Memories of Lenin: A Visit to the Soviet Lenin museums, 1948

LENIN MUSEUM. School children and their teacher view portraits and statues of the founder of their State.

From USSR Magazine, April 1948:

The life of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is depicted in the permanent exhibits of the great Central Lenin Museum in Moscow, and in those of smaller museums of great interest which have been set up in the various places throughout the Soviet Union where Lenin lived.

The Central Lenin Museum, established on Stalin’s initiative and opened on May 15, 1936, is a wonderful monument to Lenin, and it is also a scientific research institute. Here the ideas of the founder of the Soviet State are preserved and propagated; and here students have an opportunity to make profound studies of Lenin’s life and thought, with the aid of original manuscripts and documents.

The tremendous love which the Soviet people feel for Lenin, and the great interest which laymen as well as scholars show in the material preserved at the museum, reflect their pride in their socialist country and their appreciation of Lenin’s role in history, as well as of the great part played in world thought by Leninism.

The museum, the displays of which include 80 thousand items connected with Lenin’s life and work, has arranged the exhibits in chronological order to give a magnificent, living picture of Lenin. His life may be followed year by year, from the childhood days of young Vladimir Ulyanov to the days of the mature statesman.

Collected in the museum are many documents describing Lenin’s role in the days of the October Revolution. The visitor sees how Lenin led the October uprising, how confidently he took upon himself the administration of an enormous state under conditions of struggle against foreign armed intervention and internal reaction.

Manuscripts and first editions of Lenin’s writings, copies of revolutionary journals and newspapers which he edited, are of much interest to spectators.

Here is the resolution calling for armed uprising, written by Lenin on two small pages torn from a writing pad and adopted by a meeting of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party on October 10, 1917. All eyes are drawn toward the manuscript of a leaflet addressed To the Citizens of Russia. This leaflet proclaimed the victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution, and was written on October 25, 1917.

The material which characterizes the collaboration of Lenin and Stalin is impressive. There are many documents in the museum which they edited or wrote jointly. Prominent among these are the historic resolution on the national question (defining the rights and status of various nationalities in the multi-national state), which they wrote together, and also the Draft Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited People, which they drew up jointly.

So closely is the life of Lenin linked with that of the State he founded that the museum displays also illustrate the history of the Soviet Union.

Diagrams and maps show vividly how the great socialist republic came into being and developed. In the showcases lie decrees drawn up by Lenin treating the questions of the ownership of the land, of peace, on the nationalization of banks, factories, railways.

There is a revolving globe in one of the halls which has tiny red bulbs which light to indicate the places throughout the world where Lenin’s writings have been published. There are 209 such points in the USSR and 237 in foreign countries.

Visitors to the museum always spend a long time examining Lenin’s personal effects. There are an overcoat, a hat, boots, a watch, and the pen with which the first decrees of Soviet power were signed.

The rooms and repositories of the Museum which house collections of paintings and sculpture dealing with Lenin’s life also include many examples of folk art on this subject.

A number of drawings from life, are shown including the series of 154 studies in pencil by the sculptor Andreyev for his sculptured figure of Lenin. The sketches show characteristic poses and facial expressions which were peculiarly Lenin’s.

Almost a million persons visited the museum during its first ten years of existence. The visitors come from all walks of life, from all parts of the vast country and from abroad, and range from school children learning the history of their country to those who can well remember the events of Lenin’s life.

Among the smaller museums elsewhere which trace the course of Lenin’s life, of particular interest is that at Ulyanovsk, the former Simbirsk, on the Volga. This museum is established in the small house where Lenin was born and lived as a child. Here the little room of the schoolboy Vladimir Ulyanov is preserved.

On Lenin Street, in Kazan, stands the second of these museums–in the house where Lenin had a room while a law student at Kazan University. In this house, in 1887, he was first arrested by the tsarist police–for participation in a students’ revolt. He was exiled to the village of Kokushkino, and here too a museum exists in his lodgings.

In Leningrad, the former tsarist capital, many places are connected with Lenin’s life and revolutionary activity. Among these are an apartment where Lenin attended revolutionary meetings and where his lucid thought and clear analysis made him the leader of the Petersburg Marxists; the apartment of the worker, Babushkin, where Lenin led a workers’ circle; and a prison cell where, writing in milk between the lines of borrowed books, he drafted a program for the Bolsheviks, and wrote various pamphlets and leaflets.

In Leningrad, also, are the historic places connected with Lenin’s later history–after his return from Siberian exile–and with the history of the Revolution itself. Most prominent among these are the Finland railway station where, on April 16, 1917, Lenin, just returned from exile, mounted an armored car and delivered his famous speech hailing the revolutionary proletariat of the city; and the Smolny Institute, general headquarters of the revolutionary forces, where Lenin directed the revolutionary uprising, and where Soviet power was proclaimed.

In Shushenskoye village in Siberia, where Lenin spent three years of exile, the humble house where he lived and worked is a museum today. Here is his shelf of books -- Marx and Engels, Gogol and Pisarev, Darwin and Timiryazev, Kant and Hegel. Here, in this little house, two hundred miles from a railway, he wrote and studied, and remained even then the ideological leader of the Revolution.

In Moscow are the places where Lenin lived and worked during the stirring days as head of the first socialist state in the world. Here are the Kremlin, the Red Square -- the heart of the Soviet Union, of the country which itself is a monument to the life and work of the great revolutionist and statesman. And here, on the Red Square, beneath the walls of the Kremlin, stands the tomb of Lenin, visited in love and sorrow by millions.

From Articles by Nikolai Yushkevich (Vice-Curator of the Central Lenin Museum) and Ilya Vostryshev, USSR Magazine, April 1948.