Rosenberg Puts Down A Marker

Editorials & Opinion: Wednesday, July 04, 2001
Guest columnist
Shame on Fremont for its tribute to Lenin

By Matt Rosenberg
Special to The Times

Imagine a statue in Westlake Plaza of Hitler, who stoked ethnic and class hatred to inspire extermination of six million Jews. Unthinkable. Yet, under the insidious, value-neutral rubric of "provocative art," Seattle proudly displays a larger-than-life sculpture of a man equally abhorrent.

His focus on strict adherence to the bloody principles of revolutionary class war led to a vastly greater death toll than that of Hitler. There's much to the ugly truth about Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, whose likeness shamefully stands in a public square in Fremont.

Respected historians agree Lenin laid the ideological groundwork for 50 million to 100 million murders in the name of 20th-century Communism. Still, some local media observers have suggested our Lenin is cloaked in "ambiguity" and the statue deserves a pass because he inspired solidarity among our Wobblies in their heyday, or because a democracy-promoting fragment of the Berlin Wall has been considered for installation nearby.

Such blithe rationalizations and the labored explanatory text adjoining the statue itself betray worries we're condoning something awful. We are. It's finally time for Seattle's limousine liberals and bicycle-riding bohemian bourgeoisie to face Lenin's real meaning. There just aren't two sides to it.

In "Fifty Million People Dead: The Grand Failure - The Birth and Death of Communism in the 20th Century," former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski details "the catastrophic legacy of Lenin" in Russia, Eastern Europe and Asia. He writes that Lenin exemplified the "concentration of power in just a few hands and reliance on terror."

Estimates from leading Soviet and European scholars in the "Black Book of Communism" are of some 85 to 100 million dead at the hands of 20th-century Communists. Here again, Lenin is strongly implicated as the founding father of Communist mass murder.

Reviewing this years-in-the-making 800-page work, the noted biographer of Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Michael Scammell, wrote in The New Republic about the book's "suffocating torrent of fresh evidence from newly opened Soviet archives" of murderous excesses under Lenin. These included mass exterminations by the "Cheka" secret police Lenin founded (renamed the MVD and later the KGB), and torture.

One internal report from Lenin's time noted, "orgies and drunkenness are daily occurrences. Almost all the personnel of the Cheka are heavy cocaine users. They say this helps them deal with the sight of so much blood on a daily basis."

Scammell observes, "the 'Black Book of Communism' lays to rest once and for all the myth of the 'good' Lenin versus the 'bad' Stalin. . . . Lenin blazed a path of tyranny and bloodshed not only for Stalin, but also for Mao, Ho Chi-Minh, Pol Pot, and a century's worth of psychopaths at every level of the Communist chain of command, from dictators to bureaucrats."

Then read "Black Night, White Snow," by the late Harrison Salisbury, the New York Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning Russian correspondent. Guiding Lenin were these, his own words: "We must stick the 'convict's badge' on anyone and everyone who tries to undermine Marxism, even if we don't go on to examine his case. When you see a stinking heap on the road you don't have to poke around in it to see what it is."

The recent biography, "Lenin," by British scholar Robert Service of St. Anthony's College in Oxford, confirms his place in history as "a rebel whose devotion to destruction proved greater than his love for the 'proletariat' he supposedly served."

Lenin's disturbing legacy persists. A State Department report estimates some 100 killings last year of members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, considered a threat by Chinese communist leaders. Aware of Falun Gong's plight early on, Seattle Mayor Paul Schell in late 1999 issued a proclamation saluting the group, but quickly rescinded it after protests.

Local media references amusedly note Lenin stands amidst Fremont's groovy capitalism, guarding a burrito stand, no less. Detached modern irony abnegates the taxing responsibility to thoughtfully employ free expression (a basic human right Lenin killed people to deny).

Our breezy attitude puts us in distinguished company. A fancy Las Vegas eatery, Red Square, also installed a statue of Lenin for arty, edgy atmosphere. Appropriately enough, someone excised his head.

But it was recovered and then frozen in a block of ice used in the restaurant's sub-zero designer vodka "locker." Customers would don a Russian fur coat and hat, march in and snort a few premium Stolys chilled on Lenin's frozen cranium. Then back to their tables for caviar, blinis and the house specialty, "Siberian Nachos."

What good, campy fun! Forward, comrades, to the baccarat tables!

Seattle's Lenin statue isn't illegal. But it is unconscionable. A man from Issaquah brought it from a Poprad, Slovakia, junk heap after the Iron Curtain fell. That's where it belongs.

Matt Rosenberg is a Seattle writer and regular contributor to the opinion page of The Times. He can be reached at oudist@nwlink.com.

Copyright 2001 The Seattle Times Company
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Letters to the editor

Lessons in lenin
Without the statue, would we reflect on personal freedoms?

Editor, The Times:

I have to disagree with Matt Rosenberg's call to remove the statue of Lenin from display in Fremont ("Shame on Fremont for its tribute to Lenin," Times guest column, July 4). And my reasoning is specifically because of his call for its removal.

Without that statue, the general public would not get access to discourses such as yours about Lenin, communism and the USSR. Ignorance is risk: Our appallingly short memory spans and negligible sense of history need to be prodded by conversations and thoughtfully written historical perspectives in public papers. This discussion would never have taken place if Lenin weren't in Fremont.

And let's face it: While preserving art and propaganda from our glorious - as well as not-so-glorious - past is essential, it should also be noted that the statue is not being displayed in anything that could be considered a place of honor. There's no question that its placement in front of Taco del Mar is distinctly ironic and uncomplimentary to the memory of Lenin. As it should be.

-- Gary Tucker, Seattle

Think Taliban

Shame on Matt Rosenberg for his July Fourth diatribe against the public display of a statue of Lenin on the streets of Fremont!

Rosenberg certainly makes the case that Lenin was responsible for horrible acts against humanity. However, his advocacy for the statue's removal or desecration is reminiscent of the recent destruction of the 1,500-year-old statue of Buddha by the Taliban in Afghanistan because it offended their religious beliefs.

Whenever I drive by Fremont's Lenin statue, I am reminded that it is a display of the very freedom that makes our country the greatest in the world and that to retain that freedom we must remain ever vigilant to preserve it from the attacks of those who would deprive us of it.

-- Robert Benish, Lake Forest Park

His own words

Matt Rosenberg is right to point out the shame reflected on Fremont by its statue of Lenin. Eight years ago, the Library of Congress held an exhibit called "Revelations from the Russian Archives." One item was a telegram from Lenin to some local communist leaders. In part here is what it said:

"Comrades! The revolt by the five kulak volosts (farming districts) must be suppressed without mercy! We need to set an example. 1) You need to hang, so the public sees, at least 100 notorious kulaks [farmers], 2) publish their names, 3) take away all their grain, 4) execute hostages... This needs to be accomplished in such a way that people for hundreds of miles around will see, tremble and scream out; let's choke and strangle those blood-sucking kulaks. Yours, Lenin. P.S. Use your toughest people for this."

Fremont's Lenin statue is not some quaint example of local color erected by campy, misguided leftists. It is a memorial that honors a malevolent man who devoted his life to spreading hate and death.

-- Paul Guppy, Seattle

Bit of a joke

Matt Rosenberg is a myopic fool. The statue in Fremont is not there to venerate Lenin, the Stalinistic pogroms, or Maoist persecutions. Everything that Fremont represents would have been anathema to Lenin and Leninism.

When the statue of Lenin was plucked from the Poprad scrap heap and placed in Fremont as a bit of a joke, no one realized the transformation that Lenin would undergo. Lenin, standing as he does, quietly tells us every day that democracy defeated communism.

Rosenberg needs to look beyond why the statue Lenin was originally cast and place it in context of where it stands today. Very few symbols could be so transformed by a simple change in location.

We should celebrate the victory the Lenin statue in Fremont represents and stop whining about what it once stood for.

-- Jeffrey Kirtland, Seattle

Statue of limitations

Rosenberg does a fine job excoriating Vladimir Lenin, but his complaint is unneeded. The relocated Soviet statue in Fremont is not tribute, but mockery; we can be amused by it because we no longer fear what it represents.

If anything, it is a monument to the demise of Leninism, and where better than ever-skeptical Fremont to celebrate the failure of a brittle, brutal ideology?

-- Tyler Page, Kent

Double fantasy

I'm glad to read that someone else is bothered by (the statue). Each time I passed the statue, I felt irritated and embarrassed by its presence. And somewhat bewildered that in the heart of ultra-sensitive Seattle there stands a statue to a guy who was the trigger man for a century of suffering in Eastern and central Europe.

In an effort to resolve this situation, I offer this modest proposal. Like those folks in Las Vegas, let's cut off Lenin's head. But instead of encasing it in a block of ice, let's melt it down, recast it in the image of someone more in tune with Fremont's funky locus, and replace it. I suggest John Lennon.

What could be better? From a statue of Lenin to a statue of Lennon. People will flock to see it. Money for the project could be raised by cutting a slot in the statue for passersby to drop coins in. Perhaps enough money might be raised to someday commission another statue. A statue of Marx. Groucho, of course.

Imagine.

-- Barry McDermott, Kirkland

Bad company

When the statue was first erected, I expressed concern to friends and was ridiculed. I'm ashamed to say that was the last time I brought up the issue. At the time, I also mentioned Hitler and Idi Amin. I was derided as a humorless spoilsport.

Would Fremont today consider such a tribute to Milosevic? It's time to lose the statue.

-- Diane Dambacher, Seattle

What does Jay think?

Matt Rosenberg needs to slow down a bit. Fremont is not paying tribute to Lenin. I dare to think that 87 percent of the passersby think the statue is of Jay Buhner, or else don't have a clue who it is.

The statue is, however, a symbol. It's the logo of Communist Russia; just as the Golden Arches represent McDonald's, and the swoosh represents Nike. It is with a great sense of irony (get some, Mr. Rosenberg) that the logo of communism now guards a burrito shop.

Oh, Mr. Rosenberg, don't go see "The Producers" on Broadway. It pays tribute to Hitler.

-- Jim Bowman, Seattle