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A Long Century with Lenin
We still live in his world
One hundred years ago, on January 21, 1924, Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik Revolution and creator of the Soviet Union, died in Gorki, near Moscow. Just as in January 2024, Moscow was experiencing bitter frosts at that time. This did not prevent, however, thousands of people from taking part in the funeral events, which lasted a record five days. Among the organizers of the funeral was Joseph Stalin, the future Soviet leader. It later became a good Soviet tradition for a new leader to bury an old one. Only in the first day to say goodbye to Lenin came more than 100 thousand people (the population of Moscow in 1924 was about 1.5 million). Contrary to the long public farewell ceremony, Lenin was never buried. His body was embalmed and placed in the Mausoleum on Red Square, a famous symbol of the Soviet era. The era that still lives on in Russia.
Lenin’s ideas and the political institutions he created remain alive in the modern Russian Federation and throughout the post-Soviet space. The Bolshevik leader is sometimes portrayed as “anti-hero” and his legacy is used to justify contemporary politics. On the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, another Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, often spoke unkindly of Vladimir Lenin.
He called Lenin “the creator of Ukraine”, accused the Bolshevik leader of giving Ukraine “the lands of historical Russia” and criticized Lenin’s approach to the creation of the USSR. According to Lenin’s project, the Soviet Union was established as a union of equal sovereign republics with formally very broad powers, up to the right to withdraw from the USSR.
Some Russian political commentators go even further and say that the Bolsheviks “created” not only Ukraine, but also the Ukrainian nation. Naturally, this has nothing to do with reality.
The Ukrainian national movement existed long before 1917, and after the Revolution its efforts led to the creation of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR).
The Bolsheviks won the Civil War (1917–1922), the UNR ceased to exist as a result, but nevertheless, it is not…
