There definitely aren’t as many Lenin statues around as there were 25 years ago. As the communist political and economic system fell apart, reformers made sure that its founder took a symbolic fall too. In central squares from Tallinn to Tbilisi, crowds cheered as statues of Lenin were unceremoniously pulled down and bulldozed.
So this is a rarity—a new Lenin statue. And Lenin appears to be in his most famous pose, right arm raised, gazing in the distance toward some socialist utopia. Except that he’s not. At this mountain resort near Almaty, Kazakhstan, Lenin is on commercial duty, pointing the way to the Russian restaurant. He's flanked by my colleague Galiya Ibrayeva from Kazakh National University and her daughter, sporting her University of Montana sweat shirt. It’s really the same as those Che Guevara t-shirts. Revolutionary icons recycled to raise profit margins.
Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia (Ohio University Press, 2016) is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and other online retailers. Read excerpts at www.davidhmould.com (Travel Blogs) or Facebook /PostcardsFromStanland/ or view readings and interviews on YouTube