We still live in Lenin’s world

Today is the centenary of Vladimir Lenin’s death. His Moscow funeral was marked by official communist solemnity, as if a messiah had come and departed. Trams and buses were halted and boats were tied to mooring posts. Factory whistles were sounded at the moment when his corpse, not yet embalmed for the mausoleum that stands today on Red Square, was lowered into the ice-cold earth. Those who refrained from lamenting his passing joked that people who’d had to applaud him in life were whistling when he died.

Vladimir Putin does not worship at Lenin’s shrine or memory. He holds him culpable for the 1922 constitutional settlement that gave ‘artificial’ recognition to Ukraine and laid the conditions for the current war about frontiers and the Russian zone of influence. Brought up to idolise Lenin, Putin now invariably describes him as a blundering idiot. In doing so, however, he makes no comment on how Lenin installed dictatorship, engineered false elections, suppressed free expression and conducted terror against dissenters.