On Russia, the Life magazine I’m reading has an entry for “The Bloody Kremlin” that notes Vladimir Lenin was almost killed in a shooting in 1918 after speaking at the Hammer and Sickle factory. Lenin never fully recovered and had a series of strokes that killed him in 1924. “Though his body is now creepily entombed in Red Square in front of the Kremlin Wall,” surrounded by victims of his revolution, his ghost is thought to prowl the site.
The magazine entry notes Ivan the Terrible also died of a stroke and that his ghost can still be seen. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin also died of a stroke as he drifted into paranoia in old age, and his ghost is also reputed to be there. Whether the ghosts are “real” doesn’t matter, the entry says, quoting Anton Chekhov that “man is what he believes.”
I was in college when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union disintegrated. One of the books at the time about the phenomenon was called “The God that Failed.” I have said before in this blog series that communists are often well-intentioned but not practical. That is also my assessment of the Democratic party’s electoral campaign with the Biden/Harris ticket. They aren’t literally communist, but they have some similar utopian ideas.