Lenin’s Memorization as a Hierotopic Project

Abstract

This article traces the implementation of the concept of ‘temple consciousness’ in hierotopic processes, including the construction of monuments and the organization of memorial sites. The memorials were designed to stand as an eternal reminder of an event that was experienced as a common heroic story in its symbolic representation. The study shows the transit and transformation of memorial discourse in the Soviet and post-Soviet symbolic spaces, which manifested itself in the redefinition of memorial sites in the direction of either actualization or levelling of the cultural and historical memory, given the dominant ideological paradigm. The sources of research, in addition to architectural and artistic monuments, include the mythopoetics of the mass culture, which also acts as a projection of ideology and contains archetypal patterns of the collective unconscious.Lenin’s memorialization as ‘the leader of the world proletariat’ became useful. The memorial policy of the Bolshevik Party was influenced by the ideas and events that took place back in history, including the discovery of the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun in Luxor (1922) and the teachings of Russian cosmologist Nikolai Fedorov in the work Philosophy of Common Cause published in full in 1913. The use of religion should point to key preconditions that have ensured the development of Soviet ideology which should be codified through the dominance of religion, in particular as ‘political religion’ or ‘secular religion’. The peculiarity of this phenomenon is the merging of two forms of thinking: political and religious.In addition, the Bolshevik atheists allowed the bodily resurrection of Lenin considering their unconditional belief in the “science of the future”; incidentally, they were not mistaken, because the leader’s body, engaged in the research work, survived until the invention of the cloning procedure. The secularized religious energy was mobilized to achieve political goals, which made possible the implementation of a totalitarian system, revealing the imitative essence of totalitarianism, which parasitized on religious thinking. Lenin’s Mausoleum is seen as a reliquary temple in the view of the communist cult of Eternity, which became the basis of Lenin’s cult.The levelling of the cult of Lenin began in the 1970s, which was facilitated by the pompous celebration of his 100th anniversary, which gave rise to political anecdotes as a symptom of the destruction of Lenin’s myth. The Revolution of Dignity (2013–2014) in Ukraine contributed to the dismantling of monuments to Lenin which were seen as personifications of Soviet-style ‘Leninism’ and symbols of imperial-Russian oppression.The purpose of this article is to substantiate the legitimacy of the author’s proposed concept of ‘political hierotopy’.