100 years after his death, Lenin remains “a very controversial figure”

If Vladimir Putin is in the midst of an operation to rehabilitate the Soviet Union, the image of Lenin still arouses ambiguous feelings. Which does not prevent many Russians from visiting his mausoleum.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of Russians spend a few minutes in the silence of Lenin’s mausoleum, on Red Square in Moscow, to catch a glimpse of the revolutionary’s mummy lit up in his glass sarcophagus. Tatiana, originally from Siberia, made this the first stop of her stay in the capital, mainly out of curiosity: “He is a very controversial figure, but he is an integral part of Russian history. A page of history that all generations should know.”

No questioning of the past

Tatiana’s words clearly reflect the ambiguous relationship that the Russians of 2024 have with Lenin, 100 years after his death, January 21, 1924. According to polls, more people consider Stalin the true hero of the Soviet Union, the victor of the Second World War. However, the statues of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known as Lenin, still stand by the thousands throughout Russia, while they have been torn down almost everywhere in the former Soviet republics.

“Unfortunately, there has been no serious questioning of the past in Russia,” deplores Jan Ratchynski, who headed the former NGO Memorial, dissolved in 2021 by the Russian government.

“Lenin was a criminal and Stalin was a war criminal. We can no longer say all this today. And without this work of understanding the past, we will not be able to move forward.”

Jan Ratchynski, former director of the now dissolved NGO Memorial

at franceinfo

Vladimir Putin may have launched a major undertaking to rehabilitate the Soviet Union, but he does not consider Lenin as a statesman. In 2019, here is what he said about the action of the leader of the October Revolution of 1917: “During the creation of the Soviet Union, originally Russian territories, the entire Black Sea coast, the western lands of Russia, were transferred to Ukraine under the strange pretext of increasing the percentage of proletarians in Ukraine. All this is the legacy of Lenin’s state-building. And now we have to deal with what they did.”

No official ceremony

However, the head of the Kremlin put an end to the oft-mentioned project to remove Lenin’s body from his mausoleum to bury it. “For Putin, the state is sacred, even if he criticized Lenin on several occasions, analyzes Jan Ratchynski. This does not take away from the fact that Lenin was the head of state and therefore he could not be that bad.”

No official ceremony is being organized on Saturday January 20 for the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s death. Only the Communist Party will celebrate the event.