Russian communists call for canonization of V. I. Lenin as Russian national hero

Communist group calls for Lenin to be made Hero of Russia

On the 85th anniversary of the death of Vladimir Lenin, a Russian communist group has called on the country’s president to make the father of the Bolshevik Revolution a “Hero of Russia.” The Hero of the Russian Federation award is the highest honor the country can bestow on a citizen. In an open letter on their website, the Communists of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region appealed to President Medvedev to award the honor posthumously to Lenin for “organizing the repulsion of intervention by Western states in the years immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution.” “Millions of people in our country and the entire world bow their heads to the memory of this great person,” the letter read. “It is possible that you are unaware that during Lenin’s life he received no government awards, apart from the Order of Labor from the Khorezm People’s Soviet Republic.” “Vladimir Lenin was a very humble man, but we have no right to forget his services to the country and its people. Especially at the current time, when the world capitalist system is collapsing,” the appeal continued. “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live!” finished the letter, using a Soviet-era slogan. There has been no reaction from the Russian authorities to the appeal so far. Lenin’s embalmed body has been on public display in a glass case in a mausoleum in Red Square since he died following a series of strokes in 1924. His continuing presence in the heart of Moscow has been an ongoing source of controversy since the break up of the Soviet Union in 1991.