{"id":1151,"date":"2023-09-10T10:20:34","date_gmt":"2023-09-10T17:20:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/?page_id=1151"},"modified":"2025-07-20T17:30:58","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T00:30:58","slug":"the-fremont-lenin","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/the-fremont-lenin\/","title":{"rendered":"The Fremont Lenin (2023)"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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I don’t usually defend Communists, but when a Russian American journalist suggested in the Seattle Times that the statue of Vladimir Lenin be taken down, I defended the statue \u2014 though not the man it represented. I wrote a defense on the Seattle web page Post Alley. There came some replies; then the Times fired the journalist, and I wrote about that. Finally, I summed up the whole thing in a piece on the Liberty web page, posted August 4, 2023, reprinted here.<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Seattle has the\u00a0<\/span>largest public statue<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>in the Americas of\u00a0<\/span>Vladimir Lenin<\/a>. On July 7, the\u00a0<\/span>Seattle Times<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>posted an opinion piece arguing that it should be torn down. I disagreed, and wrote a reply on the Seattle web page PostAlley.org. I wouldn\u2019t presume to defend Lenin on this page or anywhere else, but I did defend the statue as it has stood for years a couple of miles from my house.<\/p>

The statue is 18 tons of bronze, 16 feet high. Done in Soviet style by Bulgarian artist Emil Venkov, it shows Lenin striding out from stylized flames with a vanguard-of-the-proletariat look on his face. City officials in Poprad, Slovakia, put him up in 1988. The next year, Communism fell and, soon after, they took Lenin down. Lewis E. Carpenter, an American who had met Venkov, spotted the bronze figure of Lenin in a scrapyard, waiting to be melted. Carpenter made an offer to buy him. Officials in Poprad preferred to liquidate him, but the American was offering $13,000 in hard cash, and they discovered a higher public interest. Carpenter bought the Old Bolshevik and had him cut into three pieces and shipped to his home in Issaquah, Washington (also the home of Costco Wholesale). The statue ended up costing Carpenter about $40,000, and he had to mortgage his house to pay for it.<\/p>

Carpenter wasn\u2019t a communist. At the time, he told Seattle\u2019s KING-TV, \u201cI don\u2019t know anything about Lenin. It\u2019s a piece of art. I just didn\u2019t want to see it destroyed.\u201d He had been teaching English in a Communist country and dealing with Communist officials, so I\u2019m not inclined to believe him ignorant of the Communist hero he was buying a statue of. But that\u2019s what he told the TV people.<\/p>

Carpenter envisioned his statue placed outside a Slovakian restaurant, much as the Mandalay Bay casino on the Las Vegas Strip had a\u00a0<\/span>decapitated statue of Lenin<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>frosted with imitation bird turd to promote its vodka bar. (The bar and the statue are gone.) But Carpenter was never able to put his non-decapitated Lenin to work. Shortly after his TV interview, he died in a traffic accident.<\/p>

Carpenter\u2019s family wanted the statue melted down and made into something else. They sent it to the Fremont Foundry in Seattle, but the owner, Peter Bevis, talked them into saving it. An artist and a fisherman, Bevis was a saver of historic relics. He is most famous in Seattle for buying the streamlined hulk of the 1935 Puget Sound ferry\u00a0<\/span>Kalakala<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/span>\u2014 \u201cthe silver slug\u201d \u2014 \u202fin the hope of restoring it, but the cost was big enough to sink him. He sold it, but they buyer couldn\u2019t swing it, either, and the vessel was scrapped.<\/p>

Lenin was more fortunate. Bevis\u2019s foundry was in Seattle\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>Fremont district<\/a>, which was just the place for a statue like that. A rundown area of biker bars in the 1970s, Fremont had been revived in the 1980s and 1990s as a \u201ccounterculture\u201d neighborhood of artists, coffee shops, and ethnic restaurants. In the nineties, it gentrified somewhat when the California software company Adobe moved in, as did Tableau Software. The core of the neighborhood retained its bohemian flavor, with a\u00a0<\/span>Sunday street market<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>and an annual\u00a0<\/span>solstice parade<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>in which\u00a0<\/span>painted cyclists<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>ride in the nude.<\/p>

Into this neighborhood, whose unofficial motto is\u00a0<\/span>\u201cDe Liberta Quirkas,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>\u2014 \u201cfreedom to be weird\u201d in ersatz Latin \u2014 came the statue of Vladimir Lenin. The statue had the support of Fremont\u2019s very capitalist landowner,\u00a0<\/span>Suzie Burke<\/a>, and the\u00a0<\/span>Fremont Chamber of Commerce<\/a>, which promotes Fremont as \u201cThe Center of the Universe.\u201d The statue is now ensconced at Evanston Avenue North and North 36th Street, overlooking a busy street in front of the\u00a0<\/span>Dumpling Tzar<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>pelmeni<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>restaurant, the Sinbad Express gyros shop, and a reader of Tarot cards.<\/p>

Lenin is not Fremont\u2019s only quirky statue. In 1991, under the north end of the Aurora Bridge \u2014 the old US 99 \u2014 \u202fcame the\u00a0<\/span>Fremont Troll<\/a>, a folktale monster with a grip around an actual Volkswagen. And since 1978, Fremont has had \u201cWaiting for the Interurban<\/a>,\u201d a statue of five adults and a child waiting for the old streetcar that ran from Seattle to Everett until 1939, when U.S. 99 put it out of business. Looking out between their lower legs is a dog. The sculptor, Richard Beyer, was a member of the Fremont Arts Council, and had assigned the work to himself \u2014 and when fellow councilmember Armen Stepanian objected, Beyer put Stepanian\u2019s face on the dog.<\/p>

I\u2019ve always wondered how many people who pass by that statue see the man\u2019s face on the dog.<\/p>

\u201cWaiting for the Interurban\u201d is Seattle\u2019s most beloved statue. Usually when I drive by it, it\u2019s dressed up in something or other \u2014 umbrellas, Covid masks, Hawaiian leis, umbrellas, etc. A few blocks away, people doll up Lenin, too, putting bunny ears on him at Easter and spiderwebs at Halloween, though recently they have been painting his left hand red or splashing him with the blue-and-yellow of the flag of Ukraine. Lenin, the Troll, and Waiting for the Interurban have become attractions on the tourist circuit. Seattle\u2019s arts cognoscenti consider all three pieces kitsch, and not to be compared with the\u00a0<\/span>serious<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>stuff<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>they sell to the public authorities here.<\/p>

Lenin had stood in Fremont for 28 years when the\u00a0<\/span>Seattle Times<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>hired David Volodzko as a new editorial writer \u2014 the same job I had from 2000 to 2013. He specializes in foreign relations and human rights. Volodzko\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>webpage<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>says he has 15 years\u2019 experience in Japan, South Korea, China and India. An ethnic Russian, he made his debut in the Seattle Times opinion section with a full-page criticism of his new city\u2019s statue of Lenin. It was titled, \u201cDear Fremont: We Need to Talk about Lenin and Your Statue of the Genocidal Tyrant<\/a>.<\/p>

Volodzko recalled his grandfather Josef, who \u201chad come to the United States after escaping a Nazi concentration camp. The only thing worse, he said with bitterness in his voice, was the Russia Lenin had built.\u201d And Seattle has a statue of him! \u201cA tutu for Pride Month, a Halloween get-up, a Christmas star. I guess they think it\u2019s cute,\u201d he wrote. \u201cApparently Lenin\u2019s bloody legacy is OK.\u201d<\/p>

Volodzko continued: \u201cSome claim the statue is critical of Lenin because it depicts him marching with guns and flames instead of playing with children or reading. Others say it\u2019s just a joke. Still others claim it\u2019s another oddball feature of quirky old Fremont, like the Fremont Troll or the summer solstice festival . . . None of these arguments work.\u201d He had just come from Georgia, where people were taking down statues of Robert E. Lee. Could Lee be anathema and Lenin OK?<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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A few days later, PostAlley.org posted my reply<\/a>. First of all, I wrote, the statues of Confederate generals were mostly on public property \u2014 in town squares and city parks. Though it faces a public street, Lenin is privately owned and on private property. \u201cIt would be altogether different,\u201d I wrote, \u201cif the city council had bought him with tax dollars and stuck him in a public park. But private owners have certain rights in our world, if not in Lenin\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2017, when a protest was made over a small monument erected in 1926 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in a private Seattle cemetery, Mayor Ed Murray called for that monument, and also the Lenin statue, to come down. \u201cWe should never forget our history, but we also should not idolize figures who have committed violent atrocities and sought to divide us based on who we are or where we came from,\u201d the mayor said. The monument was later wrecked by vandals, but Lenin remained. Two years later, when Republican legislators in Olympia offered a bill<\/a> to create a \u201cwork group\u201d to replace the old communist with something better, Fremonter Suzie Burke reminded them that the statue was on private property.<\/p>\n

It was also doing different work. The statues of Robert E. Lee in the South functioned as objects of historical pride. Seattle\u2019s Bronze Bolshevik, who was rescued from liquidation by Europeans who hated him, functions here as neighborhood marketing. Lenin was a bad guy, but he was never our<\/em> bad guy. His 16-foot bronze is also merchandise, said to be available from the Carpenter family for $250,000. Apparently the market value of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov<\/a> has never reached that point, though if a real buyer came along, I wouldn\u2019t be surprised if Suzie outbid him.<\/p>\n

The Times<\/em> readers who left comments on Volodzko\u2019s article mostly disagreed with him. I quoted several of them in my reply, including one who wrote, \u201cHere is a classic symbol of overwrought totalitarianism, dropped in the middle of an anarcho-libertarian neighborhood, available for all to mock and ponder the horror of.\u201d Another wrote, \u201cHe gets a yellow rubber duck on his head for Easter . . . He is used as a pole to string Christmas lights at Christmas, the ultimate capitalist holiday. He is not exactly an object of respect.\u201d<\/p>\n

My favorite comment was by a reader who said, \u201cWhen I drive by it, I like to laugh and tell it, \u2018We won.\u2019\u201d My response was, \u201cI think of it in reverse:\u202fYou lost<\/em>. I imagine\u202fAnna Louise Strong<\/a>, Seattle\u2019s historic apologist for Stalin and Mao, coming back to life and seeing Lenin done up in proud Socialist Realism with a duck on his head. The red lady would not be pleased.\u201d<\/p>\n

John Hamer, a conservative who had Volodzko\u2019s job at the Seattle Times<\/em> years before I had it, posted a note on my reply:<\/p>\n

Bruce \u2014 Nice try, but you are wrong and Volodzko is right. The Lenin Statue has long been an iconic symbol for Seattle\u2019s systemic left to thumb their noses at the more conservative establishment: Neener-neener, stick it to The Man! More lazy radicalish faux protest. So typical and tedious.<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/i><\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that the Left has been a part of this capitalist town for more than a century. In recent years, there were the anarchist protests at the World Trade Organization conference in 1999, and the election of a Trotskyist, Kshama Sawant, to the city council in 2013.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t hang out with the Left, and I don\u2019t imagine Hamer does, either. But they do make a noise. If the statue was iconic to them, I would be hearing them defend it, and I hear nothing. The Russian Communist Party defended the statue<\/a>, if anyone cared, but to the best of my knowledge, the Seattle Left was silent.<\/p>\n

I like the thing. It\u2019s a piece of history. It helps people to remember communism. Americans have movies, some really good ones, that will never let us forget the evil of Nazism. We have only a few that offer a similar treatment to the Reds (not Warren Beatty\u2019s Reds<\/em>), and can you think of any movies about Lenin? How many kids today know who Lenin was? Maybe some kid who sees the 16-foot-high statue will ask, \u201cDad, who was<\/em> that guy?\u201d If the statue angers Russian Americans, and they lecture Seattle about what a tyrant he was, I think, \u201cGood. Tell us about him. We need to know.\u201d As for me, I like being able to gaze upon the founder of 20th-century communism and recall that next January 21 he will have been dead for 100 years.<\/p>\n

And you lost!<\/em><\/p>\n

As did Volodzko. On July 7, the day his piece was posted on the Seattle Times<\/em> <\/i>web page, Volodzko was led into a Twitter argument on who was worse, Lenin or Hitler. There is no profit in such arguments. Volodzko, with his long experience in journalism, had to have known better. But he pushed on, gamely arguing that Lenin was worse.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn fact, while Hitler has become the great symbol of evil in history books, he too was less evil than Lenin because Hitler only targeted people he personally believed were harmful to society,\u201d Volodzko wrote, \u201cwhereas Lenin targeted even those he himself did not believe were harmful in any way.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a piece looking back<\/a> on this, Volodzko writes, \u201cI was only speaking in terms of intention \u2014 of who wanted<\/em> to kill more, not who actually<\/em> did, and in a follow-up tweet I explained: \u2018Hitler was more evil than Lenin if we\u2019re looking at what they did to people and that\u2019s a pretty important metric for assessing evil!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Too late. \u201cPeople insisted I was \u2018defending\u2019 Hitler,\u201d Volodzko writes. \u201cThey called me a Nazi.\u201d Volodzko, who called himself a \u201cdemocratic socialist,\u201d found himself the target of the socialists of Seattle and in the Twitterverse. \u201cThey told me to kill myself \u2014 or suggested they\u2019d do it for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Six days after his opinion piece on the statue was published, Seattle Times<\/em> management fired him for having \u201cpoor judgment\u201d and posting material on Twitter that was \u201cinconsistent with company values.\u201d<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t agree with Volodzko\u2019s piece about the Lenin statue, and I thought the \u201cIn fact, while Hitler\u201d quote didn\u2019t make a lot of sense. But I never thought he was defending Hitler or that he deserved to be fired.<\/p>\n

Volodzko would like to stay in Seattle, but it won\u2019t be at the city\u2019s morning newspaper. Lenin remains, striding into a future that never came, his hand painted red.<\/p>\n

\u00a9 2023 Bruce Ramsey<\/i><\/p>\n

David Volodzko is a writer and editor at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and writer of the internet newsletter The <\/em>Radicalist.<\/i><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t usually defend Communists, but when a Russian American journalist suggested in the Seattle Times that the statue of Vladimir Lenin be taken down, I defended the statue \u2014 though not the man it represented. I wrote a defense on the Seattle web page Post Alley. There came some replies; then the Times fired […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1151","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1151"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1576,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1151\/revisions\/1576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}