Bizarre and kind of wonderful.

They all speculated on what the bust might have been made out of; marble or concrete.
“You wouldn’t believe it. He’s plastic,” he said.

The "Plastic Lenin Band" would make a good explorer party name.

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

This reminds me of a mate who lived on a farm when he was young. One Friday he was getting ready to party, all alone in the house as his parents were away he packed up the wine that he bought and ran for the bus to the city for a weekend of partay. He missed the bus by 30 seconds running like crazy but the unforgiving busdriver did not stop. No more buses all weekend. So he went home, set the big dining room table with food and wine and a bust of Lenin and drank with Lenin all night.

The only surprise, I guess, is that it was made of plastic. That the statue was there was well known.

Still, it's hilarious. The kind of thing that should have been worked into Chekov's dialog at some point.

The thing predates the Antarctic Treaty and is a bit of a legal conundrum. It can't be disturbed as the property of a signatory state, but it's also outside the treaty as a prior claim, and now it's the erection of a no longer existing entity.