The Lenin museum occupied a palace set in a block-square park behind the railroad station. In the summer, mothers who lived in the tatty turn-of-the-century buildings nearby sat on the benches while their infants soaked up the sun. The facade of the museum was gray but in far better shape than the rest of the neighborhood. No loud kids raced around the broad driveway or, God forbid, the pristine front lawn. 

On the drizzly day when I decided that I finally ought to go and see this place dedicated to a world historical figure who lived in this city almost 75 years earlier, two teachers and a group of small school children had just gone in. The woman in the ticket window next to the front door asked me, "How many?"

"One."

"Aren't you a group?"

She was not used to individuals, and had to call the boss. This woman informed me that all their visitors were class outings from local schools or tourist groups from friendly socialist countries, for whom the museum was an official attraction. She said that she could check her reservation book, and if there was a group from my country due in the next few days, I could come back then. When I told her that I was from America, she said that we might have a problem. Guests were allowed in only with a guide, and all the guides were booked up to serve groups from schools or the various socialist countries. I volunteered to join the children who had just gone in, and assured her that I would be happy to listen to what their guide said in Polish. She finally agreed. 

I wanted to buy a ticket, but there were no individual tickets.

Inside, I scurried along the parquet floors and caught up with the first graders. They went through room after room looking at period photographs of Cracow before the First World War, conditions in factories, strikes, rallies, and demonstrations. Here and there was a picture of Lenin. Whenever they came to one of these, the guide would point it out to the seven-year-olds and say, "This is the revolutionary leader, Vladimir Ilyich...." She waited like a game show host until a bolder child said, "Lenin."

I found what I wanted in a room at the back of the second floor, on a wall of portraits of "Persons Associated with the History of the Workers' Movement in Cracow." At the top came Lenin, his wife Krupskaya, and Ignacy Daszynski, the first socialist delegate to the Austro-Hungarian parliament. Halfway down, among fuzzy blowups of union leaders and pimply closet communists, she was there, with long dark hair and glowing eyes. 

The children passed into the next room, and a couple of women from the museum staff entered behind me, whispering to each other. "Excuse me," I called, and they shuffled over. "Can you tell me something about this woman here?" I asked, pointing to the picture of Inessa Armand. They looked at the picture, at each other, and shook their heads. "Probably some, you know, woman of loose morals," one of them said, and they both giggled.

I went off to catch up with my first-graders. I wondered as I passed through the empty room about how all our lives might have turned out if, on some warm spring afternoon as they strolled across the Blonia or in Lasek Wolski, V. I. Ulyanov had taken a good look at Inessa and thought clearly for a moment about what was really important in life. But he hadn't. He had been too busy tinkering with the one big idea that would make all mankind happy.

The next room was the last one. It covered Lenin's summer spot in Poronin, and featured a cutaway model of a typical Polish highlander farm, complete with miniature furniture, farm implements, and even a little mill. The kids loved it and so did I. "Now, boys and girls," said the guide, "next year when you're in the second grade, you can come back and begin to learn about the ideas of the revolutionary leader, Vladimir Ilyich...."

Nobody answered -- they were too wrapped up in the cutaway of the highlander farm. I made my voice as squeaky as I could and said, "Lenin," and then all the kids cheered and ran down the stairs, bumping each other and talking about how neat that farm was. 
 
Read a review of a hagiographical 1970s account of Lenin's Cracow days.
 

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© Cracow Letters 2004