Twenty rubles seemed low even for a country that has had its fill of Vladimir Lenin. But the complete collected works of Lenin were advertised with not even two-dozen rubles asked.

If you know Lenin, then you know he was a bit of a scribbler. Love notes to Krupskaya, letters to the kefir man asking for the full-fat version, doodles in Latin on the back of Kremlin notepads as he waited for that dullard Kalinin to shut up. And it's all in the complete collected works, 55 volumes, 35 thousand pages and not a dull, unparsed sentence in there.

Despite the 55 volumes in the complete collected works of Lenin, there is not much of the man-behind-the-Lenin in there, which is how he almost certainly would have liked it. Instead it begins with pieces he wrote in 1894 on one revolutionary theme, and carries on and on until his last piece before his death in 1924 in much the same vein, with not a limerick scribbled on an envelope in sight.

Lenin's death came at a time that the Soviet Union began to print in larger and larger numbers. The first collected edition appeared soon after his death, but the most common one appeared in 1955. A third came in 1971, and each republic had their own print runs in local languages.

When rung, it seemed the seller was selling them for twenty rubles but twenty rubles a volume, so that his life's works came in at 1,100 rubles. There is room for bargaining, though, as a few of the volumes are not in good shape.

What is wrong with them?

"They are just a bit ... a bit ... they were on the balcony and got a bit damaged. But only a few of them," she said.

It was her father who bought the collected works in the 1950s, and "nobody reads them anymore."

The complete works of Lenin are regulars on the small ads circuit -- not as many as Soviet pianos or as few as MAKE AS MUCH MONEY AS YOU WANT WHILE SITTING AT HOME -- appearing in clumps like stray dogs outside the metro before disappearing for months again. The prices seem to be arbitrary, as if showing a still reluctant disdain for the capitalist system.

It would be nice to think that it is Lenin's lack of lyricism that is making the owners finally get round to shift the multi-tomed slog, but for most it is for reasons of space.

Indeed, fifty-five volumes take up a lot of space. Throw in a Bolshaya Sovetskaya Encyclopedia and a Jack London collection, and you have barely enough room to swing a Theodore Dreiser collected edition, volume 2.