Source: Russia Beyond the Headlines
January 21, 2016
Vladimir Lenin(left) and Joseph Stalin look-a-likes eat ice cream as they share a minute of rest in downtown Moscow. Source: AP
Vladimir Putin has criticized the ideas and actions of the leader of the Russian revolution, Vladimir Lenin, which he thinks led to the ruin of historical Russia.
He was responding to the head of the Kurchatov Institute, Mikhail Kovalchuk, who at a meeting of the presidential council for science and education quoted Boris Pasternak's poem 'Sublime Malady', which analyzes the October revolution and contains references to Lenin: "And now, having seen him in reality, I thought, thought without end, about his authorship and right to dare in the first person." "The answer is this: he was steering the stream of thought and therefore the whole country," said Kovalchuk, adding that the scientific community, too, "should find organizations that would steer the stream of thought in concrete directions."
"It is right to steer the stream of thought, only we need this thought to lead to the right results, unlike in the case of Vladimir Ilyich. Because, eventually, this thought led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, that's what it led to. There were many such thoughts: autonomation, and so on. They planted an atomic bomb underneath the building called Russia, later it blew up. Nor did we need the global revolution either. There was this thought there, too," Putin said at the end of the Council's meeting.
