Moscow Letter: The clocks are stopped at 6.50 p.m., and stand amid books unread for 80 years, writes Daniel McLaughlin.
Letters lie unfinished on the writing table and outside, through an alley of snow-covered trees, a unique Rolls-Royce sits silently behind locked doors.
"We used to have huge crowds of visitors, back in the Soviet days," says Nikolai Tsvetovaty, a retainer here for 31 years. "They won't come back, but you can still feel the presence of a great man here. That will never fade."
Mr Tsvetovaty has spent more than half his life looking after the estate where Vladimir Lenin, leader of Russia's Bolshevik revolution of 1917, died on the evening of January 21st, 1924.
The man who created the world's first Soviet communist state was felled by a fourth stroke in two years, his life ending in the yellow and white stucco mansion where he increasingly sought refuge from failing health after a would-be assassin's bullet lodged in his shoulder in 1918.
Mr Tsvetovaty says the Gorki Leninskie estate, 20 miles south of Moscow, used to attract almost a million visitors a year.
About 110,000 came last year, he says, but the figure echoed incongruously through the empty rooms this week. On the anniversary of Lenin's death, just two tourists and a Russian film crew disturbed the quiet.
On the same day in Red Square, about 150 mostly elderly Russians placed crimson carnations beside the mausoleum where Lenin's body lies embalmed.
"He is one of the great figures in world history, and he did what he promised, not like today's lot," said pensioner Mr Vladimir Nayibin, throwing a glance at the Kremlin walls that reared above him.
"He gave the world's poor a chance to improve their lives, that's why we're here today," said the 77 year-old. "We'll keep coming here too, to make sure he's not forgotten."
Not all Russians share Mr Nayibin's affection for Lenin or his resting place. Opinion polls suggest an increasing number would like to see his corpse finally buried, and debate over the issue bubbled constantly under President Boris Yeltsin.
His successor, former KGB spy Vladimir Putin, has discouraged talk of such a move, while restoring the Soviet national anthem and encouraging Russians to be proud of their history under communism, for all its dark and bloody chapters.
Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, whose party took a battering in last month's parliamentary elections, was appalled this week at the prospect of evicting Lenin from his red marble mausoleum.
"We must safeguard this place as a sacred site of our fatherland," he said after laying his own flowers on Red Square. "Anyone with a shred of conscience must respect history as it is."
Science too, seems to be on Lenin's side.
"We guarantee that the body of Lenin will survive for a long time, as will its outward appearance," said Mr Valery Bykov, the specialist charged with preserving the esteemed corpse. "If we talk about concrete figures, then the body will last for at least 100 years and maybe even more."
At Gorki Leninskie, Mr Tsvetovaty claims more and more young Russians are coming to the estate, to find out about a man who still looms large in the nation's psyche.
"Lenin lived a simple life here, walking, collecting berries and mushrooms," he says. "And he would hunt wolves and foxes when his health allowed." In the modest bedrooms of Lenin and his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, wolf skins lie on the floor and books sit piled on the desks. A thick wall separates their narrow beds, indicative, Russians say, of the coolness of their relations. For passion he went to lover Inessa Armand, they whisper, or even to one of his many young Kremlin secretaries.
But Mr Tsvetovaty says Lenin never wavered from his revolutionary work while at the estate.
"He chose Gorki Leninskie not only for its beauty but its proximity to Moscow, its road and rail connections and its phone line to the capital. He could work as well here as he could in the Kremlin." A handwritten letter lying beneath his telephone suggests otherwise.
In the latest instalment of an obviously protracted correspondence, he berates a Moscow functionary for failing to fix his crackly phone line, saying the repairmen were "either total fools or excellent saboteurs". A British-made motorised wheelchair sits unused in the hallway, its right-handed controls impossible for Lenin to use after his penultimate stroke.
His Rolls-Royce saw more action. Built in 1920, Russian engineers fitted skis to its front wheels and caterpillar tracks to the rear so that Lenin could travel in comfort around his snow-bound estate.
"The people around here used to see him all the time," says Irina Ofonina, a local woman whose grandmother remembers taking flowers up to Lenin's house.
"We were raised on stories of Lenin, they were like mothers' milk to us."