trotsky, Lenin’s closest lieutenant, who likened it to the holy relics displayed by the Russian Orthodox Church — a staunch opponent of the Bolsheviks— that had “nothing in common with the science of Marxism.”
But Stalin, once a divinity school student, understood the value of the secular analogue to a saint.
The first mausoleum of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, who died on Jan. 21, 1924, is seen in Red Square next to the Kremlin Wall in Moscow, Russia, on Feb. 25, 1924.
(AP Photo, File)
The weather may have tipped the scales. Temperatures were reportedly as low as minus 30 C (minus 22 F) when Lenin’s body was displayed during a wake in Moscow, stalling decomposition and inspiring authorities to hastily build a small wooden mausoleum in Red Square and make further efforts to preserve the body.
A later version, a more modernist take on ancient stepped pyramids clad in somber deep red stone, opened in 1930. By that time, Trotsky had been forced into exile and Stalin was in full control, bolstered by a determination to portray himself as absolutely loyal to Lenin’s ideals.
In the end, the cult of “Lenin After Lenin” may have worked against the Soviet Union rather than strengthening it by enforcing a rigid mindset, in the view of some historians.
“In many ways the tragedy of the USSR lay in the fact that all subsequent generations of leaders tried to rely on certain ‘testaments of Lenin,’” Vladimir Rudakov, editor of the journal Istorik, wrote in this month’s issue.
The Mayakovsky poem that proclaimed Lenin’s immortality was “a parting word, or a spell, or a curse,” Rudakov said.
The weather may have tipped the scales. Temperatures were reportedly as low as minus 30 C (minus 22 F) when Lenin’s body was displayed during a wake in Moscow, stalling decomposition and inspiring authorities to hastily build a small wooden mausoleum in Red Square and make further efforts to preserve the body.
A later version, a more modernist take on ancient stepped pyramids clad in somber deep red stone, opened in 1930. By that time, Trotsky had been forced into exile and Stalin was in full control, bolstered by a determination to portray himself as absolutely loyal to Lenin’s ideals.
In the end, the cult of “Lenin After Lenin” may have worked against the Soviet Union rather than strengthening it by enforcing a rigid mindset, in the view of some historians.
“In many ways the tragedy of the USSR lay in the fact that all subsequent generations of leaders tried to rely on certain ‘testaments of Lenin,’” Vladimir Rudakov, editor of the journal Istorik, wrote in this month’s issue.
The Mayakovsky poem that proclaimed Lenin’s immortality was “a parting word, or a spell, or a curse,” Rudakov said.
People walk by a statue of Vladimir Lenin, painted in the colors of Ukraine’s national flag, in Velyka Novosilka, Ukraine, on Thursday, Feb. 19, 2015. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda, File)
About 450,000 people file past Lenin’s corpse per year, according to Tass, about a third of the number of Moscow Zoo visitors and a sharp contrast from the Soviet era when seemingly endless lines shuffled across Red Square.
The honor guards whose goose-stepping rotations fascinated visitors were removed from outside the mausoleum three decades ago. At the annual military parade through Red Square, the structure is blocked from view by a tribune where dignitaries watch the festivities.
Lenin is still there — just harder to see.
Bertrand Russell on his meeting with Vladimir Lenin in 1920
Vladimir Lenin's Legacy: An In-Depth Look at His Impact on Communism and Socialist Movements
BioQuote
Mar 8, 2023
BioQuote
Mar 8, 2023
Vladimir Lenin was a Russian revolutionary and political leader who played a key role in the establishment of the Soviet Union. He was born on April 22, 1870, in the town of Simbirsk, in central Russia. His parents were well-educated members of the middle class, and his father was an inspector of schools. Lenin was an intelligent and ambitious student, and he developed an interest in revolutionary politics at an early age. He was particularly influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and he began to read their works while still in high school. In 1887, Lenin's older brother, Alexander, was executed for plotting to assassinate Tsar Alexander III. This event had a profound impact on Lenin, and he became more determined than ever to fight for political change in Russia. In 1893, Lenin moved to St. Petersburg (then known as Petrograd), where he became involved in radical political groups. He quickly rose through the ranks of the Marxist movement, and he soon became a leading figure in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP). In 1903, the RSDLP split into two factions, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, and Lenin became the leader of the Bolsheviks. Over the next several years, Lenin worked tirelessly to promote his vision of a socialist revolution in Russia. He wrote numerous articles and pamphlets, and he organized underground cells of Bolshevik supporters throughout the country. In 1917, his efforts paid off, and the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution. As the leader of the Soviet government, Lenin implemented a series of radical policies aimed at transforming Russia into a socialist society. He nationalized industry, redistributed land, and established a system of worker control over the means of production. However, these policies were not without their challenges, and the country soon faced economic hardship and political turmoil. Lenin suffered a series of strokes in the last years of his life, and his health deteriorated rapidly. He died on January 21, 1924, at the age of 53. His body was embalmed and placed on public display in Moscow's Red Square, where it remains to this day. Despite his controversial legacy, Lenin remains an iconic figure in Russian and world history. His ideas and leadership continue to inspire revolutionary movements around the world, and his legacy continues to shape the course of political discourse and action.
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