Native Communist Party, father Stalin, and dear Lenin…

Unlike Nazi totalitarianism which did not try to hide the antihuman essence of its ideology, communist totalitarianism held in power not only thanks to terror but also due to constant use of fraud. Soviet propaganda always used the words borrowed from the European political lexicon of democratic and humanistic orientation. Although, in realities of antihuman regime such words as “freedom,” “equality,” and “brotherhood” lost any sense, the government continued to use them for manipulative effect on public consciousness. As Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski once noted, the purpose of propaganda in communist countries was not to simply lie but to destroy the very idea of truth in normal understanding of the word.

Particularly we should consider such manipulative techniques as using words taken from the field of family relations in the language of political propaganda. For example, the name of Communist Party was often used with an attribute “native” – Soviet people were building a bright future under the leadership of native Communist Party. The absurdity of such combination of words was that the word “party,” which comes from the Latin root meaning “a part” refers to a union of people for political views, thus, a party can not be native even for the members of such union, not to mention all of the country’s population.

Another common stamp of Soviet agitprop, which still remains dominant, is “brother nations.” The peoples of the Soviet Union were always called “brother nations,” “family of nations,” “one family,” etc. I must say that Marxist propaganda started to use the mentioned phrasing even before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. In epistolary heritage of Lesia Ukrainka we can find eloquent fact, which indicates that the poetess had already then recognized hypocrisy in that stamp from the internationalist rhetoric of Marxists. In her letter to Mykhailo Kryvniuk from February 18, 1903 she wrote: “It is time to take the point that ‘brother nations’ are just neighbors linked, however, in one yoke but in the deeper essence they do not have identical interests and, therefore, it is better to act side by side but each on their own hand without interfering in neighbor’s internal policy.”

Naming Joseph Stalin “Father of Nations” bound totalitarian propaganda with even an older tradition – tradition of Eastern despots. Rare immorality and cynicism of the Bolsheviks lay in the fact that by using family vocabulary for intimization of language of political propaganda and humanization of the images of Bolshevik leaders in the public perception, at the same time, in real life they with blatant cruelty destroyed all personal contacts and affections – not only public and friendly, but also family connections. After all, the cult of Pavlik Morozov put in immature child’s mind the conviction that it is a “correct” behavior to watch your own father and denounce him to the authorities.

But again, our brilliant poetess prophetically warned about the danger of such “fathers of nations”coming to power in her writing. She still remains the unheard prophet in Ukrainian culture. Let us recall the words of the neophyte-servant from the dramatic poem “In the Catacombs”:

Prometheus alone I homage pay,
he did not make his people into slaves,
he brought the light with fire
and not with words,
he fought not meekly but
with courage bold,
he suffered not just three
but countless days,
his tyrant he did not a father call
but as a universal despot cursed,
foreboding the destruction of all gods.

(translation by John Weir)

At the same time, the Communist propaganda, entirely in the spirit of hierarchical succession, sculptured an image of a gentle grandfather from the dead Lenin. Verbal expression of such portrait was the widely used name Illich borrowed from respectful form of addressing older people generally accepted among Russian peasants, from where it spread at some point to the villages of the Russian Ukraine. Patronimic name Illich as well as the rest of “family” vocabulary from the arsenal of Soviet propaganda appealed to the deep structures of mass consiousness humanizing the image of the World Proletariat Leader.

Instead, the true face of “gentle grandfather,” whose embalmed body is still the object of worship in a mausoleum in the central square of Moscow, reveals itself from the texts of his orders and resolutions. Lviv newspaper Post Postup (Issue No. 1 from 2012) recently reminded about the evil essence of those resolutions. Here are only a few of the examples. On the letter from Felix Dzerzhynsky from December 19, 1919 about nearly a million imprisoned Cossacks Lenin put the resolution: “Shoot all.”

On August 11, 1918 Lenin sent the following order to the Bolsheviks in Penza: “Hang (hang for sure) so that people would see at least 100 well-off peasants. Find firmer men for the execution.”

On May 1, 1919 Lenin sent Dzerzhynsky such an order: “It is necessary to eliminate priests and religion as quickly as possible. Priests have to be arrested as counterrevolutionaries and saboteurs, shoot relentlessly and everywhere. And as many as possible. Churches must be closed. Seal the premises of temples and convert them into warehouses.”

And now, when these and other documents that show the true face of the sadist and misanthrope have already been published both in Russia and Ukraine, according to the author of the quoted article by Roman Krylovych, one can count almost 2,500 monuments to Lenin and nearly 30,000 of his busts.