In Lenin’s Kerzhenet spirit
The Abbot cries decrees,
As if the sources of all storms
He was looking at the books of Old Believers.
– Nikolai Klyuev, Lenin (1918) [1]
Why Lenin?
The historical significance of the form of Vladimir Lenin is too often reduced to the role he played as a communist ideologue, the leader of the Bolshevik movement and possibly founder of the Soviet state, but only superficially seen as the Bolshevik state, the first communist country in the world. Meanwhile, Lenin does not equal communism nor vice versa. For followers of the Communist slogans of equality and human liberation, the political legacy of Lenin must appear to be a very troublesome. Continue reading