The Drive to Make Lenin a Secular Saint

IF Vladimir Ilyich Lenin were one-tenth as modest as the Russian history books make him out to be, he would be mortified. Last week, as the April 22 centennial of Lenin's birth approached, a flood of books, articles, paintings, plays, movies, symphonies, posters, busts, lapel buttons, and even special candy bars washed over the Soviet Union and some 100 other countries as well. The atheistic Soviet state is coming very close to conferring secular sainthood on its founder.

The buildup has reached an intensity that boggles Western minds as well as many Russian ones. More than 800 editions of Lenin's works have been published for the centenary. Throughout the Soviet Union, bookshops are crammed with such works as Lenin and Modern Statistics (in three volumes) and Lenin and Philosophical Questions of Relative Physics. For foreign consumption the 55-volume "Complete Works" has been translated into English, French and Finnish. Dmitry Shostakovich and Aram Khachaturian have composed new works to Lenin's memory, and six Soviet movie companies have made no fewer than 14 feature films about Lenin in the past six years. Factories, store windows and hotel lobbies are festooned with his picture, always in the inevitable heroic poses: addressing workers, receiving peasants in the Kremlin, studying hard as a boy, consoling his mother after his brother's execution by the Czar, trudging off through the snow to Siberian exile. Across Moscow streets hang bright banners with somewhat less than pithy inscriptions. Sample: LET'S IMPLEMENT LENIN'S IDEAS IN OUR LIVES.

Big in Baltimore. To hear Tass tell it, the whole world is caught up in a frenzy of anticipation. Interest in Lenin is growing in American cities, says Tass, including Baltimore, where his books are "undoubtedly most popular with youth." Calcutta and Mogadishu, capital of Somalia, have renamed streets for him. According to Tass, Indian students have asked their Soviet friends to send them seedlings from Ulyanovsk because "they want to grow trees from the motherland of Lenin." He was the subject of an "international" meeting in Bamako, Mali, and of a quiz show on Radio Sierra Leone. A program called Lenin Soirees is reported to be "greatly popular with televiewers in Brazzaville," while in Paris, "thousands of excursionists" have visited the apartment on Rue Marie-Rose where Lenin once lived. Tass failed to note, however, that the Paris city council has just churlishly refused to rename the street in Lenin's honor.

Though Lenin's birthday may not be quite the international event that the Soviet press makes it out to be, the deification clearly fills a deep domestic political--and psychological--need. "Please remember, for us Lenin is an icon," declared a ranking Soviet official. The icon, moreover, serves an up-to-the-minute function. In a year scarred by serious economic shortcomings and rumors of rifts at the top, Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev and Premier Aleksei Kosygin have invoked Lenin's ideas to enhance their collective leadership and his image to associate themselves with the heroic struggles of the past. By emphasizing their identity with Lenin as the authentic interpreter of Marx and the innovator of Socialist power, the Soviet leaders have also sought to buttress their position against Mao and Communist China.

The adulatory overkill has grated on the nerves of many Russians. The Soviet youth newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, under the headline WHAT FOR?, has attacked the "pomposity and bombast" surrounding some of the celebrations. Wry jokes circulate in Moscow, not about Lenin the man--whom Russians indeed revere--but about Lenin the oversold commodity. One tells of a contest for the best statue honoring the writer Pushkin. First prize is awarded for a statue of Lenin, second for a statue of Lenin reading Pushkin, and third for one of Pushkin reading Lenin. (Pushkin, as it happens, died 33 years before Lenin was born.)

Yugoslav Challenge. According to another wisecrack, first, second and third prizes will be awarded for the best jokes about the Lenin anniversary: 15, ten and five years' exile respectively in Shushen-skoye, the Siberian town to which Lenin was exiled under the Czar. Also making the rounds is the story of an elderly citizen who writes to his party committee for a new apartment, then to the Central Committee and finally to Lenin himself, but receives no answer. He goes to the Central Committee and asks to see Lenin, but is told by the Party Secretary that Lenin died in 1924. "Why is it that when the party needs Lenin he is alive," demands the old man, "but when I need him he is dead?"

Even ruder noises have been heard abroad. The Yugoslavs have openly challenged Moscow's pretensions that the Brezhnev doctrine, which asserts Moscow's right to intervene in other countries to defend "Socialism," is a pure reflection of Leninist thought. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, far from accepting any idea of Lenin's sainthood, weighed in with a condemnation of him (see RELIGION). The Chinese line has been downright blasphemous. It was on the eve of Lenin's birthday ten years ago that Peking's theoretical journal Red Flag, in an editorial entitled "Long Live Leninism," fired the first shot in the Sino-Soviet conflict by challenging Moscow's claim to be the only true interpreter of Lenin's thoughts. Lately the Chinese have been emphasizing that Mao Tse-tung has carried Lenin's theories to a "higher and completely new stage" by integrating "the universal truth of Marxism-Leninism with the concrete practice of revolution." In apparent anticipation of the centennial, the Chinese party has attributed the "theoretical basis" of its thinking to something called "Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung thought." It is an inventive bit of phrasemaking that definitely one-ups the Russians. While the Soviets have been busy turning Lenin into an icon, the Chinese invented a new trinity of Communism.

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