A century after Lenin’s death, the USSR’s founder seems to be an afterthought in modern Russia

Not long after the 1924 death of the founder of the Soviet Union, a popular poet soothed and thrilled the grieving country with these words: “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live.” A century later, the once-omnipresent image of Vladimir Lenin is largely an afterthought in modern Russia, despite those famous lines by revolutionary writer Vladimir Mayakovsky. The Red Square mausoleum where his embalmed corpse lies in an open sarcophagus is no longer a near-mandatory pilgrimage but a site of macabre kitsch, open only 15 hours a week.