Karl Marx’s last words as a London-based correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune were to attack the hypocrisy of Westerners who defend sacred values only when it suits them.
Marx left the paper in 1863 and spent the final decades of his life, until his death in 1883, studying Russian rural communes hoping they would democratically evolve toward liberation. But the Russian Revolution from 1917-23 carried the country down a different path, and Vladimir Lenin had no such faith in the intelligence of the poor.
The peasant class knew nothing of Marxist economic theory and therefore, the new government’s chairman believed, they had no clue what was best for themselves. Lenin was bent on helping them, with or without their consent.
What followed were secret police raids, gulags, mass torture, extrajudicial killings and public executions. When peasants in Tambov protested the government seizure of grain without compensation, Lenin had 15,000 of them shot and another 50,000 thrown into camps. He applied the same “liberation” methods in cities and districts across Russia. Not to mention the genocidal killing or deportation of up to half a million Cossacks and execution of millions of prosperous peasants and their families.
Why the history lesson?
Last weekend, I ventured to Fremont to look at one of its landmarks, a bronze statue of Lenin. I was there having lunch at Dumpling Tzar, where they serve pelmeni, which is and always has been my favorite dish. As a boy, I hand-made pelmeni with my babushka Alla, my hands and face covered in flour as we worked in the cold of my grandparents’ basement in Paterson, New Jersey. My grandfather Josef, a horse rancher-turned-engineer, had come to the United States as a refugee after escaping a Nazi concentration camp. The only thing worse, he said with bitterness in his voice, was the Russia Lenin had built.
Josef knew he would never see his family again, but every holiday, my family stood around the kitchen table while he packed a box to send home, filling it with mundane but greatly needed raw cloth, buttons, paper. Josef had pre-sliced bread, but his mother needed flour. He had electric light, she needed candles.
Back in Seattle, Lenin’s statue stands 16 feet tall on the corner of Evanston Avenue North and North 34th Street. Locals like to dress him up like a mascot. A tutu for Pride Month, a Halloween get-up, a Christmas star. I guess they think it’s cute. Currently, his hands are painted blood red and his chest is marked with the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag.
Slovakian sculptor Emil Venkov created the statue in 1988. In the early 1990s, Issaquah native Lewis Carpenter found it in a Czech scrapyard and paid $40,000 to get the seven-ton thing back home. He planned to open a restaurant and thought Lenin would help draw attention. “I’ve had a few idiots call me up and say that this had something to do with communism,” he later told King 5 News. “I don’t know anything about Lenin. It’s a piece of art.”
Perhaps we should be thankful the scrapyard wasn’t holding a statue of Stalin.
Mind you, I’m new to the city. I moved here in May when I joined The Seattle Times editorial board, coming from rural Georgia. As such, the statue wasn’t a shock to me. Folks down there have controversial statues too.
Indeed, critics have compared the Lenin statue to Confederate counterparts, but most Confederate monuments were erected between 1890 and 1915 in reaction to Reconstruction policies, or in the 1960s in reaction to the Civil Rights Movement. In contrast, I could find no evidence to suggest the Lenin statue was created to insult his victims, though standing it in the middle of Fremont arguably does.
More importantly, the nationwide removal of Confederate statues was in reaction to events such as the Charleston church shooting, the Charlottesville white supremacist rally and the murder of George Floyd. In 2005, King County’s namesake was redesignated from slaveholder William Rufus DeVane King to Martin Luther King Jr. In 2016, the Legislature discarded Highway 99’s Jefferson Davis Highway name in favor of the William P. Stewart Memorial Highway, after a Black Civil War veteran from Snohomish. This year, the State Committee on Geographic Names renamed nine places using the term “squaw” with names proposed by Washington tribes.
Advocates for these changes talk about the need to reckon with history and challenge the legacy of racism. Apparently Lenin’s bloody legacy is OK. Or is it sheer ignorance?
But never mind the racist Russification programs. Forget about classifying minority groups as “enemies of the people.” Forget ethnic cleansing. The Trail of Tears killed more than 15,000 Native Americans while Russia’s genocidal resettlements killed 50,000 Russian Koreans, 150,000 Crimean Tartars and more than 200,000 Chechens. But who’s counting?
We are sickened by events like the deadly Charlottesville rally. But in Russia, racist attacks are so common one cannot keep track. Neo-Nazism thrives, the government fans the flames, Ukraine is on fire.
Yet, in a hip district in a blue city, we honor the man who fathered it all.
In 2017, activists tore down the Daughters of the Confederacy Veterans Monument in the privately-owned Lake View Cemetery in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. The mayor at the time had urged the removal of that monument as well as Lenin’s statue, also on private property. The activists left a note saying they did it for everyone “who has been stolen, murdered, enslaved, raped, tortured, brutalized, terrorized, displaced [ …] by white supremacy.”
Almost everyone.
So why is Lenin still there? If you talk to people or search online, you’ll find three main defenses. Some claim the statue is critical of Lenin because it depicts him marching with guns and flames instead of playing with children or reading. Others say it’s just a joke. Still others claim it’s another oddball feature of quirky old Fremont, like the Fremont Troll or the summer solstice festival.
None of these arguments work. Lenin and the Bolsheviks emphasized the need for violence, so depicting him with guns is, if anything, a celebration of his legacy. People can say “it’s just a joke” if they like, but that works no better than it does to excuse wearing blackface for Halloween. Nor is Fremont’s freedom to be peculiar any more an excuse than it would be if we were talking about a statue of Joseph Goebbels.
That said, should we tear it down? And with all the millions he killed, would we even be asking this question had Lenin owned so much as a single Black enslaved person?
“It’s a slap in the face of millions whose loved ones were victims of genocide,” said Vladislav Davidzon, former editor-in-chief of The Odessa Review, when I told him about it. “But it should not be taken down by fiat.”
Davidzon has seen Ukraine eaten alive by the legacy of Lenin. He’s also seen countless Lenin statues torn down across Europe. But he’s a proceduralist who believes not even Confederate statues should be torn down by mobs, though he also thinks they should never have been put up. They are part of our society, and as a society, we should decide these things through community input.
I agree. Tearing down a Lenin statue will erase the symbol, but in so doing we honor the man with our actions by using violent rather than democratic means. Still, as long as it stands, it’s an ugly reminder of Marx’s last words as a London correspondent, particularly for a city that prides itself on social justice.
You can despise oppression. Or you can dismiss those offended by the statue as snowflakes. But you can’t do both.
At the very least, when the next holiday rolls around, people might think twice about playing dress-up with the effigy of a homicidal tyrant. We don’t decorate Nazi flags with glitter and we don’t wrap statues of Confederate scum in Christmas lights.