I hope Fremont doesn't hear about this.

Seattle's Lenin statue and Russia's Lenin's corpse both belong on board the old, decayed art-deco ferry boat we just can't seem to get rid of, the Kalakala.

I hear the "Fremont" Lenin is for sale - that statue's presence in Seattle is its greatest shame. And highly indicative of the garrulous liberal self-absorbtion of Seattle's mainstream. My dream is to see "Vlad" melted down at the Nucor Steel plant in West Seattle. Call it a personal quest in memory of his victims...

Scott, that is a truly inspired vision for Seattle's Lenin statue...more so perhaps than being cast upon The Kalakala, if I must admit. But what about the corpse? Perhaps a humble end after all, such as incineration. If so, where exactly should Lenin's ashes be scattered?

Scatter them on the ashheap of history.

Maybe the pink McDermott will buy the Fremont statue being that Lenin and him have so much in common.

clarification on:

"a dictator responsible for decades of suffering and millions of deaths"

ussr formed in 1920, lenin, leader of the revolution, died (mentally) in 1923 after 4 stroke, physically, in jan. 1924. on his death bed, the last thing he wrote, ws degcree againt the totalitarian regime that was emerging. Lenen was not a dicator or a murderer. you might be thinking of Stalin. Lenin was a true 'for the people' person. Stalin just took over and ruined it for everyone..learn some history and dont be so naive. Lenin killed no-one......

"In The Know," you should know this:

In "Fifty Million People Dead: The Grand Failure - The Birth and Death of Communism in the 20th Century," former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski details "the catastrophic legacy of Lenin" in Russia, Eastern Europe and Asia. He writes that Lenin exemplified the "concentration of power in just a few hands and reliance on terror."

Estimates from leading Soviet and European scholars in the "Black Book of Communism" are of some 85 to 100 million dead at the hands of 20th-century Communists. Here again, Lenin is strongly implicated as the founding father of Communist mass murder.

Reviewing this years-in-the-making 800-page work, the noted biographer of Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Michael Scammell, wrote in The New Republic about the book's "suffocating torrent of fresh evidence from newly opened Soviet archives" of murderous excesses under Lenin. These included mass exterminations by the "Cheka" secret police Lenin founded (renamed the MVD and later the KGB), and torture.

One internal report from Lenin's time noted, "orgies and drunkenness are daily occurrences. Almost all the personnel of the Cheka are heavy cocaine users. They say this helps them deal with the sight of so much blood on a daily basis."

Scammell observes, "the 'Black Book of Communism' lays to rest once and for all the myth of the 'good' Lenin versus the 'bad' Stalin. . . . Lenin blazed a path of tyranny and bloodshed not only for Stalin, but also for Mao, Ho Chi-Minh, Pol Pot, and a century's worth of psychopaths at every level of the Communist chain of command, from dictators to bureaucrats."

Then read "Black Night, White Snow," by the late Harrison Salisbury, the New York Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning Russian correspondent. Guiding Lenin were these, his own words: "We must stick the 'convict's badge' on anyone and everyone who tries to undermine Marxism, even if we don't go on to examine his case. When you see a stinking heap on the road you don't have to poke around in it to see what it is."

The recent biography, "Lenin," by British scholar Robert Service of St. Anthony's College in Oxford, confirms his place in history as "a rebel whose devotion to destruction proved greater than his love for the 'proletariat' he supposedly served."

"Man of the people," indeed.