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I'm still amazed that this incredibly ghoulish display survived the fall of Communism all the way to this day.
by smitherfield 12y ago
I'm still amazed that this incredibly ghoulish display survived the fall of Communism all the way to this day.
- breakyerself 12y agoLenin was genuine. He did things out of perceived neccesity that many are critical of in hindsight, but few historians would argue Lenin wasn't actively trying to improve the lives of men. Many around the world have much respect for the man. This is a way that people honor him. The only reason to seriously object would be if it somehow went against his wishes.
- gnoway 12y agoIt's hard to imagine, given your characterization of him, that Lenin would support this at all. I think people who wish to honor the dead will do so regardless of whether there is a mummy or memory to honor. I think the preservation and display of Lenin, at the time, was a political stunt for political goals. I think they continue to do it today because for everyone involved, it's just something they've always done. There's no real purpose for it at this point.
- joshuapants 12y agoI'd imagine it helps with tourism, money is a good motivator
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- geoka9 12y agoIt is kept around because of older folks who pine for the good old days of which it is a symbol. It'll take another 20-30 years until those folks are no more and the body will probably be buried.
- Aloha 12y agoLenin specifically requested no memorials to him. However the needs of the state superseded the wants of the individual, in the end (with a dose of broad over simplification), its what sunk soviet style communism in eastern europe.
- smitherfield 12y agoIn 1921, Lenin had his soldiers steal nearly all the grain produced on peasant farms, then distributed it amongst his soldiers and cronies while five million people died of starvation: https://www.google.com/search?q=soviet+famine+of+1921&source=lnms&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=soviet+famine+of+1921&source... When America donated enough grain to relieve the famine, Lenin deliberately prevented it from reaching the starving rural peasants. Lenin, by the way, purchased no fewer than nine Rolls-Royce cars during his brief reign. I'll give you that he was genuine. So was Hitler.
- themartorana 12y agoall wealth including land, industry and business was confiscated Right. No one rich, well off, or even well fed except him. Sounds genuinely like all absolute dictators ever. Leaders around the world respect a glorified, scrubbed version of an idealistic man, not the real Lenin. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin
- themartorana 12y agoDownvoted. Gonna take that as a compliment.
- ommunist 12y agoSo was Sir Winston Churchill, by whose policy 10 mln Bengali people died from starvation. I see no difference between one greedy self-important politician and another. Its a pity we are defenseless in front of them.
- Aloha 12y agoThere is good information that the true scope of the famine didn't really reach London until after the 1943 harvest came in, and by then the famine was easing.
- mc32 12y agoThere is a difference when one is intentional and the other is due to unreliable information. Yes, the results are the same (starvation), but it matters how it happened. It's also interesting that in soviet Russia it was the urban disaffected population who supported the revolution, while the farmers and peasants did not. Lenin at first tried to get them to cooperate (volunteer) in the collectivization programme, but farmers wanted none of that, they preferred selling their grain and produce on the market to urbanites. Finally, desperate, Lenin gave orders, contradicting his advisors who told him it would result in poor production and starvation, went ahead and forced collectivization. This resulted in famine, as farmers forced to hand over their production, didn't have an incentive to produce.
- Aloha 12y agoIndeed, Lenin however was an absolutist, and absolutists rarely come to a long term solution.
- WalterBright 12y ago> He did things out of perceived neccesity that many are critical of in hindsight, but few historians would argue Lenin wasn't actively trying to improve the lives of men. I bet most (all?) tyrants genuinely believe they are doing the right thing. Murderers in prison mostly believe their crimes were justified.
- classicsnoot 12y agoI know this buzzfeed generation prefers 'top fives' and '20 mosts', but if you look at the history of Russia from ~1224 to now, it is hard to not think that Stalin has the top score solely because of technology, not brutality. if killing loads of people for vague reasons were in the olympics, russia would always win.
- saiya-jin 12y agoI read somewhere Mao screwed his nation pretty badly, topping some chart way above hitler and stalin (something around 60 million?)
- mercurial 12y agoMaybe a better way of looking at it would be in terms of percentage of potential victims (in this case, Genghis Khan should be pretty high).
- classicsnoot 12y agoI was talking about the intra-national/regional competition.
- lotsofmangos 12y agoThe only reason to seriously object would be if it somehow went against his wishes. It did go against his wishes.
- Htsthbjig 12y ago"but few historians would argue Lenin wasn't actively trying to improve the lives of men." So was Hitler. He wanted to improve the lives of Aryan Germans (at the expense of everyone that was not, like Polish, or Jews). Lenin remains the biggest killer of nuns and religious people of the wold ever. He had a real problem with people deciding on their own not to follow him, so he killed a big part or Russian society. While he did not dirty his hands directly, he gave the dirty orders that other people would follow. The dirty jobs pal of Lenin was called Stalin. Lenin wanted money, let's make Stalin rob a bank, Lenin wanted to remove someone, let's call Stalin again. Of course, If you lie down with dogs, you'll wake up with fleas. Lenin was probably poisoned by Stalin, and the rest is History.
- felipeerias 12y agoThis sums my own thoughts in the matter: "If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used—if necessary, terror, slaughter. Lenin believed this after reading Das Kapital, and consistently taught that if a just, peaceful, happy, free, virtuous society could be created by the means he advocated, then the end justified any methods that needed to be used, literally any." http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/oct/23/message-21st-century/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/oct/23/message...
- vbezhenar 12y agoLenin, Stalin are huge figures in Russia history. Many men worships them. They are generally not considered like evil in Russia. Lenin made communism under which USSR became the most powerful empire in the world and Stalin won second world war. PS I'm not exactly agree to above statements. History is complex thing. But many men I know think the way I described.
- oblio 12y agoWhat do they think about the men they killed? Especially Stalin.
- amirmc 12y agoHistory is always written by the victors. What does the western world think of colonisation, wars etc?
- mercurial 12y agoBut Stalin lost (historically speaking). His successors spent a lot of time erasing his legacy. And at least in Europe, our colonial past is usually not seen as something to be proud of, apart from the nationalist groups (which is par for the course, it's difficult to be a nationalist without a strong ability for cherry-picking historical facts).
- vidarh 12y agoEven in Western Europe, while Stalin is overall portrayed in a negative light, he's still given quite a lot of positive portrayal in the context of World War II. It's not surprising that there are still people that see him in a more positive light in a country where several generations grew up in the shadow of a massive propaganda operation setting him up as a hero. As for the European colonial past, I think that depends on where you are. In Britain at least it's not that unusual to notice signs of people that miss at least the idea of the British Empire. A lot of British culture is tied indirectly to it through an admiration for the stereotype of the British military forces that held the empire together, and a fascination with the ex-colonies. As well as the Commonwealth, of course, which is basically a re-packaged, politically correct way of holding on to some of the last vestiges of the empire.
- mercurial 12y agoHe is in good company. There is not much communism left in China, but Mao is still embalmed in his mausoleum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mausoleum_of_Mao_Zedong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mausoleum_of_Mao_Zedong
- vixen99 12y agoNot much communism? Seems to me that the media plus almost every bank plus every square inch of land being entirely state-owned is quite a lot.
- lotsofmangos 12y agoJust because the state owns lots of stuff does not mean the state is being communist. State capitalism is also a thing. As far as enterprise goes, after finding out that keeping everything in house was not working, nearly all state enterprises were incorporated and the government mostly got out of the running of the businesses, while still holding onto a majority of shares. There are also privately owned enterprises, which first equaled the number of people in employment in the public sector in 2001, and has been growing fast since, with China today having about the same balance of private sector to public sector jobs as Alaska. Also, the state does not own all the land, for the past ten years private land ownership and property rights have been established in law, hence the nail houses - http://www.danwei.org/bbs/property_rights_the_coolest_na.php http://www.danwei.org/bbs/property_rights_the_coolest_na.php
- vidarh 12y agoCommunism is about public ownership of the means of production. Given that the Chinese state is pretty much an extension of the party elite, state ownership in China does not have much, if anything, to do with public ownership. Is the working class controlling these things? No. Has class struggle been eradicated? No. So it's not communism. (Arguably at least in a marxist sense the very existence of a state wielding political power is incompatible with communism, but fundamentally the one key definition is that communism is a society without class differences - one would be hard pressed to argue that is the case in China) There'd be a better basis for arguing it's socialism of some form, but state ownership does not automatically mean socialism either, nor does socialism require state ownership (but it also does not preclude it).
- ivan_gammel 12y agoLook at it from another perspective: it is a tourist attraction, that may bring some money to Moscow, just like mummies in the British museum. Legacy of communism can and must be commercialized in all possible ways: Soviet Union produced amazing quantity of artifacts, cultural objects and scientific data that is possibly yet to be rediscovered and re-thought, just like the ideas used by PreVu mentioned in the article.