Thursday was the official “grand closing” for recently hired Seattle Times editorial writer David Volodzko, whose first and only column was about the locally famous statue of Vladimir Lenin in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood. Volodzko considers the statue offensive, which is his right, but he also demands its removal from private property, which is a little pushy.
The column’s headline, “Dear Fremont: We need to talk about Lenin and your statue of the genocidal tyrant,” clues you in early that you’re in for some tedious nonsense. Volodzko is new to Seattle, but that doesn’t make this a new or even that compelling a topic for discussion. The statue was a subject of a lot of right-wing “whataboutism” during the recent push to remove Confederate statues that were openly erected in response to the Civil Rights movement and to intimidate Black people in the Jim Crow South.
Volodzko even acknowledges the difference:
Back in Seattle, Lenin’s statue stands 16 feet tall on the corner of Evanston Avenue North and North 34th Street. Locals like to dress him up like a mascot. A tutu for Pride Month, a Halloween get-up, a Christmas star. I guess they think it’s cute. Currently, his hands are painted blood red and his chest is marked with the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag.
The Lenin statue is art and a testament to the resistance against tyranny. Confederate statues are hagiographic memorials to racist traitors.
Here’s where Volodzko acts like an annoying CinemaSins video (so, all of them) that keeps answering his own questions and neutralizing the complaints he raises.
Mind you, I’m new to the city. I moved here in May when I joined The Seattle Times editorial board, coming from rural Georgia. As such, the statue wasn’t a shock to me. Folks down there have controversial statues too.
Indeed, critics have compared the Lenin statue to Confederate counterparts, but most Confederate monuments were erected between 1890 and 1915 in reaction to Reconstruction policies, or in the 1960s in reaction to the Civil Rights Movement. In contrast, I could find no evidence to suggest the Lenin statue was created to insult his victims, though standing it in the middle of Fremont arguably does.
This column deserved the derision it received, but Volodzko later responded to reader criticism with unhinged tweets about how actually Hitler wasn’t so bad, compared to Lenin. Look, his grandfather was a Nazi concentration camp survivor, who believed that “the only thing worse, he said with bitterness in his voice, was the Russia Lenin had built.” I obviously defer to his grandfather’s firsthand experience. However, Volodzko felt it necessary to post this since-deleted tweet:
In fact, while Hitler has become the great symbol of evil in history books, he too was less evil than Lenin because Hitler only targeted people he personally believed were harmful to society whereas Lenin targeted even those he himself did not believe were harmful in any way.
That’s actually not a fact. I also don’t care if Hitler had “sincerely held beliefs” about the people he brutally murdered. American enslavers specifically targeted my ancestors because they “personally believed” Black people were inferior. They were still evil.
Volodzko insists Hitler was the “lesser evil” compared to Lenin, which is a third-rail debate argument. It’s also irrelevant to his column about the Lenin statue in Fremont. A Hitler statue that is drenched in blood and meant to symbolize the evil of Nazism is very different from the Confederate statues littering the American South.
Unfortunately, we weren’t able to have a meaningful discussion about resistance art because Volodzko got so weird at the end there. The Seattle Times cut its losses before it became known as the “Hitler-defending” paper. Declaring Volodzko’s Twitter diatribe as “inconsistent with our company values and those of our family ownership,” the Times announced Thursday that Volodzko had been fired, “effective immediately.”
And the statue of Lenin endures. Score one for controversial art.
[Seattle Times / The Stranger / The Big Lead]
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The difference between the Bolsheviks/Soviets and the Nazis? The Soviets would murder anyone who got in their way. The Nazis went out of their way to murder. The SS tied up insane amounts of manpower and resources in the Shoah. Troops that could have been at the front were guarding concentration camps, trains that could have been taking ammo and supplies to the front were used to take Jews to "the East". That's why the Allies did nothing about the death camps after they found out about them early in 1943-if the Germans want to waste resources murdering Jews instead of fighting us, let them, was the attitude. Hell, the last transport of Jews from Berlin was in March 1945, as Soviet artillery was landing in the Berlin suburbs.
The USSR was murderous in pursuing its goals. The goal of the Third Reich was murder.
Beyond being an idiot who goes nuclear as soon as anyone dares to question his genius, this feller seems to have just a terrible sense of what is worth of editorializing.