Lenin's Mausoleum

Lenin's Mausoleum is underwhelming from the outside, considering it's the final resting place of one of the world's most influential men. I walked past it before I realized what it was. Sitting at the foot of the Kremlin's eastern wall it feels small, which is perhaps fitting, but it's quite the contrast from the gargantuan tributes other countries erect to their founding fathers. Perhaps the tumultuous years of the early Soviet Union precluded a grand monument to Lenin, I can't say that I really know... But I do know that in this tomb lies the body of a man of immense consequence, a socialist icon and a committed revolutionary, with a ghost that cast a long shadow over the 20th century... What to say about Vladimir Ilyich Lenin? Perhaps it's best to let him say it himself... Below are a handful of quotes illuminating the mindset of someone on the vanguard of socialist revolution, when it was new, full of promise and hope, and offering up an alternative to the millennium-long struggles of proles against imperial power....

"Sometimes - history needs a push."
"Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle. The modern industrial proletariat does not belong to the category of such classes."
"Under socialism all will govern in turn and will soon become accustomed to no one governing."
"Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted."
"When there is state there can be no freedom, but when there is freedom there will be no state."
"Can a nation be free if it oppresses other nations? It cannot."

This is a miniscule sampling of his thought. His life and writing are well worth a deep dive, if you've got the time and have a penchant for history. Just because an ideology is discredited as a basis for government doesn't mean the men who breathed life into it aren't worth examining... Contradictions make for rich characters...