Russia commemorated this Sunday in the midst of a very revealing official silence the centenary of the death of Vladimir Leninthe founder of the Soviet Union, whom Kremlin blames Ukraine “problem”.

“If we take the special military operation in Ukraine as an example, we see it clearly. The more Lenin is criticized for Ukraine, the more evident it is that the path he chose to solve that problem was more effective than the current one“Guennadi, a communist veteran, told EFE today.

In anticipation of possible protests, the authorities sealed off Red Square, and reduced public events and tributes to the leader of the Bolshevik revolution to a minimum, the repetition of which is one of the greatest fears of the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin.

“I was born in 1949. Those of us who lived under socialism compare it with today’s life and there is no comparison. Before we went singing everywhere, now everyone is hypnotized by the telephone. Furthermore, now Putin limits our freedoms“Lida said through tears.

Low temperatures -some 15 degrees below zero– reduced the influx of public, but did not prevent hundreds of people from paying tribute to the father of the Soviet proletariat at the foot of the Kremlin. Communists and nostalgics of the old regime of all ages fought the cold by waving flags with the hammer and sickle and singing Soviet songs on the cobblestones of the square.

They placed large wreaths of flowers at the entrance to the marble mausoleum that houses Lenin’s embalmed body, protected since 1924 by a sarcophagus, before which they paid their respects in almost sepulchral silence. “Lenin went to the other world, but stayed forever among humanity“said Gennady Zyuganov, the leader of the Russian Communist Party, who led the procession.

Zyuganov, who defended the permanence of Lenin’s mummy in the mausoleum, also highlighted that the revolutionary leader tried create “a new world” governed by labor, not capital. The permanent revolution Without chanting slogans in favor of Leon Trotsky’s permanent revolution, the youngest people repeated the refrain in front of the mausoleum: “And Lenin is so young and the young October (revolution) is still to come.” “History is cyclical. Sooner or later, the spiral will return to the point where Lenin was when he died,” Elizaveta, a young historian, told EFE.

“Who criticizes Lenin? The capitalists”

For his part, Yuri, a Moscow pensioner, believes that “in the last 100 years practically nothing has changed“, since “in the world the capitalists have more and more money and limit the rights of workers.” “We will have to do again what Lenin and the Bolsheviks did in 1917. The people do not like what is happening . We ourselves have a bourgeois and classist State,” he commented.

Boris, of Azerbaijani origin, believes that the authorities are afraid of Lenin. “Who criticizes Lenin? The capitalists. We need social justice. All bad things come from capitalism (…) When the people understand what is happening, they can decide to overthrow it. “The authorities do not want to lose power,” he says. Lenin is to blame, according to Putin

As happened on the centenary of the 2017 revolution, the head of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, was absent from the communist celebrations. Of course, within the framework of the presidential campaign, he takes advantage of any opportunity to criticize Lenin, whom he accuses of placing “an atomic bomb under the building called Russia”, by recognizing the right to self-determination of peoples.

This same week he recalled that the leaders of the pro-Russian east of Ukraine expressed, after the revolution, the desire to be part of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, but Lenin chose to integrate those territories into Ukraine, the origin of the current conflict. “After the fall of the USSR, it was evident that finally we would return to that point“he added, alluding to the reincorporation of the Russian-speaking territories of eastern Ukraine.

The USSR was born in December 1922 as a federal state. Point 26 of the founding treaty contemplated the right of each republic to freely leave the union. Russians and Ukrainians were on equal footing.

That option was used by several republics to break ties with the Kremlin in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which led to the disappearance of the Soviet Union.

Precisely, Joseph Stalin, who wanted to avoid this process by creating a centralized State, is being rehabilitated by official historiography. Stalin, whom Lenin tried to remove before he died, was also honored by the communists, who placed bouquets of flowers at his grave in the Kremlin Necropolis.