Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov overthrew the provisional government and seized power in Russia on this day in 1917. But 100 years after the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin’s aura seems to have faded even in his hometown
Mecca for Lenin lovers
The city of Simbirsk 700 km southeast of Moscow, where Lenin was born and lived until he was 17, was renamed Ulyanovsk in his honour after his death in 1924. It became a Mecca for tour groups of Lenin lovers from socialist countries
No more Communist funds
But Lenin no longer resonates in the same way. “Today practically the biggest (Lenin) museum that is left is ours, in his motherland,” AFP quotes former director Valery Perfilov as saying. The museum was once lavishly funded by the Communist Party and had around 5,000 visitors a day, but after the breakup of the USSR “it all suddenly collapsed,” the 70-year-old recalls
Erasing memories of the Revolution
A plaque on Lenin’s former school calls him “Vladimir Ulyanov, the head of the government of Soviet Russia and the USSR from 1917 to 1923”. “There’s a certain number of people in power who according to their views would happily raze the whole memory of the October Revolution and Lenin,” complains a communist resident of Ulyanovsk
Chinese tourists and Soviet sites
The museum is also shifting its focus from Lenin as a political figure to his childhood in Ulyanovsk, the current director said, as Lenin’s role as an ideologue in the Soviet era is now generally downplayed by officials, according to AFP
The city markets its Lenin links as part of a “Red Circuit” for Chinese tourists visiting Soviet sites around Russia. The city is also looking to other famous natives, including 19th-century novelist Ivan Goncharov,
to possibly end Lenin’s domination over its image