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On 8/7/17 3:49 PM, Ralph Johansen wrote:
A Communist Icon Toppled in Ukraine Is Restored. In England. By ZEPHIRA DAVISAUG. 6, 2017
Those types of icons had little to do with communism, especially those of Lenin that he specifically opposed.
https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/13592 The making of a socialist 'saint' Wednesday, October 15, 1997 - 10:00 Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia By Nina Tumarkin Harvard University Press, 1997 337 pp., $31.95 (pb) Review by Phil Shannon Cults come in all shapes and sizes. The Elvis cult is tacky but harmless. The Princess Diana cult is schmalzy and intellectually repellent, but not a direct threat to life and limb like the quasi-religious cults of the mass-suicide variety. The cult of Lenin that existed in the Soviet Union managed to be tacky, schmalzy, intellectually repellent and, in the hands of Stalin, camouflage for the deaths of millions. Nina Tumarkin's book on the Lenin cult looks at the first expressions of the eulogising and mythologising of Lenin at the time of his attempted assassination in 1918; the cult's mad growth spurt, including the embalming of Lenin's body, during the two years following his death in 1924; and the subsequent icon fashioned by Stalin. Tumarkin acknowledges the element of "spontaneous devotion to revolutionary symbols and leaders", derived from the genuine popular aspect of the Russian Revolution and which contributed to the cult of Lenin, as much as the "self-conscious artifice" by some Bolshevik leaders to mobilise loyalty to the political regime. Thus when Fanny Kaplan, a member of the terrorist organisation of the anti-Bolshevik Socialist Revolutionary Party, fired two bullets into Lenin in August 1918, an emotional tidal wave of praise for Lenin and anger at the attempted murder flooded in from the Russian people who saw this assassination attempt as an attack on their revolution. Much of the praise, especially from Bolshevik leaders like Zinoviev, although a sincere expression of solidarity and respect for Lenin, was extravagant, flamboyant and quasi-mystical. Lenin was distressed by the exalted glorification and appalled at the un-Marxist veneration of the individual. The cloying adulation that filled acres of scarce newsprint was "shameful to read", Lenin said. "They exaggerate everything, call me a genius, some kind of special person. All our lives we have waged an ideological struggle against the glorification of the personality, of the individual", and now here was Lenin, who had always detested flattery and praise, being turned into a socialist saint. Lenin requested the publication of his praises be stopped and the volcano settled down, but the subterranean lava remained active. On Lenin's fiftieth birthday in 1920 the Bolshevik Party in Moscow organised a commemorative meeting at which many Bolshevik leaders, including Stalin, vied with each other to sing Lenin's praises. Lenin, however, only entered the meeting after all the speeches and poems. He expressed his annoyance at the stylised and elaborate praises by "thanking the assembly for their greetings and for having spared him from having to listen to them" and bluntly suggested that personal anniversaries should be "celebrated in more appropriate ways in the future". A vain hope, as it turned out. A socialist economy in an isolated, backward, war-ravaged, peasant-based country faced severe stresses and this created the social space for the growth of a bureaucracy under the oxymoronic banner of Stalin's "socialism in one country" with its attendant horrors of rapid industrialisation and forced collectivisation. The cult of Lenin was to be used by the victorious Stalin faction as gospel against all dissent and opposition. Not that Stalin was the sole architect of the Lenin cult in the beginning. When Lenin died from a brain haemorrhage as a result of a major stroke in January 1924, Zinoviev, the most prominent Bolshevik leader apart from Trotsky, took the lead in the official veneration of Lenin. The rituals and symbols of the cult were designed to control and channel popular grief over Lenin's death into legitimacy of, and subservience to, the leadership of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin in their struggle against Trotsky. Lenin, when alive, was the acknowledged leader of the Bolsheviks but his authority did not necessarily mean automatic acceptance of his views in a party that still practised open debate and decided issues on their merits. The cult of Lenin became the unquestionable authority used to drive democracy from the party, the soviets and the country. Lenin's cultification swung into high gear after his death. Institutions and cities were re-named after Lenin: Petrograd became Leningrad and Lenin's image appeared on cigarette packets, cups and biscuits. New biographies created myths and legends. Previous memoirs which showed Lenin to be less than perfect were beautified, as was Lenin's personality. The gravitational centre of the cult was the embalmed body of Lenin on display in a mausoleum in Red Square, a holy relic for veneration. There was opposition to the Lenin cult. Lenin's sisters, Maria and Anna, and his brother, Dimitri, criticised the legends invented to idealise Lenin and they opposed the embalming. Amongst the Bolshevik leadership, Trotsky was outraged at the decision to preserve and display Lenin's body, Kamenev thought it un-Marxist, whilst Bukharin though it an affront to Lenin. Krupskaya, Lenin's widow, wrote that Lenin should be honoured not by embalming, monuments, celebrations and the like, all of which had meant nothing to him, but by building day-care centres, kindergartens, homes and schools. Krupskaya continued her private protest by never visiting the mausoleum. The revolutionary poet, Mayakovsky, denounced the "rituals, mausoleums and processions" and the trafficking in Lenin kitsch. With the political defeat of Trotsky in 1926, however, the cult was fully established and regulated. Stalin graduated from yoking his name to Lenin's to his own full-blown Stalin cult in the early 1930s. With Stalin's death, his own body joined Lenin's in the mausoleum for eight years until Kruschev's limited de-Stalinisation ended that obscenity. But it wasn't until Gorbachev's reign that a partial erosion of the Lenin cult was initiated. Tumarkin's book can yield an informative account of the origin, growth and political utility of the Lenin cult but (and there is always a "but" in establishment treatments of Lenin) Tumarkin does not stray from the anti-Leninist path. While she concedes that Lenin was a popular leader inspiring a genuine reverence, she goes on to serve up the usual fare of Lenin's alleged dictatorial ambitions and "personal domination of his party". Whilst innocent of initiating the cult, or at most guilty of passively accepting it, Lenin, according to Tumarkin, got his kicks in other ways, wanting, instead of praise and flattery, submission and obedience. Tumarkin finds much to credit in the orthodoxy of establishment and ex-Stalinist biographers of Lenin such as General Dimitri Volkogonov, who portrays Lenin as absolute evil, responsible for only "blood, coercion and the denial of freedom". But Lenin as the ruthless bogey-man of official anti-communism, the soulless, fanatical, compulsive power-freak is as mythical as the Lenin of the Lenin cult under Stalin, the lifeless icon, the commanding figure in the windswept coat with arm outstretched grimly pointing to the socialist future. Also questionable is Tumarkin's emphasis on the influence of traditional Tsarist Russian culture on the Lenin cult. Certainly, as was recognised with frustration by the Bolsheviks, the old culture reasserted itself after the revolution. Peasant superstitions such as the religious veneration of icons and the myth of the just Tsar-deliverer, did mould the cult, but it was politics that mattered. When Lenin was active, cultification was stopped or moderated, but when used to fight Stalin's political battles it was full steam ahead. Tumarkin's concept of cult is very elastic, which allows her to assign responsibility for it to anyone who had ever shown any respect for Lenin, or a desire to emulate his virtues. Any note of praise, any resort to the writings of Lenin becomes at least a seed sown or at worst a conscious attempt to build the cult. So Trotsky and other anti-Stalinist communists, and by implication the entire Marxist project, are doomed to the defect of the cult of personality. It is possible, however, to recognise and honour Lenin as an important revolutionary theorist and politician whose greatness lay in his ability to unite his political imagination with realism and in his powers of clear and direct argument. The difference between this view and a cult is the acceptance of the whole Lenin, the Lenin who was fallible, who got things wrong, who does not have all the answers to everything today and who suffered from ordinary human failings. Lenin was not special or superior. The elitism inherent in a capitalist cult figure like Princess Diana denies her followers their own self-worth and dignity with each ritual of royalty worship. The Diana cult serves to reinforce people in their "ordinariness" and powerlessness. The real Lenin was about the collective power and creativity of "ordinary" people to make history and to remake themselves. Lenin, writing tate and Revolution just days before the revolution, made the prophetic remark on the attempts by ruling classes to convert revolutionaries, after their death, into "harmless icons" as a means of consolation of the oppressed and cooption of their heroes, whilst robbing their revolutionary theory of its substance. Cruelly this was to be Lenin's fate at the hands of Stalin. There is a real Lenin still to be rediscovered. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
