Interfax: Positive attitude to Lenin in Russia tops 50% – poll

(Interfax – April 20, 2016)

The share of Russian citizens who positively assess the historical role of Vladimir Lenin has grown from 40 percent to 53 percent in the past ten years, the Levada Center told Interfax.

The opinion was mostly voiced by pensioners (67 percent), Russians older than 55 (66 percent), people with primary education (59 percent), people with a low consumer status (58 percent) and residents of towns with a population of less than 100,000 (62 percent).

Twenty-seven percent of respondents said that the role played by Lenin in history was rather negative (36 percent in 2006). Most of those respondents were office workers (34 percent), executives and managers (33 percent), people aged from 25 to 40 (33 percent), people with higher education (34 percent), people with a relatively high consumer status (38 percent), Muscovites (22 percent) and residents of other cities with a population exceeding 500,000 (32 percent).

Twenty percent of 1,602 respondents polled on March 24-29 were hesitant.

A probable reason for the rise in the positive attitude to Lenin is that central television channels have been providing less information about his ambivalent role in the life of Russia in recent years. Indirect proof of this is the opinion of Russians younger than 25, some 30 percent of whom were unable to give a substantive answer to the question about the role played by Lenin in Russia’s history, sociologists said.

Definite and more negative attitudes prevail amongst respondents aged 40-55, whose mentality formed in the perestroika years and the 1990s, when the Soviet, communist period of domestic history was given more detailed and rather negative coverage.

The 146th anniversary of Lenin’s birth will be marked on April 22, 2016.