Lenin, RIP

As an old Sovietologist I could not resist commenting on Maryna Zamyatina’s musings about the central role Lenin (and once upon a time Stalin) played in the moral universe of people being brought up in the System. We who studied that system from our distant library carrels were bemused, and there was even a wonderful monograph on the Lenin cult called Lenin Lives! Still, while we also read the Twelve Commandments for the Builder of Communism, and studies were written about it, the moral universe of those days seemed somehow incomprehensible in its absurdity. After all, a good four volumes of Lenin’s officially published Complete Collected Works were chock full of his Civil War era hang ‘em high orders, ones little more tame than those to come out later. Did people really not know about them? How could it be?

The Soviet Union was in a sense a self-contained civilization, not a terribly effective or humane one, but a civilization nonetheless. The people here accepted its values as their own because they were fed to them precisely as Maryna describes from the cradle on up. Then came the end. Anyone who has read Volkogonov’s Lenin knows that the man who carcass remains on display in Moscow was a bloodthirsty fanatic and in his final years gradually succumbing to a brain sickness, running a state without all his wits about him. This was not the Lenin whom the Soviet people had believed in, even loved. And it did leave a gaping moral hole.

Nobody has really figured out how to fill the moral vacuum thus created. Christian values have meaning for some but by no means all. Putting the nation or state in that position is both dangerous and impossible. Thus we have a class of people with no moral compass except their own self-interest. This may be why Ukrainian politics has become so openly venal and amoral. The post-Soviet states seem to be run by people who really do not care about their country as long as they can take whatever they can get their hands on. Berezovsky in Russia might be the ideal type of this kind of political-criminal entrepreneur, but Ukraine has quite a few smaller Berezovskies of its own, and nobody had better get in their way. This is both a moral tragedy and a political one. Will they allow Ukraine to even try to evolve into a civilized state? Not if they can help it.