The sentence above is in the twitter and brings an image of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva at the event in which he showed that the alliance with former toucan Geraldo Alckmin is for real. The phrase refers to the return of Vladimir Lenin after twelve years in exile in Switzerland. The post was written by someone who has worked in some of the main newsrooms in the country, is one of the most requested advisers to politicians, works as a researcher at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation and is a former advisor to Antonio Palocci and a former spokesman for the government of Dilma Rousseff. With such baggage, which includes living in the bowels of petismo, I think it’s a case of paying attention.
Lenin spent twelve years in exile. On his return journey to Russia, he boarded a sealed (yes, literally sealed) carriage bound for Finland Station in St. Petersburg. In the eight days he spent on the train, he matured the ideas that he would put into practice months later. The revolution would not take place without violence.
Lenin returned so determined that the ideas presented by him the day after his disembarkation – those that would later be called the April theses – sounded so radical that some of his comrades thought he had slipped into anarchy. His wife, according to some accounts, thought he had lost his mind. The most radical understood. That “revolution” that was underway – half striker, half spontaneous – was far from being the revolution of the proletariat conceived by him and apparently purified over the last few days inside a train car.
The communist leader provoked deep ruptures. It drove the country into civil war, and the brutality that laid the foundations of its proletarian revolution underpinned some of the greatest waves of persecution, violence and extermination in our history, which were to be commanded by its successor Joseph Stalin.
Lula has returned. So, would this be the only similarity between the Brazilian and Lenin? The return of an “exile” to implement the revolution.
Did the former president have the same plans for reformulating the direction of the revolution, which he had to test when he was in charge of Brazil?
Does Lula, who in 2022 dream of disembarking at the Finland Station, carry in his luggage the resentment of having almost been wiped out of public life as the centerpiece of the greatest structure of corruption ever discovered?
What kind of errors would the passenger be willing to remedy? Those who led Brazil to 16 years of economic stagnation? Or those who allowed them to be plundered and thrown out of power?
It is impossible to conjecture about what went through the mind of the author of the comparison between Lenin’s and Lula’s return. But there are a series of historical events that become worrisome within a natural comparison between what happened in Russia in 1917 and what is projected to be taking place in Brazil.
This train that would be heading to Finland Station does not carry a peacemaker. Nor is a leader willing to forgive. By the way, revenge is an increasingly common word among some who describe the former president’s goals.
For these crazy coincidences, Lula had his imprisonment decreed on the days that coincide with the 101 years since Lenin’s return. Lula spent 580 days in a VIP cell at the Federal Police Superintendence, in Curitiba. He left there in the midst of an operation that resembles a prisoner’s rescue more than a legal process. The “helicopter” that lifted Lula from jail and returned him to the streets was the work on a state scale that is attributed to some coup plotters in Araraquara.
The known part of what was stolen from Brazilian authorities’ cell phones and computers was used to support the thesis that Lula was a victim of persecution by public officials. But, it seems, they really served to heat up what is not known about the stolen information and that made many people change direction along the way.
The questions that remain for 2022: Will Lula be able to land at Estação Finland? Which Lula will land on it? The only thing clear is that he definitely got on the train.
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