Astral Codex Ten

Lenin

5 min read

Lenin

Article

Lenin is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between March 09, 2021 and October 30, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “The second contains Lenin, Mussolini, the Equal Rights Amendment”; “totally sans Lenin posters”; “The anthem’s refrain praised “the Party of Lenin, the Party of Stalin / Leading us to the triumph of Communism.”“. It most often appears alongside Soviet Union, Europe, Germany.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: March 09, 2021
  • Last seen: October 30, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

The Consequences Of Radical Reform
March 09, 2021 · Original source
These threads don't cleanly map to the modern left-right political spectrum. The first contains Jane Jacobs and anti-colonialists coexisting uneasily alongside religious fundamentalism and wisdom-of-repugnance-style arguments against homosexuality. The second contains Lenin, Mussolini, the Equal Rights Amendment, and neoliberal reformers. They don't even map cleanly to libertarianism vs. authoritarianism; the first has a libertarian streak, but could presumably justify various monarchies and theocracies; the second has clear authoritarian elements, but would also include extreme libertarians who want to abolish the state and run everything on market principles.
Your Book Review: Down And Out In Paris And London
June 10, 2021 · Original source
The two of them carry on like this for some time, drifting aimlessly though Paris, hoping for work. At one point they get scammed by a fake Bolshevik cell that dissapears once they pay their membership dues. Orwell’s underrated and understated sense of humor is on full display after he and Boris return to the cell office to find it deserted and totally sans Lenin posters:
More Memorable Passages From "The Man Without A Face"
August 04, 2023 · Original source
A rare honest Leningrad official recalls an unusual economic mission to Germany:
In May 1991, Salye, in her capacity as chairwoman of the Leningrad City Council’s committee on food supplies, traveled to Berlin to sign contracts for the importing of several trainloads of meat and potatoes in Leningrad. Negotiations had more or less been completed: Salye and a trusted colleague from the city administration were really there to sign the papers.
“And we get there,” Salye told me years later, still outraged, “and this Frau Rudolf with whom we were supposed to meet, she tells us she can’t see us because she is involved in urgent negotiations with the City of Leningrad on the subject of meat imports. Our eyes are popping out. Because we are the City of Leningrad, and we are there on the subject of meat imports!
In Search Of AI Psychosis
August 26, 2025 · Original source
In the early 1990s, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, performance artist Sergey Kuryokhin presented a Daily Show style segment on a Russian talk show. He argued that Vladimir Lenin ate so many mushrooms that he eventually turned into a mushroom, and led the October Revolution while possessed by a sentient mushroom spirit.
Inline links: presented
I don’t have all the answers, so think of this post as an exploration of possible analogies and precedents rather than a strongly-held thesis. Also, I might have one answer - I think the yearly incidence of AI psychosis is somewhere around 1 in 10,000 (for a loose definition) to 1 in 100,000 (for a strict definition). I’ll talk about how I got those numbers at the end. But first: I. Lenin Was A Mushroom In the early 1990s, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, performance artist Sergey Kuryokhin presented a Daily Show style segment on a Russian talk show. He argued that Vladimir Lenin ate so many mushrooms that he eventually turned into a mushroom, and led the October Revolution while possessed by a sentient mushroom spirit.
Inline links: presented
Today this all sounds banal - just another schizo conspiracy theory that probably wouldn’t even get enough YouTube clicks to earn back its production cost. But 1990s Russians were used to a stodgy, dignified version of state TV. While it’s an exaggeration to say it would never lie to them, it would at least be comprehensible lies, like how the latest Five Year Plan was right on track. And Kuryohkin designed his piece masterfully, interviewing leading authorities about tangentially related topics (“so, you’re the world’s top Lenin biographer, would you agree that Lenin often ate mushrooms?”) and splicing the footage to look like a growing scholarly consensus. The result basically one-shotted a large segment of the Russian populace. According to Wikipedia:
Inline links: to Wikipedia
Links For October 2025
October 30, 2025 · Original source
32: Wikipedia: Names Of Soviet Origin. After the Communist Revolution, the Soviets wanted to replace the old set of religious/nationalist names. They didn’t do a very good job: “Mels - acronym for Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin”, “Vilen - short for Vladimir Ilyich Lenin”. Though some were slightly more creative: “Gertruda - ‘Gertrude’ reimagined as being short for geroy truda, ‘hero of labor’”
Inline links: Wikipedia: Names Of Soviet Origin