This Lenin, cast by the Bulgarian sculptor Emil Venkov at the request of the Czech Communist Party, stood in front of the Poprad regional party offices. First installed in 1988, the statue was removed in the early 1990s. Lewis Carpenter of Issaquah, Washington spent the early 1990s tromping across the former Soviet world. In 1993, he sighted the sixteen-foot, eight-ton Lenin partially interred in a gravel lot in Poprad. He promptly purchased the sculpture and arranged for it to be shipped to Seattle, mortgaging his house to cover the costs. Carpenter died in 1994, but not before his Lenin was installed in Freehold Square, becoming an eccentric Seattle landmark. His arrangement with the city was peculiar kind of public consignment: he hoped installing the statue outdoors would facilitate its prompt sale.Venkov, the artist, died earlier this year in Bratislava. The statue is still held in trust by Carpenter’s family, and remains on sale, with an asking price of $250,000.

Today, the Lenin of New York’s Lower East Side perches gargoyle-like atop an apartment building on Norfolk Street. Before that, for more than twenty years, it stood sentry over a $100 million Houston Street property, a twelve-story condo development called Red Square. But originally, it was fashioned in Moscow by sculptor Yuri Gerasimov in 1989 — a very bad year for Lenin statues.In 1994, a pair of maverick real estate developers — one of whom, Michael Rosen, worked a day job as a professor of “radical sociology” at New York University — discovered the junked Lenin in a cluttered Moscow backyard. They wasted no time in getting it to New York to coronate their Houston Street passion project. But in 2016, Red Square was sold, and Lenin went underground.A few months later, he reemerged just blocks away. He now presides over another of Rosen’s buildings, and waves towards Wall Street once again.