Lenin Making a Comeback in Russia Today Despite Putin’s Hostility Toward Bolshevik Leader

Paul Goble

    Staunton, Apr. 26 – A survey conducted by the Svobodnya pressa news service concludes that Lenin has never been as viewed as positively by Russians as he is now, despite Putin’s criticism of the Bolshevik leader for setting up the USSR in a way that allowed it to disintegrate in 1991, the new service’s Sergey Aksyonov says.  

    At least part of the reason for this, the journalist says, is to be found in the Ukrainian attacks on Lenin’s statues, a case in which for Russians the enemy of my enemy is my friend. (For the survey, see svpressa.ru/reports/sptv/461106/; for Aksyonov’s analysis, see svpressa.ru/politic/article/461666/).

    But over the past decade, Aksyonov says, Russians have adopted a more positive attitude toward Lenin as they have taken a more positive view of the Soviet past and now consider Lenin to be the founder not only of a great power in the Soviet Union but also of a new great power in China.

    Putin’s war in Ukraine has reenforced positive attitudes among Russians not only toward the Soviet past, large swaths of which have been presented in an upbeat way by the Kremlin and its propagandists, but toward Lenin as the founder of that past and thus someone many Russians now look back to in a positive way.

    Present-day enthusiasts of Lenin have hardly read any of the Bolshevik’s works or even learned much about his specific policies. Instead, they see him as the founder of a great power who deserves to be remembered in a positive light alongside of Stalin rather than eclipsed by his successor, the commentator continues.

    Today, 67 percent of Russians, another survey, this one by the Levada Center found, have a positive view of Lenin, while only 17 percent have a negative one; and young people are even more positive than their elders, in part because of the Bolshevik leader’s attacks on the wealthy (levada.ru/2024/04/16/predstavleniya-o-lichnosti-vladimira-lenina-i-ego-roli-v-istorii-strany/).

    And while Aksyonov doesn’t mention it, this revival of support for Lenin may be the unintended result of Putin’s own promotion of a single stream of Russian history in which all leaders who achieved some greatness are re-entering the national pantheon even if the current Kremlin leader wouldn’t in fact include them.