I lived in a town on the Siberian railroad for a couple years in Northern Kazakhstan and pass the statue of Lenin everyday on my way to teach at the university. The Kazakh government had to carefully orchestrate the removal of that statue in the middle of the night so as not to upset the Russian majority of that town. But they did it. When I cross the border into Russia, I met a few older “babushkas”, Russian grandmothers, who had fond memories of Stalin and loved him. Truly bizarre, but it gave me a new perspective.