A bust of Lenin blocks cars from passing through in Liman, Ukraine, on April 11, 2023Mykhaylo Palinchak (SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty Images)
The centenary of the death of Vladimir Lenin, which occurred on January 21, 1924, is not a notable event in either Russia or Ukraine, those two countries currently at war, which were the great pillars of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). ), the State founded by Lenin and disappeared in 1991.
In Russia, the image of Lenin languishes as if a kind of political mummification had been added to the embalming of his body, which still lies in the mausoleum on Red Square, which contrasts with the vitality of the figure of Stalin, whose imperial course and nationalist fits better in today's Russia.
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In Ukraine, Lenin is seen as a symbol of Soviet domination.
Statues and busts of him have been demolished or destroyed and place names related to him have been replaced by others as part of the campaign to eradicate traces of communism from public spaces.
The so-called Leninopad (a term translatable as “the fall of the Lenins”) put an end to the statues of artistic value, such as the one on the boulevards of Kiev, or gigantic ones, such as the one in the Kharkov center, and also the quaint figures produced in series with concrete, metal or plaster.
When the USSR dissolved, there were thousands of statues of Lenin in Ukraine.
By 2013, half had already been eliminated and, after the “Euromaidan” (the pro-European revolt that culminated in February 2014), practically all the rest disappeared.
No new monuments to Lenin are erected on Russian territory, but they are to Stalin.
However, in the lands of Ukraine occupied by the Russian Army, such as the city of Mariupol, Moscow defies the Leninopad policy and restores already destroyed monuments and busts of the founder of the USSR.
In the list of the great people of all time, compiled by the Levada center in Moscow based on the preferences of Russians, Stalin overtook Lenin in popularity in 2008 and has been widening his lead.
In 2021, Stalin was the first on the list with a score of 39, followed by Lenin with 30. However, “the Soviet image of Lenin and the idea that it was he who opened the way to progress for the country remain,” says Lev Gudkov, sociologist and former director of the Levada center, according to whom, in Russia, sympathy for Lenin (25%) still dominates over antipathy (13%).
Putin does not recognize the existence of Ukraine or the Ukrainian people and has repeatedly criticized Lenin, alleging that he artificially created the State of Ukraine and, by recognizing the right of the federated republics to leave the Soviet Union, placed a "mine of delayed effect” that broke out in 1991.
“From the point of view of the historical destinies of Russia and its peoples, Lenin's principles of state-building turned out not only to be wrong, but much worse.
After the collapse of the USSR in 1991 this became absolutely obvious,” Putin said three days before Russian troops invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
“Lenin could not create Ukraine, because Ukraine existed before him and the Ukrainian national movement was a real force,” Yaroslav Hrytsak explains to us.
This Ukrainian historian believes that “Lenin was a genius of tactical compromises and was willing to support anything to preserve his power, and that is why he could not ignore the Ukrainian national movement.”
In the elections to the Russian Constituent Assembly, called by the Provisional Government in November 1917, the majority of Ukrainians supported the national parties, not the Bolsheviks, Hrytsak points out.
Before the revolution, he relates, “Lenin was against any expression of Ukrainian political ambitions (…) because he was a Marxist and thought that a global communist revolution would occur and, therefore, he was against any national movement.” .
But during the revolution, Lenin took a radical turn, understanding that the Bolsheviks could not impose themselves in the former Russian empire without making concessions to the people on the periphery, first of all to Ukraine, as the historian continues to explain.
Despite being a minority force, the Bolsheviks prevailed, because they understood the importance “of terror and also the national question, unlike the whites, who opposed any compromise with the nationalists, Ukraine included, he continues to relate.
“With cynical pragmatism, Lenin recognized the right of Ukraine to leave the Soviet state and at the same time waged war against it.
In early 1918, the Bolshevik army entered kyiv and applied terror unprecedented since the Mongol occupation,” Hrytsak concludes.
The criticisms of Lenin that Putin uses to justify aggression against Ukraine are
ad hoc
and do not in fact influence the canonical profile of Lenin, who "continues to be recognized as the founder of the Soviet State," points out Russian historian Daniil Kotsiubinsk, according to the which in Russia there is no institutional criticism of Lenin because he created a firm system that resisted until Gorbachev came to power.
Lenin started from the logic of the possibility of greater expansion of the Soviet State and the incorporation of more and more republics into it in the future, it is stated in the school manual written by the former Russian Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky.
The right to freely secede from the USSR later became “the pretext” for “the united republics to demand independence from Moscow, which ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union,” the manual notes.
Aside from Putin's short-term judgments, the Kremlin does not seem to have any intention of disturbing the mature citizens (and voters) for whom Vladimir Ilyich is still a point of reference.
In theory, the administrator of the Leninist heritage is the Communist Party of Russia, but this formation, says Kotsiubinski, has developed multiple facets independent of Lenin, such as affinity with the Orthodox religion, nationalism and anti-Semitism.
“For Russian communists, Lenin is an icon,” says the historian, and remembers that, for those who want to investigate, several versions of Lenin's complete works are available on the Internet in Russian.
When perestroika began, Lenin was the center of the lively debates in which the reforms sponsored by Mikhail Gorbachev since 1985 were proposed as a return to Lenin and the origins of the USSR.
“But it turned out that the reforms did not return to Leninism, but rather towards liberalism and capitalism,” says Russian historian Nikita Sokolov.
In the 1990s, Lenin became an object of “anti-cult,” explains Gennady Bordiugov.
But, in the opinion of this Russian historian, the demonization of Lenin did not last long and today, the authorities' strategy is reduced to remaining silent about Lenin and with it also about the importance of the revolution.
The guard of honor that watched over Lenin's mummy in Red Square has long since disappeared, but the time for the transfer of his body to be buried next to his mother in St. Petersburg seems to have not yet come, although, as Gudkov recalls, so The majority of Russians wanted it in 2017 on the occasion of the centenary of the October Revolution.
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