Not long after the death of the founder of the Soviet Union in 1924, the popular writer comforted and delighted the grieving country with the following words: "Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live."
A century later, the once ubiquitous image of Vladimir Lenin is largely ignored in contemporary Russia, despite that famous line by the revolutionary writer Vladimir Mayakovsky.
The mausoleum on Red Square, where his embalmed body rests in an open sarcophagus, is no longer a mandatory destination of a kind of pilgrimage, but has become a place of kitsch, open only 15 hours a week. The Mausoleum has significantly fewer visitors than the Moscow Zoo.
The bearded face with an intense look that was once almost inevitable still watches passers-by from the statues, but many of them have become targets of pranksters and vandals. The one at Finland Station in St. Petersburg, which commemorates his return from exile, was targeted by a bomb that left a huge hole. Many streets and localities that bore his name were renamed.
The ideology that Lenin advocated and spread over a vast territory is in the background in modern Russia. The Communist Party, although the largest opposition group in parliament, has only 16% of the seats and is completely overshadowed by the political dominance of President Vladimir Putin's United Russia party.
"It turned out that Lenin is completely redundant and unnecessary in modern Russia," he told Konstantin Morozov from the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov talks as if Lenin is still the undisputed leader: "One hundred years from the day when his great and good heart stopped beating, the second century of Lenin's immortality begins," he said.
As for Putin, he seems determined to keep Lenin at a distance, even criticizing him.
In a speech three days before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Putin dismissed the country's sovereign status as an illegitimate holdover from the Lenin era, when it was a separate republic within the Soviet Union.
“Soviet Ukraine was created as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution, and even today it can be justifiably called the Ukraine of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. He is its creator and architect," Putin said.
In a speech a year earlier, Putin said that giving Ukraine and other republics the right to secession planted "the most dangerous bomb."
However, regardless of his objections to these policies, Putin is clearly well aware of the emotional significance that Lenin holds for many Russians, and does not support initiatives that occasionally appear to remove his body from the mausoleum.
"I think it should be left where it is, at least as long as there are those, and there are quite a few, who tie their lives, their destinies, as well as certain achievements of the Soviet era to it," Putin said in 2019.
Such relationships can last for decades. A 2022 public opinion poll by the state agency VTsIOM found that 29% of Russians believe Lenin's influence will have waned so much that in 50 years he will be remembered only by historians. However, this percentage is only 10 percentage points lower than a decade earlier, suggesting that Lenin still remains important.
Lenin's influence on the heart of Russia is still strong enough that three years ago the Union of Russian Architects heeded the public's call and abandoned a public call for proposals to rename the mausoleum on Red Square.
Lenin died on January 21, 1924 at the age of 53 after three strokes. His widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, wanted him to be buried in a conventional cemetery.
For months, Lenin's close associates feared his smartness. The artist Juri Anenkov, invited to paint his portrait in the dacha where he rested, said that he had a "helpless infantile smile of a man who has returned to his childhood".
Due to these fears, at a meeting of the Politburo, Joseph Stalin presented the proposal of "some comrades" that Lenin's body be preserved for centuries, according to the historical version reported by the Russian news agency Tass. This idea offended Leon Trotsky, Lenin's closest associate, who compared it to to the holy relics exhibited by the Russian Orthodox Church - a fierce opponent of the Bolsheviks - which "has nothing in common with Marxism".
However, Stalin, once a seminary student, understood the value of a secular counterpart to the saint.
It is possible that the prevailing weather conditions also brought about it. Temperatures were reportedly minus 30 degrees Celsius when Lenin's body was on display during a vigil in Moscow, which slowed the decomposition process and inspired authorities to quickly build a small wooden mausoleum in Red Square and take extra efforts to preserve the body.
A later modernist version of the ancient step pyramids clad in red stone was opened in 1930.
By then, Trotsky had already been exiled, and Stalin was in full control of power, backed by a determination to present himself as absolutely devoted to Lenin's ideals.
In the end, according to some historians, the cult of "Lenin after Lenin" may have worked more against the Soviet Union than to strengthen it by establishing unanimity.
"In many ways, the tragedy of the USSR rests on the fact that all subsequent generations of leaders tried to rely on certain "legacies of Lenin", stated Vladimir Rudakov, editor of the journal "Istorik".
Rudakov said Mayakovsky's poem proclaiming Lenin's immortality was "a farewell, or a spell, or a curse."
About 450 people pass by Lenin's body a year, about a third of the number who visit the Zoo and in stark contrast to the Soviet era when endless lines of people waited in Red Square.
The guard of honor whose rotations fascinated visitors was removed from outside the mausoleum three decades ago. At the annual military parade on Red Square, the view of that building is blocked by a grandstand from which officials watch the celebration.
Lenin is still there, but he is harder to see.
Translation: N. Bogetić
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