On Lenin...

As Jambo stated, the fact that Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was one of the five most influential men in the last two hundred years of human history is undeniable... but it certainly doesn't make him a "hero".

Yes, there are tens of thousands of people in the former Soviet Union that think he brought the "Golden Age" to Mother Russia and her millions of people... but it is simply not fact.

Lenin preached an ideology focused on a centralized economic and political system, wherein the Party (which utterly controlled the State) determined what was best for the nation in all matters political, economical, military and socially. Every facet of that society was driven by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU)... from crime and punishment to education at every level. All aspects of medicine, infrastructure, government (local, regional and national), communications, entertainment, foreign relations, trade (domestic and international), agriculture, industry, labor... everything was controlled and dictated by a single political body known as the PARTY.

Where Lenin truly and utterly FAILED is that the ideology he preached, from beginning to end, was WRONG. Not only in principle... but in practical fact, too. In the nearly ten years he ran the nation, he had to fall back to a limited, almost feudal, economic plan to keep the government and the party functioning... something he called his "New Economic Policy". He did this not once... not twice... but three times. Three times in his short tenure as "Premier" he had to fall back to the evils of "capitalism" and "free market" pricing because his utopian "socialism" was failing so monumentally that the entire nation was on the brink of failure and collapse... far worse than what was experienced prior to the Red Revolution in 1917, too.

I have gazed upon that waxy, shrunken corpse and can honestly say to anyone that wants to know... the man needs to be put six feet under, as soon as possible. Hell, bury him in the Kremlin wall with the rest of the former Soviet Premiers, if that seems fitting... but this semi-religious veneration that continues to be played out to a man who was so completely mistaken about nearly everything he believed to be true is a national stain on an otherwise proud and determined people.

Bury him, and perhaps his memory will fade all the quicker.