The Great Lenin Makeover

Even though I never made it to the original Lenin Museum in Tampere (wish I had), over the years I’ve heard plenty about the place. Following a major facelift the museum reopened recently. Renamed ‘Nootti’ – Finnish for a diplomatic note – the refashioned exhibits are said to reflect the seachange in relations between neghbours Finland and the Soviet Union that developed in the wake of Russia’s February 2022 all-out invasion of Ukraine.

A recent piece by The Guardian’s Nordic correspondent notes that when the original museum first opened in 1946, it was intended to serve as symbol of postwar friendship between the two nations. Reportedly, too, it was located in Tampere owing to the fact that this was where Lenin and Stalin first encountered each other, at an unofficial meeting of the Russian Communist Party’s Bolshevik faction held there in December 1905.

In fact it turns out that this is not the first time the museum’s thematic focus has been ‘revised’. Only nine years back, it was apparently revamped to focus on Soviet history as a whole rather than an earlier, more hagiographic focus on Lenin’s life.

It would be interesting to visit the place now and find out what a ‘diplomatic note’ from Helsinki to Moscow looks like these days. After all, the Finns have enough experience of dealing with their powerful neighbour to know a thing or two about what works – and doesn’t work – in dealing with them.