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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

Death of a Salesman

27 April, 1999 - 00:00

On April 22, the corpse whom the tourists to Moscow call "Dead
Fred" and we know as Vladimir Ilich Lenin marked his 129th birthday. I
once wrote an essay on Dmitry Volkogonov's two-volume biography of the
USSR's Great Dictator and will always regret that he died before he could
respond. In fact, local scholars take it for granted that his untimely
death was "assisted " by those who had granted him access that they could
not later take away.

The point is not this, for here we are all too accustomed to crimes
we know will never be solved. Lenin's crimes were solved long ago. There
are at least four volumes in his interminable Complete Collected Works
which  can be described as "hang 'em high" letters to subordinates,
high "so people can see them." Volkogonov found quite a few more such documents
(many would undoubtedly have been published in Gorbachev's projected 100
volume "even more complete collected works" had not the collapse of the
USSR cut the project short) from the little man whose brain was in the
process of drying up. In fact, after his death they even founded a special
institute to study the walnut-like thing they took out of his head.

The tragedy is not the waxy corpse lying in the mausoleum built, incidentally,
of Ukrainian marble, but of the bill of goods he managed to sell the people
of Russia, Ukraine, and a number of other countries - that we can build
heaven on earth if only we just kill off all the rich people and take what
they have, after which the omniscient Party will take care of us and everything
else. Anyone who thinks otherwise can be "rehabilitated through labor"
in a concentration camp (a Leninist, not Stalinist, invention). Well, we
saw where that road leads. But in spite of all the documents, all the research,
there are still people who want to go back there. After all, they were
not in the camps, and people like them "lived quite well" under Stalin.
They are quite willing to forget, even now, such a minor unpleasantness
as a few million "misplaced" in the GULAG.

The specter of Communism still haunts this part of Europe. As long as
this remains the case, positive change will remain elusive. I may not like
some of the oligarchs running this country, but I am not so naive as to
think that killing them and distributing their ill-gotten gains will help
anything. If we can get them to put their money to work for the benefit
of this country, let them spend their profits in Jamaica! I'll be making
better money, and so will you.

 

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