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Death of a Salesman

27 April, 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.

Newspaper output №:

№16, (1999)

Section

Day After Day