Time's running out to see Lenin!
■"With Lenin's Ideas Dead, Russia Weighs What to Do With Body," by C.J. Chivers, New York Times, 5 October 2005, p. A1.
I visited Lenin's mausoleum in Red Square back in the summer of 1985. I spent that summer studying Russian (allegedly) at Leningrad State University in what is now called St. Petersburg. About halfway through our studies, we made a brief sojourn in Moscow, training down from the north.
I remember the three days we spent there quite well, because I arrive incredibly hung over from a night of drinking vodka in Leningrad, coming off the all-night train barely able to speak.
First night in Moscow I stopped in at an old baba's house, carrying my booty of smuggled goods from the West, at the request of a Russian-language teacher of mine back at Harvard. My host cooked me a big meal and made me a martini (my one and only in my life; she felt it was crucial to serve me this Western drink in appreciation for my efforts).
Then I headed out for another night of drinking with some contacts also set up by this Harvard instructor. I showed up for the Red Square tour the next morning in really rough shape, but managed to hold it together as we filed through the mausoleum (to my amazement, one of the guards was a guy I had been drinking with the night before!). It was a very weird, quasi-religious experience, something I would have expected for a dead pope in the Vatican. To go through it in Moscow, center of the commie universe, was truly queer, but such was the cult of Lenin.
Well, the push is coming from Putin and company to finally bury the man. They want to put the past behind them, not have it on fully display in the country's living room. The trick is, if you remove Lenin, do you then start pulling out the rest of the crowd buried in the walls of the Kremlin, like Stalin? And if you do that, do you stop with them or go on to the czars?
That'll be the slippery slope argument, but the truth is, the bod's getting awfully moldy and it's time to end the hagiography. Lenin was the great disconnector of Russian history, severing what should have been Russia's emergence into the global economy following WWI. All the man did was delay the inevitable and set in motion a lot of death that was unnecessary. Historic, yes, but not to be celebrated.