Is there a Lenin's Day in your town? In my town it was celebrated yesterday

Some 20 years ago, when the Soviet Bloc was collapsing and suddenly all statues and busts of Marx and Lenin had become unfashionable, the konpartsa (festive group) Pa...Ya from a working class neighborhood, Otxarkoaga, had the memorable idea of asking some Eastern European city, Bucharest I believe, if they could send us their undesired gigantic Lenin statue. They were all for it. The whole endeavor was kind of impossible in the end (too costly to transport) but finally they conceded for a more realistic homage to the Soviet Revolution: a bust of Marx and Lenin donated by a local embassy or consulate. 

Since then Otxarkoaga, and thanks to this brave neighborhood, all Bilbao, has its own monument to Marx and Lenin, raised by popular action (the Town Hall was totally bypassed, I believe - not the first popular monument erected this way but the first one to non-Basques).

Lenin Eguna (Lenin's Day in Basque) was maybe a distinct but convergent development. I think it was promoted by Boltxe Kolektiboa (Bolshe Team) in order to have a day of celebration and discussion around the anniversary of the October Revolution, which, as everybody knows, happened on November 7th. 

In that day, grassroots structures known as councils (soviets in Russian) became the backbone of the new socialist state, albeit monopolistically led by the Bolshevik Party, which in the mid term produced Stalin's dictatorship and the degeneration of the system into a bureaucratic dinosaur unable to adapt (yet the results of these issues only became really obvious after 1968: the system was still very fit for the disciplinary conditions of Fordism and its vertically organized mass production economy).

So all that made possible that yesterday Lenin Eguna was celebrated in Otxarkoaga, reminding us all that we are one of the few cities worldwide who still has a monument to Marx and Lenin, and the corresponding yearly celebrations. 

Singing the International under the typical rain of Bilbao

Txarli and Vlad, adoptive citizens

Source: Boltxe (who else!)