COMMUNISTS
(See Cover)
Iconoclasts always end up needing more icons than anyone else. Thus the familiar, revered image is seen everywhere in Russia—framed in classrooms and pasted on peeling walls, idealized on canvas and frozen in marble. It is almost as ubiquitous in China, where it is often carried in processions, shaped of paper or flowers, surrounded by mock dragons and popping firecrackers.
The face with its high-domed forehead and arched eyebrows seems slightly Asiatic to Western eyes; in Asia it looks Western. Both the Russians and the Chinese passionately claim it as their own. On either side of the great split that now divides the Communist world, the disputants exalt Vladimir Ilyich Lenin as their patron and prophet. Lenin looks on as, in his name, Nikita Khrushchev denounces the Chinese as dogmatists, fools, adventurers and warmongers. And Lenin looks on as, in his name, Mao Tse-tung denounces the Russians as revisionists, traitors, bourgeois cowards and capitulationists.
Monthly Outing. He has been dead for 40 years, lying inside a glass coffin in the squat redgranite mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square, where thousands of Soviet citizens queue up to march soberly past his waxy form, guarded by rigid Russian soldiers as immobile as the corpse. Not long ago, when Khrushchev was asked how Lenin's remains were kept looking so lifelike, he replied: "That's easy. We just take him out once a month and re-embalm him." So it is with Lenin's ideological remains. Constantly re-embalmed, retouched, re-clothed, he remains at the center of a savage historical fight, the most important split in the history of Communism.
If he could return from that other world whose existence, as a good Marxist atheist, he of course denied, Lenin would be dismayed by the quarrel but hardly surprised. Contrary to its reputation, Communism has never been a "monolith." Communists live in a violent hate-love relationship, and have always reacted to one another's heresies far more viciously than to any "class enemy."
In a sense, it is absurd to find Communists today fighting each other—and the rest of the world—over a tomb, with a mass of dated polemics used both as sacred writ and a manual of strategy. But unlike monarchists, Reds cannot find legitimacy in a family tree or by divine right. Unlike democrats, they do not draw their mandate from the people they rule. Communist legitimacy, such as it is, derives from the writings of Karl Marx and from the words and deeds of Lenin, the first man to apply Marxism to a living nation.
First-Class Lion. As Nikita Khrushchev celebrated his 70th birthday last week, the image of Lenin appeared in yet another prominent place: Nikita's chest. The Order of Lenin was pinned on him by President Leonid Brezhnev. There were other decorations. Outer Mongolia awarded Khrushchev its Order of Suhe-Bator, Czechoslovakia weighed in with the Order of the White Lion, first class, with gold chain, and top orders came from East Germany and Rumania. The congratulations almost recalled the "personality cult" that once surrounded Stalin; they salute Nikita as a "militant leader, a fiery tribune, giving his burning energy in the service of the cause of Communism."
But that cause is in deep trouble. When Khrushchev took over Russia, he could boast