Simultaneously Lenin’s writings acquired the status of holy writ; his collected works – whose publication had been under way since 1920 – were accorded a political and cultural significance greater than anything else in print. An Institute of the Brain was established in his honour; thirty thousand slices were collected from his cerebral tissue so that research might begin on the secrets of his great genius. A whole ideology was discovered: Marxism–Leninism. The claim was made that Lenin was no mere footsoldier in the Marxist battalion but a global thinker on a par with his heroes Marx and Engels. The October Revolution, the Bolshevik party and the USSR were his outstanding achievements. A bright new page in the story of humanity had been inscribed by Lenin. The world’s governments – whether they were conservative, liberal or socialist – were trembling at the consequences of 1917; and fascism arose in several European countries in large measure in reaction to Soviet communism and its potential to be reproduced elsewhere on the continent. The twentieth century was being forged on the anvil of Lenin’s seizure and consolidation of power in Petrograd. When Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in 1924, it seemed appropriate testimony to his historical significance.
Nadezhda Konstantinovna sat for a day by his coffin as it lay in state. She felt completely alone. Her parents were dead, she had no brother or sister, and she had never felt entirely comfortable with Lenin’s relatives. The dearest person to her was Inessa’s twenty-five-year-old daughter Inna, who was like the child she had never had. After the funeral she wrote her a letter:1
My very own dearest Inochka,
We buried Vladimir Ilich yesterday… Lenin’s death was the best outcome. Death had already been suffered by him so many times in the previous year… At this moment above all I want to think about Vladimir Ilich, about his work and to read him.
Nadya would not trust medical specialists again. She was certain that Lenin had suffered to the end: ‘They say that he was in an unconscious condition, but now I firmly know that doctors know nothing.’2 The Politburo annoyed her to a still greater extent. The decision to preserve the body of her husband disgusted her. Soon she was writing again to Inna:3
When the project arose among our people to bury V.I. in the Kremlin, I was filled with terrible indignation – what they should have done was bury him with his comrades so that they could lie beneath the Red Wall together.
The communist authorities permanently kept this file marked ‘completely secret’. This is not surprising. Nadezhda Konstantinovna was not merely challenging the decision on embalming and mausoleumisation. By saying that Lenin should have had a proper burial in that precise spot, she was also recommending that his final resting-place should be near to Inna’s mother Inessa Armand. Nadya had a generous spirit. Something made her want to keep the two families together even in death; she was willing for her husband to lie by his former lover Inessa in the cold Moscow ground.4
But this was not to be. The erection of the Lenin Mausoleum proceeded despite her anguished protests about Stalin and the Politburo. But historians have not previously been able to appreciate how much she nevertheless helped to develop the Lenin cult in other ways. Although she hated the Mausoleum, she actively propagated an image of Lenin as the perfect revolutionary, thinker and husband. Indeed she started writing a pamphlet about him immediately after the funeral.5 This incidentally demonstrates that she lived for politics almost as much as her deceased husband had done. She mourned him, but her grief was not such as to inhibit her from writing in a fairly detached fashion about him. Furthermore, she set about this work with the full co-operation of Stalin himself. The picture we are usually given is one of permanent frostiness between Krupskaya and Stalin. The central party archives have material that tells a different story. In May 1924, once she had completed a first draft, Krupskaya took the initiative of sending Stalin a copy and asking for his opinion on it. He replied, suggesting a few factual corrections and encouraging her to go ahead with publication.6
This co-operation continued for years. Although Nadezhda Konstantinovna did not retire from her duties in the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment, she spent her spare time lecturing and writing about Lenin. The sanctification of his memory was her abiding preoccupation and she became virtually the high priestess of the Lenin cult. This was a personal as well as a political matter. Collecting her photographs of him, she filled an album and decorated the cover with the word Ilich, which she cut into letter-shapes from other photographs of him. She cherished, too, the leather briefcase he had given to her after he had been presented with it by a group of workers. Nadezhda Konstantinovna never got over the loss of her husband.7
Her rivals as high priestess of the cult were Anna Ilinichna and Maria Ilinichna. But it was a friendly rivalry. Now that the object of their affections was dead, the three women got along better. With Nadezhda, Anna and Maria as high priestesses, there was no doubt about the identity of the chief priest: Stalin himself. Meanwhile the collusion of most leading party figures in the suppression of Lenin’s political testament allowed Stalin to survive as Party General Secretary, and he was quick to join in the collective effort to develop a set of doctrines explicating the core of Leninism. His series of lectures to the Sverdlov University, published as Questions of Leninism, were a succinct summary. Trotski, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin too made votive offerings to the memory of the party’s founder and tried to expound what he had meant to world communism. Steadily his ideas were being codified. The process could not be brought to completion because Lenin had left behind – and on the public record – many contradictory ideas.
If codification was difficult, however, there was little problem about censoring what appeared about him. The need was confidentially emphasised to describe Lenin in hagiographic terms. The agencies of propaganda in party and government were deployed in the service of this objective. His works were produced in print-runs of hundreds of thousands of copies. Lenin’s files were examined and Kamenev led an editorial team that published a lot of his previously unknown writings. Always the purpose was the same. Lenin was not merely to be depicted as a heroic figure in the history of Bolshevism and world revolution. He had to enjoy the mythic status of an omniscient revolutionary saint. No blemish on his record as a theorist, propagandist or party organiser was tolerable. He had to be hallowed as the sole great successor to Marx and Engels in the first quarter of the twentieth century. His foresight and determination in forming the Bolshevik party and leading it through the October Revolution and Civil War had to be laden with unconditional praise. His genius as party chief, government premier, wartime planner and global statesman had to be hailed. His humanity as a comrade, a husband and a Marxist had to be extolled.
Another criterion became more emphatic as the years rolled on. This was that anything said about Lenin had to suit the immediate interests of the communist political leadership. As the struggle for the succession was joined, the ascendant group – Kamenev, Zinoviev, Stalin and Bukharin – excised from the history books anything that even remotely reflected badly on them. Trotski suffered most in this rivalry; his opponents not only removed him and his supporters from important posts but also prevented him from publishing material demonstrating his close working relationship with Lenin. The result was the depiction of a largely imaginary Lenin, a Lenin who had had a warm association only with those who presently held power.
The main devotees of the cult – Nadezhda Konstantinovna, Maria Ilinichna and Anna Ilinichna – colluded in creating a quasi-religious myth. They understood that every publication should abide by the criteria of hagiographic and political calculation. Yet Lenin’s relatives could not always predict what would fit the bill, and much of what they wrote was subsequently excised before publication. Ultimately they had to accept the judgement of Stalin. By the time others got going with their memoirs, the tacit rules of the cult had become clear and the authors knew they had to write accordingly. What is more, the Secretariat of the Central Committee under Stalin rigorously kept secr
et the minutes of most meetings of the supreme political leadership in the party and the government. Just a carefully vetted sprinkling of documents was allowed into the light of day. The reasons for the caution are easy to comprehend. The USSR, the October Revolution and Marxism–Leninism could have no justification unless the reverence for Lenin became a popular emotion. Thus the cult of the party’s founder was not an optional matter for his successors. It was a political necessity. And so it remained until the end of the USSR.
The leading priests of the cult changed over the years. The anti-Trotski group of Kamenev, Zinoviev, Stalin and Bukharin fell apart as soon as Trotski had been defeated in 1924. Kamenev and Zinoviev opposed Stalin and Bukharin and lost. Then Bukharin opposed Stalin, and Bukharin lost. Stalin by 1928–9 was initiating his First Five-Year Plan. He herded peasants into collective farms, suppressed their resistance and arrested and imprisoned nationalists, religious leaders, critical intellectuals and internal party opponents. In 1937–8 a Great Terror raged at his instigation. Throughout this period he manufactured a ‘Lenin’ that fitted exactly with his current requirements. Stalin’s Lenin had always been the friend of Stalin. Purportedly he had relied on Stalin for advice and had recognised Stalin as his worthiest successor. The contents of Lenin’s political testament were banned from the media of public communication and opponents of the new official version of the past were executed or thrown into the Gulag system of forced-labour camps.
Stalin put it about that he was ‘the Lenin of today’. His stress upon violence, hierarchy, orderliness and discipline found reflection in the historical textbooks. The complexities of Lenin’s Marxism were wiped away. The Soviet mass youth organisation was named after him: the All-Union Leninist Communist Union of Youth. Further collected editions of Lenin’s works were published. Pictures were painted of him to be hung in art galleries, but his image was everywhere else too: on postage stamps, on crockery, on posters draped across the thoroughfares of the great cities of the USSR. Every front page of the main central newspapers Pravda and Izvestia was adorned by his image. An Order of Lenin was founded. Excerpts from his writings were used to indoctrinate schoolchildren so that they might grow up as committed communists, and speakers at Party Congresses quoted him in support of their proposals. If Marx, Engels and Lenin made up a secular Trinity of Marxism–Leninism, then the greatest of the three in the treatment by Soviet propagandists was not Marx or Engels but Lenin. Lenin appeared as the Godhead of Marxism–Leninism.
Increasingly it was not Marxism–Leninism but a modified ideology, Marxism–Leninism–Stalinism, that was propagated and Stalin for most purposes had himself depicted as Lenin’s representative on earth. On the anniversary of the October Revolution, Stalin would stand atop the Lenin Mausoleum beneath the Kremlin Wall and look down over the parade of military personnel, youth organisations and sportsmen. He did this even in 1941 when there was danger that the Luftwaffe might bomb central Moscow. The poet Vladimir Mayakovski had once finished a piece with the words: ‘Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live!’ Short of raising Lenin from death like a modern-day Lazarus, the Soviet regime did everything else to impregnate the minds of its citizens with the notion that the Leninist heritage had an inextinguishable life of its own.
So much of this ‘Lenin’ was an emasculated version of the historical Lenin. It was not permitted to refer to the non-Russian ingredients in his ancestry; no one except exceptionally well-informed Bolshevik veterans knew that he had grandfathers who were not Russians. Mention was never made of his noble status; even the fact that the Ulyanovs had had a comfortable existence was seldom noted. His Classical education, his agrarian-socialist terrorist sympathies and his rather privileged lifestyle even in Siberian exile were banned from public discussion. It became heretical to dwell on the fact that Lenin took ideas from other thinkers and politicians. Even the influence of Marx and Engels was played down. Accounts of tensions inside the Bolshevik party dwelt upon a struggle between Lenin, Stalin and the true Leninists on one side and a host of ne’er-do-wells – from Martov in 1903 to the rest of the Politburo in the early 1920s – on the other. The more intimate aspects of Lenin’s life were not so much distorted as kept strictly hidden. His liaison with Inessa Armand was a prohibited topic. Thus his marital relationship was portrayed as a political partnership – and little more than that. The charm of Lenin for his friends and comrades was obliterated from the historical record. His astuteness as a party leader was overlooked. His alternation of bull-headed insistence with carefully calculated fudges and compromises was excised.
Outside the USSR there were attempts to describe Lenin more plausibly. Memoirs by Mensheviks who had known him were available; and after his deportation in 1928, Trotski published several pieces which challenged the crude falsehoods of the contemporary Soviet biographies. But not even Trotski had brought out all the archival information stored in Moscow, and anyway he had his own political agenda. He claimed that he, not Stalin, was the political successor preferred by Lenin. Trotski opposed ‘the Stalinist school of historical falsification’ with an account that was not untainted by considerations of personal interest. Obviously the Menshevik accounts, too, had their bias; no Menshevik memoirist was going to write gently about Lenin, who had locked up or deported the Menshevik leadership. Nevertheless both Trotski and the Mensheviks described and analysed Lenin in terms that reduced him from demigod to human being.
Western communists dutifully followed the lines of the picture supplied from Moscow. They took their Lenin from Stalin, and it was a shock to them after Stalin’s death in 1953 that his successors announced that Lenin and Stalin had not seen eye to eye. In 1956, Nikita Khrushchëv quoted from Lenin’s political testament and added that Stalin had proceeded in the 1930s to commit mass murder. Across the communist world, especially in the USSR, Khrushchëv caused a sensation. As he pulled Stalin from his pedestal, he felt obliged to elevate the status of Lenin higher than ever. A massive fifth edition of ‘the complete collected works’ was ordered. So, too, was a new official biography of Lenin. Khrushchëv’s purpose was not to unfetter scholarship. Historians were carefully vetted before being granted access to the Central Party Archive on Pushkin Street, and were required to stick largely to the interpretation of Lenin’s life that had prevailed under Stalin, except for the single major difference that they were free to expose any disagreement between Lenin and Stalin. But there were other benefits for historical plausibility. Not every instance of factional strife in the party was treated as a capitalist conspiracy, and it was also shown that Lenin was no despot over his fellow communists.
Abroad, however, further uses were made of the newer information. Some writers suggested that Lenin’s last battles with Stalin demonstrated that the communism of the New Economic Policy was of a kind very different from the communism of the Civil War. Dissenting Soviet communist historians like Roy Medvedev took the same approach. Their argument was that Lenin as he lay dying envisaged a permanent communist order that involved cultural pluralism, ethnic diversity and perhaps even a mixed economy. Among the Western communist parties these ideas had a warm reception. Several so-called Eurocommunists in Italy, France and Spain proposed that, if Lenin’s health had held out, then communism with a human face could have been constructed.
Other Eurocommunists, however, raised the question whether Leninism had always been flawed by its propensity for dictatorship, terror, ideological rigidity and amoralism. For anti-communists this was no great discovery: they had always believed that Lenin’s impact upon his times had been malign. But what was the scope of his impact? As writers got to grips with this question in the 1970s and 1980s, they were interested mainly in his politics. Enquiries were made into the intellectual milieu of Russian revolutionaries in the late nineteenth century, into the internal divisions among Marxists of the Russian Empire, into Russian Marxism and into the limits on the power of Communist Party leaders before and after they seized power in Russia in the October Revolution. But all the
time there was agreement with the conventional wisdom, Western as well as Soviet, that the course of the USSR’s history was largely the product of the energies of one man: Lenin. Thus Lenin was not fundamentally redrawn as an actor on the world stage. Details were changed, but not the basic analysis. Lenin was placed alongside Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, Khrushchëv, Gorbachëv and a few others as the principal actors in the history of the twentieth century.
Despite many disagreements, the opinion gained ground that Lenin was not quite the demiurge that had been claimed by both communists and their enemies since he had leaped to the world’s attention in 1917. Further research on the political, social and economic environment tended to indicate that he worked to a large extent with the grain of Russian traditions. Without intending it, many writers produced an analysis that suggested that Lenin’s contribution to his country’s history was more as facilitator than as maker.
This was to ignore so much. There were turns in the history of Russia and the world that would not have been taken without Lenin. He decisively affected events, institutions, practices and basic attitudes. This was felt to be the case at the time, and most commentators felt the same many years later. Lenin had founded the Bolshevik faction. He had written What Is to Be Done?, the April Theses and The State and Revolution. He had elaborated a strategy for the seizure of power and seen to it that power was seized. Not only the October Revolution but also the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and the New Economic Policy might not have occurred without his influence – and the Soviet regime might quickly have disappeared into history’s dustbin. He did not have a plan for the one-party state that was created in 1917–19, but several institutions of that state were founded by him. Among them was the Cheka, and he insisted that terror should continue to be an instrument of rule available to the communists. Above all, Lenin was the main creator of the Russian Communist Party itself, a party distinguished by commitments to centralism, hierarchy and activism. It would be odd to claim that there would have been no far-left party in Russia had Lenin not lived. But it would be equally absurd to suppose that the Soviet one-party, one-ideology state would have been born without Lenin.
Lenin: A Biography Page 64