Showing posts with label Stalin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stalin. Show all posts

Saturday, July 18, 2020

Unscrupulous Flattery

(A footnote on Crabtree, Kern, and Siegel, “Cults of Personality, Preference Falsification, and the Dictator’s Dilemma”, Journal of Theoretical Politics 32(3) 409-434 [2020])

Charles Crabtree, Holger Kern, and David Siegel just published an article in the Journal of Theoretical Politics that models cults of personality as screening devices. Their argument is similar to arguments I’ve made in this blog and in academic papers, though much more formal, and with a different twist. So I can’t pass on the opportunity to comment.

I can’t say I understood all the details of their game-theoretic model, but the basic intuition is simple. The key idea in a screening model of a “cult” (for our purposes here, extravagant flattery of a political leader) is that extreme flattery has a cost for the flatterer, and willingness to pay that cost provides information about the kind of person you are, or the kind of loyalty you can give – information that the leader can then use as part of their “personnel management [strategy], helping [him] sort subordinates into their most useful regime roles” (416).

On their model, this cost is primarily psychic. Drawing on Timur Kuran’s ideas about preference falsification, they note that repeating barefaced lies or exaggerated praise (things like Hafez al-Assad is Syria’s “premier pharmacist”, or Stalin is “the coryphaeus of science”, or “this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration … both in person and around the globe.”) has a cost for anybody with a shred of integrity. But those who are genuinely smitten with the leader, or those who are particularly unscrupulous and opportunistic will find this cost less onerous: the first because the barefaced lies are close to what they actually believe (or are at least consistent with their beliefs), and the latter because they have no problem with lying if they can get something out of it.

In my first paper on this topic, I thought this led to a problem, since a cult could not induce a separating equilibrium distinguishing the truly loyal from the merely opportunistic in the eyes of the leader. If there are sufficient rewards for participation or strong enough punishments for non-participation, both the opportunistic and the loyal will participate in the cult equally, leading to flattery inflation as particular forms of flattery get devalued when the opportunistic or scared imitate the loyal. In these circumstances the cult could at best serve to deter collective action from the disloyal, not to clearly separate opportunists from loyalists.

But Crabtree, Kern, and Siegel note that a dictator does not always want to exclude the opportunistic and unscrupulous, since they actually need such people in their governing apparatus. In particular, the repressive agencies of a dictatorship require people who have no qualms about torturing, killing, or expropriating others, enforcers who don’t trouble themselves much with their conscience to achieve the dictator’s goals; and people who are willing to repeat barefaced lies are likely to be good at doing other morally dubious activities. As the (likely apocryphal) quote from Napoleon they use as their epigraph puts it, “the man who will say anything will do anything”.

To be sure, the unscrupulous may also be dangerous to the dictator – they are more likely to be corrupt, or more willing to betray the ruler if the occasion arises. Unscrupulousness need not imply loyalty. By the same token, loyalty need not imply total unscrupulousness; the loyal may be willing to do distasteful things up to a point, but object that these things don’t really serve the interest of the ruler, or lose their loyalty if asked to do too many such things. Moreover, the loyal and the unscrupulous may be best fitted to different tasks within a regime’s apparatus of rule – perhaps the more loyal are best suited to propaganda or supervisory roles, while the more unscrupulous are best suited to enforcement roles. So there’s still an adverse selection problem here, even if it’s a bit less urgent from the dictator’s point of view. The main contribution of Crabtree, Kern, and Siegel is to show formally that, under some conditions – in particular, when the preferences of the loyal and the unscrupulous for roles within the regime match the preferences of the dictator – levels of cult participation can sufficiently separate those who are loyal and unscrupulous from those who are merely unscrupulously opportunistic, enhancing the utility of the cult as a screening device. The model thus depicts the cult as a boutique HR department for the needs of the discerning dictator.

A couple of explicit limitations and complications of the argument are worth noting. First, Crabtree, Kern, and Siegel indicate that their focus is on leader cults in dictatorships; extreme flattery in democracies is beyond the scope of their model, I assume because in principle democracies should not have great need for people willing to engage in repression (we’ll come back to this point). Moreover, they also explicitly limit the scope of their model to elite interactions. Their argument is not meant to be a guide to why ordinary people might participate in the rituals of a cult of personality, possibly because their activity is neither directly observed by the dictator, nor likely to result in a role in the regime. Finally, they also note that the model assumes the dictator only cares about the signaling value of cult participation; if they cared about, say, the ego gratification they got out of it, they would have a harder time distinguishing the loyal and unscrupulous from the merely unscrupulous. A rational dictator should not “believe their own hype” - they may end up like CeauČ™escu if they do.

Models are maps. They need not be “realistic” representations of the underlying social reality as long as they are similar enough to it in some limited respect to guide inquiry, or to allow one to do some form of inferential play. So I am not going to complain about particular assumptions of this model; it’s fun to play with. But I do have some reservations, or rather I can see some limitations that are worth exploring.

There are certainly cases where the model does seem to help us make sense of historical patterns of leader flattery. For example, the top Bolsheviks around Stalin in the late 1920s and 1930s were all ruthless people, though they varied in their level of commitment to the leader. Consider Lazar Kaganovich. Like many other Bolsheviks Kaganovich was capable of brutality in pursuit of revolutionary goals (crushing peasant uprisings or arresting “saboteurs”), but he was also unusually unscrupulous in support of Stalin (falsifying votes in the Central Committee in 1934 to help re-elect him as General Secretary), and seemed to be genuinely in awe of him, treating the latter “more reverently than Sergo [Orzhonikidze] or Mikoyan,” as Simon Sebag Montefiore recounts:
He so admired the Vozhd, he admitted, that “when I go to Stalin, I try not to forget a thing! I worry every time! I so worry every time. I prepare every document in my briefcase and fill my pockets with cribs like a schoolboy because no one knows what Stalin is going to ask.” (Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, p. 64)
(Stalin apparently reacted to Kaganovich’s “schoolboyish” adoration by “teaching him how to spell and punctuate” – Kaganovich was, like many other Old Bolsheviks, a self-educated autodidact, a cobbler with only minimal formal education).

“Iron Lazar” was one of the main promoters of the Stalin cult: he coined the term “Stalinism,” and was among the first to write paeans to Stalin in state media (a practice other senior Bolsheviks disliked in private but did not actively resist; Molotov once disdainfully said that Kaganovich was “200% Stalinist”). While Molotov, Orzhonikidze, Mikoyan, and others often argued with and disagreed strongly with Stalin well into the 1930s, and Stalin often had to apologize to them (at least in the late 1920s and early 1930s), Kaganovich was more pliable.

It might seem reasonable to infer that his high level of participation in the Stalin cult (indeed, his founding role in it) was one reason he survived the turbulent 1930s (he died in 1991!), while other Bolsheviks, who were certainly ruthless and unscrupulous (if deeply faithful to a certain ideal of revolutionary communism), sometimes had a harder time credibly signaling their commitment to Stalin (Orzhonikidze comes to mind). Their willingness to debase themselves to credibly signal their loyalty to Stalin certainly varied; these people had strong egos!

But note that extreme flattery from top Bolsheviks could not give Stalin information about their ruthlessness or lack of scruples; he already possessed a better source of that information, as the top Bolsheviks had shown time and again what they were capable of. Task performance, not cult participation, was sufficiently informative about their capacity for violence in the turbulent 1920s and 1930s that willingness to debase themselves in front of Stalin could not add anything to what was already known about their lack of scruples in pursuit of revolutionary goals. In this sense the cult may have helped to separate the loyal and ruthless from the purely ruthless, though even here the separation may have been imperfect (the seemingly amoral Beria, who would have betrayed anyone if he had seen any benefit, ended up in charge of the NKVD).

This analysis could be pursued further; unlike in many other dictatorships, in the case of Stalin we have a lot of archival evidence about the motivations and interactions of those in the inner circle of rule. But I am not certain we would find that the main effect of extreme flattery at the top level of the party was to provide clear information to Stalin about the loyalty and unscrupulousness of senior Bolsheviks, or that Stalin encouraged or tolerated such flattery for for that reason. My unsystematic reading (and I’m no expert!) of the interactions at the top of the CPSU in the 20s and 30s suggests that the effect of the cult was more to deter collective challenges to Stalin as the latter consolidated power than to allow him to determine more clearly who was loyal and who wasn’t; in a sense the cult, by forcing the public recognition of Stalin’s superior status among top Bolsheviks and making it harder for them to coordinate against Stalin, diminished the importance of personal loyalty. In an environment that created a strong collective action problem for anyone wishing to defect, he needed to have fewer genuinely committed supporters like Kaganovich.

The Chinese case is even more equivocal. There the main elite promoters of the Mao cult during the mid to late 1960s, Lin Biao and the Gang of Four, were not themselves more obviously loyal to Mao than others; Lin Biao himself seems to have had no illusions about “old Mao” (Leese, Mao Cult, p. 90), and Mao himself remained utterly suspicious of their motivations. As in the Soviet case, moreover, participation in the cult did not provide additional information about lack of scruples; we can assume that at the top of the CCP there were no naifs. There the cult (= extreme flattery at the elite level) seems to have been used far more as an instrument of factional warfare (deterring collective action by opponents) than as a way of signaling exceptional loyalty or unscrupulousness to Mao.

There’s another problem, evident in the example of Saparmurat Niyazov that Crabtree, Kern, and Siegel use to open their paper, which is that many manifestations of a cult depend on large-scale uses of resources and bureaucratic power. When the Turkmen government spends millions on statues of Niyazov, uses its airwaves to promote the Ruhnama, and so on, the audience for these manifestations of power is not Niyazov (except incidentally), and the poor saps who had to attend the design meetings for the Neutrality Monument or coordinate the publication of Niyazov’s works were likely not being promoted for their loyalty and unscrupulousness. (I don’t know, and I don’t know if anybody does know, if people at the top of the Turkmen government elite were rewarded for enabling these things; perhaps one day we might understand more about the bureaucratic politics of cult-building in Turkmenistan, as well as about the elite interactions leading to these excesses).

In some ways, the Crabtree, Kern, and Siegel model of elite flattery seems to apply more to a context like that of the Trump administration than to the classic personality cults of the 20th century, which went far beyond elite flattery to incorporate not only large-scale uses of bureaucratic power but also mass participation. This is only idle speculation, but it seems to me that in today’s USA, extreme flattery of Trump among close associates of the President does seem to go hand in hand with a willingness to break other norms. Moreover, because the reputational costs of such flattery are reasonably large outside the Trump administration, it serves as a credible signal that one is tying one’s fate to the President. If Trump wants people to break norms that have constrained previous presidents, it thus makes sense for him to recruit precisely the people who flatter him outrageously; he can probably separate the loyal and unscrupulous from the merely unscrupulous or the disloyal in this way.

Wednesday, January 17, 2018

Stalin as Reviewer #2

(Of historical interest mostly, though I think it’s a good story).

Most people reading this blog probably know about Trofim Lysenko, who, with Stalin’s help, set back Soviet genetics in the late 1940s, preventing any discussion of Mendelian inheritance. Yet Stalin’s influence on Soviet scholarship after WWII was much more far reaching. He intervened in disputes concerning philosophy, physics, physiology, linguistics, and political economy; in fact one of the epithets by which he was sometimes referred in the press was “the coryphaeus of science”, i.e., the leader of the chorus of Soviet science. (Lysenko himself used the term in his eulogy for Stalin in 1953, though it was first used in 1939).

Most of these interventions were editorial in character. He edited pre-publication drafts of articles and books, often in close consultation with their authors and at great length (he was actually a decent editor), and occasionally provided feedback on published and unpublished work. And he did this despite the fact that he was the undisputed ruler of one of the victors of World War II, a country that was facing the gigantic task of reconstruction after one of the most destructive conflicts in human history. In short, he was the editor and reviewer from hell.

The story of Stalin’s intervention into Soviet linguistics is particularly funny, at least in the morbid way that anything from that time can be funny. And it also brings out some interesting points about how official ideological commitments both constrained and enabled Stalin and Stalinism.

Some context here. In the late 1940s, the Soviet government set in motion a number of campaigns to reduce “foreign” influence on Soviet science. Some of these campaigns involved harassing scholars who cited too many foreign scientists or wrote in English too much, while others attempted to stress the distinctiveness of socialist science.

In linguistics, the standard socialist position was represented by the work of N. Ia. Marr, who had argued in the 1920s that class struggle explained the development of language. Marr, like Pavlov, had been pretty much canonized by the Soviet academic establishment, so nobody bothered to attack his views, despite the fact that they had some obvious weaknesses, and Marr wasn’t around to defend them. In any case, one would think Marr’s view was sufficiently socialist – sufficiently Soviet – to be safe from attack.

But in 1949, a Georgian linguist, Arnold Chikobava, convinces the First Secretary of the Georgian Central Committe, Kandid Charkviani, to send a letter to Stalin arguing that Marr was wrong. According to Ethan Pollock (from whose piece on Stalin’s scientific interventions in the post-war years I am getting most of this), Stalin reads the letter carefully and agrees with Charkviani:
The letter pointed out that if all languages were class-based, as Marr claimed, it became impossible to explain the use of language during primitive communism, when classes had yet to form. Marr also suggested that languages went through stages of development along the lines of modes of production. Contemporary languages represented various points along this uni-directional progression towards an advanced stage, which according to Marr had already been reached by Semitic and modern European languages. Charkviani pointed out that this challenged the particular linguistic and ethnic development of individual national cultures. Further, Marr posited that all languages could be traced back to four fundamental sounds. Charkviani countered that Marr had presented no credible evidence in defence of this idea. Marr argued that the main goal of Soviet linguists was to work towards a single, world language; Charkviani cited a quotation from Stalin supporting the notion that nations and national languages would persist in the first stage of the worldwide dictatorship of the proletariat. In the name of bringing about a world culture, Marr supported the imposition of Latin alphabets throughout the Caucasus. Charkviani saw this as an insult to the ancient languages of the region. In sum, Charkviani argued that Marr was a rootless ‘cosmopolitan’. What appeared revolutionary and Marxist in the 1920s, now foolishly disregarded the importance of national traditions and interests. (pp. 274-275)
The charge of “rootless cosmopolitanism” is notable; this is just before the high tide of Stalinist anti-semitism. But Chikovaba (via Charkviani) is also clearly pointing to some obvious problems with Marr’s views, and the overall thrust of the criticism suggests a way of reconciling the universalism of Marxism with Stalin’s conviction of the importance of national cultures. And Stalin is clearly looking for a way to shake up Soviet linguistics in this direction, and is thus receptive to these criticisms of Marr.

In any case, Stalin is sufficiently impressed with the letter that he summons both Georgians to his dacha to discuss the matter. (Think how unusual this is – among his many duties, Stalin believes it’s important to discuss the correct Marxist-Leninist position on the development of language!). The discussion goes well, and Stalin asks Chikovaba to write an article for Pravda, a draft of which Stalin edits “line by line, at times eliminating or adding words, sentences, or paragraphs”, and stressing in his comments that “languages were national in character, not class-based.” Revise and resubmit! Chikovaba sends another draft a few days later (nothing like having Stalin as your editor and reviewer to put the fire in your belly) which Stalin again discusses with him extensively and finally approves for publication, sending a note to the Politburo saying that there should be a “free discussion” of linguistic issues.

But when the article is published, it was not immediately obvious what Soviet linguists were supposed to do. The article didn’t come from Stalin, after all; and Chikovaba was attacking the orthodox position. So it seemed like he was doing something very risky, or else that he was a provocateur (perhaps the article was intended to expose the enemies of the orthodoxy to later punish them?). In any case, genuine discussion ensues for a time: some linguists publish articles in Pravda attacking Marr, others defending him, and others going for some sort of compromise. This is not quite what Stalin wanted, so eventually he publishes his own series of articles indicating the proper Marxist approach to the controversy (‘On Marxism in Linguistics’). The reaction from linguists is immediate and panicked:
In their wake came a chain reaction of people dissociating themselves from the views of Marr. Pravda began to receive not letters but express telegrams. “Please insert in my article immediately corrections of the following content: in any class society, language reflects not the class structure but the national culture. The remainder of the article may be left as it is.” “I beg you not to publish my article on the linguistic question and to return it.” “After the articles of Comrade Stalin I reject the fundamental propositions of my article and beg you not to publish it.” “I beg you to withhold my article ‘For the Complete Defeat of the Idealists and the Metaphysicians in Linguistics.’ … I consider this article erroneous and harmful.” “After the brilliant article of Comrade Stalin it is no longer necessary to publish my article.” “Do not publish my article on the linguistic question. I will send another in a few days.” (Elena Zubkova, Russia After the War, p. 127)
No disinclination to retract one’s findings here!

Stalin’s intervention posed new problems, however, since it seemed to contradict things he had said in the 1930s. So people wrote letters asking for guidance: how do you reconcile the contradictions between Stalin’s “cosmopolitan” position then and his “national” position now? Is it ok to speak or learn Esperanto? What about foreign loan-words? And Stalin (and the newly empowered anti-Marrist faction) either had to answer or to ignore these questions – some of which raised even more complicated issues about the relationship between science and the class structure. But, as Pollock notes, “there was no accepted method of continuing discussion after the time for official discussion had concluded. Stalin’s decisive role only deepened the quagmire” (p. 282) by pre-emptively establishing a new orthodoxy.

Yet Pollock makes a good case that Stalin really wanted some genuine discussion and criticism as a way of furthering the progress of science, at least in some fields (though he underplays the connection of Stalin’s views on linguistics with his interest in strengthening national identities and making use of patriotic fervor), and goes on to make the more (speculative) claim that Stalin’s repeated assurances that science only progresses via discussion, and that it is not necessarily class-based, account at least in part for “science’s rising prestige in the post-Stalin decades”. Stalin really needed (some) science to work well in the coming competition of the Cold War, and dimly understood that this could not happen if dogmatism reigned everywhere. Yet as long as he was alive, no such discussion could take place. His influence was like that of an enormous gravitational body; once he intervened (or was even suspected of intervening), the space of discussion became completely warped.

Dogmatism was safety: one needed to know where to stand in order to get on with life. Wherever the orthodoxy was unclear, best not to tread.

Friday, December 04, 2015

The King's Two Bodies in Bolshevik Political Thought

I recently finished Nina Tumarkin’s fantastic book Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia, which is totally up my alley, as you may imagine. (Why hadn’t I heard of this book before? It’s so good!). One really interesting point that comes up in her book is the development, alongside the actual rituals of the cult, of what we might call a “theory of representation” to justify a phenomenon (Lenin worship) that was prima facie contrary to the tenets of Marxism (and even to Lenin’s own wishes). And it struck me that this spontaneously developed and unsystematic “political theology” (to use a more pretentious term) was strikingly similar to the medieval doctrine of “the King’s two bodies.”

The idea of the King’s two bodies is in principle quite simple: the King’s authority does not come from any of his actual personal qualities, but from his personification of the “body politic,” to which his natural body is joined. Kantorowicz (in a famous book) traces this view to its roots in the relationship between the incarnate body of Christ and the Church as a “body” of believers, though this is not particularly important for our purposes here. A passage from Plowden’s Reports gives the gist of the view as it was understood by the jurists and lawyers of the Tudor period:
For the King has in him two Bodies, viz., a Body natural, and a Body politic. His Body natural (if it be considered in itself) is a Body mortal, subject to all Infirmities that come by Nature or Accident, to the Imbecility of Infancy or old Age, and to the like Defects that happen to the natural Bodies of other People. But his Body politic is a Body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of Policy and Government, and constituted for the Direction of the People, and the Management of the public weal, and this Body is utterly void of Infancy, and old Age, and other natural Defects and Imbecilities, which the Body natural is subject to, and for this Cause, what the King does in his Body politic, cannot be invalidated or frustrated by any Disability in his natural Body (p. 7)
We might say that the king “represents” the state (makes it present) by personifying it physically; despite the fact that Louis XIV never actually said “L’Etat, c’est moi,” it is the sort of thing that would have made sense for him to say, as it summarizes this view quite well. And in personifying the state, the king’s “natural body” is in a sense “wiped clean,” gaining a kind of grace (“charisma”). To use Max Weber’s terminology, the “charismatic authority” of the king – his authority in virtue of the kind of person he is – thus becomes “routinized” , no longer dependent on his actual personal qualities but merely on his possession of an office. Yet it still remains a form of personal authority: loyalty and obedience is owed to the actual person of the king, not simply or solely to the abstract body of laws, the state, or the constitution, and the body of the king has a special majesty that must be honored.

Now, the early Bolsheviks would certainly have thought this was all nonsense. Yet the circumstances of the revolution, and in particular the obvious appeal of “charismatic” justifications for authority, seem to have forced them to try to accommodate such claims in ways that ended up being structurally quite similar.

The early Bolsheviks were rather “voluntaristic” by Marxist standards: they did not believe in merely sitting still and waiting for the dialectic of history to work its revolutionary magic. Yet most of them were wary of “heroes,” good Marxists that they were (unlike, say, the members of the Socialist Revolutionary party). Lenin’s What is to be Done exalted the role of the vanguard party of professional revolutionaries in the revolutionary process, not the role of any individual leader. And though his enormous energy, clear tactical judgment, and unshakable faith in the triumph of his vision, generated a form of charisma, as evidenced in a number of testimonies from both friends and enemies, he disliked flattery and did not seem to have consciously exploited his talent for “social hypnotism” to personalize state power.[1] Other charismatic Bolsheviks (Trotsky, for example) also preferred to exalt the party rather than themselves.

Yet soon after the October revolution it became clear that “charismatic” appeals were exceedingly useful in the struggle for the loyalty of the masses. Already in early 1918 the old Bolshevik M. S. Olminsky argued that though “[t]he cult of personality contradicts the whole spirit of Marxism, the spirit of scientific socialism,” Bolsheviks should not ignore their leaders, who personified the party and the working class (Tumarkin, p. 87). Individual Bolsheviks – primarily, but not exclusively, top leaders like Lenin – were both exemplars of the values that a good Communist should have (and thus to be emulated) and personifications of the proletariat (and thus to be honored). Lenin himself, for all his dislike of flattery, was quite conscious of the power of his image, and grudgingly accepted some of the manifestations of the cult growing around him. As Tumarkin puts it:
Lenin’s passive acceptance of publicity doubtless was partly inspired by his perception of the effectiveness of his image in legitimizing the new regime and in publicizing it. As Lunacharsky once observed, “I think that Lenin, who could not abide the personality cult, who rejected it in every possible way, in later years understood and forgave us” … [Lenin] was not ambivalent about playing the role of exemplar, as he did on May Day 1919 when he had worked in the Kremlin courtyard on the first subbotnik (p. 105) [2]
The cult of Lenin thus grew inexorably, even in the face of Lenin’s personal resistance, from the perception that the values and aspirations of the Bolshevik party were credibly embodied in his person. Charismatic claims to authority may have been suspect from a theoretical point of view, but they seem to have worked in practice. Yet in order to account for them the Bolsheviks were forced to insist that the veneration of Lenin and other leaders was acceptable because the leader always symbolized and represented, in a heightened degree, the party and the proletariat; to glorify Lenin was thus not to venerate the “hero” as such, but the proletariat itself, even though the “mortal” body of Lenin was connected to his “symbolic” body.

Possibly the most striking example of this thesis of “Lenin’s two bodies” appears in a piece written when Lenin was shot by SR member Fanya Kaplan in August 1918. At the time, Bolshevik journalist Lev Sosnovsky (who was to become the head of the Central Committee’s Agitprop department in 1920) wrote in Bednota, a newspaper “aimed at the broad mass of peasant readers” that:
Lenin cannot be killed … Because Lenin is the rising up of the oppressed. Lenin is the fight to the end, to final victory … So long as the proletariat lives – Lenin lives. Of course, we, his students and colleagues, were shaken by the terrible news of the attempt on the life of dear ‘Ilich’, as the communists lovingly call him … A thousand times [we] tried to convince him to take even the most basic security precaurions. But ‘Ilich’ always rejected these pleas. Daily, without any protection, he went to all sorts of gatherings, congresses, meetings (pp. 83-84)
Tumarkin comments that in Sosnovsky’s presentation, “Ilich is the mortal man and Lenin is the immortal leader and universal symbol … The mortal man exposed himself to danger, but Lenin cannot be killed.” Yet this piece is not an isolated case, explainable perhaps by Sosnovsky’s attempt to appeal to peasant readers. The futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, for example, well aware of the problematic nature of leader cults within Marxist thought, nevertheless justified the veneration of Lenin in terms similar to Sosnovsky’s, writing on the occasion of Lenin’s fiftieth birthday (1920):
I know –
It is not the hero
Who precipitates the flow of revolution.
The story of heroes –
is the nonsense of the intelligentsia!
But who can restrain himself
and not sing
of the glory of Ilich? …
Kindling the lands with fire
everywhere,
where people are imprisoned,
like a bomb
the name
explodes:
Lenin!
Lenin!
Lenin! …
I glorify
in Lenin
world faith
and glorify
my faith (p. 100)
Mayakovsky hits on the crucial point: to glorify Lenin is to glorify the values of his party because Lenin represents more than the mere mortal Ilich; he represents, as another writer put it in a piece published on the sixth anniversary of the revolution, “a program and a tactic … a philosophical world view … the ardent hatred of oppression … the rule of pure reason … a limitless enthusiasm for science and technology … the dynamic and the dialectic of the proletariat;” in sum, “Lenin is the one Communist Party of the Red Globe” (p. 132).

In these last couple of passages, Lenin is glorified primarily as a symbol – of the party, the revolution, and the proletariat. But the physical body still mattered; the embodiment of Lenin as Ilich was not irrelevant to his symbolic effectiveness. As Tumarkin notes, both in 1918 (when Lenin was shot) and in 1923 (when he died) the party press had presented Lenin as a sort of physical superman, surviving physical harm that would have killed a lesser man (p. 171); the natural body of the king, joined to his spiritual body, is no longer an ordinary body. And of course, the significance of Lenin’s natural body emerges most clearly in the fantastically strange decision (from a Marxist point of view) to embalm it and put it on public display after his death.

It is not clear, at least at the time Tumarkin was writing (1980s), how the ultimate decision to embalm was made; she suggests that Stalin was the driving force, since he had insisted that Lenin be buried “in the Russian manner” rather than cremated in the “modern” manner. (Cremation was apparently associated with executed prisoners in Russia, and Stalin seems to have been concerned about the bad symbolic connotations of doing this to Lenin). It certainly seems to have been controversial: Trotsky, Bukharin, and Kamenev all opposed it – Trotsky specifically objecting to turning Lenin into an Orthodox icon. So did Lenin’s secretary, Bonch-Bruevich, and Nadezhda Krupskaia (Lenin’s wife) protested publicly when the decision was revealed. The obvious similarities between the worship of the saints in Orthodox Christianity (whose bodies, if they are truly saintly, are not supposed to decay) and the proposal to mummify and exhibit Lenin’s body must have discomfited many “good Bolsheviks.”

But some of the people involved, like Leonid Krasin, had belonged to the “God-building” movement within Bolshevism, which we could call the transhumanist wing of the Bolsheviks. (Tumarkin tells some fabulous stories about them – both Gorky and Lunacharsky, the latter the first “Commissar of Enlightment” were also affiliated with this current of thought). They believed in the power of science (including Marxism, which they saw as the most important part of science) to eventually to overcome death itself, and saw themselves as consciously engaged in the creation of a new divinity. Krasin even “publicly preached his belief in the [physical] resurrection of the dead” through science, and speculated on the potential of cryonics to preserve the dead until the time “when one will be able to use the elements of a person’s life to recreate the physical person.” (Bolshevik EMs!). For them, the “immortalization of Lenin was a true deification of man.”

By showing that they could preserve Lenin’s body from corruption, they also seem to have hoped to create a proper sort of communist Saint, whose undecaying body was due to science rather than to God, and thus to help weaken an Orthodox Christianity widely believed by the population. As one of the people involved in the project (Boris Zbarsky) put it after the embalming:
The Russian Church had claimed that it was a miracle that its saints’ bodies endured and were incorruptible. But we have performed a feat unknown to modern science … We worked four months and we used certain chemicals known to science [though the chemicals remained secret - the lore of embalming was among the arcana imperii in the Soviet Union]. There is nothing miraculous about it (p. 196).
Nevertheless, proponents of embalming (the members of the aptly-named “Immortalization Commission”) still had to justify the decision to skeptical Bolsheviks in terms that clearly distinguished between the veneration of Orthodox Saints and the “new” veneration of Lenin. And the best they could come up with was generally some variation on the theme that the physical body of Lenin would provide genuine happiness to future generations. (I am reminded here of Mao’s mangoes). Here’s Avel Enukidze:
It is obvious that neither we nor our comrades wanted to make out of the remains of Vladimir Ilich any kind of “relic” (moshchi) by means of which we would have been able to popularize or preserve the memory of Vladimir Ilich. With his brilliant writings and revolutionary activities, which he left as a legacy to the entire world revolutionary movement, he immortalized himself enough.
[…]
We wanted to preserve the body of Vladimir Ilich, not in order simply to popularize his name, but we attached and [now] attach enormous importance to the preservation of the physical features of this wonderful leader, for the generation that is growing up, and for future generations, and also for the hundreds of thousands and maybe even millions of people who will be supremely happy to see the physical features of this person (p. 188).
I’m not arguing that the physical body of Lenin was actually useful as a mobilization device. There is little evidence that people came to the Lenin mausoleum for “spiritual” reasons, or that they experienced great “happiness” upon seeing Lenin – more likely, as Tumarkin argues, they came “out of a combined sense of political duty and fascination, or even morbid curiosity” (p. 197). But at the end of the day, leading Bolsheviks felt strongly that Lenin’s body needed to be preserved; to them the physical body of Lenin was inextricably tied to his symbolic and representative function. It became a “fetish” in the technical Marxist sense of the word.

It is tempting to dismiss these things as the result of sheer “flattery inflation.” But while flattery inflation was certainly going on (Tumarkin tells some very humorous anecdotes about that), the Bolsheviks still needed to come up with a theory of representation to justify the veneration of Lenin, whether mostly spontaneous (as in the aftermath of Lenin’s shooting in 1918) or more orchestrated (as in the aftermath of Lenin’s death in 1923). For all the bad faith required (since almost everyone agreed that ruler veneration was a feudal practice that had no place in a Marxist state), this theory remained remarkably consistent from Lenin to Stalin and even beyond Stalin, after Khrushchev denounced the “cult of personality” in the famous “Secret Speech” to the 20th Party Congress. Even Stalin, whose cult was, to put it somewhat uncharitably, basically a cynical ploy to concentrate power, felt the need to indicate that the veneration of “Stalin” was not the veneration of the mortal Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, but the glorification of the Soviet state. There’s a funny anecdote Jan Plamper retells in his book on the Stalin cult that shows how seriously Stalin took this idea:
Artyom Sergeev, Stalin’s adopted son, was also fond of telling a story. He recalled a fight between Stalin and his biological son Vasily. After he found out that Vasily had used his famous last name to escape punishment for one of his drunken debauches, Stalin screamed at him. ‘But I’m a Stalin too,’ retorted Vasily. ‘No, you’re not,’ said Stalin. `You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, not even me! (Plamper, The Stalin Cult, p. xiii)
Stalin could be venerated and respected because “Stalin” did not refer to the king’s mortal body, with all its failings, but to his representative function. To be sure, Stalin’s drive towards “totalization” – to paraphrase Mussolini, “all within Soviet power, nothing outside Soviet power, nothing against Soviet power” – meant that perhaps unlike Lenin, Stalin had to represent everything. As Tumarkin puts it, “Lenin was … like a Greek or Roman god who was master in only one field of activity” while “Stalin in the heyday of his personality cult wished to be recognized as superlative in everything - philosophy, linguistics, military strategy - like an omniscient deity” (p. 60). As the power of the state expanded, so did the domain of charismatic representation.

I suspect a similar theory of representation developed in China after Khrushchev’s denunciation of the cult of personality in Russia prompted some soul-searching about the cult of Mao within the Chinese Communist Party (as I noted here). In China, the distinction between the “correct” cult of truth (geren chongbai 个人 崇拜) and the “incorrect” veneration of mere persons (geren mixin 个人 迷信), however transparently driven by Mao’s desire to concentrate power, remained within the orbit of a (non-Marxist) theory of representation that derived the charismatic claim to authority from the credibility of the leader’s claim to symbolize the truth of the Chinese revolution. And yet, as in Russia, the actual physical body of the ruler mattered; the ruler was never purely an abstract symbol. Mao the superhuman swimmer, Mao’s mangoes, Mao’s physical appearance - they were all infused by Mao the truth of the revolution.

Perhaps I’m making too much of this. But it strikes me that the independent Communist reinvention of medieval theories of representation as a way to accommodate “charismatic” claims to authority (real or fake - it doesn’t matter), despite the obvious theoretical inconsistency between leader worship and classical Marxism, is indicative of a broader problematic of modern politics in a democratic age. Put bluntly, all mass politics is symbolic politics (whether in democratic or non-democratic contexts); and thus what we might call the “charismatic temptation” – the temptation to grant authority to a person who embodies these symbols, rather than to the law, or the constitution – remains ever present.

  1. The phrase “social hypnotism” is from a short description of Lenin by one B. Gorev, published in a 1922 Komsomol anthology of propaganda writings, quoted by Tumarkin (p. 130).
  2. The subbotnik was a Russian revolutionary way of celebrating May Day by offering “voluntary” labor. Lenin famously participated in the first subbotnik in the Kremlin by doing some heavy labor, which gained him the admiration of the workers present (and a lot of positive publicity). Incidentally, Tumarkin gives the date of the first subbotnik in which Lenin participated as May Day 1919; other sources give its date as May Day 1920.