Lenin was exceedingly modest in his personal wants: his living quarters, his food, his clothing were strictly utilitarian. He carried to an extreme the notorious indifference of the Russian intelligentsia for the finer things, leading even at the height of his power an austere, almost ascetic, style of life. He
always wore the same dark-colored suit, with pipelike trousers that seemed a trifle too short for his legs, with a similarly abbreviated, single-breasted coat, a soft white collar, and an old tie. The necktie, in my opinion, was for years the same: black, with little white flowers, one particular spot showing wear.64
Such simplicity, emulated by many later dictators, did not, however, preclude—and, indeed, perhaps even encouraged—the rise of a personality cult. Lenin was the first of the modern “demotic” leaders who, even while dominating the masses, in appearance and ostensible lifestyle remained one of them. This has been noted as a characteristic of contemporary dictatorships:
In modern absolutisms the leader is not distinguished, as many former tyrants were, by the
Russian literature on Lenin published in 1917 and the first eight months of 1918 is surprisingly sparse.66 In 1917 most of what was written about him came from the pen of his opponents, and although the Bolshevik censorship soon put a stop to such hostile literature, the Bolsheviks themselves wrote little on their leader, who was hardly known outside the narrow circles of the radical intelligentsia. It was Fannie Kaplan’s shots that opened the floodgates of Leninist hagiography. As early as September 3–4, 1918, a paean to Lenin by Trotsky and Kamenev came out in an edition of one million copies.67 Zino-viev’s eulogy, around the same time, had a printing of 200,000, and a brief popular biography came out in 300,000 copies. According to Bonch-Bruevich, Lenin terminated this outpouring as soon as he recovered,68 although he allowed it to resume on a more modest scale in 1920, in connection with his fiftieth birthday and the end of the Civil War. By 1923, however, when Lenin’s health forced him to withdraw from active politics, Leninist hagiography turned into an industry, employing thousands, much as did the painting of religious ikons before the Revolution.
On the present-day reader this literature makes an odd impression: its sentimental, mawkish, worshipful tone contrasts sharply with the brutal language which the Bolsheviks liked to affect in other walks of life. The image of the Christ-like savior of mankind, descended from the cross and then resurrected, is difficult to reconcile with the theme of a “merciless struggle” against his enemies. Thus Zinoviev, who had mocked the “bourgeoisie” as fit to eat straw, could describe Lenin as the “apostle of world communism” and “leader by the grace of God,” much as Mark Antony in his funeral oration for Caesar had extolled him as a “god in the sky.”69 Other Communists exceeded even this hyperbole, one poet calling Lenin “the invincible messenger of peace, crowned with the thorns of slander.” Such allusions to the new Christ were common in Soviet publications in late 1918, which the authorities distributed in massive editions while massacring hostages by the thousands.70
There was, of course, no formal deification of the Soviet leader, but the qualities attributed to him in official publications and pronouncements—omniscience, infallibility, and virtual immortality—amounted to nothing less. The “cult of genius” went further in Soviet Russia in regard to Lenin (not to speak of Stalin later on) than the subsequent adoration of Mussolini and Hitler, for which it provided the model.
Why this quasi-religious cult of a politician by a regime espousing materialism and atheism? To this question there are two answers, one having to do with the internal needs of the Communist Party, the other with the relationship of that party to the people whom it ruled.
