Political Ritual and the Cult of Lenin

Abstract

think, Maxim Gorky wrote in 1922, the Russian masses have a special predilection for brutality in the same way, let us say, that the Englishman has a sense of humour.' Gorky was arguing that violence was the basis of all power relationships among the Russian peasantry, and that peasants manifested political dominance by brutalizing each other. Gorky was a Marxist and, of course, had utter disdain for the peasantry. But his observation may fairly be said to reflect that of the new regime, which at the time he wrote was consolidating its power following the protracted Russian Civil War of 1918-1921. Early on in the history of Soviet Russia, brutality and the threat of brutality became a prime means of expressing political power; likewise, popular submission to brutality and to the threat of it became a conventional manifestation of political acquiescence. This, perhaps, is what Professor Gibian means by the domesticated quality of terror in Russia.2 I should like to suggest that Soviet Russia also developed at least one alternate convention for demonstrating acquiescence to political authority: public participation in organized political ritual. The first such ritual to be standardized on a national scale was the cult of Lenin. As the Russian Revolution progressed, the Communist Party recognized the need for new symbols to confer meaning upon the political chaos. Increasingly the Party centered its claims to legitimate rule on the figure of Lenin who, as the revolution's author and guiding force, provided a fit subject for idealization. The Lenin cult was an organized system of rituals and symbols whose collective function was to arouse in the cult's participants and spectators the reverential mood necessary to create an emotional bond between them and the Party-the symbolic Lenin personified. At the very least the Lenin cult ritual was to induce the public to go through the motions