Immanuel Todd, a demographer-prophet, and his book that stings
Let us start from the beginning. In the painting below a Soviet artist captures a very famous, to Soviet citizens of course, moment in Lenin' s life. His house in Shushenskoe, a place of his exile, is being searched by the police. As an aside: Lenin is supposed to be 27 years old here. There are two versions of Lenin in the Soviet art- an angelic looking 3 year old and a wise elder, a sage. Nothing in between. Here he is a sage. In reality, Lenin looks older than he had ever lived. He died aged 53 years. Note a little detail in this painting: one of the policemen is paging through the books on the shelves. This was, according to the large Soviet corpus of writings on the subject, the so-called Leniniana, the main point of each of the many house searches performed by the Russian imperial police in Lenin’s houses. Search for forbidden books. What were they,...