‘Lenin,’ at $3 a photo op
Impersonators of the Soviet icon come in all varieties on Red Square. They charge for snapshots, and watch for the police.
Lenin and the czar were ready. There were no cops in sight, and the sunny weather had brought out a swarm of tourists on this early winter afternoon.
Adjusting the worker’s cloth cap on his bald head, Lenin set off at a brisk pace across the dark-gray cobblestones of Red Square, trailed by Nicholas II, who shouldered a flag emblazoned with the doubleheaded eagle, the emblem of Russia’s emperors.
“Lenin,” came voices, some amused, others astonished. “It’s Lenin.” “The czar is back.” The dvoiniki, or impersonators of historical figures, got down to business. Price of a souvenir snapshot with them: 100 rubles, or about $3. Demand was brisk, but the costumed entrepreneurs had to keep an eye out for the police. Lenin (real name: Sergei A. Solovyov) had 20,000 rubles, or about $630, in fines pending against him for unlicensed peddling.
“It’s only become a crime because I don’t pay off the police,” he said, insisting that he has a license. (“I pay taxes, I’m an honest businessman.”)
By some counts, as many as five Lenins compete for the tourist trade in Red
Square (known among themselves as “Tall Lenin,” “Drunk Lenin,” and so on). There’s also a Putin, a Brezhnev and a Stalin. There was a Karl Marx as well, but he died.
“Brezhnev doesn’t even look like Brezhnev, except for those eyebrows,” a figure dressed like one of Ivan the Terrible’s musketeers said as he stood outside the entrance to the State Historical Museum of Russia. “Plus, he’s from Kazakhstan.”
None of the dvoiniki appear to inspire more astonishment, passion or desire for a posed snapshot than those who look and dress like Lenin, the Marxist revolutionary and ideologue who led the 1917 October Revolution and founded the Soviet state.
In the hard conditions of contemporary Russian capitalism, it turns out that bearing a physical resemblance to the man whose life work was the destruction of Russian capitalism can be quite profitable.
About a dozen years ago, Solovyov, 53, on weekdays a mechanic who drives a Ford Focus, came dressed like Lenin to the car dealership where he then worked and caused an uproar.
His break came in 2004, when he was hired to impersonate Lenin during Communist Party celebrations of the Soviet leader’s birthday in Red Square. For a few hours’ work, Solovyov found out, he could earn the equivalent of a week’s pay. That astonished him, but so did the rapturous reception he got.
“I didn’t know a lot about Lenin,” he recalled. “People came up to me, saying, ‘Vladimir Ilyich, Vladimir Ilyich!’ thanking me, asking my advice about what was happening in the country now.”
Old women wept. When he stood in line to pay his respects to the remains of the real Lenin, housed in a squat granite mausoleum in Red Square since his death in 1924, some children gave Solovyov a military-style salute.
During the Soviet years, it was a weighty affair of state, deciding who could appear in public in Moscow or any other city dressed as Lenin. Within two decades of the Russian Revolution, the personage of Lenin had become so sacred that amateur theaters, for instance, were no longer allowed to stage plays that included Lenin as a character, and approval from the All-union Committee for the Arts was required for any actor playing Lenin. Just five actors received permission, according to a scholarly study of public celebrations in the Stalin era.
The collapse of the communist order swept away any restrictions on who could dress up like Lenin, or any other historical figure, if they wanted to. The first Lenin dvoinik to appear in Red Square may have been “Fat Lenin” in 1996, five years after the demise of the Soviet Union.
For the last four years, Solovyov (he’s Tall Lenin) has partnered with Viktor A. Chepkasov, a bearded ex-interior Ministry guard who dresses like the last of the Romanov czars. The real Nicholas II was killed along with his family by Russian revolutionaries in 1918, a cold-blooded massacre for which Solovyov says some contemporary Russians seem to blame him and other Lenin impersonators.
Such reproaches are just part of the emotional wear and tear on the dvoiniki. As Solovyov relaxed one evening over glasses of vodka and a plate of boiled shrimp in an overheated tavern near the old Moskvich car plant in southeastern Moscow, he vented about the travails of being Lenin today.
“We envy each other, worry about what the others are earning,” he said. “And Fat Lenin … he’s starting to think he’s really Lenin.”
Solovyov said that won’t happen to him; never mind that his email address uses the names Lenin and Lenin’s real family name, Ulyanov, and that he is wont to quote the late revolutionary like a member of the old Komsomol, or Young Communist League.
“Remember how Lenin said, ‘We must proceed by a different way?’” he asked at one point.
Solovyov said that for him, the different way was to stop bribing the police. He said he bought the equivalent of an occupational license and that since he’s being compensated for nothing but his appearance, he isn’t a peddler under Russian law.
That’s not the view of the police, though, who keep bundling him and Nicholas II off to the Kitai Gorod precinct station near Red Square. In November, he said, he was busted for being a “hooligan” and allegedly interfering with the police in the fulfillment of their duties.
His problems, he said, all come from the police demanding payoffs and needing to make arrest quotas.
“In our country, things never change,” Solovyov said. “Only the methods change, the methods of extortion.”
He has no faith that the thousands of his countrymen who have been indignantly demonstrating against the results of December’s parliamentary elections can change anything for the better. “The revolution won’t win,” he said flatly. “Whoever is in power will win.”
The upshot: This father of three is now talking of emigrating. Working as Lenin here subjects him to too much harassment, Solovyov said, though the extra cash has been welcome. He says his weekly take from photo ops varies, but he sometimes can earn $150 or more from a personal appearance.
As Tall Lenin downed a final glass of vodka, he disclosed that he and Nicholas II have been talking about asking for political asylum in the U.S., though it’s unclear on what grounds. Being subject to police harassment for posing for photos in period dress probably won’t suffice. Solovyov pondered what to do.
“Perhaps the moment has come for Lenin to leave Russia,” he said. “For I’m never going to stop being Lenin. I’m going to die the way you see me.”