Obraz Lenina v massovom vospriatii sovetskikh liudei po arkhivnym materialam (review)

During most of the Soviet era, the Lenin cult ran in the background of daily life almost as unobtrusively as a computer operating system, imposing meaning on the myriad events, developments, discoveries, and decisions that constituted the Soviet historical experience. The cult arose amidst the ambiguities of the NEP, permeated the crisis of legitimacy and struggle for power after Lenin's death, dimmed as Stalin used it to confirm his own cult, revived after his demise, and persisted throughout the Brezhnev era. Even the fall of communism has not yet dislodged Lenin from his moldering mausoleum. Ol´ga Velikanova is well suited to tell the story of this cult. She grew up in and around the Lenin Museum of St. Petersburg, where her mother was the assistant director. She became a guide and researcher at the Museum of the Revolution in Petersburg. She is currently a fellow at St. Petersburg State University and at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Toronto. Her first book, Making of an Idol: On Uses of Lenin, appeared in Germany in 1996. ¹ The fact that her second book on the subject is also published abroad suggests that some of Lenin's post-Soviet countrymen have not yet reached a level of comfort regarding him sufficient to allow them to examine the cult and its implications for their own experience.

Velikanova was inspired in part by Nina Tumarkin's pioneering study of Lenin's cult, which appeared almost 20 years ago, when there was virtually no access to unpublished documents. ² Velikanova now explores a wide range of archival materials to answer questions Tumarkin could only raise about how the cult developed and how public perceptions of Lenin diverged from his official image over three-quarters of a century. Velikanova's archival sources fall into roughly three categories. They include materials gathered by the political police, various local and central party documents, and letters to the editors of newspapers, public officials, and political leaders. She begins with a cook's tour of these resources, reminding us that Soviet authorities and their supporters left a unique legacy of information, most of which they never expected to be viewed with critical eyes. Where else can the historian draw on secret weekly eyewitness reports on the reactions of different groups of people to political events, as well as an ongoing anthology of rumors, gossip, anecdotes, and folklore about high politics? Where else can the historian browse through excerpts from a significant proportion of all domestic and foreign correspondence and telegraphic traffic? Of course, no sources are perfect, and the reports of spies, snoops, and snitches are hardly unbiased. While some testimony reveals more about the apparatus and its minions than the people under surveillance, that too is of great interest.

This is a study of overlapping official and popular mythologies, and the problem of distinguishing among them is considerable. Are the reports of the political police, local party officials, or enthusiasts evidence of an official mythology or something else? Can we believe police informers when we know the paranoia of their world and can guess their eagerness to please their bosses? Velikanova negotiates this minefield successfully by showing the diversity across a range of sources. Take, for example, the issue of mail. In the early 1920s, soldiers expected their mail to be read, but most people who sent domestic letters did not. From October 1923 through October 1924 the VChK/OGPU examined more than 8 million letters and 8 million telegrams, which included a significant percentage of ordinary correspondence as well as everything sent abroad or from the army. It is remarkable that this extraordinarily mistrustful regime was still able to govern while devoting massive resources...