Recently Lenin's 150th birthday went by (as with all COVID things) with not a bang but a whimper. Over at Arc Digital, a woman who grew up under the Soviet system recants some of the tales.
Some of the Lenin material intended to show his great humanity had a rather disturbing subtext. One such story was the tale of Lenin and the stoveman, adapted into a poem by Alexander Tvardovsky. It goes like this: In the early 1920s, when he is already the head of the Soviet state, Lenin is taking a stroll in the village where he has a summer home. A villager — the local pechnik, or stove maker and repairer— spots him walking across a meadow and yells at him for trampling freshly mowed hay. Then he learns that the man he just cussed out was Lenin and goes home terrified. A few weeks later, two military men in a horse-drawn cart show up and ask the stoveman to come with them. His wife bursts into tears, telling him he’s about to pay a heavy price for his rudeness. But instead of taking him to prison, the visitors take him to Lenin’s house: It turns out that Lenin needs his stove fixed, that’s all. Relieved, elated and overwhelmed by Lenin’s generosity, the stoveman does the job and the two have a long heart-to-heart chat over tea. In other words … Lenin did not have the man shot or sent to prison for being rude to him! Hallelujah!
Once the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, Lenin constantly urged ruthless reprisals against “the bourgeoisie,” “the upper classes,” “kulaks” (well-to-do peasants) and the clergy (to whom he always referred by the contemptuous terms popy or popovschina, slurs similar in spirit to “fundies” or “Jesus freaks” in American slang). He also called, no less relentlessly, for the brutal suppression of left-wing and center-left political parties including the Constitutional Democrats (“cadets”), Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), and Mensheviks (the rival Communist faction).The money quote for any Albertan with memories of Rat Bastard 1.0 and the sick anti-freedom agenda of Rat Bastard 2.0 of course, has to be:
In March, Lenin made his agenda even clearer in a letter to fellow Politburo member Lev Kamenev. “It is a great mistake to think that the NEP put an end to terror,” he wrote. “We will bring it back yet, including economic terror.”Quite.
