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MY LENINIANA

25 April, 00:00

On January 21, 1971, the first (only in our city at that time) television channel again ran the film Lenin in 1918 on the occasion of a new anniversary of the Leader’s death. My mother and the whole family watched the film from beginning to end and then went to the maternity hospital. I came into the world the next day, so I can say most emphatically that the image of Lenin has been with me since my day of birth and even a bit earlier.

Then was the kindergarten with, of course, the portrait of a lovely boy Volodia Ulianov on the wall, and with verses and songs like “Lenin also was once a little boy with curly hair and felt-lined boots.” In class, we were read endearing stories about the childhood of Grandfather Lenin, the apocryphal gospel according to Mariya Prilezhayeva and Zoya Voskresenskaya. I liked the stories very much, I wanted to be as sincere, honest, and industrious (the list of virtues can be continued ad infinitum ) as the angelic boy Volodia, but, for some reason, I always fell short. There were also stories about grownup Lenin: about how he loved children and, as far as I remember, arranged New Year’s parties for them in his country retreat Gorky. And, of course, there was “The Society of Clean Dishes.” Were there any Soviet youngsters who did not have to gulp down cold semolina under the entreaties of nannies saying, “Well, little Mariyka, do you remember us reading about Grandfather Lenin telling us to eat everything up?” That was perhaps the only dark spot on the Leader’s radiant image at the time. Why, of all things, did he want me to lick the plate clean?

In school, I opened a new facet of Lenin’s life story. He happened to do everything only with distinction in a classical gymnasium! And all those who wanted to have the right to called Octobrists (the Communist answer to Cub Scouts — Ed.), wear a small star on their chests, take in the game called A Tour of Placed Related to Lenin, and go to the Lenin Museum with the whole class, also had to make straight A’s. I remember being vaguely surprised, when, on November 7, even the inveterate underachiever Serhiyko, who had drawn (holy terror!) horns onto the portrait of Lenin hanging (naturally) on the class wall, was also made an Octobrist.

But this surprise had not yet raised doubts. Even three or four years later, when we kept telling each other, in the school restroom, the so-called jubilee series jokes that emerged in 1970 (one of the most innocent examples: “A triple bed called Lenin with Us has been produced in honor of Lenin’s centennial”), as a butt of jokes Lenin somehow ran counter, in our awareness, to the textbook Lenin, the hero, L eader, and example to follow. Similarly, we would laugh at jokes about Chapayev (Civil War Red Army commander — Ed.) and his orderly Petka, but then would cry, watching the film where an enemy bullet reaches Chapayev swimming across the river .

But the real eye-opener came, of course, in 1985. I had to sit for promotion exams, but, instead of slaving over textbooks, we would avidly read articles in Ogonek and Novy mir, crying out heatedly: now you see! Didn’t I tell you that! Lenin planned NEP (New Economic Policy, 1921- 1927 — Ed.) as a long-term policy, not a temporary measure! “Letters to the Congress!” Stalin is rude and intolerant! The articles were bringing down everything, the foundations of our society seemed to waver like jelly, but not Lenin! On the contrary, he seemed to have emerged better and nobler in light of what we came to know about him. It turned out the blame should be put on the Leader’s entourage (a familiar tune, isn’t it?) and his followers who distorted the Leninist principles. So, over the next few years, he became for us, to quote writer Fazil Iskander’s phrase of genius, “one who tried to do good but lacked the time.”

And then, of course, came the year 1991. And we, who thought we had come to know the whole truth about our history, read in newspapers and magazines not the emotion- filled and ardent articles typical of the first heat of glasnost but the succinct and sober information laying down true facts and unvarnished quotations from Lenin’s “works” never found his officially published Complete Collected Works. Orders and instructions strewn with the words “shoot down,” “showpiece execution by firing squad,” and “take hostage.” The truth about the shooting of the imperial family in the Ipatyiev house. The truth about German money transferred to the Bolsheviks, by which they bought the Brest Peace. Some of us believed all this at once with some kind of boundless joy. Others were overcoming painfully and tortuously their previous idea of Lenin. Still others do not believe it even now.

A few more years passed. The accusatory fervor has run down. And now I happen to hear occasionally that, in losing our faith in an immaculate Lenin, we have lost too much. We have lost an example to follow, an ideal on which the young were once raised. We have found nothing new, so the holy place is a gaping empty hole. Well, it really is impossible now to force my son to eat up his porridge with such magic words as the Society of Clean Dishes. Or, maybe, it is better for him not to eat it all up?

As to the holy place, it cannot of course remain empty. The point is now children can (and many do!) read a Gospel for Children instead of The Childhood of Illich. Teenagers can (and I hope many do) learn the Ten Commandments instead of “The Moral Code of the Builder of Communism. And the picture of Lenin on the wall has given way to the icon... No, I am wrong. The icon on the wall is in its proper place. It was the portrait of Lenin that hung in something else’s place.

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