Evgeny Maizel. For the Motherland, for Lenin

For the Motherland, for Lenin
Evgeny Maizel

Publication date: December 15, 2000

Alexander Pyatigorsky said somewhere that the British are characterized by an extremely strict attitude towards their own past, the content of which is not verified (oddly enough) with the conjuncture of the current day and remains in this sense unchanged. For example - I quote approximately - an Englishman can easily say about his old acquaintance, who at the time of his speech was convicted of brutal murders: “Oh, Tommy was a nice fellow...”. And this will mean that Tommy was a nice guy, and that’s how he will be remembered. What happened to him later - when he did what he did - is a separate story. Pyatigorsky adds that for us, for Russians, the opposite is typical - when we mention this kind of acquaintance, we will certainly wrinkle our brows and say to each other: “But still, even then there was something like that in him...”

Piatigorsky's observation is, of course, mythological: neither this England nor this Tommy exists. But what do we care about this, with our craving for perfection?

The war with one’s own past has long been widespread in Russia. Since the time of the Bolshevik revolution, our psychotic historicist boom has not subsided. First, in accordance with the left-revolutionary project, history was “written anew” by the Bolsheviks. Then it (and at the same time the Bolsheviks themselves) was rewritten by the meticulous Stalin , who loved accuracy. With ever fewer adjustments, this continued until perestroika, when the passion for the next palimpsest flared up with new, unprecedented force. If previously the only legitimate chronicler was the Government, then since 1985 several social movements rushed to become census takers, pushing each other aside. Their sad difference from the utopian, Marxist-modernist fantasies published by the Soviets is the predominance of conservative-revanchist sentiments. And since revanchism as such is essentially an unreflected, predominantly allergic reaction to the excess (and indigestion) of the swallowed Yesterday, it is not surprising that its adherents genetically suffer from historical myopia and general intellectual helplessness.

The above also applies to modern monarchists with the official rhetoric of 100 years ago; and to the communists, who in their imitation of the communists of the past do not even achieve the parodic, “farcical” effect noted by Marx ; This diagnosis is also relevant in relation to our liberals with the indispensable anti-communist component of their bourgeois pathos.

The impetus for writing this text was the recent demand of Mr. Chubais, then supported, as usual, by the SPS faction , “to remove Lenin’s corpse from Red Square.” Higher education was not enough for the enlightened oligarch to recognize the Mausoleum as a unique historical monument. Even in mummified form, the leader of the world proletariat for domestic liberals is still more alive than all the living: almost a personal enemy, the people's executioner, a German spy... Anyone, but not who Lenin is, regardless of their (and anyone else's) ) political convictions - one of the largest figures of the last century...

Minus the Christian-spiritualist desire to “betray the body to the Earth” (we, of course, will not discuss it), the entire argument in favor of burying Ilyich can easily be reduced to the following formulation: The mausoleum was a symbol of Soviet power, a symbol of Communism, and therefore - if the current government wants to distance itself from the course of its predecessors, the course of the CPSU - it is obliged to bury Lenin and generally somehow figure out what this low building called the “Mausoleum” is doing on Red Square.

What is more here: mysticism or casuistry? If it’s mysticism, then maybe we should also deal with the Execution Place on the same square (also a symbol of who knows what), and at the same time with the Kremlin itself? No memorial will withstand the criticism leveled at it from the standpoint of the notorious political correctness (or, which is almost the same thing, mystical symbolism). It seems that highly educated Democrats really do speak the same language as the illiterate Reds. In the minds of the intelligentsia of our Duma, the Kremlin should become like the aborigines who burn crucifixes in the hope of thereby neutralizing the hated Christian aliens. Or, to use a more recent analogy, the Moscow mob who felt the taste of “freedom” and spontaneously dismantled Dzerzhinsky at the Lubyanka... Why, when this happened, did not Mr. Chubais remind us that “the truth is not established by the majority”? "Are we barbarians or not?" - asks Nemtsov . In response, we shrug our shoulders: yes, you do.

In the text “Russian Showdown,” Andrei Levkin writes that his native Riga has become an empty, dead city - so thoroughly have the traces of those who once founded and built Riga been erased in it: the Germans, the Swedes, and now the Russians. Of course, one can object to Levkin that the locus from which the sign characterizing it has been removed does not lose anything semantically, and even gains and becomes more complicated. In a "house that Jack built" way, it goes from "a place where a monument was once erected" to "a place where a monument was once erected, which was once torn down." But the objector himself will pass by such a place without stopping. Who is worse off from this is another question.

Meanwhile, a generation has already grown up in Russia to whom Nicholas II and Lenin are equally dear (or indifferent).

Munster, USSR