Goodbye Lenin?

What’s a dead dictator to do?

First your beloved Soviet empire comes crashing down, then you lose your Socialist Paradise, as capitalism inundates the motherland, as if Marx and Engels didn’t matter a whit.

Thankfully, over 70 years of Soviet Power, your image was set in all manner of stone, metal (ferrous and non), wood, straw, even lentils. Surely those will stand the test of time, until these newly minted kulaks and privateers come to their senses and welcome you back.

Nope.

Turns out that, where there is money for the task, Lenin statues have been toppled, crushed, and mercilessly tossed onto history’s scrap pile.

By one reckoning,* the number of Lenin monuments (including statues and busts) in Russia have declined from about 7000 in 1991 to 6000 today. De-Leninization has moved more swiftly in the “near-abroad” states of the former USSR. For example, in Ukraine, where in 1991 there were 5500 Lenins, today there are only about 1800.

And lately, incited by events in Ukraine, Uncle Lenin has been the brunt of insults and defacings in places where people are anything but nostalgic about the Old Soviet Ways.

In Kharkiv (Ukraine’s second largest city) at the end of September, angry protesters cut down a massive, 28-foot-tall statue of Lenin. The city’s mayor pledged to restore it.

Then, showing decidedly more humor and less anger, unknown pranksters in Zaporozhye, a city on the lower ranges of the Dnieper River, dressed a Lenin statue in a vyshivanka, an embroidered Ukrainian shirt.

Yet, two steps backward, one step forward... In the town of Tommot, Yakutia (population 8057), a restored statue of Lenin was unveiled on October 8 by the local Communist Party.

* There’s a site for that: leninstatues.ru seems very thorough in its reporting and accounting of statues put up and taken down (site is Russian only).