This is not a book of history but a book of devotion. Lenin in Our Life, translated by T. Kapustin and edited by Y. Sdobnikov, was issued by Progress Publishers in Moscow in 1967, the fiftieth year of the October Revolution, and it belongs to that jubilee as surely as a wreath belongs to a monument. It has no single author, because it is a collection: eighteen short reminiscence-pieces by Soviet writers, artists and scientists — Lydia Zhak on Gorky, Alexander Deich on Lunacharsky, Sergei Konenkov the sculptor, the cosmonaut chronicler Yevgeny Ryabchikov — each recalling an encounter with Lenin, or the mark Lenin left on a life. The unsigned foreword, "About the Book," states the organising idea with a candour worth keeping in view, because it is the whole method in one sentence. The reader, it says, "need not be surprised that among the men and women whose reminiscences are collected in the present volume he will find not only old and tried Bolsheviks and Lenin's trusted comrades-in-arms, but also those who may never have had a chance of meeting or speaking with Lenin."
That is the first thing to understand. A book of reminiscences that admits, on its opening page, that some of its rememberers never met the man they remember, has stopped being a record of a life and become something else: a liturgy of presence. And presence — living, continuing, immortal presence — is exactly what the volume is built to produce. Lenin died on 21 January 1924. This book was made to demonstrate that he had not, in any sense that mattered to the Soviet state of 1967, gone anywhere at all.
Date the text before reading it. The catalogue says 1967, and here the catalogue is honest: the essays reach forward to the space age, to the Novosibirsk science city of the early 1960s and the cosmonauts, so this is a genuine mid-1960s composition and not, as several Progress titles turn out to be, an older text in a fresh jacket. That matters, because it fixes the book in a precise moment. Nikita Khrushchev, who in 1956 had denounced the "cult of personality" around Stalin, had himself been removed in 1964; the Brezhnev leadership was settling in; and the approaching fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution called for a vast display of legitimacy. The problem such a display had to solve was delicate. The cult of Stalin had been officially disowned. But a state descended from October still needed a sacred founder — a figure of unquestioned authority whose name could bless every undertaking. The solution was to pour the whole reverence that had been withdrawn from Stalin back into Lenin, now purified and made safe by being long dead. Lenin in Our Life is one small vessel of that operation. It was commissioned, translated and exported to show the world, and to remind Soviet readers, that the founder lived on in the daily texture of the society he had made.
Read that way, the book's method is consistent and even beautiful in its own terms. Its Lenin is not primarily a thinker with positions that could be argued; he is a warmth, an attentiveness, a "guiding star" — the phrase is Konenkov's title. He shakes the hand of the architect Ivan Zholtovsky and talks of educating a new intelligentsia; he finds time, in a freezing hall in 1921, for the inventor Friedrich Tsander and his plan for an interplanetary ship, and asks him gently, "Will you go up there first?"; he blesses, at a distance, the fruit-breeder Michurin and the space visionary Tsiolkovsky, neither of whom he ever met. The essays repeat, in a dozen keys, a single chord: to have been near Lenin, or merely to have read him, was to become more fully alive. The most explicit statement of this comes near the book's centre: "In the presence of the living Lenin," one contributor writes, "everyone felt the vibrant joy of the asserted reality of one's own existence." This is not the language of political biography. It is the language of communion.
And it culminates, as a jubilee book of 1967 almost had to, in the heavens. The closing essays bind Lenin to the Soviet space triumph, the regime's proudest possession after Gagarin's flight of 1961. Because the Soviet people are "armed with Lenin's immortal teaching," Ryabchikov writes, "there are no limits to their accomplishments and dreams"; the cosmonauts themselves "are all Leninists, implementing his behests." The dead founder is made the author of the future — of rockets he never saw, launched by men and women born after he died. In the last essay the Novosibirsk physicists, most of them "born after January 21, 1924," carry his image "from earliest childhood." The one date the whole book fixes upon, the single hard fact of chronology it will not let go, is the date of Lenin's death.
Here is where the volume becomes something more interesting than a period curiosity, and where an honest introduction has to do its work. For the living, immortal, ever-present Lenin of this book is an icon that has quietly replaced a man — and the man, when you set him beside his icon, spent the last conscious months of his life fighting the very thing the icon now serves.
Consider what the real Lenin of 1922 and 1923 was doing. He was not radiating benign immortality. He was a sick man, half-paralysed by strokes, using what strength remained to warn the Party against a danger he had seen too late: the growth of a bureaucratic apparatus, and the concentration of unaccountable power in the hands of its General Secretary, Stalin. In December 1922 he dictated the confidential letter that became known as his Testament, and ten days later added the postscript that has never lost its force: "Stalin is too rude, and this fault, entirely supportable in relations among us Communists, becomes insupportable in the office of General Secretary." He proposed, in plain words, that the comrades find a way to remove Stalin from that post. He drafted a "bombshell" against Stalin on the national question; he dictated a final letter breaking off personal relations with him; he wrote, in the article Better Fewer, but Better, that "we have bureaucratism not only in the Soviet institutions but also in the party." This was the last political act of Lenin's life: an attempt to check the machine that, within a decade, would be embalming him.
None of it is in this book. Not the Testament, not the struggle with Stalin, not the word "bureaucratism" turned against the Party itself. Stalin's name occurs exactly once in the whole volume — in Lydia Zhak's essay on Gorky, and even there it appears in a form that rewards attention. She notes that in 1917–18 disputes over Gorky split the Party, "the two extremes of which were expressed by the articles of Lenin and of Stalin," and that Gorky's later work "disproved the prediction made by Stalin, who himself later radically changed his views." This is the single crack through which the awkward, quarrelling, human world of the early Bolsheviks shows itself — a real disagreement, between Lenin and Stalin, admitted on the page. But notice how safe it is. It is a dispute about a novelist, not about power; and it is resolved by the reassuring formula that Stalin "later radically changed his views." The one place the book touches the conflict at the heart of the regime's origins, it touches it to soothe it.
There is, too, the matter of temperament. The Lenin who is celebrated on every page of this book was, in life, conspicuously uncomfortable with celebration. His aversion to being made an object of reverence is well attested — when the Moscow Party organised a jubilee for his fiftieth birthday in April 1920, he arrived only as the eulogies were ending and asked, in effect, that the Party spare him the ceremony and get back to work. Even Trotsky, no flatterer of the mature Soviet cult, recorded the trait plainly: "Lenin had no taste for the exaggerations of anniversary or funeral panegyrics." A book of anniversary panegyrics, exported for a jubilee, is thus not merely selective about Lenin's politics; it is at odds with his manner. The distaste for adulation was itself edited out, because a founder who waves the wreaths away cannot be the object of a wreath-laying industry.
The deeper irony is doctrinal, and the book walks into it without knowing. Its Lenin is the immortal presiding genius of a mighty state, its ministries, its academies, its cosmodromes. Lenin's own most famous book, The State and Revolution, written on the eve of October, demanded the opposite: not the perfection of the state but its withering away, the dismantling of the "special apparatus" of officials standing above society. The state that produced Lenin in Our Life — with its Progress Publishers, its Institute of Marxism-Leninism, its editorial boards and its export catalogues — was the negation of that programme, grown vast and permanent and self-worshipping. And it is precisely that state which needed the immortal Lenin. A founder who wanted the apparatus to die away is inconvenient; a founder who is an ever-living warmth, a guiding star, blesses the apparatus by his mere continued presence and asks nothing of it.
There is a small, unbearable emblem of this in the Zholtovsky essay. The old architect wishes Lenin a hundred years of life, and Lenin laughs it off — "That's overdoing it, I'm afraid. But, in general, we Bolsheviks are immortal." The line is offered as a charming pleasantry about the permanence of ideas. Read it in 1967, with the founder's chemically preserved body lying in the granite mausoleum on Red Square and pilgrims filing past it, and the pleasantry curdles. The state took Lenin's throwaway remark and made it literal. The man who fought the cult became its central relic; the theorist who wanted the state to die was installed as the state's undying god. This is not a point to make with a sneer — the reminiscences were written, many of them, by people who had loved Lenin or been genuinely changed by the Revolution, and their feeling is not counterfeit. But feeling that has been organised, at scale, by the ideological apparatus of a great power, into an instrument of legitimation, is a political fact, and it is the fact this book is.
What was manufactured here was described, while it was being manufactured, by the anti-Stalinist Marxists who were its first victims. Trotsky, writing in exile, watched the cult being built out of the corpse of the leader whose last advice had been to curb Stalin, and he traced its mechanics precisely. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936) — the standard critique against which every Soviet self-portrait in this series should be measured — he named the process by which the record itself was refashioned: "Even the explanatory notes to the complete works of Lenin are radically worked over in every new edition from the point of view of the personal interests of the ruling staff: the names of 'leaders' magnified, those of opponents vilified; tracks covered up." He mocked "the Soviet idolators with their cult of a bureaucratic state," and observed that the Party program's own promise that the state would die away now "sounds like a spectral voice from the mausoleum." The deepening reverence, he argued, was not sentiment but function: "The increasingly insistent deification of Stalin is, with all its elements of caricature, a necessary element of the regime." Transferred after 1956 from Stalin to the safely dead Lenin, the deification lost none of its function; it simply changed its object.
And Trotsky had already, in 1932, written the history that Lenin in Our Life is designed to make unthinkable. His essay "On the Suppressed Testament of Lenin" reconstructs, from documents, the last struggle: the dictation of the Testament, the letter breaking with Stalin, the manoeuvres by which the ruling group kept Lenin's final words from the Party. He records that "the official historians have in recent years made literally gigantic efforts to wipe out of the memory of man this whole chapter of history," and that when Moscow's oppositionists marched on the tenth anniversary of the Revolution in 1927 carrying a banner that read simply "Fulfill the Testament of Lenin," picked troops broke into the line and tore it down. That is the counter-image to this book. In 1927 men were arrested for asking that Lenin's actual last wishes be honoured; forty years later Progress Publishers exported a volume proving that Lenin was gloriously, immortally, everywhere present — everywhere, that is, except in the one document where he spoke his mind about the men who would inherit his name. The suppression Trotsky described and the veneration this book performs are two sides of a single coin: the founder is kept alive as an icon precisely so that the founder's inconvenient words can stay buried. As Trotsky noted in The Revolution Betrayed, even under the new constitution "the innumerable articles, speeches, and letters of Lenin, ending in his 'testament', will continue ... to be locked up merely because they rub the new leaders the wrong way."
It is worth setting this volume beside its siblings in the same series, for the apparatus produced several Lenins at once and the differences are instructive. Lenin — A Biography (1983), the official life prepared by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, cannot avoid the Testament — by the 1980s it was published in the USSR and known everywhere — so it prints the document and then quietly deletes the sentence about Stalin's rudeness, keeping the remedy and cutting the diagnosis. Triumph of Lenin's Ideas (1978) is the stenographic record of an anniversary conference, Lenin as the banner of a state ceremony. Lenin in Our Life solves the problem of the awkward Lenin more elegantly than either: it does not mutilate the Testament, because it never raises it. By dissolving Lenin into an immortal presence — a feeling, a guiding star, a warmth in the hearts of cosmonauts — the book removes the need to handle his dangerous last words at all. You cannot contradict an icon. It has no positions to check against the record. That is the icon's whole advantage over the theorist, and it is why the apparatus preferred it.
None of this means the book is worthless, and the series does the reader no service by pretending it is. Buried in the veneration is a good deal of real material, and it should be credited. Lydia Zhak's long essay on Gorky is the strongest thing in the volume: it draws on genuine sources — Lenin's letters to Gorky, including the warm and searching letter of November 1909; the correspondence of R. S. Zemlyachka reporting Gorky's financial help to the Bolshevik press; the record of Gorky's 1906 campaign in the European press against loans to the tsar. Framed hagiographically as it is, this is nonetheless a substantial account of one of the important friendships of the revolutionary movement, and much of its documentary detail holds up. The essays on Tsiolkovsky, Tsander and the pre-history of Soviet rocketry preserve real cultural history — Lenin's documented enthusiasm for the electrification plan and for science, his 1920 conversation with H. G. Wells, the "dreamer in the Kremlin." The reminiscences of Lunacharsky at the founding of Soviet education, and of the fruit-breeder Michurin battling official indifference, contain observed human detail that a reader can use, provided the frame is discounted. The book is a poor guide to what Lenin thought and a worthless guide to what happened to his Party after he died; it is a not-negligible source of anecdote and texture about the early Soviet cultural world, and about the emotional history of the cult itself, which it documents by embodying.
For the reader who wants the other side of the coin — the man rather than the icon, the last struggle rather than the eternal presence — the texts are close at hand and were written by people who paid for them. Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed anatomises the bureaucratic state that this book venerates; his 1932 essay on the suppressed Testament restores the chapter of history that this book is built to erase; and Lenin's own final writings, the Testament and Better Fewer, but Better and The State and Revolution, say in his own voice what his official mourners could not let him say. Lenin in Our Life is most valuable, in the end, precisely as evidence — evidence of how a revolution's bureaucratic heirs learned to keep their founder immortal so that they need never again hear his last advice. The wreath, laid often enough and grandly enough, becomes a way of not reading the will.