Quote:
Originally posted by Cream
It really is an historic moment. It is like the Berlin Wall coming down or the fall of the USSR when they dragged Stalin through the streets.
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Well... not quite exactly
I think you got Mussolini's fate mixed up with Stalin's.
Mussolini and his mistress were captured by Italian partisans while trying to escape to Switzerland. Both were shot on the spot by firing squad; the following morning the bodies were taken to the main square in Milan and hung by the heels -- allowing a little modesty for Clara Petacci; someone tied a belt around the bottom of her skirt so it wouldn't ride up (down?) when she was hung up. After a brief period of public display, they were cut down and hacked to pieces by the crowd.
Stalin, on the other hand, died a natural death and buried next to Lenin in Red Square. Within the year, Nikita Khrushchev was well in the process of de-Stalinizing the Soviet Union, and ol' 'Joe Steel' (the literal translation of his name; his real name was Josef Vissarionovich Dzugashvili) got evicted from Lenin's tomb.
On the other hand, when Communism ended in the former Soviet Union, the people knocked down as many statues and pictures of Lenin and other Commie cronies as they could find; one particular one stands out in my mind: the toppling of Cheka founder Feliks Dzerzhinsky at the square named after him in front of KGB headquarters. (The Cheka later became the KGB; in Russian slang a 'chekist' refers to a member of the secret police or their network of stool-pigeons -- current Russian president Vladimir Putin got his start in the KGB). And what was across KGB HQ? A toy store,
Detsky Mir (Children's World)!)