Monument 

It was minus 15 degrees—too cold to talk. An Intourist guide told us we were lucky, it was minus 25 the day before. We drove into the city from the airport along a snow-covered road. It was 8 a.m. and people were going to work—bundled-up forms walking, riding bicycles, Statues of Lenin appeared along the roadside from time to time. The hotel was across the road from a building we called the ‘Ministry of Truth’. 

In the travel guide I read about the ‘naked power emanating from the Kremlin’. So we went to Red Square and played in the snow and had our photos taken near Lenin’s tomb. Lenin wasn’t there. His body had been taken away for its biennial restoration and the mausoleum was closed. Months later I returned and queued up along with hundreds of Soviet tourists to see him, his plastic face newly polished and his thin hair a friendly shade of orange. They did the same thing with Stalin for a few years, but then they stopped and he was allowed to wrinkle and fade.