Once a shrine to Lenin, his birthplace city seeks a new identity

Ulyanovsk, (Russia): Crowds are sparse these days at the world’s biggest Lenin museum in the Russian city of Ulyanovsk, which has fences round it to protect visitors after several massive panels dropped off its facade.

A giant topiary sign still spells “Lenin” near the white stone box of the Lenin Memorial Museum on the bank of the Volga River, but the former Soviet leader’s home city is in search of a new identity 100 years after the October Revolution.

The city of Simbirsk 700 kilometres southeast of Moscow, where Lenin was born and lived until he was 17, was renamed Ulyanovsk in his honour after his death in 1924.

It became a mecca for tour groups of Lenin lovers from socialist countries.

To communists, Lenin is still the best thing to happen to Ulyanovsk, and local 68-year-old communist activist Yevgeny Lytyakov says the city owes its growth and status to the fact that Lenin was born there.

“Before the revolution, Simbirsk was a nondescript little town,” he said. But Lenin no longer resonates in the same way and AFP journalists saw only a handful of visitors at the city’s showpiece museums.

“We call Ulyanovsk Lenin’s motherland, but all the same, the young generation has moved on,” admits Yelena Bespalova, head of research at the Lenin Motherland Reserve, the city’s second biggest Lenin museum.

In the red-carpeted halls of the Lenin Memorial Museum, which covers some 4,000 square metres , exhibits range from Lenin’s death mask to a giant map of the Soviet Union that lights up glowing red.

Contemporary touches include a huge photograph of President Vladimir Putin, who visited in 2002.  

“Today practically the biggest (Lenin) museum that is left is ours, in his motherland,” says former director Valery Perfilov, 70, who still works there. The museum was once lavishly funded by the Communist Party and had around 5,000 visitors a day, but after the breakup of the USSR “it all suddenly collapsed,” he recalls.

“We were left without any funding.” “If in the Soviet period, Lenin was idolised, deified, in the 1990s he was demonised.”

Today the museum is financed by regional culture ministry and the current director Lidiya Larina says the complex, including a concert hall.

It is due for a makeover ahead of Lenin’s 150th birthday in 2020 according to Larina, who wants to bring in interactive displays as well as a better shop and cafe.

The museum is also shifting its focus from Lenin as a political figure to his childhood in Ulyanovsk, Larina said, as Lenin’s role in the Soviet era is now generally downplayed by the officials.