Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was the leader of the Russian Revolution and the first dictator of the Soviet Union. Among his most notable achievements in this position was the starvation of at least five million people due to his idiotic agricultural policies.
Less well known, however, is Lenin's history in my home country. During his exile, he often operated from Finland.
Lenin first expressed his support for Finland's independence at meetings held in Tampere in 1905 and 1906, in the building that now houses the Lenin Museum. The Soviet dictator did not do this out of goodwill but rather to weaken Tsarist Russia.
After his revolution, Lenin hoped that newly independent Finland would fall into a revolution that would bring it back into the fold of Soviet Russia. To this end, he incited the left, which indeed launched a bloody rebellion in 1918.
Today, it was reported in the Finnish press that the Lenin Museum, which I mentioned earlier, has seen more visitors this summer than in a long time. The reason is likely that the museum is set to close on November 3rd.
Thus, one monument to a time when Finland sought to secure its independence by avoiding provoking the eastern superpower is closing. This strategy was quite successful in that Finland remained independent, but the price was the eventual withering of Western-style democracy and the media's descent into the "woke" phenomenon of its time, where all opinions critical of the Soviet Union were condemned as politically incorrect and heretical.
This fate eventually befell even the largest right-wing party, the National Coalition Party, which subsequently joined the ruling center-left in adhering to the same policy of silence on certain facts. In doing so, it had to abandon the virtues of open democracy and freedom of speech.
All of this is relevant in the current world, where there are also attempts to condemn views based on people's own experiences and understanding as politically incorrect, regardless of their truth. In this sense, it is a shame that the Lenin Museum is closing, as it serves as a reminder of a time when Finland gradually slid into its own "truth," where black was white if the country's political leadership decreed it so in fear of the Soviet Union.
If my dear reader notes similarities in this writing to recent events in the United Kingdom or Ireland, Olympics or the changes in the workplace experienced in many Western countries, they may very well be on the right track.
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