Word: lenin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
From the outside, the mausoleum still looks impeccable, its brown marble and granite façade polished to a gleaming shine. But today Vladimir Lenin's tomb is a site of only passing interest, and the gleam from its walls reflects the lights of the shops across Red Square: Louis Vuitton, Kenzo, Chanel. "The only Muscovites who come here are showing a visitor around," says a policeman on duty near the tomb. "Always out-of-towners. You can tell from their clothes--like ours from about 15 years ago." The officer hasn't been inside to see Lenin's embalmed body...
These days Lenin leaves most Russians cold. As a post-Soviet generation comes of age and consumerism is the rage, the father of the Bolshevik Revolution is irrelevant. "No one discusses Lenin, not even our teachers," says Serezha, 17, who was riding his mountain bike nearby. And yet nearly 15 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Lenin's body retains its place of honor in Red Square, where it has lain since 1924. Now Russia's ruling élite is exhuming an old debate: whether to move Lenin's body out of the mausoleum and bury it. Georgi...
...some intellectuals, Lenin's corpse pales in comparison with the crises facing Russia, such as growing authoritarianism and Chechnya. "I hate Lenin," says human-rights activist Lev Ponomarev. "But this latest idiocy doesn't interest me. The state is rebuilding its repressive machinery, and we are discussing Lenin's body." Yet the debate also is a window on changing attitudes among the ruling élite. Since Putin came to power, a new ideology has been taking shape that blends imperial nostalgia with the occasional careful nod to the Soviet Union's greatness under Stalin. These days the Kremlin honor guard...
...perhaps not surprising that the two figures leading the push to move Lenin's corpse want to distance themselves from their pasts. Poltavchenko spent his career in the KGB but now maintains he was always secretly religious--once a crime that would have landed him in a labor camp. Mikhalkov's father Sergei established the family fortune by writing chilling verse about enemies of the people at the height of the Stalinist purges. And he composed the words to his country's national anthem--three times. In 1944 he hailed the "Great Lenin" and Stalin. In 1977 he wrote...
...satirical moving sculptures. Among them is the 3-m-tall Tower of Babel (1989), slung with flywheels that bring to life scores of tiny wooden figures that frantically turn handles, ring bells or pull each other's strings. From a high pulpit, a tiny Vladimir Lenin urges them on; below, a uniformed Joseph Stalin wields a bloody...