With regard to your comment about the Russian Army massing on the border ready to attack, maybe you should read up a little bit on the ACTUAL situation before you make stupid statements like that: http://www.salon.com/2014/03/12/propagan…

Royal Grinder: way cool. Lenny scoop: revolutionary.
Royal Gringer: that would never fly when Goldy was around.

Royal Grinders is a great sandwich shop. It's hard not to look at the "royal" and "crown" imagery in their sandwich names as a foil to the bolshevik outside.

Worse things have happened to that statue. Once I saw what was either a severed dog's or pig's head in a big plastic bag, hung around Lenin's neck with a bike chain.

No one has made the connection between the red hands and the thousands - perhaps millions - of souls who died at the hands of this man?

"We must... put down all resistance with such brutality that they will not forget it for several decades... The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing... the better."

Charles,
I'm neither a friend nor an enemy of the Lenin statue. I would never deface it regardless of the times. It's quirky for the Fremont Neighborhood. Whatever. On the other hand (OK, bad choice of words), if it was a statue of Stalin, "blood" on his hands would be most appropriate.

Russia is the current gold standard of free market capitalism. Whoever is blaming Lenin for the current crisis in Ukraine is a fucking dumbass.

To me, the most shocking part of this is that someone has been painting the hands of the statue red for months and the Fremont Chamber of Commerce comes out and paints over it. But the artist keeps painting them...no one knows who is doing it. No one has mentioned it on any blogs. Do you think if more people congregated on the streets we would pay attention to these random acts of quiet protest? Is there a possibility that the Fremont Chamber of Commerce is stifling protest and free speech by removing these modifications to the statute?

In Istanbul the city rallied behind a man who had spent his own time and money to paint a set of stairs in his neighborhood the colors of the rainbow. The city sent it's workers to paint over the stairs, first denying it, but then admitting to it. Soon, as word spread that the stairs had been painted grey people from all parts of the city began posting pictures of the stairs they had painted in protest of the man's original rainbow having been removed. http://weburbanist.com/2013/09/29/painti…

Is there a need for the Chamber to paint these hands over? Is it ok for us to modify existing public art temporarily in protest? Should we, as a city with the only on staff art critic, spend more time discussing the guerrilla and street art instead of dismissing it as graffiti? I have so many questions!

@7, if it was Stalin, it should be covered with "blood" from head to toe.

http://www.fsu.edu/news/2007/09/11/gella…
"To put it another way, Stalin initiated very little that Lenin had not already introduced or previewed"
I like the bloody hands.

The good news is there's still an attempt at constructive thought happening in Fremont in 2014.

@11,

There's a fundamental difference: Stalin was actually competent in achieving his goals.

@9,

Who owns the statue? Does anyone own it? In the absence of any ownership, isn't it within the free speech rights of the Chamber of Commerce to paint over the red paint? Why should the protester's free speech trump everyone else's?

What most folks don't realize is that Lenin is already portrayed as an untrustworthy destroyer in this statue. He is surrounded by somewhat abstract-looking flames, and there's a stack of rifles leaning against his side below his right hand, right where he can get at them. As the story goes, the Slovak artist who was commissioned by the Soviet authorities snuck his own political statement into the statue.

@6:

I made the connection and considered painting the hands red myself. A few years ago I was highly offended by Lenin's presence; it seemed to me that his image, and Communism, was being rehabilitated by the people he called "useful idiots".

Then I saw the statue and read the plaque that was installed. Apparently most Lenin statues made in the USSR showed a benevolent Lenin with outstretched hands or holding a book; this Lenin made in Czechoslovakia showed him emerging from flames and guns and more accurately depicted him as the violent revolutionary that he was. In fact here he looks like Satan without the horns. So I'm OK with it.

This was made less than 20 years after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia to crush a Communist government that intended to make liberal economic and human rights reforms. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Spri…

People have been huffy about this statue forever. And I will be the first to chime in and say that Both Lenin and Stalin were real stinkers. But in the rush to condemn these men, we too often gloss over the fact that they were the product of a stupid, inbred, Tsarist dynasty.

Go ahead an do whatever you want to the statue, and criticize Lenin all you want, but recognize that the communists were a reaction to an untenable political situation.

It is a portal and I have a key. Enlightened, unite!

Troll, that's nonsense, and you know it. The "provisional government" lasted for about six months before the Bolsheviks claimed power and plunged the country into a civil war. The Romanov Dynasty, on the other hand, had been in power since the 1600's, and Russia was little more than a feudal state with electricity. There was no opportunity for democracy.

The legacy of the Tsars still lingers in Russia today.

The AP dropped the article from Ukraine's name in 1991. Perhaps it's time for the The Stranger to do the same.

Thanks, Doug (@20) for pointing that out so eloquently. Writing "The Ukraine" is insulting to the Sovereign State of Ukraine and demonstrates an embarrassing ignorance here in The America.