For almost a century after his death, Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin’s carefully preserved body has lain in a purpose-built mausoleum on Red Square — a glaring reminder of Russia’s communist past.
However, the father of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that founded the Soviet Union — and the 100th anniversary of his passing — have largely been ignored by ordinary Russians.
Few official events have been scheduled to mark the centenary yesterday, beyond a Russian Communist Party ceremony at his tomb in the shadow of the Kremlin.
Photo: AP
For Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has publicly chided Lenin for his supposed role in dividing the Russian Empire into nation states like Ukraine, this is convenient.
Putin, now mired in an almost two year assault against Kyiv, has instead championed Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin — the man who led the Soviet Union to victory in World War II and who purged all his political opponents in a years-long reign of terror.
When Lenin died on Jan. 21, 1924, Soviet authorities at the behest of Stalin began embalming his body and building a mausoleum.
The red and black polished stone temple has stood at the heart of Red Square since October 1930, and briefly housed Stalin’s remains until 1961.
Huge crowds of people queued to pay their respects to Lenin in Soviet times, but today, ceremonies honoring the revolutionary are attended mainly by those nostalgic for the communist era, with flags and red carnations in hand.
His embalmed body has become, primarily, a tourist attraction. Once every 18 months, the mausoleum is closed to allow scientists to re-embalm his body and repair the damage caused by time.
Only 23 percent of Lenin’s body remains intact, housed in a glass sarcophagus at a constant temperature of 16°C, the TASS state news agency has reported.
Since the collapse of the USSR in 1991, a debate about whether to close the mausoleum and bury his body has regularly cropped up in Russian media.
However, the proposal has been met with fierce resistance from communists and has never seriously been considered by the authorities.
Putin rarely mentions Lenin. So his attack on the instigator of the October Revolution, days before ordering his troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, was notable.
In a vitriolic speech questioning Ukraine’s statehood three days before the attack, Putin accused Lenin of having “invented” Ukraine when he founded the Soviet Union.
By giving the Soviet republics a degree of autonomy, Putin argued, Lenin allowed the emergence of nationalism and the eventual implosion of the USSR.
“It was because of Bolshevik policy that the Soviet Ukraine came into being, which [one] would be perfectly justified to call Lenin’s Ukraine,” Putin said.
“He is its inventor, its architect,” he continued. “And now, grateful descendants have torn down Lenin’s monuments in Ukraine.”
However, Lenin has not been completely erased. His likeness still dominates many city centers in Russia, even though most of the statues were removed when the USSR collapsed.
In Moscow, a 22m Lenin monument still looms over Kaluga Square.
In Antarctica, at the Pole of Inaccessibility, there remains a bust of Lenin outside a defunct Soviet research station — now mostly buried in the snow.
Of all the Soviet leaders, it is Stalin that Putin refers to most often — not to denounce his appalling record of repression, but to praise the statesman and wartime leader who defeated Adolf Hitler’s Germany.
Putin has always sought to frame his military campaign against Ukraine through the lens of World War II, comparing Ukrainian authorities to the Nazis and presenting the conflict as an existential struggle for Russia’s survival.
For the Kremlin, Stalin remains a model of victory and power, while Lenin is a loser.
“The current leadership needs Stalin because he is both a villain and a hero,” said Alexei Levinson, a sociologist at the independent Levada institute. “He won the war, so all his atrocities are erased.”
In contrast, Lenin’s achievements have been undone or never materialized, he said.
“Lenin is the leader of the world revolution — it never happened. Lenin is the leader of the world proletariat — it doesn’t exist. Lenin is the creator of the socialist state — it is no more,” he said. “And no one wants to build it anymore either.”
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