The fourth principle was collectivism, which manifested itself most forcefully in the nationalization of industry, but also in collective management (collegiality), barter, education, and housing, among many other things. “Probably nothing was more typical of that epoch than the desire to eradicate individualism and implant collectivism.”
The fifth and final principle was “rationalization,” or the rejection of tradition. “In revolutionary eras, the fact of the existence of a given social institution is not an argument in favor of its continued existence…. The motto of organic eras, ‘it exists, therefore it is needed,’ is replaced by a very different one: ‘If it is needed, it exists, if it is not needed, it will be destroyed.’” In bourgeois revolutions, this principle had been applied to “religion, morality, law, domestic life, and political order,” but not to the economy. During the proletarian revolution, the whole society was subject to reform, and the most important reform of all was “the destruction of fetishistic relations and the establishment of direct, open, and immediate connections among various parts of the Soviet economy.” This meant, in the first place, “the destruction of the market, the destruction of commodity, cash, and credit relations.”67
Most of Kritsman’s book was about the destruction of the market as the central feature of the proletarian revolution (“a principle that enveloped all spheres of social life” and resulted in attempts to abolish law and religion, among other things). The predicted resistance of the enemies of the Revolution inevitably led to the Civil War, and the Civil War inevitably led to “the forcible strangling of the market,” “the suppression of money-commodity relations,” “the total ban on trade,” and “the expropriation of property owners.” Unfolding “as an irresistible, all-destroying flood,” this process inevitably went beyond economic rationality because only an all-destroying flood could deprive the counterrevolutionary capital of “the air of the market that it needed in order to survive.” “This transcendence of immediate economic rationality was both the reason for the victory of the revolution and the root of the perversions that marked the autarkic proletarian economic order.” This dialectic was the result of a pact between two mythic giants: the proletariat and the peasantry. The proletariat agreed to allow the peasantry to keep its land in exchange for military support from “the vast majority of the population”; the peasantry agreed to allow the proletariat to “strangle the market” in exchange for proletarian leadership in the war against the feudal order. Once victory over the feudal order was achieved, the peasantry withdrew its support for the strangling of the market. “Thus, the military and, most important, political victory of the proletariat inevitably led, under these conditions, to its economic retreat.”68
Under these conditions, the peasantry seemed to stand for “economic rationality,” but Kritsman did not take the logic of his argument in that direction. “What was a retreat for the proletarian revolution,” he argued, “was the completion of the antifeudal peasant revolution.” NEP was to last for as long as necessary for this process to run its course. In 1924, it was clear that a new—“cautious and methodical”—offensive was getting under way. The point of this offensive was to prepare for “the coming world-historical battle between the proletariat and capital.”69
■ ■ ■
Having won the war, taken over the state, established stable administrative hierarchies, rewarded themselves with a system of exclusive benefits, worked out a canon of foundation myths, and retreated temporarily in the expectation of the coming world-historical battle between the proletariat and capital, the Bolsheviks were about to face the most difficult moment in the history of any sect: the death of the leader-founder.
In March 1923, after Lenin suffered his second stroke and lost his ability to speak, Karl Radek wrote that the world proletariat’s greatest wish was “that this Moses, who led the slaves out of the land of captivity, might enter the Promised Land along with us.” On January 21, 1924, Lenin died. The next day, the Central Committee of the Party issued an official statement (“To the Party, to All Working People”), in which it summarized the main points of the new iconography of the Bolshevik leader.70
First, he was “the man who founded our party of steel, kept building it year after year, led it while under the blows of tsarism, taught and tempered it in the fierce struggle with the traitors of the working class—with the lukewarm, the undecided, the defectors.” He was the man “under whose guidance our party, enveloped in powder-smoke, planted the banner of October throughout the land.” As Bukharin wrote on the same day, “like a giant, he walked in front of the human flood, guiding the movement of countless human units, building a disciplined army of labor, sending it into battle, destroying the enemy, taming the elements, and lighting, with the searchlight of his powerful mind, both the straight avenues and the dark back alleys, through which the workers’ detachments marched with their rebellious red flags.”71
Lenin could be the founder and leader because he was a prophet. According to the official statement, “Lenin could, like no one else, see things great and small: foresee enormous historical shifts and, at the same time, notice and use every tiny detail…. He did not recognize frozen formulas; there were no blinders on his wise, all-seeing eyes.” He could, in Bukharin’s words, “hear the grass growing beneath the ground, the streams running and gurgling below, and the thoughts and ideas going through the minds of the countless toilers of the earth.” As Koltsov wrote almost a year before Lenin’s death, “He is a man from the future, a pioneer from over there—from the world of fulfilled communism…. Treading firmly on the wreckage of the past and building the future with his own hands, he has moved far above, into the joyous realm of the coming world.”72
Like all true prophets, Lenin was as close to the earth as he was to the world above, as close to his people as he was to the bright future. He was both a teacher and a friend, a comrade and “a dictator in the best sense of the word” (as Bukharin put it). “On the one hand,” wrote Osinsky, “he is a man of such ‘common’ and ‘normal’ appearance that, really, why couldn’t he get together with Lloyd George and chat with him peacefully about European affairs? But, on the other hand, that could result in both Lloyd George and the entire Genoa conference being blown sky high! For, on the one hand, he is Ulianov, but, on the other, he is Lenin.” Or, in Koltsov’s formulation, “There is Ulianov, who took care of those around him and was as nurturing as a father, as tender as a brother, and as simple and cheerful as a friend…. And then there is Lenin, who caused Planet Earth unprecedented trouble and stood at the head of history’s most terrible, most devastatingly bloody struggle against oppression, ignorance, backwardness, and superstition. Two faces—and only one man; not a duality but a synthesis.”73
Lenin’s synthesis went well beyond the unity of the Son of God and the Son of Man. Lenin, in both his incarnations, was equal to his followers, and his followers—in all their “countless units”—were equal to Lenin. On the one hand, according to the Central Committee obituary, “everything truly great and heroic that the proletariat possesses … finds its magnificent embodiment in Lenin, whose name has become the symbol of the new world from east to west and from north to south.” On the other, “every member of our Party is a small part of Lenin. Our whole Communist family is a collective embodiment of Lenin.” This meant that Lenin was, by definition, immortal:
Lenin lives in the soul of every member of our party….
Lenin lives in the heart of every honest worker
Lenin lives in the heart of every poor peasant.
Lenin lives among the millions of colonial slaves.
Lenin lives in the hatred that our enemies have for Leninism, Communism, and Bolshevism.74
But Lenin was immortal in another sense, too. He was immortal because he had suffered and died for mankind in order to be resurrected with the coming of Communism. “Comrade Lenin gave his whole life to the working class, all of it from its conscious beginning to its last martyr’s breat
h.” Or, in the words of Arosev’s eulogy, “he accepted the enormous and terrible burden—to think for 150 million people”—lifted the whole of Russia, and, “having lifted it, lost his strength and broke down.”75
The announcement of Lenin’s death coincided with the nineteenth anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the massacre of a peaceful demonstration by imperial troops in January 1905. According to Koltsov, “Lenin, the leader of the working people of the world, sacrificed himself to them nineteen years after those first bodies fell on Palace Square in Petersburg…. The date of January 21st, written in black to mark Lenin’s death, says simply and firmly: “Don’t be afraid of tomorrow’s bloody-red date—the 22nd. That day of blood on the snow in Petersburg was the day of awakening. This awakening will come—albeit in blood, too—to the rest of the world.” Lenin was the spring “of energy and faith” that Sverdlov had prophesied twenty years earlier—the “noisy and tempestuous” real day that was “sweeping away everything weak, feeble, and old.” Lenin, according to Koltsov, “signifies a joyous and tempestuous awakening from a long sleep full of bloody nightmares to a new energy of struggle and work.” The Easter egg commissar from Lavrenev’s The Forty-First (published in 1924) was a miniature Lenin—as were all commissars, Party members, honest workers, poor peasants, and colonial slaves. Lenin was the chief Easter egg commissar and the original savior. His sacrality (immortality) resided in his “cause” and his disciples—but also in the icons, rituals, and myths that preserved his likeness. Ulianov was as immortal as Lenin—and so, it turned out, was their body.76
“Dear one! Unforgettable one! Great one!” wrote Bukharin, addressing “our common leader, our wise teacher, and our dear, precious comrade.” Most of Lenin would live on through “his very own beloved child and heir—our Party,” but the immediacy of physical affection might be gone forever. “Never again will we see that enormous brow, that marvelous head which used to radiate revolutionary energy, those vibrant, piercing, impressive eyes, those firm and imperious hands, that whole solid, robust figure that stood at the border of two epochs in the history of mankind.” By switching from the physical “figure” to the metaphorical one within the same sentence, Bukharin suggests a solution. The images and personal objects of the dead help preserve the immediacy of physical affection for as long as live memories last; the icons and relics of sacred founders and heroes can preserve such immediacy for as long as the sacred universe they founded remains sacred. Most sacred objects associated with particular heroes—temples, icons, texts, meals, priests—acquire sacrality indirectly, by symbolic transfer; some are believed to be the hero’s personal items (the closer to the body—tunics, cloaks, chains—the better); and some are actual bodies or bodily remains (the mummies of Christian and Buddhist saints, the tooth of the Buddha, the hair of the Prophet Muhammad, the head of Orpheus, the thumb of St. Catherine). The fact that Lenin’s remains were sacred and would be venerated in some form was beyond doubt; the question was how. The answer was provided by the government Funeral Commission, which, in late March, was renamed the Commission for the Immortalization of the Memory of V. I. Ulianov (Lenin).77
The day after Lenin’s death, an official delegation took a train to the Gorki estate outside of Moscow, where Lenin had been living. Mikhail Koltsov, in his capacity as Pravda correspondent, traveled with them. “In the middle of the night, in the frozen mist, the elders of the great Bolshevik tribe set out for the place where they were to receive the still body of their departed chief: receive it, bring it back, and display it to the orphaned millions.” From the station, a convoy of horse-drawn sleds took the delegates to the manor house. Sverdlov and Malkov had chosen it as Lenin’s country residence in September 1918, soon after the assassination attempt. Its last prerevolutionary owner was Zinaida Morozova, the widow of the wealthy industrialist, Savva Morozov, who had financed the Bolshevik Party until his death in 1905.
The tall white old house with slender columns is enclosed within a noble frame of silver forest and blue snow. The glass door opens easily to let us in. This small forest palace, the leader’s final resting place, the place where an inimitable life and an unquenchable will for battle have ended, will always remain before the tired, expectant, and believing eyes of millions of oppressed people.
The house is quiet, spacious, and comfortable. The carpets guard the silence. Every inch is history; every step leads to an object of devout reverence by future generations. Through these windows, patterned with frost, he, the giant who apprehended the whole world and was then cut down in his prime and forced to suffer the inexpressible torment of imposed powerlessness, peered into the future and saw, beyond the short forest path and overgrown village garden, the extended hands of the hundreds of millions of our brothers being crucified on the Golgotha of industrialism and roasted in the multi-storied capitalist hell of the entire world.
The delegates walked through the house and ascended the stairs to “the death room.” “Here he is! He hasn’t changed at all. He is just like himself! His face is calm, and he is almost—almost—smiling that inimitable, indescribable, sly childlike smile of his that is obvious only to those who knew him. His upper lip with its moustache is mischievously lifted and seems very much alive. It is as if he himself were puzzled by what has just happened. Going back down the stairs, a soldier—a Bolshevik—murmurs to himself: ‘Ilich looks great—just the way he did when we last saw him.’”78
Lenin’s heart and brain were handed over to Arosev, who was the “responsible custodian” at the Lenin Institute, created the year before. The rest of the body was transported to Moscow, placed in the Hall of Columns of the Trade Union House, where it lay in state for three days, and, after a solemn funeral ceremony, moved to a temporary crypt in Red Square. One of the members of the Funeral Commission, the commissar for foreign trade, Leonid Krasin, proposed preserving the body indefinitely by submerging it in embalming liquid and placing it in a metal box with a glass top. Krasin was a professional engineer who used to preside over the St. Petersburg electric cable system and Savva Morozov’s electrical power plant in Orekhovo-Zuevo—as well as Bolshevik bank “expropriations,” bomb making, and fund-raising. (Most of the funds he raised came from Morozov, whose mysterious death in May 1905 had led to much inconclusive speculation about Krasin’s involvement.) Krasin was the most consistent Bolshevik advocate of the technocratic path to human redemption (and, possibly, resurrection). In 1921, in his speech at the funeral of the director of the Chemical Institute and Old Bolshevik, Lev Yakovlevich Karpov, he had said: “I am certain that the time will come when science will become so powerful that it will be able to recreate a deceased organism. I am certain that the time will come when one will be able to use the elements of a person’s life to recreate the physical person. And I am certain that when that time does come, when liberated mankind, using all the might of science and technology, whose power and scale we cannot now imagine, is able to resurrect the great historical figures, fighters for the liberation of mankind—I am certain that at that time, our comrade, Lev Yakovlevich, will be among those great figures.”79
It was Lev Yakovlevich’s friend and protégé, Boris Zbarsky, who beat Krasin out for the job of preserving Lenin’s remains. Born in 1885 to a Jewish family in Kamenets-Podolsky, Zbarsky graduated from the University of Geneva and, in 1915–16, worked as an estate manager and director of two chemical plants in Vsevolodo-Vilva, in the northern Urals. The estate and the factories belonged to Zinaida Morozova (who also owned “the tall white old house with slender columns”). In 1916, Zbarsky invented a new method of purifying medical chloroform for frontline hospitals and launched, together with L. Ya. Karpov, its industrial production. After the Revolution, he moved to Moscow to become deputy director of the “Karpov Institute.” When Zbarsky was consulted about the preservation of Lenin’s body, he rejected Krasin’s plan (along with various refrigeration alternatives) and proposed “moist embalming” as practiced in the anatomical museum of Professor Vladimir Vorobiev in
Kharkov. In March 1924, after much lobbying and maneuvering and in the face of the body’s steady deterioration, Zbarsky managed to persuade Feliks Dzerzhinsky (the head of the Immortalization Commission) to opt for the Vorobiev method and to persuade Vorobiev (a former White émigré) to agree to be involved.80
On March 25, 1924, the Funeral Commission announced that it had decided “to take measures available to modern science to preserve the body for as long as possible.” On March 26, Vorobiev, Zbarsky, and their assistants began their round-the-clock working vigil in the freezing crypt. The goal was not simply to preserve the body but to preserve the likeness, thus creating an icon in the flesh. This ruled out traditional mummification, because, according to Zbarsky, “if you were shown the mummy of a loved one, you would be horrified.” Moreover, that likeness had to look naturally uncorrupted, not visibly manipulated like body parts “in glass jars filled with antiseptic fluids.” Soviet scientists, wrote Zbarsky later, “had been given a completely new task. The goal was to make sure that the body of Vladimir Ilich remained in the open air, at normal temperatures, accessible for daily viewing by many thousands of people—while preserving Lenin’s appearance. Such an assignment was unprecedented in world science.”81
Boris Zbarsky
(Courtesy of I. B. Zbarsky)
Zbarsky and Vorobiev had been asked to produce a miracle, and they did. On June 16, 1924, Dzerzhinsky inquired whether the body could be shown to the delegates of the Fifth Congress of the Comintern. Zbarsky went to see N. K. Krupskaia to ask for some clothes. Krupskaia told him she did not approve of the idea and did not believe it could possibly work, and, when she did bring “some shirts, long underwear, and socks, her hands were trembling.” On June 18, the Comintern delegation and family members arrived at the newly built wooden mausoleum. According to Zbarsky, Krupskaia burst into tears. Lenin’s brother Dmitry said: “I can’t say much. I am very emotional. He looks exactly the way he did right after his death, perhaps even better.” On July 26, exactly four months after the beginning of the work, a government delegation saw the body and approved its appearance. Enukidze said that “hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of people would be extremely happy to see this man’s image.” On August 1, 1924, the mausoleum was opened to visitors. Vorobiev went back to Kharkov, and Zbarsky became the body’s chief guardian.82
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