De-Leninization

Former Soviet colonel general turned historian Dmitri Volkogonov gained access to the State Archive of the Russian Federation and wrote critical biographies of both Stalin and Lenin.

As historian Yury Pivovarov notes, "All these metamorphoses predominantly took place in publishing, on TV and the radio… the dismantling of Lenin happened only verbally and almost didn’t materialize in any other way.

Russian president Vladimir Putin made peace with the Communists when he came to power in 2000, but after his 2012 election began denouncing the Bolsheviks for their treachery in "betraying the country's national interests" to Germany in World War I.

[7] A 2017 survey showed that 56% of Russia's population had a favorable opinion of Lenin, with the majority of support coming from the older generation that lived in the USSR.

[9] In 2012, the state-sponsored Russia Today media network reported that Liberal-Democratic party (LDPR) deputy Aleksandr Kurdyumov proposed the removal of Lenin monuments to museums, citing high maintenance costs due to the prevalence of vandalism, and saying that Lenin's dominance was "unfair" to other outstanding personalities – such as Peter the Great, Alexander Suvorov, Ivan the Terrible and others.

[10] Organisations such as the Memorial Society have worked on numerous projects involving witnesses to past events (Gulag inmates, Soviet rights activists) and younger generations, including schoolchildren.

[19] Communist symbols continue to form an important part of the rhetoric used in state-controlled media, as banning on them in other countries is seen by the Russian foreign ministry as "sacrilege" and "a perverse idea of good and evil".

[5] The process of decommunization in Ukraine, a neighbouring post-Soviet state, was met with fierce criticism by Russia,[5] who regularly dismisses Soviet war crimes.