A century after Lenin's death, USSR's founder an afterthought

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 onceomnipresent 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.

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.

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.