The Russians are probably the most brow-beaten major country on the face of the earth, certainly the most cowed Caucasdian nation thereon. They are used to dictators and other brutes, and I'm referring as much to their religous hierarchy as their political ones. In fact, in Czarist Russia, secular and religous leaders walked hand in hand for hundreds of years. The official religion was that perpetuated, and perpetrated, by the Russian Orthodox Church, an outgrowth of the Greek Orthodox Church, the offical religion of the Byzantine Empire, in fact, the successor to the Byzantine Church. This was why for years Moscow, the capitol of Czarist Russia, was designated as the "Third Rome". It was also why the Russian Bolsheviks took so readily to the philosophy of Marxism, with it's denunciation of religion as the "opiate of the masses". Indeed, that was the Russian experience with religion, to all thinking aware Russians, at least, more so than in most other nations at the time of the Bolshevik revolution.
To them, Rasputin was not so unusual, in fact he was an actual symbol, an outward projection, of the decadence, corruption, and filth, that pervaded the Czarist state/orthodox religous hierarchy by which the people had long been afflicted.
To these people of the day, Lenin was a breathe of fresh air, the promise of a new tomorrow, the hope of equality and opportunity for all. At the same time, he provided a much needed catharsis.
He proved to be a very brutal and oppressive leader in his own right, but by then this was such an indelible fixture of Russian politics, was so ingrained, it is an unfortunate fact that, with the Russians, nothing but brutality would have worked for long. In other words, brutality was expected of the Russian leaders, and anything less would have been met with suspicion, possibly even derision, by the masses. Kindness would have been seen as a mark of weakness. Lenin was anything but weak.
Unfortunately, while the Socialist ideals he propounded may have looked good on paper, they were doomed to failure, due to the necessity of locking out any form of oppossition or contrary view-which of course was an immediate invitation to an ever festering corruption every bit as all-pervasive as that experienced under the Czarist regime. Lenin only lasted for seven years, and sometime during the middle of his reign, he was faced with the need to institute free-market reforms. And so, for a brief time prior to Lenin's death in 1924, private enterprise was in direct competition with state run businesses. The private enterprises, in general, proved vastly superior, which came as no great surprise to anyone with even a meagre understanding of economics. Nevertheless, this temporary experiment was abruptly ended after it accomplished it's objective of stabilizing the previously devastated Russian economy, which the Bolsheviks had never succeeded in building up from the devastation of the First World War.
Lenin was ever bit as brutal as he needed to be. Cold. Cynical. Hard. When news reached him that the Czar and Czarina, along with their children, had been executed in Ekaterinburg, he looked up from the minutes of the meeting he was following, and coldly asked the next speaker to read the new sanitation law for the memberships approval.
He purposely, and purposefully, inaugurated a pogrom against a specific class of Russian citizens known as Kulaks. These were Russians, peasants who had become wealthy through lands they had come to own. He confiscatd their properties, and tried to destroy them, and succeeded in large measure, in at least eliminating them as a distinct class of people. In fact, his followers used to carry banners with the slogan, "Death To The Kulaks As A Class".
Of course, the Kulaks were unpopular to begin with, as they were seen as capitalist tools, and abusers of the peasants and workers. And in Lenin's utopia, there were to be no class distinctions. Everyone was to be equal. Everyone was to have the same rights and protections. Provided, that is, they became members of the communist party. Then, you could look forward to becomming a little more equal. Of course, communist party membership too had it's drawbacks, as Leon Trotsky discovered, folowing Lenin's death, when, at the behest of his main rival, Stalin, he was assassinated via ice-pick in Mexico City.
Lenin himself, who had sacrificed so much to Marxism-to Leninism-may have sufferred the fate of conspiracy victim. It has long been suspected, though never proven, that Stalin had a hand in Lenin's death, after which Stalin proceeded to inaugurate a reign of terror that hearkened back to the days of the old crazed Czar Ivan The Terrible in it's horror. In fact, Lenin's reputation ws enhanced by Stalin, who actually succeeded in making Lenin look good-very good-by comparison.
Because of this, it is easy to forget that Lenin was himself somewhat of a monster. When he was sneaked into Russia at the behest of German Kaiser Wilhelms security services during the final days of World War One, the comparison was made to a type of germ warfare. Lenin, they said, was like a typhoid virus when they put him on that train back to Russia, from which he had been exiled for several years. From that moment, Russia's fate was sealed.
Yet, Lenin may have been a necessary evil. Surely, the evil that he replaced was by no means less evil that he had been. Besides, a catharsis after all never feels good at the time. And when the typhoid ran it's course, in 1924, and had mutated into the monster called Stalin, the original had been deemed worthy of preservation in a glass encassed tomb, an airless vacuum structure which would preserve Lenin's body for generations to come. It has been said that so perfectly preserved is Lenin, that it must not truly be him, but instead some sort of wax dummy, or some such similar thing as that.
Whatever the case, for decades Lenin's body has been encased in that tomb, for all to see. But it may not last much longer. Certain politicians and their allies in Russia have petitioned for Lenin's body to finally be buried. Naturally, this has inspired protests from members of the communist party, which is still an influence in Russian politics.
The question I would ask is-why? Is it a means of taking from the remaining Russian communists what may be viewed by them as a rallying synbol? If this is the reasoning, it is a stupid one indeed, and may actually be the first time a man dead for eighty years becomes a modern martyr. If anything, this threatens to inflame the communist sentiments even more. But I can't imagine any other reason for it. It is almost as though they think Lenin might one day rise from that tomb and start preaching his doctrine anew to millions of ruddy faced Russian schoolchildren via an aghast live satellite tv coverage. Or perhas it is simply the concerns of the Russian Orthodox Church that are being addressed here. Possibly to them he represents an image of repression of their cherished beliefs.
Whatever the case, I am against this action. Leave Lenin where he has been, in Red Square, for all to see. His presence there has been traditional for so long, it is hard to imagine him no longer there. He has become like an old friend, in a way. A dependable presence, an identifying landmark peculiar to the Russian nation.
More importantly, Lenin is unarguably one of the 20th centuries most important figures, possibly one of the top ten, right up there with FDR, Churchill, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Ghandi, Martin Luther King. Ask youself, how many times does a person have the opportunity to view the body, the preserved remains, of a person of such historic importance?
Imagine that Lenin's body is preserved in it's present state for another 2000 years, and you are living in that era, and you view him at that time. Now, imagine you have the chance , in this age, to view the remains of Juslius Caesar, had they been similarly preserved? See what I mean?
Lenin was a great man. There is no denying that fact. Great here, of course, is not a commentary meant to denote goodness. Greatness and goodness are not necessarilly always to be found in the same abode. The important thing here is the historical impact of the man, for good and for ill. Because quite frankly, I believe that, as bad as Lenin was, as evil as at least some of his actions were, and as fallacous as the philosophy he propounded turned out to be, the world in the long run would have been far worse if Lenin had not come along. In fact, I propose that had Lenin not instituted communism in Russia, the United States, during the Great Depression, may itself have become a communist state, or possibly a fascist one. But due to our obsessive need to compete with communism in those days, we did so in a way that enabled us to pull ourselves out of the great depression in such a way that our democracy was preserved, though unarguably changed. Had Lenin not been here, we would not have approached the problem of the Depression, or of Fascism, or indeed of Communism, from quite the same perspective.
For all these reason, I would strongly hope that Lenin's body is left where it is, undisturbed for all time to come. For any to imagine his presence to be any kind of a danger to either the weak minded or the strong, is absurd beyond belief. I am not a communist, by any means. I am a believer in democracy, and in capitalism, albeit strongly regulated capitalism.
Yet, were I to go to Russia, one of the first places I would visit there would be Lenin's tomb in Red Square.
