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Lenin: Here, There And Nowhere

October 22, 1993|By Howard Witt, Tribune Staff Writer.

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — Vladimir Ilyich Lenin slept here.

And here. And over there. And in this hut. And in that shed.

He used this bathtub. He rode that train. He read this book. He touched that pen.

In fact, in this historic city that used to be called Leningrad, where the great October Revolution of 1917 took place, it's almost easier to enumerate the places Lenin didn't stay than the places he stopped for a week, a day, an hour or even a few minutes.

There are Lenin plaques around practically every corner, affixed to more than 250 buildings where the founder of the Soviet Union at one time or another spoke, ate, slept or hid during the months he orchestrated the revolution.

There are maps showing a riot of colored, dotted lines-resembling nothing so much as American football playbooks-that document every walk, stroll and ride Lenin ever took through the city.

There are more than 20 Lenin busts and monuments-as well as the factory that forged most of the approximately 40,000 Lenin statues that were scattered across the vast expanse of the former Soviet Union.

And there are the museums: four apartments preserved as they looked when Lenin briefly occupied them, plus one entire steam locomotive-preserved under glass-that was used to pull a train Lenin rode from Finland.

On St. Petersburg's outskirts, the inventory includes one wood cabin-also encased in a huge glass pavilion-where, a plaque reports, Lenin lived for "a few days," and one grass hut-recast in concrete because the original long ago burned down-where Lenin hid out in the forest.

There's just one problem with all these national historic sites so lovingly cared for during the long Soviet era: Most Russians would prefer to forget all about them. The cult of Lenin is about as popular these days as the cult of David Koresh.

So the loyal Lenin museum guides spend most of their days listening to the radio or reading romance novels, waiting for tour buses that never come.

The windows are broken and the displays vandalized at the Lenin Visitor Center, next to the concretized hut.

Bird droppings spatter the Lenin locomotive's glass enclosure.

And the caretaker of the glass-encased Lenin wood cabin no longer has a telephone: One of Russia's new millionaire businessmen, constructing a mansion down the road, swiped it for his house.

Meanwhile, back in Moscow, even greater apostasies are being heard.

The mayor wants to seize the building housing the Central Lenin Museum, the nation's main repository of Lenin documents, Lenin portraits, Lenin clothing, commemorative Lenin plates and ceremonial Lenin embroidered area rugs.

And there are fresh rumors that Lenin himself, still perfectly preserved and nattily attired, will soon vanish from his mausoleum display on Red Square and finally be buried in a normal grave.

Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who spent most of his professional Communist Party political career paying homage to the goateed corpse, took a big step in that direction this month, after putting down the violent parliamentary uprising. He abruptly removed the goose-stepping guards who had stood outside Lenin's tomb day and night for more than 50 years.

The dwindling corps of professional Lenin historians can only wring their hands and repeat the question Lenin himself made famous: What is to be done?

Shrines, not museums

"Good or bad, like it or not, Lenin is among the most important figures in our history," said Vladimir Melnichenko, director of the Central Lenin Museum and a leading Lenin scholar. "The government will not erase his memory by closing the museums. It will only prove to the world how uncivilized it really is."

But who was Lenin, really? The Lenin plaques, monuments and museums, for all their abundance, do little to answer that question. In fact, they more closely resemble holy shrines-and uniformly sterile, Soviet shrines at that.

Each of the spotless Lenin apartments has a similar lamp, writing table, chair and requisite collection of revolutionary books and newspapers. Even the beds on which Lenin supposedly slept have identical iron frames, pillows and linens.

The explanations on the walls offer details like this:

"From Oct. 20 to Nov. 6, 1917, Lenin lived here and conducted the revolution."

But nowhere is there even the slightest clue about Lenin's personality, his personal life or the dark aspects of his character. There's scarcely a hint about his wife-and not a word about the mistress he is believed to have kept.

It is only inadvertently, in fact, that any of the sites says something remotely interesting to contemporary visitors. One of the apartments where Lenin briefly hid belonged to a wealthy merchant, and it is preserved as it looked in those prerevolutionary days: large, airy and richly furnished.