@Xanne Yes

Lenin's brother in 1920, holding a cat.

Dmitry worked as an army doctor in WWI, and in 1917 had a short love affair with Fanny Kaplan, who in August 1918 made an attempt at Lenin's life and was executed 3 days later.

Yakov Koshelkov, a famous Moscow hold-up man of 1915-1919.

He and his gang stopped and robbed Vladimir Lenin's car on 6 January 1919.

Lenin gave the gang his overcoat, since he had no money with him.

He showed them his ID document first and said: "my name is Vladimir Lenin!"

Yakov replied "I don't care that your name is Levin. I'm the ruler of this city at hight".

He misheard the surname.

He and his gang got into the car, and while riding it, finally got to reading Lenin's documents. They realized that they could hold Lenin hostage and give him up in exchange for their fellow gangmembers in prison.

They turned the car back, but Lenin and the other two guys were already gone.

@CowperKettle Do historians think things could have gone differently if Lenin had never been born?

@FaheemMitha Historians stay clear of such prognostications ))

Locals in Bashkiria used a tractor to bring down a cellphone tower, afraid of its "radiation"

In some biographies of Vladimir Lenin, you will find the opinion that he "dragged the Party into a revolution", because the majority of the party leaders were against taking power at that particular moment by force. They wanted to wait till elections scheduled for late 1917-early 1918.

That's about how far it goes. Nobody knows what would have happened if Lenin was not even born. Maybe some other leader would have taken his place.

@CowperKettle Just wondering if things would have gone to hell in the same way, if he hadn't been involved.

One can imagine an alternate reality where Russia entered a phase of relative democracy and less terror after the Tsars.

Word of the day: windthrow (In forestry, windthrow refers to trees uprooted by wind. Breakage of the tree bole (trunk) instead of uprooting is called windsnap.)

> A hamster has been trading cryptocurrencies in a cage rigged to automatically buy and sell tokens since June by running on a wheel & strolling through tunnels: it's currently outperforming the S&P 500, its portfolio being up ~24% on Friday

@tchrist Yuck.