Liquid History

Scuba-diving in the Black Sea, a writer contemplates Lenin in the Crimean seabed, the watery landfall from which historical figures are never meant to rise again.

- Barbara Haas

In 2015 Lenin statues were coming down at such a clip in Ukraine that a website actually tracked the phenomenon somewhat like the morel map in the US tracked the fruiting of mushrooms each year, from south to north.

Raining Lenins posted interactive charts and a searchable database. Interested parties could see when statues had come down and where. Archived videos allowed for binge-watching the most dramatic topplings. One selection, captioned “Eclectic Crowd,” showed a group of people in sock hats, puffer coats, and hooded parkas looping a chain around Lenin’s outstretched arm and pulling him down, their gloved hands gripping the metal links of the chain and yanking, as if in a tug-of-war with history.

Lenin’s outstretched arm all by itself was as recognizable as a full-body Lenin. An image of him gesturing furiously from atop the train at the Finland Station in Petrograd was iconic. Holding that arm high, he harangued the crowd, whipping the proletariat into a frenzy. Orators of the day cultivated stagy, overblown body language when addressing the masses, and Vladimir Ilyich had perfected the milieu. If ever you saw a photo of a Ukrainian landfill from 2015 that focused in on one single outstretched arm in bronze jutting up from the shredded plastic and junk, you knew it was attached to a Lenin down below.

By autumn of 2015, Lenin was mainly down below, mainly brought low by wave after wave of eclectic Ukrainian crowds. The country jettisoned five hundred statues over a six-month period.