Moscow, Jan 21 (EFE).- Russia on Sunday commemorated the 100th anniversary of the death of Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader who founded the Soviet Union.
The anniversary was not acknowledged by the Kremlin, which holds Lenin responsible for the so-called “Ukraine problem.”
“If we take the special military operation in Ukraine as an example, we see it clearly. The more they criticize Lenin over Ukraine, the more evident it is that the way he chose to solve that problem was more effective than the current one,” Gennady Zyuganov, a veteran communist, told EFE.
To ward off protests, authorities have sealed off Moscow’s central Red Square, and limited public events and tributes to the leader of the Bolshevik revolution. A repeat of that 1917 socialist uprising is one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s greatest fears.
“I was born in 1949. Those of us who lived under socialism compare it with life today and there is no comparison. We used to go everywhere singing, now everyone is hypnotized by the telephone. Besides, Putin now limits our freedoms,” said a tearful Lida.
The frigid, 15C below zero temperatures lowered turnout, but hundreds of people braved the cold to pay homage to the father of the Soviet proletariat at the foot of the Kremlin.
Communists and nostalgics of the former regime of all ages waved flags with the hammer and sickle and sang Soviet songs on the cobblestones of the iconic square.
They laid wreaths at the entrance to the marble mausoleum housing Lenin’s embalmed body, protected since 1924 by a sarcophagus, where they paid their respects.
“Lenin went to the other world, but he remained forever among humanity,” said Zyuganov, the leader of the Russian Communist Party, who led the procession.
He also stressed that the revolutionary leader tried to create “a new world” ruled by labor, not capital.
Yuri, a Moscow pensioner, believes that “in the last 100 years practically nothing has changed,” since “in the world capitalists have more and more money and limit workers’ rights.”
“We will have to do again what Lenin and the Bolsheviks did in 1917. The people do not like what is happening. We ourselves have a bourgeois and classist state,” he commented.
“History is cyclical. Sooner or later, the spiral will return to the point where Lenin was when he died,” Elizaveta, a young historian, told EFE.
Boris, of Azerbaijani origin, believes that the authorities fear Lenin. “Who criticizes Lenin? The capitalists. We need social justice. All bad things come from capitalism (…) When the people understand what is happening, they can decide to overthrow him. The authorities don’t want to lose power,” he said.
Like at the centenary of the 2017 revolution, Putin did not take part in the celebrations.
His absence is particularly noteworthy given the ongoing presidential campaign, in which he has taken any opportunity to criticize Lenin, whom he accuses of placing “an atomic bomb under the building called Russia” by recognizing the Republics’ rights to self-determination.
This week Putin claims that, after the revolution, the leaders of the pro-Russian east of Ukraine expressed the desire to be part of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, but Lenin chose to integrate those territories into Ukraine.
“After the fall of the USSR, it was obvious that we would eventually return to that point,” Putin said, alluding to the reincorporation of the Russian-speaking territories of eastern Ukraine.
The USSR was born in December 1922 as a federal state. Article 26 of the founding treaty provided each republic with the right to freely leave the union. Russians and Ukrainians were on an equal footing.
Several former Soviet republics used that option to break ties with the Kremlin in the late 1980s and early 1990s during the demise of the USSR.
mos/ks