Monumentalizing
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, was the chief orchestrator of and heir to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Until the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, Lenin figured into the national imagination as the founding father to the Soviet Republic, his person plastered onto such propaganda from monuments to stamps and place names. As this 60s poster exclaims, "Lenin Lived, Lenin is Alive, and Lenin Will Live."
And live on, Lenin did. His legacy continues both through his propounded ideology and the iconic status projected onto his person by his succeeding Soviet leaders. In particular, Lenin has been immortalized in the hundreds of monuments built in his name and image across the world. In Moscow alone, there are officially 82 Lenin statues, and locals maintain that there are even more (1).
And yet, only two of these monuments in Moscow reach the grandeur of the massive Easter-Island-esque Lenin heads that littered the USSR. Lenin's mausoleum, pictured on the right, is one of them, and the other is a gargantuan sculpture in Kaluzhskaya Square.
In the Soviet-era Lenin-loving, the leader represented all of the promise of Communism. Since the fall of the USSR, there hasn't been as simple of a rejection of Lenin's iconography as was the case for Stalin. Although Lenin served as a quasi-religious idol in the Communist atheist society, there is a certain syncretism that allows his presence to continue to figure nostalgically in an increasingly Orthodox Christian Russia (2).
Perhaps more than Stalin, this ideologue embodied the potential for the USSR, not the wreckage. While there may be an ironic distance with which today's Russians see Lenin's embalmed remains (as a tourist trap, for instance), there is still a certain level of participation or at least complacence with the pervasive presence of the fallen idol in the capital city.