His party's power is long gone, his ideas mostly discredited – but Vladimir Lenin's visage remains a fixture in much of the former Soviet Union. The thousands of statues of him spread across the vast region bring to mind poet Vladimir Mayakovsky's ringing line of devotion: “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live”. The past tense applies to many of the statues. They were torn down and pulverized by angry mobs, as happened in Kiev during the wave of protests in 2013-14, or methodically demounted by local authorities. Some of the Lenin statues taken down with care were moved from public squares and prominent points to quiet, secluded parks. There Lenin seems less like a fiery leader than a grumpy retiree, his arm outstretched as if trying to call back a bus that sped past him. But in other spots, that arm is clearly calling the masses to rise up and go forward. Viewed as a whole, the statues are monotonous – Lenin is always portrayed as stern – but there are individual nuances. In some, he holds a lapel in a gesture of self-confidence. In others, like the one in the center of Moscow's noisy, traffic-choked Kaluzhskaya Square, he has one hand in his pocket, casually surveying the scene with a boulevardier's air. Of all the statues, the one that may distill the cult of Lenin to its purest form is the seven-meter (25-foot) tall head that dominates the central square of Ulan-Ude, a city 100 kilometers (about 60 miles) southeast of Lake Baikal in southeast Russia. There's no body language to read, just Lenin's judgmental stare. The square was redesigned especially to accommodate the giant head. Removing it would leave the square seeming barren and pointless. There, at least, it's likely that Lenin will live. Here: In this photo taken on August 4, 2017, a statue of Vladimir Lenin stands in the town of Uglich, 200 kilometers (124 miles) north-east of Moscow, Russia. (Photo by Dmitri Lovetsky/AP Photo)





In this photo taken on Sunday, October 1, 2017, a statue of Vladimir Lenin stands in the central square in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Sakhalin Island in Russia's Far East. The thousands of statues of Vladimir Lenin spread across the vast region bring to mind poet Vladimir Mayakovsky's ringing line of devotion: “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live”. (Photo by Alexander Zemlianichenko Jr./AP Photo)





In this photo taken on Tuesday, October 10, 2017, a monument of Vladimir Lenin stands in Ulan-Ude, Russia. (Photo by Anna Ogorodnik/AP Photo)





In this photo taken on Friday, October 6, 2017, a bust of Lenin stands at a college of Road Facilities in Novosibirsk, Russia. (Photo by Ilnar Salakhiev/AP Photo)





In this Tuesday, October 31, 2017 file photo, a bird silhouetted by the sun sits on the hand of a statue of Soviet Union founder Vladimir Lenin in Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan. (Photo by Dmitri Lovetsky/AP Photo)





In this photo taken on Wednesday, October 11, 2017, a statue of Vladimir Lenin covered with silver paint stands in Pokrovka village, 50 kilometers (31 miles) west of Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. (Photo by Vladimir Voronin/AP Photo)





In this photo taken on Wednesday, October 11, 2017, a bust and other statues of Vladimir Lenin are displayed at the Musion park in Moscow, Russia. (Photo by Pavel Golovkin/AP Photo)





In this photo taken on Friday, October 27, 2017, a statue of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin stands at the Lenin Hut Museum near Razliv Lake, outside St.Petersburg, Russia. (Photo by Dmitri Lovetsky/AP Photo)





In this photo taken on Wednesday, October 4, 2017, visitors take photos near the statues of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin at the Grutas Park, in Druskininkai, some 120 km (75 miles) south of the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, Lithuania. Grutas Park is a sculpture garden of Soviet-era statues and other Soviet ideological relics from the times of the Lithuanian SSR. (Photo by Mindaugas Kulbis/AP Photo)





In this photo taken on Wednesday, October 25, 2017, statutes of Vladimir Lenin are displayed in a field in the village of Frumushika Nova where a local farmer set up a folk exhibition along with a collection of Soviet-era monuments. (Photo by Olga Ivashchenko/AP Photo)





In this photo taken on Monday, October 23, 2017, a statue of Vladimir Lenin stands in Moscow, Russia. (Photo by Ivan Sekretarev/AP Photo)





In this aerial file photo taken on Tuesday, October 31, 2017, a woman walks past a statue of Soviet Union founder Vladimir Lenin at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, in Kazakhstan. (Photo by Dmitri Lovetsky/AP Photo)





In this photo taken on Tuesday, October 17, 2017, a famous statue of Vladimir Lenin stands in front of the Finlyandsky (Finnish) railway station in St. Petersburg, Russia. The station is most famous for having been the location where Vladimir Lenin returned to Russia from exile in Switzerland in April 16, 1917, ahead of the October Revolution. (Photo by Dmitri Lovetsky/AP Photo)





In this Wednesday, June 28, 2017 file photo, a statue of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin stands outside the entrance of the Luzhniki stadium in Moscow, Russia. (Photo by Denis Tyrin/AP Photo)





In this photo taken on Thursday, December 10, 2015, a damaged statue of Vladimir Lenin stands in Debaltseve, Ukraine. The Ukrainian Army shot up the statue for target practice while it occupied the town, sieged by separatist rebels who captured it in February 2015 at the end of one of the most devastating battles during the conflict in Ukraine's east. (Photo by Evgeniy Maloletka/AP Photo)





Members of Belarusian Pioneers youth organisation salute standing in front of the monument to Vladimir Lenin, Soviet founder, during a ceremony marking 100th anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Minsk, Belarus, Friday, November 3, 2017. (Photo by Sergei Grits/AP Photo)