THE scene was symbolic and significant: Soviet leaders gathering solemnly, even reverently last week in Ulyanovsk (formerly Simbirsk), where, 100 years ago, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was born on April 22. They had excellent reason to be reverent and grateful, for their formidable aggregate of power still derives from Lenin's genius and from his achievements as the true architect of Communism. Thus they will invoke his name to legitimize their rule, and adroitly select from his speeches and writings to justify the existing social order. They will cite Lenin to sanctify Russia's quarrel with China, its invasion of Czechoslovakia and its imperious nuclear stance. Outside Russia, wherever there are Communists, men will also congregate in obeisance to the memory of a man who changed the world beyond recognition. Far more than Marx, Lenin is almost the only symbol shared by the world Communist movement, fragmented as it is today by national, ideological and tactical differences.
"Lenin Lives!" is an incantation that has been ritualistically repeated in Russia since his death in 1924; during this centennial year, the official worship of the Lenin cult has approached religious delirium. The Russian penchant for excesses aside, the existence of such a mystique should hardly surprise the West. Every nation requires what sociologists term a charter myth, meaning a founding father and a founding ideology. In the Soviet Union, the need for a charter myth has been particularly insistent. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 attempted to destroy every traditional institution—political, religious and economic—that had held Russia together since the 15th century. From its inception, moreover, the Soviet system has demanded terrible sacrifices of its people that had to be justified in the name of Lenin's ideals. While Stalin ruled by mass police terror, the extraordinary achievement of the Soviet people in industrializing and defending their nation could only be fully explained as an act of faith.
The Remote Invocation
Only Lenin offers a thread of continuity and legitimacy of rule for Russia's present, apparently divided leadership. Virtually all of Lenin's closest Bolshevik comrades—Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev—were dishonored and murdered by Stalin. For 40 years, from Lenin's death in 1924 through Khrushchev's ouster in 1964, every Russian leader was irreversibly disgraced by his successors. Such an interruption in legitimate succession demands a fresh reinforcement of the link between the present leaders and the founding father.
Besides, it seems to be a law of Communist history that the more remote from Leninism the Soviet system becomes, the greater is the effort made to invoke him. Thus the less that Russian leaders are interested in fomenting world revolution and the less that they are concerned with creating a Communist society as Lenin saw it, the greater the volume of Leninist rhetoric. Lenin's real remoteness is underscored by the problems with which a great power must struggle in an age of computer technology. Just as Lenin discovered that there was little in Marx to tell him how to rule Russia once he had seized power, so there is little in Lenin to tell Brezhnev how to build an ABM system.