The Father of the Bolshevik Revolution, Revised

 Moscow does not ease you into itself. It announces. Wide avenues. Heavy stone. A sense that the conservative way of life here still matters enough to die defending.

We packed a lot into that visit. A bus tour looping around the city. Two riverboat cruises, one down the Moscow Canal and one along the Moscow River. The scenery was extraordinary in that severe, patient Russian way. And then there was the main event. Lenin.

Four hundred rubles bought us a shortcut. Thirty of us paid an old woman who relieved us of both money and cameras with a practiced hand. As we waited our half hour, she filled the time with history. Red Square. The Kremlin. The weight of the place. I had little doubt that the guards would get their share. Normalna. This is how things work.

We cut into line.

Down we went, three stories underground, into a temperature controlled silence. The kind of cold that preserves more than flesh. At every corner stood young Kremlin police officers. Stone faced. Ceremonial. Instructions were implicit. Do not speak. Do not laugh. Do not look around. This is not a place for being human.

And there he was.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin.

Black suit. No cap. Short man. Red hair. Red beard. Shoes polished, practical, the kind made for long walks through central Moscow. He looked like a wax figure. My wife assured me he was not. What lay under the glass was a body maintained, restored, preserved. An icon serviced like a machine.

I tried to feel something. Anything. Awe. Reverence. Grief. History pressing in.

Nothing came.

All I could think was, wow, that is Lenin. I have now seen Lenin.

It struck me how strange that is. To stand inches from the man who fathered a revolution that crushed churches, erased faith, and trained an entire nation to distrust its own soul. And yet there he lay, unburied, displayed in full view of thousands of capitalists who file past him daily between seven in the morning and one in the afternoon.

No genuflection. No prayers. No tears.

Just tourists.

The emptiness made sense. How does one mourn the architect of a system that preached equality while practicing suffocation. That promised liberation while enforcing silence. That spoke of the future while burying the present.

I imagined Lenin’s ghost hovering above us, furious at the spectacle. Furious that his preserved body had become a museum stop. Furious that the revolution now charged admission. Furious that an old woman was skimming rubles off the icon of communism without a shred of fear.

She met us again at the exit. Cheerful. Efficient. Untroubled by guilt. From there she walked us along the Kremlin wall, where the ashes of prominent communists from across the world are embedded in stone. Yuri Gagarin earned his place there too. Spaceflight bought immortality of a sort. Nearby lay the bodies of Soviet leaders and generals. Names etched. Power spent.

Then it was over.

We were ushered back into Red Square and handed our cameras with stern warnings not to use them until we were well clear of Kremlin boundaries. History, it turns out, is very particular about where it allows itself to be photographed.

As we walked away, I realized what unsettled me most.

Lenin endured. Not because his ideas still ruled, but because they no longer did. Preserved, controlled, neutralized. A revolution reduced to climate control and queue management.

I had seen the father of the Bolshevik Revolution.

And I felt only the weight of what happens when ideology outlives truth, when power mistakes permanence for meaning, and when history leaves behind monuments that even time seems unsure how to mourn.