The balanced truth in all of this...
Tor bury or not to bury
I’m afraid, the issue is much more complicated than that. We would know this if more Russians were asked what they think of not only Lenin but the fact that his statue continues to be prominently displayed all over Moscow. The biggest towers across the street from metro Oktiabrskaia. The Soviet Union and its legacy remains a contentious issue for some. But for many it is viewed with an understandable ambivalence. It simultaneously figures as the best of times and the worst of times. There is nostalgia for many aspects the Soviet times, especially (and rather ironically because it is frequently associated with stagnation) for the Brezhnev period. I think what Lenin stands for is changing in Russia. For better or for worse, he is becoming more like Peter the Great: a firm and decisive, but necessary ruler who thrust Russia into modernity. But that is historical memory for you. A new historical narrative emerges at the moment of forgetting. Even the Lenins of the world can find their place in the genealogy of the present.
Effectual Effigies: The Controversy Over St. Petersburg’s Historicized Heroism
But regardless, one doesn’t have to be a local or a communist to understand that there is a wide gulf separating the crimes of Lenin and the early Bolsheviks from the crimes of Hitler or, for that matter, Stalin.
The real question is whether a similarly wide gulf separates the crimes of Lenin from those of Peter the Great, or any of the other major czars honored in St. Petersburg. This is where the issue of historical memory becomes supplanted by ideology. Many Russians, and many Americans who have devoted their semester to studying Russia, seem to share a highly romantic view of the czars. “Of course Peter the Great should be memorialized,” argued one student, “He founded this city and built Russia into a great power.” Well, yes, though this overlooks the tens of thousands of lives lost in building a city with slave labor in the middle of a frozen swamp, the highly centralized and oppressive feudal system Peter introduced that outlasted him by a century and a half, and the three centuries of heated controversy in Russian intellectual circles over whether or not Peter’s reforms were justified. Imperial czarist was not exactly a benevolent institution; how else to explain the revolution that brought Lenin to power? For my part, I seriously doubt that that my family would even live in America if not for the reign of Tsar Alexander III and the massive pogroms he encouraged, which continued until the Bolsheviks.
Russia is hardly the only country in the world whose national heroes include violent and morally dubious men. Certainly America is not immune from this problem. But removing statuary can be an even more blatantly political statement than erecting it. A statue, after all, is a testimony to the history of a place. To tear a statue down is to attempt to blot out the memory of whatever it represents, much as Stalin himself used to erase purged party members from photographs. In today’s St. Petersburg, one can walk alongside statues of Peter and of Lenin, cheerfully ignoring either or both if one wishes. To suddenly remove all the communists while leaving the czars standing would be to pass a sudden judgment on Russia’s history, not only demonizing the communist period and the many residents who still have mixed feelings about it, but just as importantly elevating czarism into something more noble and heroic. And Russia’s history is far too complex for such a simplistic ideological display.
There is an anecdote that Lenin did not actually want to be commemorated with statues, claiming that “they only gather bird ****.” Maybe so, but they also gather memories, and the memory of communism is now as important a part of St. Petersburg’s history as the more distant memory of the czars. Russians will not achieve inner peace by editing their own history; they can only hope to learn from it, and ultimately to try to build a better system on the ruins of two older systems that failed. Otherwise, a century from now American students will be traveling eight time zones away from home to argue about whether or not Russians should tear down the statues of Putin.