Lenin's death in the British press

Abstract

This article draws on British press reports on Lenin in the ten days or so after his death on 21 January 1924 and shows how the texts—almost universally hostile in their appraisals—are saturated with gender, class and power distinctions and tropes of race, class, family, climate and geography. These are deployed to explain character or advanced as causative agents. In addition, physiognomic explanations predominate, and supposed binary opposites of mind/body, self/others, emotion/intellect and personal/political inform the ways in which journalists and pundits construct Lenin. The press advances a narrative of Revolution and Soviet power, which suggests that communism has already failed in Russia and that capitalism is being restored. Most writers predict the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union. But the purpose of the article is not to explain or examine these representations in a conventional manner. It is to conduct an experiment in getting to grips with the problem of how to engage with past moments by recycling and reordering material from the press with a minimum of authorial comment, analysis and contextualization.