Seraphic Baby Lenin

Soviet iconic memorabilia made Vladimir Ilich Lenin (the original last name was Ulianov), born on April 22, 1870, look cherubic. Who could have predicted that he would become the founder of the first totalitarian party-movement in history? Who could have foreseen his ideological extremism? His exterminist instincts, his liberticide obsessions, his fanatic singlemindedness? When he passed away on January 21, 1924, his political heirs decreed Lenin's immortality and decided to have his body embalmed. After a century, Lenin's mummy is still there, grotesquely grim, in the Red Square Mausoleum.

Another Vladimir is now running the bloody terrorist show in full contempt of human rights and civic liberties. When students ask me what do Lenin and Putin have in common, my answer is that none had any respect for freedom. At the entry of the FSB building in Moscow, Putin made sure to install the bust of Felix Dzerzhinski, Lenin’s trusted comrade and the founder of the criminal institution known as the Cheka.

As I write these lines today, Putin has announced new Draconian “laws” against any criticism of his imperialist autocracy. In Putin’s terrorist state, words exist only for paeans. Sarcasm is seditious. “Weed out the anti-Russian vermin!” Dissidents are by definition “foreign agents.” In Stalin’s parlance, revived by Trump, “enemies of the people.” The Putin monocratic regime is unabashedly neototalitarian. Putin’s grandfather, Spiridon, cooked for Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya. The grandson was a proud Young Pioneer wearing curly-haired baby Lenin’s badge on his school uniform.