St. Lenin the Recurrent

Secular sainthood and the post-socialist fate of a soviet symbol

The political body of Lenin was made to speak long after the biological body of Lenin had fallen silent. ‘Lenin’ existed as a precondition of truth and authority in the ideological identity of the Soviet Union. Whilst this had been true, though not static, throughout the history of the Soviet Union, in the Perestroika era, this saintly intangible Lenin was reconfigured, readdressed, and reinvigorated to help update the foundational texts of the USSR in such a way that they lent credence to Gorbachev’s policy direction.

The political episteme of the Soviet Union was better constructed for longevity than its material products ever were. In the later soviet era, death and dying was a frequent presence in the halls of power. In 1966, the average age of politburo members was 55. By the early 1980s, it was 70, increasing to near 80 in the leadership group. The biological bodies of the leadership were failing, stumbling towards death like all natural things. Their political selves, however, functioned as immortal authoritative forms. So much so that when Brezhnev died in 1982, Andrei Makarevich noted that he was caught off guard as he had regarded him, not as a friable human being, but as a “biblical figure that would live eight hundred years.” Biological bodies are generally of little importance, Lenin’s corpse is displayed in the mausoleum, yes, but there is actually quite little of Lenin left there. His organs, his brain, are not preserved there, what is venerated in the mausoleum is not truly a body but an image, a symbol. Authority, it seems, had very little to do with life, vitality or even bodiliness, but drew on a quasi-mystical quality of longevity and infallibility.  

This was an established format that drew on the centrality of ‘Lenin’ in political discourse. The Soviet Union held as a core tenet the fact that Leninism was correct and entirely unquestionable. Even though the applied ideology shifted, each new change was legitimated by the same source. First, Stalin had unique access to ‘Lenin’ as his chosen heir but then destalinisation was predicated on the notion that Stalin had violated Lenin’s principles. In the Gorbachev era, this shifted once again to a claim that Lenin’s authentic words had been distorted during the whole of soviet history and that these words didn’t just need to be recovered, but that Lenin had to be allowed to speak again. For the leadership the question was not so much “what did Lenin say,” but “what would Lenin say if he were alive.” In this vein, they argued for Lenin’s capacity to change his mind in differing circumstances, to update his thought according to what was needed in the moment.  

The 1990 Plakat press of the Central Committee released a poster that bore the slogan “Slovo Leninu!” or “Let Lenin Speak!” This new understanding of Lenin saw him, not as a dead body, or his writings just as dead words, but saw him as a living entity to which we must listen for our next move. As a signifier of the good and the right, he had been resurrected, almost literally, to legitimate the new policy direction. The parallels with religious figures are so evident they are almost begging to be voiced, but it is worth holding off on too close a comparison. It is of foremost importance to remember that Lenin is a political body, sacred yes, but not a religious one. Whilst the idea of communism as a ‘secular religion’ is rather widely discussed, it is often reductive if over applied. We can glean significance from religious veneration but what I suggest is an understanding of political sainthood as distinct from religion, particularly Russian Orthodoxy. Soviet political language often referred to Lenin as sviaschchennyi, which means ‘sacred.’ Though this term does not have the same religious connotations that Sviatoi, which means ‘holy,’ does. It is too complex to simply understand it as religious, for a dual process of veneration, in which Lenin has ultimate claim to truth, but is now resurrected for additional input, whilst also becoming more naturalised, undoing the work of decades of now defunct canonisation, transcends a simple understanding.

 What this resurrection meant in practice was somewhat indeterminate. Some suggested that Lenin’s works be put into dialogue with the philosophers who inspired him, or even later theorists who were inspired by him, generating new direction from old texts. However, overwhelmingly it meant that the party had new licence to speak on behalf of Lenin, rather than just interpret. It is a complex process, that both reinstates Lenin as a saint, whilst also claiming that the canonised Lenin used in previous Soviet discourse was an egregious distortion. Authority and legitimation were coming from ‘Lenin,’ the live concept who would surely have different and supportive opinions based on these new circumstances, but not from Lenin who was simultaneously unknowable and not fit for purpose.

Like most corpses, Lenin never did speak again. For what it is worth, ‘Lenin’ never really spoke coherently either. The Soviet project tremored and collapsed, shaking the ground on which all of its symbols were based. To varying degrees, these were smashed or reconfigured, painted in a new light or simply abandoned to time. The question of what to do with the physical body of Lenin was raised multiple times. Some suggested he be buried next to his mother in St. Petersburg, other argued that to move him now would simply be a destruction of an architectural monument. In 1998 Boris Nemtsov, the liberal politician said that he had “a mystical kind of feeling that as long as we don’t bury Lenin, Russia is under an evil spell.” In a flip of the saintly script, his body was now seen to be expressing, not miracles, but something more akin to a curse. The symbol of St. Lenin, that reoccurred throughout the history of the Soviet Union has not fared well in the post-socialist decades, and who knows whether contestation over the physical body will ever be buried for good. Whatever can be seen to happen, the authority that the saintly ‘Lenin’ expressed was part of a specific system of symbolism, and without the system it cannot and will not reoccur in the same way.