Lenin’s image was well known all over East Germany. This mass-produced statue from the 1960s, displayed in Leipzig, was spray-pained during one of the ‘Monday demonstrations’ in 1989. The weekly gatherings and protests ultimately led to the fall of the Berlin Wall on in November of that year.

Painting Lenin, often seen as an austere father-like figure to socialist societies, bright pink was not only a sign of protest, but also delightfully creative. The lurid skin and turquoise beard and hair seem to sum up the very worst – or the very best – of ideas infiltrating East Germany from the West.   

Today, it’s one of the star pieces in the collection of The Wende Museum, a collection documenting the end of socialist dominance in Eastern Europe.