“I sell some of the things, but some of them I keep. They’re political documents, objects with history. But that,” he said, pointing at the Lenin bust, “that was a purchase of opportunity. It’s a cool thing. It’s the coolest thing I own.”

Not just cool, but valuable. When Mr. Lenin first came to Toronto, he lived in Coontz’s backyard at his old house in East York, then made his way to Coontz’s next place in the city’s Beach district, to the south of us. One night, a young bartender walking home from her shift came across the bust posed on the front lawn of a local church — the work of pranksters. She flagged down a cabbie, and they ended up taking it back to the cab lot. When Coontz woke up the next morning, he reported the bust stolen, claiming it was valued at around $20,000. The police pieced together the cabbie’s report and the complaint, and the bust was returned that afternoon. For insurance purposes, Coontz put a military dog tag on it, then installed it on his roof. When he moved to his current digs, Lenin once more went safely above ground.

Here at Woodbine and Gerrard, the Lenin is better known for being Coontz’s claim to fame than for the political or cultural achievements of its model. There are, of course, those who recognize him; Coontz told me about a Russian man who used to stop by every year on Lenin’s birthday and express gratitude for the joy the statue gave his wife. “Every time they drove by, she would blow him a kiss,” Coontz explained. “He made her happy.” Coontz, too, spoke of the bust with affection, though he was careful to explain that he did not support communism. He also appreciated the irony of such an artifact standing watch over his gentrifying neighbourhood.

We sat for a few moments in silence. He had things on his mind. The owner of his building was planning to put a condo development on the site. Coontz was also having health problems, and was booking appointments for tests and with specialists. Money was tight and work scarce.

Then he told me that for financial reasons, he had decided to sell his prized possession. The buyer was Pravda Vodka Bar, an upscale joint dedicated to the former Soviet Union’s favourite liquor. Another journey, this time less epic, had been arranged. Mr. Lenin was headed for one of the chicest spots in downtown Toronto — a place about as far from his roots as he could get.

he real-life Mr. Lenin was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in 1870, in Simbirsk (later renamed Ulyanovsk), a small city on the banks of the Volga River. He was an overachiever, the son of parents from the intelligentsia who could fairly be called over-supportive of their six children: every one who reached adulthood became an anti-czarist revolutionary. Vladimir ended up on this path after his brother was executed as a terrorist.

After being expelled from university for his involvement in Marxist politics, he studied law independently, moving in 1893 to St. Petersburg. His rising profile brought him to the attention of the authorities, and in 1895 he was convicted of plotting against Czar Alexander II. He spent two years in prison, then was exiled to Siberia. In 1900, when his sentence was up, he left Russia and took up residence in central Europe. There, he authored one of the founding texts of Bolshevism, What Is to Be Done? The book, written under the pen name Vladimir Lenin, called for a revolutionary vanguard to lead the working class in revolt, and it was instrumental in splitting the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party into two factions: the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Lenin manoeuvred his way to leadership of the Bolshevik Party and, in the wake of the 1917 revolution, became premier of the Soviet Union.

As ruler, Lenin enacted astonishing changes. From literacy campaigns and land reform for the peasants to widespread industrialization and modernization, he transformed the political and physical landscape of the USSR. These achievements inspired an image of him as a man whose devotion to ordinary citizens changed history and liberated the lower classes from servitude.

In reality, though, Lenin’s interest in the revolution was driven less by a love of the proletariat — only one member of his inner circle came from the peasantry, and he was later executed as a czarist spy — than by a desire for revenge against the aristocratic system. And once he took power, his policies were often less than sympathetic. In 1917, he established the Cheka (the secret police force that begat the KGB), and appointed Felix Dzerzhinsky as its head, with instructions to rid the party of detractors. He is also credited with creating the framework for the gulag prison system by establishing “special purpose camps” in Siberia. When mismanagement of industry and food production lowered living standards in Russia to terrifying levels, he executed the party members he deemed responsible. Arguably most chilling was his treatment of the kulaks (wealthier peasants) during the food shortages of 1918, when he dispatched demobilized soldiers to the farmlands to forcibly seize grain, and mercilessly suppressed the uprising that came about in response. It was only after he announced the New Economic Policy in 1921, abandoning the forcible seizure policy and replacing it with new taxation and market systems that allowed peasants to sell their surpluses on the open market, that the economy began to improve and his image as saviour was set.

Lenin died in 1924 from complications related to a series of strokes. By then, he was truly beloved as a strong leader, a father figure who had guided the country out from under czarist rule and ended a brutal civil war. More than 500,000 mourners came to pay their respects over the four days he lay in state in the Hall of Columns. In response to this overwhelming show of public grief, the Politburo decided to leave Lenin’s embalmed body on display in a crystal sarcophagus inside a granite mausoleum erected in Red Square, the centre of Moscow and the heart of the USSR. Pilgrims began travelling to the city to pay their respects, eventually numbering in the millions. This is where the cult began: Lenin the man reborn as Lenin the myth, his body reborn as artifact.

Spontaneously at first, objects bearing his image began to proliferate: busts, statues, portraits, paintings, medallions, pins, coins, rugs, stationery, notebooks. Small shrines popped up, often in spots in the home where religious icons were traditionally hung. Shortly after his death, the Chief Committee on Political Enlightenment (the Glavpolitprosvet) began a campaign to establish “Red Corners” (or “Lenin Corners”) in all institutions. Propaganda shrines went up in schools, factories, workplaces, workers’ clubs, libraries, and village reading rooms; farms, libraries, newspapers, streets, and cities — notably Leningrad — were named after him. In the years following his death, scenes and stills from Lenin footage became the basis for propaganda posters, newsreels, and agitprop films. Artists and writers participated in creating elegiac works in his honour; as the Russian futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote, “Lenin — lived. Lenin — lives. Lenin — will live.”

Lenin’s cult status lasted throughout the Soviet period, and remained intact in many former republics even after the Berlin Wall came down. But the Baltics were a different story. At the end of the Second World War, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia had been absorbed by the USSR, cut off from the rest of Europe by the Iron Curtain, and plunged into a period of tremendous cultural and social upheaval. When they finally re-established independence in 1991, nationalist ideologies were resurgent and relations between locals and ethnic Russians grew tense. The ubiquitous monuments to Lenin became lightning rods for years of oppression and mistreatment at the hands of Soviet leaders. People gathered in city squares across the Baltics to watch statues of Lenin torn down, sometimes destroying the monuments with their own hands. When I visited Lithuania for the first time, in 1992, I remember walking with my aunt through the grey, beaten-down streets of Vilnius to Lukiški? Square, the main square close to the current parliament building (and former soviet). On the site where the largest Lenin statue in the country had once stood, overlooking the KGB headquarters, there was nothing, just a square of freshly turned earth edged in marble. Today, almost twenty years later, the space remains empty.

Lenin remained something of a commodity in the Baltic countries, however, his image sold as scrap or repurposed as souvenirs and sold to curious tourists and collectors like Coontz. I recently viewed some archival footage of Vilnius’s Lenin coming down in August 1991; the moment he hit the ground, people began chipping away at his torso for souvenirs. The author of the archival footage told me that as he walked away with his own marble souvenir in hand, kids began plying him for American dollars for the chunks they had just picked up off the ground. This was their first response to the collapse of the Soviet Union: to try to turn history into money.

obin Singh, the owner of Pravda, met me on a snowy Monday afternoon. His bar is located at 44 Wellington Street East, just east of Toronto’s financial district and light years (well, a few kilometres) from Coontz’s ramshackle neighbourhood. The interior was luxe, all plush red velvet and gold chandeliers, hung with mirrors that reflected the lusciousness ad infinitum. Vodka bottles lined the shelf behind the well-polished bar, their labels etched in both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. It was three o’clock, and the waitresses were busy restocking the bar’s hundred-plus varieties and readying the tables. Singh sat me down on a velvet couch tucked beneath a small overhanging balcony. One of the waitresses brought over a sweating bottle of cold mineral water and a couple of shots of Slava, a Ukrainian brand.

There are several other vodka bars in downtown Toronto, but Pravda is one of the oldest, at more than six years. The two newest both owe their existence to Pravda: Rasputin, on Queen East, is run by a former employee; and Samovar, in Cabbagetown, belongs to Singh’s ex-partner. Both are operated by Eastern European immigrants. Singh, thirty-eight, is also an immigrant; he came to Canada from Cape Town in 1996. Though he admitted that growing up under apartheid gave him his own particular view of communism (the South African Communist Party was strongly linked to the ANC and the struggle to end apartheid), he told me his decision to open a Russian-themed bar decorated with Soviet-era artifacts and propaganda was strictly strategic. “I’m a businessman,” he said, “and it’s the in thing right now. Do I feel uncomfortable with the theme? The Soviet Union collapsed. It’s not coming back.”

His main concern for Pravda was authenticity, he said, particularly in its decor. “No place in Toronto is themed like we are,” he bragged. “Others have a face to the place but no substance. I wanted this to look like somewhere the diplomats and politicians would have hung out in Soviet Russia.”

The walls are covered with original Soviet art and well-made reproductions. The usual Russian tchotchkes — balalaikas, matryoshki, samovars — line shelves and fill cabinets. Singh pointed out some of the objects he’d bought from Coontz in the past: small bronze Lenin statues, portraits of Lenin and other Soviet leaders, a large cast iron bell engraved with tiny Cyrillic letters. Pravda even has a gulag room, a small alcove with bars on the walls and an alarmingly prisonlike door that leads to a storage closet. “You think of Russia, and you think of prisons — of the gulag,” Singh said. “It’s all about the things people associate with Russia.” At one point, the room featured a Russian prison toilet filled with ice to keep bottles of vodka cold. He removed it, though; for some reason patrons didn’t like sitting near it.