A century after Lenin’s death, the USSR’s founder seems to be an afterthought in modern Russia

By JIM HEINTZ
Associated Press

A century after the death of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union is largely an afterthought in modern Russia. The once-omnipresent face with the goatee and the intense gaze glares only from scattered statues. Many streets and localities that bore his name have been rechristened. The Red Square mausoleum where his embalmed corpse lies in an open sarcophagus is more a site of macabre kitsch than pilgrimage, drawing far fewer visitors than the Moscow Zoo. Even President Vladimir Putin seems to keep Lenin at arm’s length. Shortly before invading Ukraine in 2022, Putin dismissed its sovereign status as an illegitimate holdover from Lenin’s era, when it was a separate republic inside the USSR.