Lenin's tomb with a view
BEICHMAN, ARNOLD
Lenin's Tomb with a View by Arnold Beichman Some three decades ago, Yevgeny Yevtushenko published a poem titled "Stalin's Heirs." It was a plea to the leadership of the Soviet Union to prevent the...
...It was a plea to the leadership of the Soviet Union to prevent the return of Stalinism...
...Is Lenin morally superior to Hitler...
...But the Bolshevik who brought so much misery to so many and wrought a proto-Stal-inism ("proto" only because Lenin died in 1924) is still an object of veneration...
...But the president of the new Russia, Boris Yeltsin, is not a Communist...
...Those in doubt need only consult hitherto secret documents recently published in The Unknown Lenin (Yale University Press...
...It is true that Yeltsin has put an end to round-the-clock military pageantry, complete with goose-stepping...
...And not to be forgotten is that the Duma, Russia's parliament, has passed a resolution calling for the reconstitution of the USSR...
...But nothing happened...
...So it is now time to ask, Why is Lenin still there, lying in state in his air-conditioned shrine...
...now, a police guard lazes around the squat, reddish vault...
...Instead, with the onset of the presidential campaign earlier this year and the remarkable strength of Communist candidate Gen-nady Zyuganov, Yeltsin, the Financial Times reported, "embraced the symbols and ceremonies of the Soviet era as he stepped up his campaign for election...
...This was understandable: Lenin was communism's founder, and Khrushchev and his government were Communist...
...Arnold Beichman is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a columnist for the Washington Times...
...Any time a skinhead throws a firebomb into a tenement occupied by Turkish immigrants...
...Despite this deeply important act, there was growing alarm in the country that Stalin's spirit was alive and resurgent...
...Western public opinion would be outraged...
...For the Bolsheviks it was one means of personifying the immortality of Lenin's precepts, although on the eve of the 21st century, rather than serving as a testimony of the man's greatness, it is instead a reminder of the depth of the country's historic failure...
...When Khrushchev in 1961 ordered Stalin out of Lenin's tomb, his implication was that Lenin was still and always sacred...
...Imagine that a provincial government in Germany (Bavaria, for example) announced the opening of a Hitler tomb...
...At the time, the embalmed corpse of Stalin—once displayed in the Red Square Mausoleum alongside Lenin's—had been transferred to the Kremlin wall...
...A red flag—with a star substituting for the old hammer and sickle—waved in the breeze...
...any time a rightist party gets a big vote in Austria, a wave of apprehension about Hitler's heirs ensues...
...Perhaps it is time for Yevtushenko to give us another poem—on the dangers of Lenin's heirs...
...Imagine that people lined up daily to view a wax-museum replica of the founder of Nazism, lying in state...
...As for the corpse, the late Dmitri Volkogonov, a biographer of Lenin who had full access to the Lenin archive, writes: An entire mechanism was put in place to manage Lenin's embalmed body, which had become vitally necessary . . . for its effect on the psychology of the masses...
...Furthermore, it was said, he would relieve the Kremlin wall of some of its illustrious bones: Stalin's, Brezhnev's, Andropov's, Cher-nenko's—they would go to the Novodevichie cemetery in Moscow, or elsewhere, if the families so requested...
...Yet Lenin continues to lie in his glass sarcophagus...
...Yev-tushenko's poem expressed it well: And I, appealing to our government, petition them to double, and treble, the sentries guarding this slab, and stop Stalin from ever rising again, and with Stalin, the past . . . And his conclusion: While Stalin's heirs still walk this earth, Stalin, I fancy, still lurks in the mausoleum...
...China's rulers are Communist...
...Petersburg...
...A few years ago, it was reported that Yeltsin would order Lenin's remains to be buried in the Volkovo cemetery in St...
...on May 9, Yeltsin commemorated the anniversary of victory in World War II with a speech delivered from atop the Red Square Mausoleum...
...any time a Holocaust-denier gets a tract published...
...If Leninism were not a latent ideological force in Russia, Lenin's body, like Stalin's, would have been removed from that tomb years ago...
...Mao Zedong's mummy reposes in Tiananmen Square, and why not...
...But if Lenin and Leninism have lost their importance in Russian political thought, if their memory has been abominated, then the man himself should be taken to some cemetery far away, in a symbolic act of desecration...
...If one thing is clear at this point about Soviet history, it is that Lenin was a ghastly, inhuman revolutionary prepared to impose on Russia and all the world his messianic totalitarianism...
...In fact, he was almost overthrown by a Communist conspiracy three years ago...
Vol. 2 • November 1996 • No. 11
