It is difficult now to establish the actual emotions of the crowd that passed before Lenin’s bier. One thing is clear: everyone, even the enemies of Lenin and communism, recognized the significance of the moment. The history of an enormous country, which had always depended on the personal characteristics of its ruler, was once again at a crossroads. It was time to exclaim as Pushkin had in
Next to Bulgakov’s passage, the reaction of seventeen-year-old Dmitri (“Mitya”) Shostakovich, a student at the Petrograd Conservatory and a beginning composer (expressed in a letter to Tatyana Glivenko, with whom he was in love), seems almost like an understatement: “I’m sad, Tanechka, very sad. I’m sad that VI. Lenin has died and that I will not be able to say farewell to him because he is being buried in Moscow. The Petrograd Soviet applied to have his body moved to Petrograd, but this application must have been refused.”
On January 26, the Second All-Union Congress of Soviets was convened, and at its first session, dedicated to Lenin, the general secretary of the ruling party spoke. Joseph Stalin was a Georgian of medium height with a neatly trimmed mustache and a pockmarked face. (Today the two most famous Georgians in the West are Stalin and George Balanchine.) In his low, resonant voice heavy with a Georgian accent, Stalin declared “As he left us, Comrade Lenin willed us to preserve and strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat. We vow to you, Comrade Lenin, that we will not spare any effort to obey honorably this commandment of yours as well!” To immortalize the memory of their leader, the congress decided to establish a special day of mourning, to build a mausoleum for Lenin on Red Square in Moscow, and to publish his complete collected works.
The Congress, “fulfilling the unanimous request of the workers of Petrograd,” also renamed the city Leningrad, explaining in a special resolution, “In Petrograd the great proletarian revolution had its first, decisive victory…. Like an unscalable cliff, Red Petrograd stood high all these years, and remains today the first citadel of Soviet power…. The first workers’ and peasants’ government in the world was created in this city…. Let this major center of the proletarian revolution from this day forward be connected with the name of the greatest leader of the proletariat, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov-Lenin.”5
The city’s renaming, the second in fewer than ten years, was, like the first, hasty, momentous, and ill-fated. When St. Petersburg was renamed Petrograd in August 1914 by Nicholas II, it was intended to “Slavicize” the capital of the empire at war with Germany. At the time many considered the tsar’s action not so much in bad taste as filled with evil portents. Alexander Benois, who had always maintained that of all the mistakes made by the tsarist regime the most unforgivable was this “betrayal of Petersburg,” insisted, “I am even disposed to believe that all our misfortunes were a punishment for that betrayal, for the fact that puny ancestors dared to denigrate Peter’s ‘testament,’ and that with no comprehension they decided that there was something humiliating and unworthy for the Russian capital in the name that Peter had given it.”6
Benois, the leader of a movement for the restoration of old Petersburg’s glory and grandeur, pointed to several reasons why the city’s renaming seemed a tragic mistake. In naming the city Sankt-Peterburg, Peter the Great placed it “under the special protection of the saint who had already once blessed the idea of spiritual dominion of the world.”7 By making St. Peter the patron of the city, the tsar was announcing his own cosmopolitan ambitions. “Slavicism” was alien to the first Russian emperor. Changing the capital’s name to a more Slavic-sounding version, his descendants conspicuously rejected universal, cosmopolitan aspirations. This renaming inadvertently narrowed the city’s spiritual sphere of influence.
