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Most likely, the centenary of Vladimir Lenin’s death on Sunday will be greeted with silence by the current occupier of the Kremlin.
Russian President Vladimir Putin “cares about history,” Ishaan Tharoor told the Washington Post. He has “spent much of his time in power consciously hiding his rule under the cloak of many previous Russian eminences,” linking his invasion of Ukraine to campaigns there. Led by Tsar Peter the Great, who built the empire over three hundred years ago.
But Putin’s views on Lenin, the Bolshevik leader and founding father of Soviet Russia, are complicated and contradictory. Putin “loathes Lenin and Trotsky” as the architects of the 1917 revolution and Soviet Russia, said historian Michael Burleigh on the i news site.
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Elliott Goat is a freelance editor at The Week Digital. Winner of The Independent’s Wyn Harness Award, he has been a journalist for more than a decade and focuses on human rights, disinformation and elections. He is co-founder and editor of the Brussels-based magazine. Research NGO Unhack Democracy, which works for election integrity across Europe. Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Elliott, a member specialising in trade unions and long-term jobs, is a founding member of RSA’s Good Work Guild and a contributor to the International Initiative Against State Crime. An interdisciplinary forum for research, reporting, and education on state violence and corruption.