A century after Lenin’s death, USSR’s founder seems to be an afterthought
NOT LONG after the 1924 death of the founder of t he 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 f ace 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.
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 per cent 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: “One hundred years since the day when his big and kind heart stopped, the second century of Lenin’s immortality begins,” he 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.
A 2022 opinion survey by state-run polling agency VTsIOM found that 29 per cent 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 cancelled 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.
Lenin died on January 21, 1924, at age 53.
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 honour 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.