ROTTEN TO THE CORE:

With the COVID-19 pandemic sucking up much of public discourse, an anniversary of an event whose echoes still affect history went almost unnoticed this spring. April 22 marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov -- better known as Lenin -- the leader of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the founder of the Soviet state. There is some irony in the fact that coronavirus-related restrictions made the commemorations of this date in post-Soviet Russia even more low-key than they would have been otherwise. (Only a few dozen communists defied Moscow's lockdown to place flowers at Lenin's tomb.) After all, Lenin's chief legacy was a political plague that not only put entire nations under a full-time lockdown but killed as many as 100 million. It's not for nothing that Winston Churchill famously compared him to a deadly infection when he wrote, of Lenin's German-aided return from exile in the spring of 1917, that the Germans "transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland to Russia."

As the father of the Soviet state, Lenin is, in some ways, more legend than man. For online "tankies," he is the mythic hero of Soviet posters. For conservatives, he is the ultimate bogeyman, the source of fake quotes about socialized medicine as a commie plot.

Meanwhile, at a time of renewed interest in socialism and communism on the left, many leftists in places like Jacobin magazine see Lenin as the "good communist" to Joseph Stalin's "bad communist" -- the revolutionary wrongly maligned as an authoritarian. Indeed, Lenin's birthday this year was marked on Twitter by New York State Senator Julia Salazar, a member of the new crop of young progressive politicians.

The "Lenin good, Stalin bad" formula was also popular among Soviet reformers, both in the late 1950s-early 1960s and in the late 1980s. It was wrong then; it is wrong now. To be sure, Lenin is a figure of more nuance than Stalin. But as independent Russian historian Nikita Sokolov recently told Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe, Lenin's only consistent position throughout his political career was that "he was a fundamental believer in violence as the solution to any problem." And while he sometimes regarded liberalization as expeditious, he fundamentally regarded freedom as a nuisance.

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