TOXIC LEGACY OF THE MAN OF IRON

One hundred years after his death, from the streets of London to some of the world's worst demagogues, Lenin's anti-western ideologies remain as influential as ever...

- Christopher Sandford

VLADIMIR Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, may have been born in 1870. But he's still very much with us today. Perhaps more so than ever. A hundred years after Lenin's death on January 21, 1924, the Russian revolutionary leader's influence is everywhere.

His authoritarian approach to government continues to serve as the blueprint for several of the world's most notorious dictators, including Syria's president Bashar al-Assad and North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un.

Leninism, or its close variants, also remains the state ideology of the ruling parties of China, Cuba, Eritrea, Burma, Vietnam, Laos and, arguably, the Russian Federation itself, with a total of some 1.8 billion citizens between them or about a quarter of the world's population.

To put it another way: imagine the total number of people living in London, Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Manchester and Sheffield taken as a proportion of the UK as a whole.

Now imagine those same people, instead of being the model citizens they undoubtedly are, as members of a cult whose founding father was only too happy to murder his party's enemies on trumped-up charges forced out of them by torturers, or to have them rounded up and sent into exile, and who remain determined to spread their poisonous philosophy around the land.

What you have pictured is roughly the same thing as the strength and intensity of Lenin's continued influence in the world today.

Of course, not everyone sympathetic to Lenin or his successor Joseph Stalin is busy hoisting the red flag over their roof or dispatching enemies to the nearest gulag.