What should we make of Lenin today? How should he be framed within what Hayden White calls a ‘practical past’ narrative, one that provides an orientation to the past that might usefully illuminate the present? In the century after his death, Lenin fell victim both to a hagiographic approach in the ussr and to a more or less aggressively anti-Communist Sovietology in the West. This ‘campism’ over the historiography survived the end of the Soviet system and limited the readership to Lenin’s core haters or supporters, leaving behind the non-aligned majority. Today, the place Lenin occupies in official Russian ‘politics of memory’ illustrates the latter’s contradictory nature: Lenin is respected as a page in the state’s history but rejected as an insurrectionary. This emancipation of Lenin as a symbol from his essence as a revolutionary Marxist has roots deep in the Soviet period. During Stalin’s time, and especially under Brezhnev, a huge memorial infrastructure was created to him which includes dozens of Lenin museums—from his native city of Ulyanovsk to his last residence in Gorky, near Moscow. The complete edition of Lenin’s collected works was published in tens of millions of copies; nearly every month of his life was carefully described in the twelve volumes. In the national Marxism-Leninism Institute there was a special building, in whose long corridors each room was dedicated to a specific period of Lenin’s life, titled ‘First half of 1898’ or ‘1.07.1917–10.07.1917’.
During the period of Perestroika, the significance of Lenin in Soviet propaganda changed. Gorbachev’s reforms were announced as the implementation of Lenin’s ideas of genuine Soviet democracy, betrayed by Stalin and his heirs. However, this last short burst of Lenin’s popularity was soon followed by the Russian 1990s, with a radical turn towards the market. Liberal anti-communism became the new state ideology. In a country where hundreds of streets still bear his name, and even his body still lies in the Mausoleum in the capital’s main square, Lenin was legitimized only as a silent part of the state tradition, equal in this status with any other artifact from the Soviet or Tsarist past.
According to the official view, in the triad of twentieth-century Russia’s historical figures, Lenin represents an absolute evil, while Stalin’s reputation is mixed: ‘bad’ as a revolutionary and as the fanatical architect of the mass terror, but ‘good’ as a state-minded person who led the country to a great victory in the Second World War. The third figure, Tsar Nicholas ii, is literally a saint, canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church. Over the last twenty years, an impressive cult of the last Tsar has been established, presenting him as a great ruler and an innocent victim who died for the sins of the nation. This conservative, clerical and anti-revolutionary vision of national history has many similarities with other ‘illiberal’ Eastern European regimes, such as Hungary or Poland; the main difference with Putin’s Russia being that the Soviet legacy could not be interpreted here as a product of foreign domination, something fully external for the national history. That has lent the collective memory constructed by the contemporary Russian state a semi-schizophrenic character, whereby Lenin could occupy a legitimate place only as an empty form—a mummified body or a meaningless monument—while his ideas and beliefs could barely be treated as the object of public discussion.
In the official propaganda of the past decade—say, since 2012—Lenin and the Bolsheviks are usually portrayed as criminal fanatics, ready to sacrifice the country for their utopian ideas. During the 2017 centenary of the Revolution this view of history was widely aired, with tv series such as Trotsky (a monstrous figure) or the sprawling costume drama Wings of Empire. One of these series, Demon of Revolution, later re-worked as a movie, focused on Lenin’s relations with the German authorities in early 1917 and reproduced the old ‘German money’ conspiracy-theory narrative. A simple lesson could be drawn from all this material produced by the modern Russian culture industry: all revolutions, from the Bolsheviks to the Ukrainian Maidan of 2014, were iterations of the same ‘regime change’ strategy used by the West to destabilize and destroy the Russian state.
A few years ago, Ukraine’s symbolic ‘decommunization’ and the removal of Lenin monuments were strongly condemned by Russian officials from this conservative position, as revolutionary acts that were a ‘betrayal of our common history’. Yet in his speech justifying the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin placed the blame for its independence on Lenin. From Putin’s point of view, the Bolsheviks’ nationalities policy and the principle of self-determination inscribed in the very foundation of the ussr made it possible for Ukraine to emerge as an ‘artificial country’ with a fictitious people. The goal of Russian aggression is explicitly proclaimed to be the destruction of the principle of Ukrainian independence, and thus the correction of Lenin’s ‘mistake’.
How to begin to think freely about Lenin, in this context? How to find a new way to talk about his life and ideas that could start a reconsideration of them, in Russia and elsewhere? Lev Danilkin began approaching these questions in the run up to the centenary, with a commission from an old publishing house—once that of the Komsomol—which specializes in popular biographies of historical figures. Born in 1974, Danilkin is one of the leading literary critics of a younger generation, who came to the fore thanks to his regular book reviews in Afisha, a listings magazine that emerged in the 1990s and was largely responsible for the promotion of a ‘hipster’ lifestyle and culture in Russia. Danilkin can certainly not be labelled left-wing, but at the same time he was always slightly critical of the pro-market, anti-Communist orientation of his own liberal milieu. Initially, he presented his ambitious attempt to reinvent Lenin as a flesh-and-blood man and historical figure as an experiment upon himself: what will happen to a contemporary Russian person who tries to read all 55 volumes of Lenin’s collected works, to visit all the still-preserved Lenin museums and journey to all the far-flung places where Lenin stayed? Is it possible, in fact, to understand Lenin through these artifacts, which are still at hand for everyone in Russia, but remain silent?
Danilkin’s approach is populist in the best sense and highly effective for attracting a new mass readership. He is neither a professional historian nor a ‘partisan’, trying to defend his predictable—apologetic or negative—view of Lenin, but a gifted, independent-minded writer, willing to follow the research where it leads. As he confesses, Danilkin’s trip through the Lenin archives, which lasted five years or more, altered his own view of his subject, which by the end of the book came to be one of ‘unquestionable respect’. Pantocrator of Solar Dust—the biography’s enigmatic, almost sci-fi title remains a mystery up to the final pages—is full of references and hidden quotations from Soviet and post-Soviet literature, from Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita or Ilf and Petrov’s Twelve Chairs to the latest novels by Victor Pelevin. At the same time, Danilkin freely mixes high and low cultural references—comparing Plekhanov to pop-star Shakira, or delegates of the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903 with gnomes knocking on Bilbo Baggins’s door—which probably help to make the book excitingly readable for a young Russian audience, though they may make it untranslatable outside.