Think Lenin Was the 'Good Communist?' Think Again

ith the COVID-19 pandemic sucking up much of public discourse, an anniversary of an event whose echoes still affect history went almost unnoticed this spring. April 22 marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov — better known as Lenin — the leader of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the founder of the Soviet state. There is some irony in the fact that coronavirus-related restrictions made the commemorations of this date in post-Soviet Russia even more low-key than they would have been otherwise. (Only a few dozen communists defied Moscow’s lockdown to place flowers at Lenin’s tomb.) After all, Lenin’s chief legacy was a political plague that not only put entire nations under a full-time lockdown but killed as many as 100 million. It’s not for nothing that Winston Churchill famously compared him to a deadly infection when he wrote, of Lenin’s German-aided return from exile in the spring of 1917, that the Germans “transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland to Russia.”