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At the very end of the Soviet epoch the media bomb dropped by Sergey Kuryokhin exploded in soviet people’s fragile minds. Relying on far-fetched evidence and absurd facts, he expressed the highly controversial idea that Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Red Revolution, was both mushroom and radio wave. Despite its absurdity this wave-shroom dualism theory got a solid ground as it was delivered on Friday evening prime-time through the main and only official TV channel. A lot of people took it seriously, few as a funny joke - even an official letter was written to investigate if Lenin was not a human being.

This project is an attempt to give more substantial confirmation to the hoax of Lenin’s shroom-wave dualism. On one hand, the project is still controversial as Kuryokhin's tv show was, but on the other hand it is absolutely data driven and based on exact facts and cases. Using the dataset with an exact location of Lenin monuments I’m showing identical similarities between the mushroom biomechanisms and the pattern of distribution of Lenin’s statues which populate our planet. This includes interactive planetary scale Lenin’s mycelium model, discussion on the mechanisms that allowed the mycelium to spread worldwide (including political theology and mythbuilding) and two minor researches on migrating monuments and Lenin quarantine in ex-soviet countries.

The mycelium is the actual body of the mushroom, while the thing we call mushroom in everyday life is the reproductive organ of the mushroom that grows to spread the spores. Lenin functions in the same way except that instead of spores he uses his radio wave nature. During life Lenin’s body was being replaced with a mushroom and at the moment he died he actually became one hundred percent mushroom. After Lenin was put into the Mausoleum his existence developed in a mushroom way. The mycelium structure started to grow and form new mushroom monuments. The Mausoleum is the special device that amplifies radio waves emitted by Lenin’s body and broadcasts it to the world. Statues, in their turn, work as repeater antennas that catch the wave, direct it straight to the heads of people living around the monument and infect them. Infected people tend to live in the Sovok mentality and as a part of it to build new statues of Lenin. Same mechanism we can see for example with Ophiocordyceps unilateralis - a mushroom that parasites on ants. An ant infected by this mushroom runs away from its nest, finds perfect conditions for the mushroom to grow and dies there, providing its body to feed and protect the new mushroom.

As Lenin-mushroom parasites on human minds one can say that it's mycelium grows not under the ground but in the collective mind of humanity. It explains the booming growth of the statues network in the mid 20th century, quarantine-like Leninopad in Ukraine and other ex-soviet countries and abundance of statues nowadays.

Background

The project was started at Lovely GIS Hackathon in Decemnber 2017 and was nominated to People's Choise Award. I was one-man-army and over the one weekend I scraped and geolocated a dataset of Lenin's monuments, created the interactive web-maps based on Here Framework, as well as parametric 3D model made in Grasshopper 3D

The project is still in development and will be updated soon.