All around North America there are statues and monuments dedicated to heroes of freedom and democracy—Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson, for instance, adorn the capitol city of Washington, D.C., and dozens of towns around the country. But North America also hosts a number of statues of Vladimir Lenin.
Lenin’s communist regime led to the death of millions due to famine, war, and mass executions. Under Lenin’s leadership, the Soviet Union was created as one-party communist state that relied on terrorizing and murdering its own people. Political dissidents were persecuted or killed outright, and all industry was forcibly nationalized. Lenin’s crimes against humanity do not seem to have disqualified him from being cast in bronze as some Great Man of history, however. Such historical revisionism might at this point be expected in Russia, but for Lenin statues to stand in the U.S. and Canada would seem to be an offense against common sense. They are not figures of our own history, after all.
It is the victims of history’s most deadly ideology—communism—who should be memorialized and remembered, not the revolutionaries who killed them.
Furthermore, these statues contribute to the dangerous idea that communism has “come and gone,” and that any harm it caused is incidental to its practitioners’ intentions. Lenin’s legacy is still very much with us, and the shadow of the deadly ideology that he for the first time made politically viable looms large over contemporary politics in Russia and the world.
This stainless steel sculpture of Lenin with a small “Miss Mao” balancing on his head is located outside of the Ace Gallery, in one of LA’s premier shopping strips. The sculpture, names “Miss Mao trying to pose herself at the top of Lenin’s head,” was created by the Gao Brothers to show how Lenin influenced Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
