The 5.2-metre bronze statue of Vladimir Lenin stands at the center of Lenin Park, a small triangular green space at the junction of Dien Bien Phu and Tran Phu streets, directly opposite the Vietnam Military History Museum. The statue was a gift from the Soviet Union and was unveiled in 1985, a few years before the Soviet Union itself began to come apart. It has remained in excellent condition, repainted and maintained by the city authorities as a matter of political continuity — Vietnam's Communist Party has not engaged in the monument removal that followed the Soviet collapse elsewhere.
The park is a useful place to understand contemporary Vietnamese political culture. The statue is not ironic, not a curiosity to be endured, and not an embarrassment: it is official. Schoolchildren are brought here, and the grounds around it are kept clean and verdant. A few hundred metres to the north stands the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum; a few hundred metres to the south is the Flag Tower. The whole Ba Dinh area is in some sense a district of state symbolism, and Lenin fits naturally into it. A visit here followed by the Flag Tower and then the Imperial Citadel gives you a compressed walk through several centuries of the political history of this particular piece of ground.