The Russian Revolution полностью

Although they claimed to be a political party, the Bolsheviks were really nothing of the kind. They resembled rather an order or cohort gathered around a chosen leader. What held them together was not a program or a platform—these could change from one day to the next in conformity with the leader’s wishes—but the person of the leader. It was his intuition and his will that guided the Communists, not objective principles. Lenin was the first political figure of modern times to be addressed as “leader” (vozhd’). He was indispensable, for without his guidance the one-party regime had nothing to hold it together. Communism repersonalized politics, throwing it back to the times when human will rather than law directed state and society. This required its leader to be immortal, if not literally then figuratively: he had to lead in person, and after he was gone, his followers had to be able to rule in his name and claim to receive direct inspiration from him. The slogan “Lenin Lives!” launched after Lenin’s death was, therefore, no mere propagandistic catch-phrase, but an essential ingredient of the Communist system of government.

This accounts in good measure for the need to deify Lenin, to raise him above the vagaries of ordinary human existence, to make him immortal. His cult began the instant he was believed to stand on the threshold of death and became institutionalized five years later when he actually died. Lenin’s inspiration was essential to maintain the vitality and indestructibility of the party and the state which he had founded.

The other consideration had to do with the regime’s lack of legitimacy. This had not been a problem in the first months of the Bolshevik regime when it had acted as a catalyst of world revolution. But once it became clear that there would be no world revolution anytime soon and that the Bolshevik regime would have to assume responsibility for administering a large, multinational empire, the requirements changed. At this point, the loyalty of Soviet Russia’s seventy-odd million inhabitants under its control became a matter of grave concern. This loyalty the Bolsheviks could not secure by ordinary electoral procedures: at the height of their popularity, in November 1917, they won less than one-quarter of the vote, and they certainly would have gained only a fraction of that later on, after disenchantment had set in. In their hearts, the Bolsheviks knew that their authority rested on physical force embodied in a thin layer of workers and soldiers of questionable commitment and staying power. It could not escape them that in July 1918, when their regime came under assault from the Left SRs, the workers and soldiers in the capital city declared “neutrality” and refused to help.

Under these conditions, the deification of the founding father served the Bolsheviks as the next-best thing to true legitimacy and a surrogate for the missing popular mandate. Historians of antiquity have noted that in the Middle East, institutionalized cults of rulers began on a large scale only after Alexander of Macedon had conquered diverse non-Greek peoples over whom he could not claim legitimate authority, and who, furthermore, were bound neither to the Macedonians nor to each other by bonds of ethnic identity. Alexander, and even more so his successors, as well as the Roman emperors, had recourse to self-deification as a device for securing with appeals to celestial authority that which terrestrial authority refused to grant them:

The successors of Alexander were Greek Macedonians who occupied, by right of conquest and force of arms, thrones usurped from autochthonous sovereigns. In these countries of ancient and refined civilization, the power of the sword was not everything and the law of the stronger might not have provided adequate legitimation. For sovereigns, in general, love to legitimize themselves, because this often means reinforcing their position. Was it not wise on their part to present themselves as the titled heirs of these powers based on divine right, the heritage of which they had captured? To identify themselves as gods—was this not a way, presumed clever, to reap the veneration of their subjects, to unite their disparate populations under the same banner, and, in the ultimate analysis, to consolidate their dynastic position?⁷¹

To a dynasty … deification meant legitimacy, the regularizing of right acquired by the sword. It meant, further, the elevation of the royal family above the ambition of men who had recently been their peers, the strengthening of the rights of sovereigns by fusing them in a single whole with the prerogatives of their divine predecessors, the presentation to subjects everywhere of a symbol round which they might, perchance, rally through religious sentiment since they could not do so through their national sentiment.⁷²