A court in a German city has ruled that the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany (MLPD) will be allowed to erect a statue of Vladimir Lenin, the mass-murdering founder of the Soviet Union.

The administrative court in Gelsenkirchen overruled the city’s decision to halt the construction of a monument to Vladimir Lenin, the architect of the Russian Revolution of 1917 which birthed the Soviet Union — a state responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of innocent people.

The city had argued that the statue would detract from the historical value of the adjacent savings bank building, but the court ruled that objections over Lenin’s historical atrocities were irrelevant as the statue is to be constructed more than ten meters away from the bank, Deutsche Welle reports.

The Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany hailed the decision by the court, saying: “A few weeks before his 150th birthday, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin has once again won a great victory.”

The move by the court was slammed by Marco Buschmann, a Free Democrats (FDP) member of parliament from Gelsenkirchen, who said: “A Lenin statue would be a disgrace for Gelsenkirchen” as “Lenin stands for mass murder and totalitarianism.”

“Anyone who wants to erect a Lenin statue should ask themselves whether they are still grounded in liberal democratic principles or not,” he added.

In 2017, following the controversy over Confederate memorials in the American South, activists tried to remove a statue of Vladimir Lenin in the city of Seattle. The statue was first installed in the city in the early 1990s after a local man purchased the statue following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Benedict Evans, a local venture capitalist, and over 900 people in a Facebook group named “Seattle, Tear Down This Lenin Statue!” called for the removal of the monument to the communist dictator.

“If one wanted to pull down statues of profoundly evil people, responsible for uncountable human suffering, this one might be on the list,” Evans wrote.

Lenin’s reign as the head of the Soviet Union was marked by mass starvation, the internment of political enemies in gulags (concentration camps), the mass executions of the Red Terror, and the invasion of neighbouring countries.

In his persecution of the kulaks — peasants with over eight acres of land — Lenin ordered his men in one instance to: “1) hang without fail, so that the public sees, at least 100 notorious kulaks, the rich, and the bloodsuckers. 2) Publish their names. 3) Take away all of their grain. 4) Execute the hostages.”

“This needs to be accomplished in such a way, that people for hundreds of miles around will see, tremble, know and scream out: let’s choke and strangle those blood-sucking kulaks,” Lenin commanded.

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