Soviet mastermind was a genocidal killer.

Finally, Russians are considering burying Vladimir Lenin. Since his death in 1924, the Bolshevik leader’s embalmed body has been lying in a glass coffin in a mausoleum on Moscow’s Red Square. For many, he is the shining symbol of Soviet communism – a martyr to the utopian cause of socialist revolution. But he is the opposite – the embodiment of a murderous, totalitarian ideology responsible for the deaths of tens of millions. The issue is not whether he should be buried, but what has taken so long. This is Russia’s shame.

Russian authorities may finally be taking action. This week, a story in The Washington Times by Marc Bennetts reported that Russia’s CultureMinister Vladimir Medinsky is contemplating whether to lay Lenin’s body to rest.

“I have always believed that a body should be entrusted to the earth,”Mr. Medinsky said. “And Lenin’s relatives begged the authorities not to place him in the mausoleum.”

Lenin was not simply a prominent leader of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. He was its founder and driving political and intellectual force. Without him, the communist seizure of power would have been impossible. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Lenin’s body should have been buried along with his failed communist regime.

Instead, as Mr. Bennetts points out, Lenin’s tomb has become a shrine for many Russians still nostalgic about the Soviet empire. From Moscow to the Urals, the Bolshevik dictator is still revered. Rock bands, subway stations, libraries, regional administrations, statues, monuments – Lenin’s name and image adorn them, signifying his continued prestige. The USSR is dead, but Lenin’s cult of personality is alive and well.

This is why numerous Russians continue to oppose burying him. According to Andrei Vorobyov, a senior official in the ruling United Russia party, the issue is a “hot one.” Even Mr. Medinsky thinks Leninshould be buried with “full state honors” and the Red Square mausoleumconverted into a giant museum commemorating the Soviet past. Russian strongman Vladimir Putin uncharacteristically claims to be neutral on the issue, arguing the “people should decide.”

The Russians should be ashamed of themselves. Lenin’s shrine must go. But burying him with the pomp and ceremony accorded a state hero would be an insult to his countless victims. The idea reflects a profound moral sickness in modern Russia, an inability to confront the Soviet past.

Lenin was the architect of the greatest system of mass murder in history. He belongs alongside genocidal tyrants such as Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong and Adolf Hitler. In fact, Lenin gave birth to both 20th-century communism and Nazism. Contrary to myth, he was not some misguided compassionate socialist whose ideals exceeded the reach of humanity. Rather, he was a ruthless despot who engineered one singular, malevolent, totalitarian state.

Lenin grabbed and maintained power by waging relentless war upon his domestic opponents, both real and imagined. He fused state terror with one-party rule in an unprecedented bid to completely transform every aspect of society. His goal was not just a proletarian revolution. It was to remake human nature itself – to create what he called the “new Soviet man.” The socialist dream of human equality and liberation – of a new order without capitalism, nation-states and religion – required omnipotent state control and wholesale social destruction.

The result was genocide – the deliberate extermination of tens of millions of people. From 1917 until his death in 1924, Lenin established the Soviet empire through absolute brutality – the creation of the Cheka (the Bolshevik secret police and predecessor to the KGB), the confiscation and nationalization of all private property, the slaughter of millions of White Russians and other enemies of the regime, a terror famine that systematically starved to death more than 5 million “kulaks” (small peasant landowners), the annihilation of countless Christian churches and priests, the savage repression of basic freedoms, the building of a vast network of gulags, and the imperial subjugation of numerous peoples yearning for their national independence. In short, Leninerected the one-party totalitarian model later followed by Stalin, Hitlerand Mao.

Lenin’s great sin – inherited from the Enlightenment – was that he viewed individuals as a means to an end – he never recognized or cared for their innate worth and dignity. He believed that a small ruling class of experts could reorder society to fit his ideological, socialist ambitions. For him, people were nothing more than pieces of clay to be molded into a futuristic, post-capitalist, post-Christian world. He was a revolutionary fanatic.

His Marxist offspring eventually would butcher nearly 100 million people in an insane attempt to fulfillLenin’s twisted goals. Ukrainians, the Baltic peoples, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Romanians, Croats, Serbs, Chinese, Cubans, Nicaraguans, Cambodians and Vietnamese – if one could pile up all the corpses killed by communism, they would reach the sky.

It is high time that Russians confront the dark reality of their Soviet past. Like Nazi Germany, SovietRussia was more than an iron-fisted dictatorship. It was a totalitarian police state and expansionist empire based upon almost unspeakable atrocities. The Soviet hammer and sickle is the equivalent of the Nazi swastika.

Could anyone imagine Hitler’s name being used – and revered – across Germany today? Or that a mausoleum with his embalmed body could lie at a major square in Berlin as a shrine for neo-Nazis? The very thought is disgusting, even unfathomable. Fascism’s crimes rightly have been condemned. Those of communism, however, remain unredeemed, confined to the deep recesses of our collective historical memory. This must end.

Lenin was a dictator, a genocidal killer and a war criminal. Bury this man – once and for all. And skip the state honors. He doesn’t deserve them.

* Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a columnist at The Washington Times and president of the Edmund Burke Institute.

Source: The Washington Times