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De-Leninization (Ukrainian:Ленінопад,romanized: Leninopad,lit. 'Leninfall') is political reform aimed at refutingLeninist andMarxist–Leninist ideology and ending the personality cult ofVladimir Lenin. Examples include removing images and topplingstatues of Lenin,renaming places and buildings, dismantlingLenin's Mausoleum currently inRed Square, Moscow, and burying his mummified corpse.
De-Stalinization began in the former Soviet Union in the mid-1950s during theKhrushchev thaw following the latter's secret speech "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences". But this was framed as a return to orthodox Leninism and thus the cult of Lenin remained[1] until thedissolution of the USSR, when public challenges to the cult and its ideology and iconography began.
A referendum on restoring the historic name ofLeningrad (the city's name in 1924–1991) was held on 12 June 1991, with 54.86% of Russian SFSR voters (with a turnout of 65%) supportingSaint Petersburg (the city's name in 1703–1914). Returning toPetrograd (the city's name in 1914–1924) was not on the ballot, and neither was the colloquialPiter. This change officially took effect on 6 September 1991.[2] Meanwhile, the oblast whose administrative center is also in Saint Petersburg is still namedLeningrad. This fact is largely attributed to the population of rural localities being more conservative, while the urban population is liberal and more Western-oriented.
In 1992, Lenin's likeness disappeared from the currency as Russia's banking system transitioned to thepost-Soviet ruble.
There was some reform in education, and Lenin's name began to disappear from books, articles, and dissertations.
Former Soviet colonel general turned historianDmitri Volkogonov gained access to theState Archive of the Russian Federation and wrote critical biographies of both Stalin and Lenin. He had previously been a head of theSoviet military'spsychological warfare department.
However, there was only partial and intermittent removal of his statues and likenesses in Russia. As historianYury Pivovarov notes, "All these metamorphoses predominantly took place in publishing, on TV and the radio… the dismantling of Lenin happened only verbally and almost didn’t materialize in any other way."[3]
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Out of 7,000 Lenin statues as of 1991, Russia retained the vast majority. As of 2022, there are approximately6,000 monuments to Lenin in Russia.[4]
Notable anti-communist measures in theRussian Federation include the banning of theCommunist Party of the Soviet Union (and the creation of theCommunist Party of the Russian Federation) as well as changing the names of some Russian cities back to what they were before the 1917October Revolution (Leningrad to Saint Petersburg, Sverdlovsk toYekaterinburg and Gorky toNizhny Novgorod),[5] though others were maintained, withUlyanovsk (former Simbirsk),Tolyatti (former Stavropol) andKirov (former Vyatka) being examples. Even though Leningrad and Sverdlovsk were renamed, regions that were named after them are still officially called Leningrad and Sverdlovsk oblasts.
Russia's first presidentBoris Yeltsin tried and failed to establish the new regime on a basis ofanti-communism. Russian presidentVladimir Putin made peace with the Communists when he came to power in 2000, but after his 2012 election began denouncing theBolsheviks for their treachery in "betraying the country's national interests" to Germany inWorld War I.[6] In 2016, he critiqued Lenin's concept of a federative state divided along ethnic lines, each with a right of secession. Various public figures also denounced Lenin formurdering the Tsar and his family and for killing priests.[7] A 2017 survey showed that 56% of Russia's population had a favorable opinion of Lenin, with the majority of support coming from the older generation that lived in the USSR.[8] In a 2021 poll, a record 70% ofRussians indicated they had a mostly/very favourable view ofJoseph Stalin.[9]
In 2012, the state-sponsoredRussia Today media network reported that Liberal-Democratic party (LDPR) deputyAleksandr Kurdyumov proposed the removal of Lenin monuments to museums, citing high maintenance costs due to the prevalence of vandalism, and saying that Lenin's dominance was "unfair" to other outstanding personalities – such asPeter the Great,Alexander Suvorov,Ivan the Terrible and others. The lawmaker proposed regional referendums to decide the question.
Conscious attempts in Russian society to deal with the Soviet past have been uncertain.[10] Organisations such as theMemorial Society have worked on numerous projects involving witnesses to past events (Gulag inmates, Soviet rights activists) and younger generations, including schoolchildren. The organization was officially banned in Russia in 2022.[11][12][13]
Many have proposed burying Lenin's corpse and dismantling the Lenin Mausoleum, includingMikhail Gorbachev,Boris Yeltsin, and hierophants of the Russian Orthodox Church. In 2017, legislation was proposed by six lawmakers, including three from Putin'sUnited Russia party and three from theLDPR, but was opposed by theRussian Communist Party. The embalming and Mausoleum had been opposed from its outset byLeon Trotsky,Bukharin,Kamenev, by Lenin's widowNadezhda Krupskaya, and reportedly by Lenin himself before his premature death.[14]
After thedissolution of the USSR, otherpost-Soviet states also began removing many of their Lenin monuments, although some have remained. In 1991, Ukraine, where the Soviet Union is viewed much more negatively than in Russia, (according to a poll by the sociological groupRating, 76% ofUkrainians support the initiative to rename streets and other objects whose names are associated with theSoviet Union andRussia after the2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine[15][16]) had 5,500 Lenin monuments,[17] and until November 2015, approximately 1,300 Lenin monuments were still standing.[17] More than 700 Lenin monumentswere removed or destroyed between February 2014 and December 2015,[17] On 9 April 2015, theUkrainian parliament passed legislation onde-communization,[18] which provided for their removal, signed into law on 15 May 2015.
Nostalgia for the Soviet Union is gradually on the rise in Russia.[19] Communist symbols continue to form an important part of the rhetoric used instate-controlled media, as banning on them in other countries is seen by theRussian foreign ministry as "sacrilege" and "a perverse idea of good and evil".[5] The process ofdecommunization in Ukraine, a neighbouring post-Soviet state, was met with fierce criticism by Russia,[5] who regularly dismissesSoviet war crimes.[20]