Three weeks ago I boarded a plane to Ulan-Ude, a city five time zones and six hours of flight time away from Moscow. I didn’t really know what to expect from our Baikal trip: if you had asked me what Siberia was like prior to my trimester in Russia, I would have said something about miserable gulags, deserted tundra, and extreme cold. In our class readings, I read about Mongol hordes, shamanistic rituals, and the natural majesty of Lake Baikal. These impressions suggested to me that Siberia would a far cry from the western capital city of Moscow, which can at times feel like any other European capital with classical European architecture, American brands, and thousands of tourists.

When we landed in Ulan-Ude, my prediction seemed to be accurate, as I quickly started noticing all of the differences between this city and Moscow. For example, the whole landscape was surrounded by beautiful, rolling mountains, signs advertised a regional specialty called buuza, and a bright yellow and red Buddhist Datsun topped the highest point.

However when our van rounded a corner to drive through the central square, an incredible (but familiar) sight met our eyes. A 42-ton statue of Vladimir Lenin’s head gazed at us tiny visitors. Not a bust–just an enormous, metal, discombobulated head. Finally, here was something to connect this city with the Moscow I knew and loved: both have a huge Lenin monument in the main square.

This was the first of many Lenins we would see in Siberia. In Kyakhta, a bright white Lenin gazed sternly at a gorgeous, gleaming cathedral, perhaps considering the various “opiates of the masses” which survived here despite the Soviets best efforts. In Irkutsk, we celebrated several Lenin-statue-related firsts: not only our very first “taxi-hailing” Lenin (which we had been looking forward to after reading about these in Lisa Dickey’s Bears in the Streets) but also a modest reddish carving with the distinction of being the first monument ever erected in Lenin’s honor in Russia. The Lenins we encountered were not the only examples of the influence of the Soviet years on these cities with rich histories of tea trade, Buryat tribes, and Old Believers. We read Vladimir Rasputin’s Farewell to Matyora, which describes the destruction of a village for a Soviet dam project, and saw a Buryat-language play in response to Rasputin’s work. In the historical museum in Ulan-Ude, we saw World War II medals belonging to Buryatia’s Red Army war heroes. To me, the many Lenins of the Siberian cities were a symbolic reminder of Russia’s Soviet past, connecting these far away places full of traditions, religions, history, food, art, and languages that I had not yet encountered with the Western half of Russia I have been experiencing and attempting to understand.

Coming home from Siberia three days early gave us extra time in Moscow to use in a different Lenin-related way: instead of looking at statues, we went to one of the strangest buildings on the Red Square and paid a visit to Lenin himself. Although there are quite a few monuments to Lenin in Moscow today,  there were once many more such statues all around the city. Several of these Lenins now reside in the “Graveyard of Fallen Monuments” in Gorky Park, where monuments to Russia’s out-of-favor leaders have been aging unceremoniously by the river, reduced from objects of awe to props in tourists’ selfies. Yet the most important Lenin remains, despite some controversy. Against his wife’s and his own wishes, Lenin was embalmed after his death and put on display in a pyramidal mausoleum the color of the Kremlin walls, where he resides to this day. 

I knew that I couldn’t leave Moscow without satiating my morbid curiosity about this building I had passed so many times on the Red Square but never entered, so I dragged Alexis, Nick, and Ian along with me to visit the body. We had no idea what we were in for. Along

with a crowd of mostly tourists, we cheerfully stood in line in the shade for approximately 45 minutes before we were ushered through metal detectors by guards and into the front entrance of the mausoleum. We stepped into the cold, dark air of the pyramid. The mood of the crowd turned solemn as a guard holding a finger to his lips urged us to be silent, remove hats from heads and hands from pockets, and not take photos. My eyes had just finished adjusting to the dark when we emerged from a labyrinthine series of turns into the central room.

There, illuminated in a glass case lying underneath a black blanket, was Lenin himself. His hair and beard were perfectly trimmed, and one of his hands was clasped in a fist. We shuffled along the guided route in silence, and I found myself facing him front on.

Face to face with the father of the USSR, I was surprised at how small he was–nothing like the 42-ton version. Yet his face was familiar, thanks to the fact that I have seen its likeness hundreds of times. His skin was pale but well-preserved, and he didn’t really show any signs of being dead for almost a century. In fact, he almost looked like he could open his eyes and sit up. This thought disturbed me, and I became a little freaked out.

I wasn’t alone: when we stepped, blinking and shaken, into the sun again, Alexis turned to us and remarked:

“I think my soul just left my body!”

I was glad that I wasn’t the only one who found the experience of seeing a preserved corpse unsettling. We passed more graves, among them Stalin’s and Yuri Gagarin’s, and were funneled back out onto the sunny and tourist-filled Red Square. But I was still distracted by our visit to Lenin. Now more than ever, it was clear to me that despite the almost thirty years since the fall of the USSR and century since his death, for many Vladimir Lenin is still watching over Russia, from his uneasy rest in the Red Square to his larger-than-life head in Ulan-Ude.