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Remarkable large format map of the Soviet Union, celebrating the life of Vladimir Lenin, published in the year prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The presentation is overseen by the portrait of Vladimir Ilych Lenin (1870-1924), the intellectual father of Russian Marxism and the revolutionary founder of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The main map depicts European Russia and much of Europe as it appeared in 1917, just before Lenin led the 'Red October' Revolution that toppled Czarist Russia and replaced it with the U.S.S.R. The map details important locations in Lenin's life, from his birth in the city of Simbirsk (renamed Ulyanovsk, in honor of Lenin's birth name) on the Volga to his arrival in St. Petersburg (soon to be renamed Leningrad) in 1917, after his long exile abroad. The map shows the various European cities that Lenin visited or lived in and delineates the overland route he took (with clandestine German cooperation) from Zurich, thorugh Germany and Scandinavia, to Russia. The Russian part of the map shows the towns where Soviet councils were set up in support of the revolution. This view is extended to include the entire country in the small map in the upper-right.
The map, which includes all of the U.S.S.R. below details the spread of the Red Army and Communist control over the country, in the face of White Russian resistance, from 1917 to 1924. The small city maps to the right detail St. Petersburg and Moscow (the new captial of the U.S.S.R.), with important sites in the life of Lenin. The map to the lower-right shows the locations of Communist clubs which sprang up in major cities acress the world in the wake of Red October.
This map was issued as a propaganda piece in 1988, one year before the collapse of the Berlin Wall and 2 years before the collapse of the Soviet Union. It shows that even during the era of Mikhail Gorbachev and his policies of Glasnost and Perestroika, some Russian govermnent information officers were still working to keep the old Leninist dream alive.
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