100 years after his death, Russians shrug at Lenin’s legacy

MOSCOW: For almost a century after his death, Vladimir Lenin´s carefully preserved body has lain in a purpose-built mausoleum on Red Square -- a glaring reminder of Russia´s communist past.

But the father of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution that founded the Soviet Union -- and the 100th anniversary of his passing -- have largely been ignored by ordinary Russians.

Few official events have been scheduled to mark the centenary on Sunday, beyond a Communist Party ceremony at his tomb in the shadow of the Kremlin.

For President Vladimir Putin, who has publicly chided Lenin for his supposed role in dividing the Russian Empire into nation states like Ukraine, this is convenient.

Putin, now mired in an almost two year assault against Kyiv, has instead championed Joseph Stalin -- the man who led the USSR to victory in World War II, and who purged all his political opponents in a years-long reign of terror.

When Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin) died on 21 January 1924, Soviet authorities at the behest of Stalin began embalming his body and building a mausoleum.

The red and black polished stone temple has stood at the heart of Red Square since October 1930, and briefly housed Stalin´s remains until 1961.

Huge crowds of people queued to pay their respects to Lenin in Soviet times, but today, ceremonies honouring the revolutionary are attended mainly by those nostalgic for the communist era, flags and red carnations in hand.

His embalmed body has become, primarily, a tourist attraction. Once every 18 months, the mausoleum is closed to allow scientists to re-embalm his body and repair the damage caused by time.

Only 23 percent of Lenin´s body remains intact, housed in a glass sarcophagus at a constant temperature of 16 degrees Celsius, the TASS state news agency has reported.

Since the collapse of the USSR in 1991, a debate about whether to close the mausoleum and bury his body has regularly cropped up in Russian media.

But the proposal has been met with fierce resistance from communists and has never seriously been considered by the authorities.

Putin rarely mentions Lenin. So his attack on the instigator of the October Revolution, days before ordering his troops into Ukraine on 24 February 2022, was notable.

In a vitriolic speech questioning Ukraine´s statehood three days before the attack, the Kremlin leader accused Lenin of having “invented” Ukraine when he founded the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).