22 April is Lenin’s birthday.
Interestingly, I know a few Macedonian guys in Australia whose first name is Lenin. There was one guy, my age, born in Australia to Macedonian parents in the 1970s – his name was Lenin. And apparently Macedonian-Australian cricketer Len Pascoe was otherwise Lenin Durantovich… well according to Wikipedia his official birth name was Leonard Durantovich, but Nick Anastasovski’s book Pechalbari, a history of Macedonians in Australia, claims the former. But then again, many of us Aussie-born Macedonians from pre-multicultural times were given (OK, forced to have) an ‘acceptable’ Anglo official name but use a Macedonian name for communication at home and in the community. Lenin essentially means “Lena’s son” or “belonging to Lena” so I was never sure whether they were just named that way to show their kinship (a once typical feature of Balkan personal nomenclature) or their parents’ political stripes. Especially in the the period immediately after the end of WWII, it was not unusual to name Macedonian boys Lenin, Tito (such as politician Tito Petkovski, born 1945) or Stalin (such as renowned Macedonian journalist and writer Stalin Lozanovski). The practice of naming children after prominent world leaders continues, as was shown with the number of Kosovar boys born in 1999 named ‘Tonibler’, ‘Toni’ or ‘Bler’ after Tony Blair.
Associated with Lenin was the Leninski Subotnik, a ‘voluntary’ community spring clean that would happen on a Saturday (‘subotnik’ comes from the word ‘subota’ meaning ‘Saturday’) around this time every year. The practice started in communist Russia in 1919 and spread to the then new Eastern Bloc countries after WWII. My grandfather from Bulgaria, though having fled the communists, had brought the concept of the subotnik with him to his new family, so as a child, my mother would dread whenever her father would announce on a Saturday morning that instead of her playing with her toys, she will be joining her parents in doing a ‘subotnik’ around the family home engaged in such fun tasks as pulling weeds and clearing piles of wood. And in true parental style, come the time she had children herself, she too would destroy their weekends by declaring a ‘subotnik’ and calling for their ‘voluntary’ participation. Note, there was nothing ‘voluntary’ about this – we had to toe the line.
Leninski subotniks have not taken place in Bulgaria since the fall of communism (and it shows!), and most Bulgarians under 40 don’t even know of the term, but when older Bulgarians are asked what aspects of communism they miss the most, Leninski subotniks often rank quite high.
Picture: the last time I was in Russia happened to be in time for Lenin’s birthday in 2018. Here’s the scene at the Lenin statue in Astrakhan on the evening of Lenin’s birthday.
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