“An adventurous documentary filmmaker, a friend informed me, spent a year touring the Russian outback as the last [twentieth] century closed. He visited dozens of small out-of-the-way towns and villages, everywhere asking the local children the same single question: ‘Who was Lenin?’ Somewhere in his travels a little girl in an audience far from Moscow grew excited. ‘I know!’ she exclaimed. ‘Lenin was the first amphibian who came ashore. He was the one who crawled from the water, learned how to walk, climbed atop an iron tank, and called for everybody to follow him.”
Andrew Meier, Black Earth
