Sovietized Charisma

...Bertolt Brecht's Galileo said, "Unhappy the land that needs heroes " Yes, indeed...

...his body was mummified and placed on permanent view in a tomb at the center of Reel Square, despite the reportedly appalled reaction this drew from his widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya Like everything else on Soviet soil, her husband's remains were the property of the state, to be disposed of as the authorities saw fit Undoubtedly, the deceased, too, would have found the idea of being preserved abhorrent But it was he who two years earlier had told a gathering of young Party members that for Communists there was no "all-human" morality divorced from the class struggle, that personal ethics had to be totally subordinated to the cause of the liberation of the proletariat The genie he had let out now jealously guarded his very corpse...

...The peculiar form of worship matured along with the Soviet state Paeans to Lenin in his days as the active national leader showed a certain diversity in style if not in substance Some, like the homage delivered by Anatoly V Lun-acharsky, could even be described, in Tumarkin's phrase, as "florid but fair " During Lenin's fatal illness, strictly standardized adulations were formulated and polished When he died in 1924, they were ready The intensity of mourning week and the rapidity with which memorial activities occurred,' Tumarkin reports, "indicated [that] the agitational apparatus of the Party and government was remarkably well organized at a time when little else in the political and economic structure of Soviet Russia was functioning efficiently ". By 1926, the official hagiography was firmly defined The Lenin legend was purged of all apocrypha, outfitted with a permanent set of interchangeable cliches and tableaux, and pared down to a few permissible topics All recollections that strayed from the approved portrait were, and remain, heresy...

...Although for me this is the author's paramount achievement, it by no means exhausts the merits of her work The cult of Lenin that today seems always to have existed is still among the most important legitimizing myths of the Soviet Union Particularly for the broader nonspecialist audience, this book's examination of the phenomenon's inception and development is thus bound to shed light on the evolution of the Moscow regime Indeed, it is fascinating to follow Tumarkin as she charts the various stages of "organized veneration," each more deliberately-albeit crudely-wrought and carefully orchestrated than the one preceding, all of them expediently tied to the political exigencies of their times...

...It is perhaps testimony to the sorry state of interdisciplinary communication in the academic world that Professor Nina Tumarkin's meticulously researched and lively account of the Soviet government's secular canonization of its first leader, Vladimir llyich Lenin, does not contain a single reference lo Weber Yet whether she intended it or not, the Harvard-educated historian has supplied political sociologists with an excellent case study of the process their forerunner defined in the abstract...

...One Soviet "anecdote" tells of a hapless Jew who tried to outgrieve his fellow office workers at an official mourning ceremony by wailing "They say Lenin is dead but his cause is alive Oh, I wish it were the other way around'" He was shipped off to a concentration camp Lenin the human being quickly ceased to matter, only Lenin the icon was needed to bless the "cause" from far above "The cult of Lenin,' notes Tumarkin, "came to concentrate less and less on mourning the leader and more and more on using his sanctified memory to fight political battles of the moment '. The Russian Clio must have smiled through tears up on Parnassus (or in the Urals), recording the cruel irony of the whole affair The fervent Marxist materialist, was embalmed like a Pharaoh and put on display A former seminarian, Josef V Stalin became the high priest of the new Lenin church and exterminated his closest associates He then proceeded to slaughter hundreds of thousands of people over the course of roughly a quarter century, while year after year his glory was celebrated in military parades that he watched from atop the idol's mausoleum...

...A further irony In '24, the head of the dreaded Cheka chaired the commission that organized 1 enin's funeral Some 60 years later, u hen according to the founding lather s vision the Soviet Communist society of love, joy and liberated labor should ah each have produced at least its second generation the chief of secret police was surreptitiously selected by elderly oligarchs to inherit Lenin's mantle...

...Sergei Esenin wrote of Lenin's death "He is no more, but those who are alive, /Whom he left [to govern]/Must clad in concrete/The land swept in a turbulent flood " Lenin himself was clad in granite...

...Sovietized Charisma Lenin Lives!: The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia Harvard 384 pp $20 00 Reviewed by Leon Bernstein Early in this century, the great German sociologist Max Weber outlined the theory of "routinization of charisma " A charismatic leader, he argued, derives power solely from his followers' belief in the outstanding character of his personality-his "personal heroism or personal revelation " Such a figure's authority, then, is by definition foreign to governmental routine, for it exists independently of either a political hierarchy or established administrative organs Herein lies charisma's inherent weakness A revolutionary force par excellence, it is unsuitable for the transaction of day-to-day affairs of state Therefore, Weber concluded, it must be transformed into a "charisma of office" that will, among other functions, lend legitimacy to the high positions, social prestige and economic advantages acquired by the leader's adherents Harnessed in this manner, charisma can protect what it has gained, it "continues to work in favor of all those whose power and possession is guaranteed" by the ruling structure that has grown out of the revolution...