The Icon and the Axe

Departing from us, Comrade Lenin adjured us to hold high and keep pure the great title of member of the Party. We swear to thee, Comrade Lenin, that we will fulfill thy bequest with honor! . ..

Departing from us, Comrade Lenin adjured us to guard the unity of our party like the apple of our eye. We swear to thee, Comrade Lenin, that this obligation too, we will fulfill with honor!56

The seminarian was clearly in a better position than the cosmopolitan to create a national religion of Leninism. He felt no sense of embarrassment as Lenin's embalmed body was laid out for public veneration with hands folded in the manner of the saints in the monastery of the caves of Kiev. The incongruous mausoleum in Red Square, which paid tribute to Lenin and the new order by exemplifying the purely proletarian "constructivist" style of architecture, was forced to pay a deeper tribute to an older order represented by the crypt beneath and the Kremlin walls above it. Stalin transformed the simple building into a shrine for pilgrims and the site of his own periodic epiphanies on festal days. He chose the traditional, theological way of immortalizing Lenin in contrast to the Promethean effort by the Revolutionary intellectuals to discover after Lenin's death the material forces behind his genius through "cyto-architectonic" research (involving imported German scientists, innumerable microphotographs of his brain, and the projected comparative study of minute cranial slices from other leading thinkers).57

For the rest of his life Stalin claimed to be nothing more than the rock on which Lenin had built his church. His theoretical writings were always presented as updated thoughts on "problems of Leninism." In the name of Lenin's theory of the past Stalin felt free to contradict both Lenin and himself and, of course, to suppress Lenin's final uncomplimentary assessment of Stalin.

Along with the forms of theological discourse went the new content of Great Russian patriotism. Stalin rehabilitated a whole host of Russian national heroes in the thirties and introduced ever sharper differentiations in pay and privilege to goad on production. The ingeniously Marxist and almost nameless sociological histories of Pokrovsky, which had dominated Soviet historical writing until his death in 1932, were "unmasked" two years later as a deviation from "true Marxism," which henceforth glorified such unproletarian figures as Peter the Great and General Suvorov. The fiercely proletarian novels of the period of the first five-year plan, such as Cement and How the Steel Was Tempered, were replaced by a new wave of chauvinistic novels and films glorifying Russian warriors of the past.

By the late thirties, Stalin had produced a curious new mass culture that could be described by inverting his classic phrase "nationalist in form, socialist in content." The forms of Russian life were now clearly socialist: all agriculture had been collectivized and all of Russia's expanding means of production brought under State ownership and central planning. But socialization throughout the Stalin era brought few material benefits to the consumer, or spiritual benefits to those concerned with greater equality or increased freedom. The content of the new ersatz culture was retrogressively nationalistic. Under a patina of constitutions and legal procedures lay the dead hand of Nicholas I's official nationalism and some of the macabre touches of Ivan the Terrible. Stalin's proudly announced "wave of the future" looks, on closer analysis, more like backwash from the past: ghostly voices suddenly returning like the legendary chimes from the submerged city of Kitezh on Midsummer Eve-only to jangle on uncontrolled and out of tune.

Even the most servile of Bolshevik poets, Efim Pridvorov ("the courtier"), who wrote under the name Bedny ("the poor"), was thrown out of court in 1936 for his Bogatyrs, which made the "vulgar Marxist" error of burlesquing these popular heroes of the early Russian epics. The following year saw a host of purely patriotic festivals: a Pushkin centenary, a 125th anniversary of the Battle of Borodino, and a revival of Glinka's Life for the Tsar (under the alternate title of Ivan Susanin). The growing fear first of Japan and then of Germany accelerated Stalin's tendency to rely on nationalistic rather than socialistic appeals. The general staff and many traditional army titles were reintroduced in the late thirties; the League of the Militant Godless was abolished shortly before the German invasion of Russia in 1941, and a limited concordat with the Patriarch of Moscow agreed upon shortly after. So traditionalist did Stalin seem to have become that many in the West were prepared to accept at face value the gesture of their wartime ally in abolishing the Communist International in 1943.