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One hundred and forty years ago, grandfather Lenin was born, noted in his infantile cherubic appearance, with a curly head, on all October badges, and now illuminating us with his bald head from the Mausoleum on Red Square. Out of grief and impotence, some democrats eventually started talking about the fact that he himself did not want to go to the Mausoleum, but asked to be buried next to his mother at the Volkovo cemetery. Even arguments were used that he was uncomfortable in the sarcophagus. Although the millions of victims of the Civil War, famine and the Cheka give descendants the right not to be guided by considerations of his personal comfort. No one was interested in the last will of the Nazi bosses who were executed in Nuremberg.

So why can't we get rid of the mummy of the "first falcon - Lenin"? It's not working. It didn’t work even under the anti-communist Yeltsin, much less it won’t work under the Chekists. The mausoleum is a granite case of the myth about the USSR as a country where there were still a lot of good things: baked potatoes, pioneer bonfires, balloons, Arteks, popsicles and red flags. The myth on the topic "All the children go to school there, and the old people are always full."

I still remember the ballad about the little Hindu who ran away from the evil sahib to the good Lenin. “The one far away lives behind the snows that lead to the sky like steps, in a city with big houses, and people call him Lenny.” And what about the poem by Konstantin Simonov about a guy from Java who, in prison on the night before the execution, “in shackles, rising from the floor to his knees, on the wall he scrawled with blood: Lenin.” That is, there is a planetary myth. And if Grigory Yavlinsky, before the 1996 elections, answered a voter's question about Lenin's funeral: "Let our children bury Lenin" - for the sake of the political situation and the leftist electorate; if Yeltsin was afraid of a communist revolt due to the eviction of Ilyich from the Mausoleum, then the basis of the planetary myth is much deeper and more dangerous.

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No one has physically climbed the Mausoleum since the early 90s. But the serene and thoughtless pathos of Soviet self-affirmation is based on the Mausoleum

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By the way, today our Chekists who have advanced into the “consumer society” absolutely do not need Lenin. They are not going to move the poor from the dorms to their mansions. No one has physically climbed the Mausoleum since the early 90s. But the serene and thoughtless pathos of Soviet self-affirmation rests on the Mausoleum. The Chekists, who worked in the KGB, are unable to cross out these 70 years, from 1917 to Gorbachev's perestroika. Neither, of course, could Khrushchev, who was restoring "Lenin's norms of life." Nor could Gorbachev, who spoke of "the socialist choice of his grandfather." Neither could Mikhail Shatrov in his play “Further, further, further…” All of them kicked out Stalinism with Leninism, and without this point of support, everything collapsed: history, the past, memory, attitude. And after all, no one could deny Lenin's atrocities: there is the Gulag Archipelago, the Black Book of Communism, and even the film Chekist. But lies lie on top of lies, because Soviet reality did not give us other supports and other building material.

A cunning, talented, cruel and ruthless politician, when necessary - a cynic, when necessary - a fanatic who did not hesitate to speak directly about the "mass character of terror" in his articles, turned out to be needed by too many as an intermediary between the commune and the "welfare state".

Today's first-graders confuse him with tsars and emperors, but monuments to him stand all over the country, because they can be thrown away only along with the Soviet past. Even the Western socialists would have to give up the red flags and participation in politics: since a “human face” is impossible, then socialism is left with only a totalitarian mug.

Lenin is not ready to be rejected even by the convulsively clinging to "brotherhood" and "equality" Europeans. Lenin's Solovki and Stalin's Kolyma, the terrible island of Fidel, the North Korean barracks and the Chinese zone are strongholds guarding the illusions and delusions of mankind.