Seattle's 16-foot bronze Vladimir Lenin statue first appeared in Washington state in 1993. Lewis Carpenter found it while traveling through Slovakia after the collapse of the Soviet Union and learned the statue was going to be melted down. He purchased it for $13,000, then paid more than double that to have the seven-ton statue disassembled and shipped to the States. So is it an ode to communism? Actually, no. Carpenter didn’t like communism or Lenin. In fact, he said just because you want to destroy something “doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen.” #history #communism #seattle #sovietunion