The once “eternally living” Lenin is still dead. Really?

Monuments to Joseph Stalin and Felix Dzerzhinsky are constantly increasing in contemporary Russia. However, new monuments to Lenin are no longer being built. From the perspective of today’s strongmen, Stalin and Dzerzhinsky represent strength, war victory and domestic “iron order”. Lenin, on the other hand, is seen as a political adventurer and destabilizer. As a man who, according to Vladimir Putin, placed a time bomb under the construction of a the thousand-year-old Russian statehood.According to the current ruler of the Kremlin, that time bomb was the fact that individual nations were supposed to have – at least on paper – equal rights, including the right to secede from the union, in Lenin’s Soviet Russia and later the Soviet Union. And that is something that even Putin fears in today’s Russia.Most of all, however, Lenin's legacy is shrouded in silence in today's Russia. Last year's centenary of his death was very cold, and this year's - not round - 108th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution is no less cold. The embalmed Lenin still dominates Red Square today. But why is the body of the man who, according to Putin, did so much harm to Russia, still in the mausoleum?