In bid to popularise former leader’s image, group calls on Instagram users to take photographs of themselves with his statues. Global Voices reports

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Capitalising on Russia’s love-hate relationship with the selfie, a communist youth organisation has launched a competition encouraging young people to share photographs of themselves with statues of the former leader.

Using the hashtag #LeninLives, the group says the project is a “cheap and effective way to popularise the image of the leader of the world’s proletariat among the youth”.

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In an appeal to the leader of the Russian Communist party Gennady Zyuganov, Komsomal activists from the northern republic of Komi stressed the competition would help shed light on the state of the Lenin statues scattered across the country, as well as popularising his image.

Suggested prizes for the competition, which launched at the beginning of August with on Russian social media site VKontakte, include tablet computers loaded with the 45-volume collected works of Lenin, who ruled the country from 1917 until his death in 1924.

Zyuganov told Russian site Izvestia he welcomed the initiative to photograph his predecessor. “We’ll definitely support it. I think Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin] will be thankful.”

#selfiewithLenin

The Communist party, the direct successor of the body which ruled Russia for the seven decades after Lenin instigated the October Revolution in 1917, is still a force in Russian politics. At the last Duma election in December 2011, Zyuganov’s party increased its share of the vote by more than 7%, making it the second most powerful bloc in parliament after Vladimir Putin’s United Russia, commanding a fifth of all seats.

But not every Russian is in favour of rehabilitating the man who ushered in the Soviet era. Nikita Petrov of human rights group Memorial said the campaign would “domesticate the tyrant” and was an “attempt to slide Lenin into the mainstream”. He described it as a “gesture of despair” from the party that was be likely to fail.

Russia is home to more than 6,000 Lenin monuments. Notably, neighbouring Ukraine saw a number of statues toppled during the Euromaidan protests and the ongoing war with pro-Russian separatist forces in eastern Ukraine, a phenomenon dubbed “Leninfall”.

With so many statues scattering the country, Russian youth have been taking pictures of Lenin long before the Communist party launched the hashtag. Here are some of the best:

Animation designer Eugene Seleznev covered his face for this shot:

Lenin impersonators got into the swing of the competition:

Lenin impersonators got into the swing of the competition.

This example of the Lenin-kiss sub-genre of selfie is captioned “Granddad died, and business lives – it should have been the other way around”.

Russian user Radik_Mulia made his very own Red Square:

A user shoots her selfie of a Lenin bust in Ulan-Ude, a city near the Mongolian border:





A version of this article originally appeared on Global Voices