Lenin - Purest Evil.

If only there were more Russians like Andrei Zubov, a professor of philosophy at the Moscow State Institute of International Affairs, writing in the Moscow Times (good luck trying to find this kind of thing in the Russia press) In the small town where my dacha is located, the main street is called Soviet Army, and an iron statue of Lenin stands right in the middle of it. Although the children love to play around the statue, it is a terrible place for games. The children’s parents, however, have another opinion. “Let the kids play around Grandfather Lenin,” they say. “Who is he bothering? After all, he is a funny man.”          

There is nothing funny about the hundreds — perhaps thousands — of Lenin statues and memorial plaques with his profile still adorning Russia’s cities, towns and villages. As soon as my eye catches a Lenin image, I turn away in disgust. I flinch every time I am on the metro and hear the words over the loud speaker: “Next stop: The Lenin Library.” As a historian, I know all too well what crimes Lenin committed, how much blood was shed as a result of his direct orders, how many millions were killed or suffered from hunger and disease when Lenin and his comrades unleashed the Civil War and Red Terror.

Lenin’s hatred for all religions resulted in endless violence against the Russian Orthodox Church and other faiths. After receiving millions of Deutsche marks from Germany, which helped fund the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Lenin signed the shameful Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany on March 3, 1918. No leader has done as much harm to Russia as Lenin. If there were no Lenin, there would have been no Stalin, Beria, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov or Gorbachev. Nor would there have been a NKVD or KGB. Without Lenin, there would never have been a Soviet Union, and Russia would have had a completely different fate. Although Russia would probably not have become a paradise on earth, it definitely would not have denigrated into the gulag hell that it became.

There was nothing funny about Lenin. He was evil.

Why, then, are there still so many Lenin statues and Lenin streets in so many Russian cities? It is not because of simple neglect or that nobody has the time or money to dismantle all of them. In fact, many actually have been restored since 1991. La Russophobe.