Soviet Union Chipping Away at an Icon

By Bruce W. Nelan

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, founder of the one-party Soviet dictatorship, believed that anyone who disagreed with him was an enemy who had to be ruthlessly smashed. He would not have hesitated a moment before arresting the members of the Congress of People's Deputies who decided last week to form a legal opposition calling itself the Interregional Group. At a freewheeling conference in Moscow's House of Cinema, the new faction elected a collective leadership and adopted a platform that called for rewriting the Soviet Constitution to make the system safe for pluralism and basic civil rights. In a direct challenge to Leninism, the central dogma of the Soviet Union, the organizers agreed that the power to rule should be taken from the Communist Party and handed to an elected government.

Such a profound alteration of the very foundations of the Soviet system would have been unthinkable even a year ago. But many Soviet citizens are thinking the unthinkable these days. During his years of exile and his reign over the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1924, Lenin formulated prescriptions for every aspect of the nation's political, economic and social conduct. Now even he, like so much else in this changing land, is being questioned.

That was brought to vivid life by the Interregional Group. In the first issue of its new newspaper, Moscow Deputy Sergei Stankevich assured his colleagues that they no longer had to believe that organizing a political opposition was a crime against the state. A struggle among dissenting factions, he said, "is the only possible method of existence for a legislative body." Counting absentees, 388 Deputies said they were willing to associate themselves with this departure from Communist rectitude. Though that is a distinct minority of the 2,250-member Congress, the surprising thing is that an opposition faction exists at all.

The Interregional Group is staking out a program that would create something akin to social democracy. Perhaps most daring, it proposes eliminating Article VI of the Constitution, which entrenches the Communist Party as the "leading and guiding force" in all aspects of the society. Dumping this provision would effectively reverse Lenin's totalitarian doctrine that the party must control the state.

The group's members insist they are not so much an opposition faction as ardent advocates of perestroika eager to speed its implementation. Said Leningrad's representative Anatoli Sobchak: "I am not a member of the opposition; I am a supporter of the struggle for a normal economic and political life in our country." But there is a hint of criticism of current as well as past party leaders. President Mikhail Gorbachev, said historian Yuri Afanasyev, an elected official of the group, "is justifiably regarded as the man who launched reform. But the time has passed when he can successfully remain the leader of perestroika and the leader of the nomenklatura," the topmost ranks of the party. "He must make a choice." Gorbachev responded at a Supreme Soviet session last week, referring to "provocative appeals" from some of the group's members and criticizing their description of themselves as "left radicals." He was uncertain "what good this will bring to our cause."

Questioning Gorbachev has become commonplace. Doing the same to Lenin, by far the more sacrosanct of the two, has not. He was the intellectual father and revolutionary founder of the secular religion that replaced the Russian Orthodoxy uprooted by the militantly atheist Bolsheviks. His portrait, lighted by a candle, replaced icons on the walls of urban apartments and hung under the red bunting of the "Lenin corner" in schools and offices. His statue stood in thousands of city squares throughout the country, and toddlers went off to kindergarten wearing lapel pins with a photo of curly-haired Baby Lenin, age 4.

Even more important to the dictators who followed him, Lenin was the man who < gave legitimacy to their monopoly of power. As the self-ordained interpreter of Marxism, Lenin claimed that Communist rule in backward Russia was the result of the iron laws of historical development, a scientific system that offered an infallible method for solving problems and planning the future. But with no formula for succession, each new Soviet leader could seek legitimacy only by claiming to be the closest follower of the founder, Lenin.

For the Soviet establishment to question Lenin's authority openly is as dramatic as it would be for the Roman Catholic Church to question St. Peter's. Gorbachev tells the nation that it is in appalling shape and must be rebuilt. Among the causes of the crisis were the wholesale falsification of Soviet history and slavish adherence to old slogans. Politburo member Alexander Yakovlev, one of Gorbachev's closest supporters, warned that a "new world requires a new philosophy" and that "subordination to dogma" offers no freedom.

The first historical attacks fell on Joseph Stalin, already a fallen idol for his ruthless rule from 1924 to 1953, which raised the system of militarized labor, centralized power and secret-police terror to its highest form. But Stalin was Lenin's successor, and Soviet scholars are now examining the continuities between them.

In the current issue of the academic journal Science and Life, Gavril Popov, another leader of the new parliamentary opposition, argues that Stalin was not a sudden short circuit in Soviet Communism but the inheritor of Lenin's political program. Lenin's attempt to abolish free markets made the use of force inevitable, writes Popov, and to carry it out the dictator created the Cheka, a secret-police force responsible only to the party.

Such rethinking began in earnest late last year with a groundbreaking series of articles in Science and Life by Alexander Tsipko, a scholar at a Moscow think tank. Tsipko saw the crimes of Stalin as an outgrowth of Lenin's ready use of guns and jails to enforce the party's sole right to rule. Had he written such articles in pre-Gorbachev years, prison would have been the next stop for Tsipko -- and for Science and Life editor Igor Lagovsky as well. "We didn't think about the problems we might face" by publishing, says Lagovsky. "We thought about the interest this would generate."

American experts find such revisionism a dramatic development. With establishment journals publishing criticism of Lenin, says Dimitri Simes of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, "nothing about Communism is sacred any longer in the Soviet Union." Robert Legvold, director of Columbia University's Harriman Institute, does not expect Lenin to go from icon to archvillain. "Lenin will be given an honorary place in Soviet history as the founder of the country," says he. "Yet, just as U.S. historians can show the warts of George Washington, Soviet historians will be able to do the same with Lenin."

The demythifying process, argues Nina Tumarkin, professor of history at Wellesley College and author of The Cult of Lenin, is necessary if the Soviet Union is to right itself. "Lenin is being brought down to earth to make way for the new myths of perestroika," she says. If Gorbachev's political reform is more than a myth and the government is able to find its legitimacy in increased democracy, it might not need Lenin anymore.

With reporting by James Carney and Paul Hofheinz/Moscow