Trevor J Smith. Historian. Volume 60, Issue 2. Winter 1998.
“It is a devastating thing for a society to discover that its greatest myths are based not on truth but on propaganda and fantasy.” — Viacheslav Shostokovskii
The death of Vladimir Ilich Lenin in January 1924 was a terrible blow to the beleaguered people of communist Russia. Having just emerged from a decade of constant war and civil strife, the loss of Lenin, their visionary leader, was almost too much to bear. So great was their loss that death was not allowed to claim Lenin: his mortal body was preserved against the ravages of nature, his image reproduced en masse, and his every word and deed sanctified. Under the direction of the Soviet leadership, a quasi-religious cult of personality, the first traces of which had appeared several years earlier, evolved rapidly and transformed Lenin into an “immortal.” Lenin’s life and revolutionary career were embellished and refined, and over time the historic Lenin was replaced by a largely fictional, god-like figure who served to legitimize both the state and generations of Soviet leaders who claimed to be carrying on Lenin’s historic mission. With his body on display in Red Square like some holy artifact and his spirit haunting virtually every corner of the Soviet Union, for decades there seemed to be justification to the poet Maiakovskii’s claim that:
Lenin, lived.
Lenin, lives.
Lenin, will live.
Today, nearly three-quarters of a century after his physical death, Lenin has finally been laid to rest in the former Soviet Union. With amazing speed the personality cult that seemingly ensured his immortality has collapsed and the once deified leader has been relegated to what Leon Trotsky, Lenin’s revolutionary comrade, once referred to as “the dustbin of history.” This rapid change in the fortunes of the Lenin cult demands explanation. Why, after weathering successfully the storms that assailed it for more than half a century, did the cult of Lenin sink so quickly in recent years?
When the winds of change began to blow in Soviet Russia in the mid-1980s, they posed no immediate threat to Lenin’s memory. Over the course of more than six decades his cult had demonstrated an impressive ability to survive dramatic change, always emerging intact. The nature of change in the late 1980s, however, proved unlike anything the cult of Lenin had ever faced, as the reforms introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev under the twin banners of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) sought to alter the very nature of the authoritarian Soviet regime. Such tampering proved fatal for Lenin’s cult, as Lenin was not amenable to reform. Because it was built on a foundation of deception and historical revision, the cult was dependent on state control over the press and dissemination of information. The Communist Party’s tight control of education, particularly primary level curriculum, was also an important ally of the Lenin cult as the classroom was an important forum for propagating Lenin’s myths amongst the state’s youngest, most impressionable citizens. Once the state began to dismantle the system of controls that had supported the Soviet regime since its inception, the cult of Lenin began to erode; and once the cult began to decline, support for the Soviet regime it legitimized waned further. Locked in an inseparable embrace, the cult of Lenin and the Soviet state spiraled downward together.
When Gorbachev came to power in 1985 he had no intention of destabilizing either the Soviet Union or Lenin’s cult. Gorbachev was a loyal son of the Communist Party and a faithful disciple of Lenin who, according to historians Dusko Doder and Louise Branson, “accepted almost literally the official image of Lenin the scholar and philosopher.” Gorbachev, however, was also a realist who recognized the need to overhaul the ailing Leninist system. After decades of corrupt and ineffectual leadership, the Soviet Union was mired in a prolonged period of stagnation that had allowed the West to pull steadily ahead of the USSR on a number of fronts. Gorbachev was determined to reverse this trend through a series of progressive reforms that were intended to restructure the Soviet political apparatus and to grant greater cultural and social freedom.
Following his election as general secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985, Gorbachev served notice that he intended to implement a fresh approach to politics in the Kremlin. Rejecting the embellishment of career and person that traditionally followed the ascension of a new general secretary, he refused to encourage or even to tolerate a personality cult of his own. Gorbachev continued to support Lenin’s cult, however. Since Lenin continued to legitimize the policies of his political descendants, even 60 years after his death, it was of vital importance for Gorbachev to establish that glasnost and perestroika, his trademark policies, were actually grounded in Leninist philosophy. To this end, he pointed out that Lenin had frequently used the term glasnost and that perestroika sprang from Vladimir Ilich’s “immortal ideas.” Gorbachev reassured the Soviet people that “the great perestroika revolution is the direct successor of the works of October (1917) and the deeds of Lenin” and asserted that “perestroika brings us closer to Lenin, and brings Lenin closer to us.” Using the general secretary’s time-tested tool of selective quotation, Gorbachev used Lenin’s words to justify sweeping social and political reform. He argued that for Lenin the precepts of Marx and Engels were nothing more than general tasks that were “necessarily modified by the concrete economic and political conditions of each particular period of history.” Through such distortions of Leninist theory, Gorbachev was able to portray Lenin as the spiritual source of his reforms.
Gorbachev also relied heavily on the physical props of the Lenin cult. For example, he officially launched his perestroika campaign in May 1985 from the steps of the Smolny Institute in Leningrad, the Bolshevik headquarters during the Revolution, to underscore his timeless connection with Lenin. Similarly, Gorbachev often made highly publicized wreath laying pilgrimages to Lenin memorials throughout the USSR to show that he honored the Leninist legacy entrusted to him.
Despite his championship of Lenin’s memory, Gorbachev unwittingly issued the cult a death sentence through his reforms. Gorbachev intended to prove that the current plight of the Soviet Union stemmed not from Leninist doctrine and communist ideology but from abuses that had been committed in the name of Lenin and the Party. To this end, he allowed a cautious, yet frank, public reevaluation of the past and even limited criticism of the Party itself. What Gorbachev did not realize, however, was that his reforms, once set in motion, could not be controlled. The cult of Lenin was based on myths and lies and could only survive so long as the state retained tight control over factual information. Accordingly, when Gorbachev announced a drastic reduction in the state’s regulation of information and extended unprecedented freedom to the media in March 1987, he paved the way for the cult’s eventual destruction.
Immediately after Gorbachev announced the relaxation of state control over the media, the complexion of Soviet publications, radio broadcasts, and television programs began to change. Of particular relevance to the Lenin cult was the televising of Leonid Pchelkin’s A Few Touches to Lenin’s Portrait, a four-episode mini-series that had been deemed politically incorrect shortly after completion in the late 1960s and never aired. Pchelkin’s Lenin, unlike other screen versions of the vozhd (leader), exhibited no traces of “messianic omnipotence or omniscience,” and he did not, according to one Soviet historian, “immediately, or even always, find the sole correct answers.” Though Lenin was still upheld as the founder and exemplar of communism, for the first time in decades some of the myths that shrouded his memory were peeled away to provide a glimpse of the historical figure who lurked beneath.
This early phase of historical reevaluation was characterized by caution and restraint, as Soviet journalists and historians were too familiar with the nature of “thaws” in state restrictions of social and cultural freedom and the “freezes” that inevitably followed them to precipitously rewrite Russian history. This moderation disappeared in November 1987 when Gorbachev publicly reaffirmed his commitment to historical reevaluation. Within five years, Gorbachev’s thaw would turn into a full-scale meltdown.
Despite Gorbachev’s assertion that there would be no more “forbidden zones” in history, Lenin did not come under fire immediately. Instead, historians and journalists looked to the more recent past to find answers to the nation’s problems. One of the first to face the critics’ fire was former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev (1906-82). Brezhnev had been in his grave for only five years and his reign was still fresh in the public’s mind; thus, it was natural to single him out and saddle him with a considerable amount of blame for the disastrous state of the USSR. Attention was drawn to the corruption and inefficiency that had plagued Brezhnev’s regime and produced an “era of stagnation.” Reaction to the revelations about Brezhnev was heated, and historical justice was quickly served. In early January 1988, Brezhnev’s name was stripped from a number of geographical locations, including the city of Naberezhnie Chelny and Moscow’s Cheremushki borough. Predictably, criticism of Brezhnev temporarily increased Lenin’s stature, as disillusioned writers and historians claimed that Brezhnev, like Stalin before him, had deviated from Leninist doctrine. It was essential to “go back to Lenin,” they argued, and to raise a generation of “active citizens of the land of Soviets who, letting go the last drops of servility, will be the direct heirs of those whom Lenin reared.”
The next page of the new Soviet history was written by Gorbachev himself. On 5 February 1988, Gorbachev announced the posthumous exoneration of Nikolai Bukharin and 19 other Old Bolsheviks who had been purged under Stalin. Bukharin’s rehabilitation was of great tactical value for Gorbachev, as Bukharin had been a leading proponent of Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), which Gorbachev claimed to be emulating through perestroika and glasnost. By removing the stain of disrepute from Bukharin, Gorbachev conferred legitimacy on the policy that Bukharin had advocated. The rehabilitation of Bukharin and other purge victims, part of Gorbachev’s campaign to explain current problems by focusing on past abuses, benefited the cult of Lenin initially as it focused attention on Stalin’s crimes. Throughout 1988 and early 1989 newspapers and journals were filled with articles revealing the atrocities committed by Stalin and his henchmen. Soviet citizens were horrified by Stalin’s crimes, and many concluded, as Gorbachev and the Party hoped they would, that his policies had been terrible deviations from Leninist ideology. Once people had time to absorb the new information, however, they began to wonder: had Stalinism been such an aberration after all?
For many Russians, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago provided startling insight into the roots of Stalinism. Although the Party had buried Gulag in the early 1970s and tried to prevent its exhumation, Solzhenitsyn’s epic tale was published in installments in the journal Novyi Mir in 1989. The publication of Gulag struck a serious blow against Lenin’s reputation, for while Stalin starred as the book’s principal villain, Solzhenitsyn unmistakably identified Lenin as Stalin’s spiritual father. The myth that canonized Lenin as a great humanitarian, so tenderly nurtured for six decades, was seriously challenged for the first time. After all, would a humanitarian have ordered the execution of conscripted peasant laborers who did not remove snow from railroad tracks quickly enough? Would a man of the people have aimed to purge “the Russian land of all kinds of harmful insects,” referring, among others, to members of the proleteriat? For many, the answer to such a question was a resounding no.
More damning to the Lenin cult than Solzhenitsyn’s prose were Lenin’s own writings. In late 1989 a large cache of previously unknown Lenin documents, uncovered at the Central Party Archives in 1988, began to find their way into print. The documents, carefully hidden from public scrutiny for seven decades, revealed a side of Lenin that few Soviets had seen before: cruelty. The Soviet public was blitzed by a wave of documents that implicated Lenin in countless acts of revolutionary terror and barbarity, including the aggressive war against the clergy and the bloody campaign against the kulaks. Here was a Lenin who, far from being a friend of peasants and workers alike, admitted that “we [the Bolsheviks] don’t like peasants…. [T] hey have fallen behind and are strong supporters of the land owners. It is necessary to take the attack to such people.” Documents showing that Lenin’s goodness was a myth helped bridge the remaining chasm between Lenin and Stalin and convinced many that Lenin, in fact, was “the true father of the Bolshevik concentration camps, the executions, the mass terror, and the `organs’ which stood above the state.” As one startling revelation after another was made about Lenin, more and more people began to believe, with historian I. D. Kovalchenko, that “the negative qualities of socialism arose not only because of the influence of Stalin’s personality cult and his administrative-bureaucratic system, as has been officially declared, but had already developed in the activities of Lenin.” Instead of being the “most humanitarian of all people,” Lenin became “the most humanitarian man with a gun.”
The disintegration of Lenin’s cult myths was paralleled by a decline in the state’s authority and popular support for the political apparatus, as Lenin and the state were intimately linked. For more than 50 years the Soviet regime had proclaimed, “We say Lenin and we imply Party–We say Party and we imply Lenin.” Accordingly, when Soviet citizens began to doubt Lenin, they began to question the legitimacy of his party and state. They also lost faith in the ability of Lenin’s heirs, including Gorbachev, to solve their problems. Because Gorbachev had refused to foster his own personality cult, he possessed none of the “infallibility” of his predecessors. When it became obvious, therefore, that his policies were not working as had been anticipated, blame was not deflected to his subordinates, as had often been the case with his predecessors; instead, it was placed squarely on his shoulders.
By 1990, open criticism of Gorbachev and the Party led many to conclude that the Soviet system and Leninism simply did not work, and millions of members defected from the Party. The mass rejection of Leninist ideology resulted in the pruning and eventual abandonment of military parades and other state pageantry that had played such a crucial role in building Soviet myths. For decades, elaborate military parades on 1 May (May Day) and 7 November (Bolshevik Revolution of 1917) had supported the Soviet Union’s image of vitality and strength. By 1990, however, Gorbachev recognized that attempting to maintain the facade of wellness through state pageantry was futile and decreed that public participation in May Day and 7 November celebrations was no longer compulsory. The nation was collapsing from within, and one or two empty demonstrations a year could not disguise the fact.
Declining support for the political apparatus was manifested publicly on May Day 1990, when pro-democracy demonstrators carried placards and banners before Lenin’s tomb that read “Communists: have no illusions. You are bankrupt” and “Down with the Cult of Lenin.” Such public exhibitions of discontent compelled Gorbachev to accept, in the spring of 1990, that it was “high time to put an end to the absurd idolization of Lenin.” This resolution, a drastic departure from 70 years of Party dogma, simply confirmed of ficially what was already happening; the cult of Lenin was staggering toward extinction, a fact that Gorbachev and the Communist Party could no longer deny.
Still, a few ardent Leninist disciples tried to downplay the significance of recent historical revelations. Some, including Natalia Morozova of Moscow, argued that “in their proper context, the horrors [committed by Lenin] do not make such a terrible impact as when they are distorted beforehand and thrown together in a bunch.” Such attempts to prop up the sagging cult failed miserably as Lenin’s apologists were attacked and condemned by those who could find no justification for his actions. For example, Morozova’s request that people look at Lenin’s “horrors” in their historical context was slammed by another Muscovite, Tatiana Ivanova. “Consider this in context,” Ivanova demanded:
It is nighttime. There is a dark house; frightened children; a quivering woman who clutches at the boots of the executioners, prepared for personal humiliation. There is the old mother; and there is the man–suspected of conspiring with an SR [Socialist Revolutionary]. How do they shoot him? In the back? In the heart? In the forehead? What did he say, what did he think just before death? What would become of his children?
Ivanova concluded her impassioned invective against Morozova by stating: “You are one of those who attempt to convince us of how democratic, freedom loving and humanitarian Lenin was. But I am one of those who knows a different Lenin.”
The destruction of Lenin myths that began in 1987 was soon paralleled by a corresponding reduction in the cult’s physical props. As history transformed Lenin from a deified cult leader into an antichrist, his shrines became unwelcome reminders of the Soviet people’s misplaced devotion. Accordingly, monuments and memorials to Lenin began to fall like dominoes. Place names associated with Lenin were amongst the first cult tributes to be discarded. Since, as journalist Anatoly Yershev has noted, “place names reflect history and shape the national memory,” cities that had been named for Lenin rushed to dissociate themselves from him. Such was the reasoning of the people of Leningrad, who chose to restore the historical name St. Petersburg to their northern city. St. Petersburg, a city intimately connected with Lenin, was renamed just days after his death in 1924 as the workers of the revolutionary capital sought to give Lenin “the best we had.” By the spring of 1991, however, the affection felt by Leningraders for their state’s founder had waned exponentially and many, including Mayor Anatolii Sobchak, were campaigning vigorously to rescind that honor. In a referendum on the issue, 55 percent of residents voted in favor of restoring the name St. Petersburg.
In August 1991, communist hardliners staged a military coup against Gorbachev. While unsuccessful, the event became the catalyst for Gorbachev’s resignation and the dissolution of the USSR the following December. As the Soviet state continued to crumble, institutions and organizations continued to dissociate themselves from Lenin. One of the most notable purges of Lenin’s name came in 1992 when the Lenin State Library of the USSR changed its name to the Russian State Library. While the Lenin Library had faithfully propagated the cult of Lenin for six decades, just days after the August 1991 coup, library director Igor Filipov ruled that the library was not a political arena and thus should not “promote one ideology above any other.” To express the library’s commitment to objective and free research, the library should shed Lenin’s name. Filipov’s decision received official state approval on 22 January 1992.
Filipov did not attempt to purge the library’s shelves of Leninist texts, however, acknowledging the right of Leninist ideology to exist within the library. As expressed by Lutfia Arifulova, Filipov’s secretary, “Vladimir Illich is no longer the main ideologue in our lives, but he has joined the ranks of other philosophers, and historical-political figures who played a role in our country’s past.” Formerly the god of the entire communist world, by the 1990s Lenin had become merely a “historical figure” in his nation’s saga.
Not all were as tolerant of Lenin’s continued presence as the Lenin Library. As popular discontent and disillusionment increased among the Soviet citizenry, Lenin’s public monuments began to disappear. In August 1991 the gigantic statue of Lenin in Kiev’s central square came down, and in June 1992 the ten-story high bronze statue of Lenin in Tashkent was toppled during the night. Most significantly, in October 1994 the black marble statue of Lenin in the Kremlin courtyard was whisked away, an ironic symbol of the expulsion of Leninist ideology from Russian politics.
The manner in which Lenin’s statue was removed from the Kremlin is significant. It was not removed outright; rather, a tall wooden fence was erected around the statue one Saturday evening and it was officially explained that the monument was under repair. Three months later, the fence still stood and no signs of ongoing renovation were evident. After much prodding, and a sizable donation to a Kremlin guard, the author learned that the statue had been taken to Lenin’s former estate at Leninskii-Gorki in October. The fence, the guard explained, was simply a device to ease the transition and to prevent public outcry. It would remain until it became a familiar fixture. When it eventually came down people would care that the eyesore fence, not the statue, was gone.
The practice of removing Lenin monuments in stages in order to limit criticism and opposition was used extensively throughout the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Soviet history professor Maria Zezina explained how this gradual purge of Lenin monuments was carried out at the state’s leading postsecondary institution, Moscow State University (MGU). “If a bust of Lenin stood in the center of a hall,” Zezina recalled with amusement, “it would be moved to the side at first. A little while later, it would be moved again, this time a little closer to the door. When it was finally removed altogether, no one really noticed. [The removal] was a gradual process and thus no one complained very loudly.”
Few protested when Lenin museums also began to close. Between the summer of 1991 and the fall of 1994 dozens of museums throughout the former Soviet Union shut their doors. The most significant closure was that of the Central Lenin Museum in Moscow, foremost of the Lenin museums. In August 1991, Moscow Mayor Gavriil Popov suggested that the Lenin Museum be relocated to allow the City Soviet (city council) to occupy the building. Museum director Vladimir Melnichenko and his staff, realizing that the proposed relocation would be a move “from somewhere to nowhere,” bitterly opposed the mayor’s proposal. While their efforts won the museum a temporary reprieve, in October 1993 the museum was issued another eviction notice, this time by new Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhbov. Melnichenko chastised those who supported the closure, claiming that “not a single civilized country would allow itself to liquidate the museum to the man who founded that state. This is absurd.”
Unfortunately for Melnichenko and other supporters of the museum, their cries fell on deaf ears. Most Muscovites were too absorbed in their personal struggles for survival in the new post-Soviet Russia to concern themselves with the fate of Lenin’s museum. Others, including one man who firebombed the museum on the night of 6 October 1993, actively supported the closure, seeing it as a measure of retribution against the man who had placed their nation on the wrong road to a glorious future 70 years earlier. Whatever the reason, on 7 October the museum was closed down for a week, and like the statues at MGU that were slowly pushed out of a room, the museum was gradually liquidated. In early 1994, the doors of the museum closed for the final time.
With the closure of the Lenin Museum in Moscow notice was given that no Lenin artifact was sacred anymore. This became unmistakably clear in 1994 when an all-out attack was launched against the holiest relic of the Lenin cult–the Lenin mausoleum, which contained his preserved remains. For nearly 70 years pilgrims had flocked to the mausoleum in dizzying numbers. As Lenin’s heroic mythology was dispelled, however, the line before the tomb dwindled steadily, and by 1992 it had disappeared altogether. Anti-Leninist crusaders seized on the mausoleum’s declining popularity to repeatedly demand its closure and burial of Lenin’s body. The mausoleum’s hours of operation were reduced; and on 6 October 1993, Post #1, the honor guard that had maintained a 24-hour vigil over Lenin since his death, was abolished. Lenin’s tomb, however, did not go down without a fight. When Itar-tass reported that a presidential decree was in the making that would lead to Lenin’s burial, outraged communists flocked to Red Square. Fearing that Lenin’s body would be removed under cover of darkness, as some of his statues had been, the demonstrators held a 24-hour vigil for several weeks in order to “prevent sacrilege.”
While Lenin’s body was left on display in Red Square, anti-Leninists continued to undermine his legend. Realizing that the popularity of Lenin’s mummy was partly attributable to the mystery that shrouded it, they began to strip away Lenin’s mystique with scientific evidence, beginning with Lenin’s brain. Under microscopic scrutiny at Moscow’s Institute of Brain since 1924, Lenin’s gray matter had long been touted by Soviet scientists as vastly superior to other great minds on a cellular level. In January 1994 this facade was dropped. The director of the Institute admitted that although scientists had sliced Lenin’s gray matter into 30,963 pieces, they had found no evidence to suggest that Lenin had been a mental superman. Indeed, the director conceded, Lenin’s brain had been slightly smaller than average.
Lenin’s body came under similar scientific scrutiny. For decades scientists at Moscow’s Institute of Biological Structures who attended Lenin’s corpse had jealously guarded the methods used to preserve Lenin’s tissues. Such secrecy spawned rumors that Lenin’s mummy was actually a wax dummy, but it also allowed the state to foster the notion of the incorruptibility of Lenin’s remains. That the body in the tomb was real and subject to decay was confirmed by the Moscow weekly Argumenty i Fakty in January 1994 when it published a grid map used by Lenin’s caretakers to maintain Lenin’s appearance. The grid contained 40 drawings of Lenin’s head and hands, each square focusing on a specific anatomical detail. A brief caption explained that a whole series of photographs, based on the grid pattern, was taken every time the body was washed with the preservative solution. The photographs were then compared with those from the previous treatment to ensure that the “God Ilich” did not undergo noticeable external change.
The final assault on the secrecy surrounding Lenin’s corpse began in January 1995. Three days before the 71st anniversary of Lenin’s death, Izvestiia published a letter by the late Boris Khomutov, a doctor of biological science who had attended Lenin’s corpse for more than 30 years. Breaking the silence observed by generations of Soviet scientists, Khomutov described in detail the history of Lenin’s mummy, including the composition of the basic chemical formula used to preserve it. More startling was his revelation that “as it turns out, the methods of [preservation] not only do not work, but have actually advanced the processes of [tissue] destruction.” Harsh chemicals in the embalming fluid and the body’s storage in an oxygen atmosphere at too high a temperature had caused considerable damage to the body in the first decade of preservation. The result, Khomutov confirmed, was the “destruction of the body’s tissues (the main one being the skin!) and the gradual change [in the corpse’s] appearance.”
For decades Soviet scientists, unwilling to face the wrath of the Party, covered up signs of the mummy’s degeneration. The unstoppable withering of Lenin’s skin was masked with injections of paraffin, glycerin, and carotin, while the unnatural texture and color of the dead flesh were disguised with ultraviolet light and filtered glass. Khomutov denounced the claims of fellow scientists that Lenin’s body could be preserved unchanged for an indefinite period of time, insisting that one look at “the [object] inside the sarcophagus without its special rubber [protective undergarments]” would be enough to sway anyone to his point of view. Khomutov concluded that the corpse had degenerated to the point that “it is absolutely absurd and even immoral to preserve the body of Lenin” any longer.
Others, including Leningrad/St. Petersburg Mayor Sobchak, also insisted that Lenin’s body should be interred in his familial plot at Volkova Cemetery in St. Petersburg, in accordance with Christian tradition. Sobchak’s reference to religion, that “opium” of the Russian people against which Lenin had campaigned so avidly, was not an isolated incident. By the early 1990s Russia was experiencing a major religious revival. Free of the fear of religious persecution, closet Christians flooded into the church. Increased tolerance of religion seriously undermined Lenin’s cult, as the god of Bolshevism could not compete on an even playing field with the God of Christianity and Judaism. As people began to recognize the true nature of the Bolshevik deity and the bankruptcy of the communist faith, the exodus from the Lenin cult into the arms of religion began in earnest.
Scientific and historical revelations about Lenin, together with religious revivalism, caused all but a tiny vanguard of die-hard disciples to forsake the Lenin cult. Even the arch-conservative Yegor Ligachev, a hardliner in the Politburo until he was forced to retire in 1990, was compelled to admit in 1991 that “Vladimir Ilich was a man, not a god.”
There can be no doubt that the cult of Lenin has ceased to exist in former Soviet Russia, as anyone who attended the 71st anniversary memorial in Moscow to mark the occasion of Lenin’s death can testify. The event, attended by fewer than 100 people, was a fiasco. A small core of demonstrators, barred from congregating in Red Square by presidential decree, huddled together in neighboring Ploshchad’ Revoliutsii (Revolution Square) to sing Lenin’s praises. Although their words were sincere and their intentions genuine, their demonstration was undermined by the hulking skeleton of the former Lenin Museum that towered over the square. The darkened windows stared out emptily at the somber gathering, betraying no traces of the vital cult temple that had once operated within. A Coca-Cola stand provided an incongruously capitalist means of refreshment, and Alexander Koklenkov, a Lenin impersonator, circulated through the crowd offering people the opportunity to have a polaroid taken with the immortal Lenin for a mere 15,000 rubles. None of the demonstrators were under the age of 40. No movement can survive without youth, and the collapse of the Lenin cult in the classroom, a central pillar of the cult, the failure of communist youth organizations, and the enthusiasm with which most young people greeted capitalism in Russia have combined to deprive the Lenin cult of future recruits.
Finally, while the procession to Lenin’s tomb had been scheduled for 6:50 P.M., the exact time that “the heart of the earth’s greatest son stopped beating,” by 5:15 the demonstrators were growing restless and the procession had to be moved up. At 5:30, the demonstrators passed into Red Square and gathered before the tomb. Flowers were placed on the mausoleum’s steps and a minute of silence was observed, after which the disciples of Lenin quickly turned and hurried from the square. It was too cold, everyone agreed, to stand around any longer.
A tour of former hot spots of the Lenin cult confirms that the lack of enthusiasm for Lenin displayed on the anniversary of his death was not an isolated incident. During a visit to Lenin’s house museum at Leninskii-Gorki in November 1994, the author was the museum’s only visitor of the day; actually, according to curator Alexandra Grigorevna, the only visitor in the last three days. A similar situation arose several months later during a visit to the estate’s huge political museum, formerly a museum to Lenin. Lenin still dominates, despite the museum’s name change, but he plays to an empty house. The lights were shut off when I entered the building; the cash-strapped museum, explained curator Sergei Chipkov, was trying to save money. No one had visited in the last two days anyway, so why bother illuminating the cavernous halls? The museum had drawn more than 350,000 visitors in 1987, but in the first two months of 1995, less than 1,000 people made the trek to Leninskii-Gorki. The only other surviving Lenin museum, the huge memorial complex at Ulianovsk, is in a similar plight: attendance has fallen by more than 85 percent since 1990.
The barren halls at Leninskii-Gorki are not the only signs that the Lenin cult has been trivialized. Everywhere in Moscow’s Izmailovskii Park, Lenin’s image stares out at consumers. His face appears on T-shirts, crowned by a familiar set of rabbit ears, or encased between the golden arches of “McLenin’s.” Like toy soldiers, his busts line table after table and can be fetched for about the same price as a Big Mac at the nation’s new capitalist mecca. Beautiful silk flags and banners with his image emblazoned on them flap loudly in the wind, week after week, as few people, western or Russian, want to take Lenin home with them.
The irreverence accorded Lenin by many today begs the question: did people ever really worship Lenin or did the population simply pay lip service to the Lenin cult to avoid incurring the suspicion of the Communist Party? There is evidence that most Soviet citizens did believe Lenin’s cult myths. The mythological Lenin was a welcome father figure who embodied all things noble. Staggering attendance figures at Lenin museums, though somewhat deceptive owing to compulsory school trips and other state-sponsored pilgrimages, testify to the respect people felt for Lenin. Throughout the Soviet era, all the major cult sites to Lenin were hives of activity.
Although most Soviet citizens today deny that they ever worshipped Lenin and strongly criticize him, it is likely that for many of them disdain for Lenin is a facade to hide their embarrassment or disillusionment. That this is the case for at least some Russians was demonstrated by a successful young construction worker, Zhenia, in St. Petersburg on the 77th anniversary of the October Revolution. Zhenia spent the entire day trying to convince his Canadian friends, the author among them, that he had never bowed before Lenin. Why, he asked, would anyone worship a man who strangled rabbits? However, as the night wore on and Zhenia’s tongue was loosened by vodka, he revealed that he had been a Pioneer (communist youth organization) leader, orchestrated a Lenin evening in his school, and made a special pilgrimage to Moscow with his family to view Lenin’s body when he was 15. Zhenia even went so far as to invoke the prayer of the Lenin cult, “If only Lenin had lived a little longer.”
Russian journalist Maria Rozonova agrees that more people revered Lenin than currently own up to it. When discussing the claims by many that there had never been genuine cult worship of Lenin, she asked: “[B]ut if there was nothing, if there was not a saint for millions of contemporaries who were filled with belief, hope and love for the words `Lenin’ and `revolution,’ then where did children get such strange names as Vladlen (Vladimir Lenin), Vili (Vladimir Ilich), and Marlen (Marx-Lenin)?”49
Although for most people in former Soviet Russia the cult of Lenin has lost its influence, this is not to say that Lenin has lost all meaning in Russia or is an immensely unpopular figure. Many people have a certain nostalgia for Lenin and the Soviet era, a fact evidenced by the impressive resurgence of the Communist Party. Considering the disastrous state of affairs in Russia today it is not surprising that people look with fondness to what they now perceive as the stability and security of Soviet times. As described by one analyst, the Soviet system “did not work well, but at least it worked.” Nostalgia, however, is not the same as adulation and deification; Lenin has rejoined the ranks of mere mortals.
Remnants of Lenin’s cult are still a highly visible part of society. Thousands of monuments to the vozhd of the revolution remain. Many survive simply because no one has bothered to take them down. Others, like a mural of Lenin on the wall of a toy factory at Zagorsk, are no longer maintained and will eventually fall to ruin. Still others are being restored and cared for, but only for their artistic and historical value.
Artistic and historic value will not save Lenin’s mummy. More than 60 percent of Russians believe that it is time to bury Lenin, an act many believe will put an end to the “misfortunes” that continue to plague the nation. Soon, probably within the next year, the doors of the mausoleum will close for the last time and Lenin will finally be laid to rest, though for now he remains in his familiar position on Red Square. His mausoleum, located at the very heart of Russia, no longer represents eternity and immortality, two qualities its architects meant to imply. Rather, Lenin’s tomb is a relic of a bygone era. Like the pyramids of Egypt or the Acropolis in Athens, it is a symbol of the hopes and ambitions of proud people who mistakenly thought they would rule the world forever.