In Russia, January 21, 2024 is a day almost like any other. If around 600 statues of Lenin still populate the territory, the anniversary of his death excites neither the crowds nor the Kremlin.
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Except, undoubtedly, the Communist Party which will salute his memory across the Russian regions, no national tribute to Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known as Lenin, is on the program. And this is undoubtedly due to the ambivalent and contrasting character that the figure of the revolutionary leader now takes on in today’s Russia.
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The man remains omnipresent with a statue, a square, a street named after him in almost every town in the country. Thousands of Russians still visit his embalmed remains every week, visible in his mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow.
But, paradoxically, the aura of the legendary Bolshevik leader is also fading. An interesting recent poll showed that if Lenin remains viewed positively by more than half of Russians, it is especially among those over 50 that he remains significant and popular. A majority of Russians – even the deputies of the Duma – are also in favor of his burial, so that he can finally rest in peace.
Critics of Vladimir Putin
And in the context of a Russia at war, it was Vladimir Putin himself who cast a veil of suspicion over the face of Lenin. We remember his speech of February 22, 2022, just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in which he half-heartedly criticized Lenin for having given too much land to the Ukrainians, even speaking of Ukraine as of a “creation” by Vladimir Ilyich.
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Among the nationalist elites, Lenin is now seen as the one who showed too much leniency towards the people who would make up the USSR, to the detriment of the Russian nation. And it is no coincidence that at the same time, it is now his brutal successor Joseph Stalin who benefits from a certain official rehabilitation in Russia.