Some Remarks on Lenin's Tribune

en En Ruiz de Samaniego, Alberto (Ed): El siglo soviéticoRussian Photogrraphy in the Archivo Lafuente 1917-1972, La Fábrica, Madrid , 2018

Visual Communication, 2008

The main issue of the paper is establishing the role and the circumstances of the great Soviet ruler embalmment, seen as a replacement for the religious relics in the Soviet anti-religious campaign and as an establishment of a new cult of political personality. The idea of embalmment and of mausoleum for Lenin's body was presented as being the idea of the masses, while it was the idea of a small group of political leaders in order to impose a political symbol and to establish a new type of "relic" as a center for "political worship", contributting to reshaping the mentality of the new-born "Soviet people" and their sense of new type of "spiritual membership" to the Soviet community. The burial issue of V. I. Lenin is analyzed throughout the decades, mentioning the main arguments in this ardent discussion. The nowadays conflict between "Orthodox monarchists" and communists is just an example of the continuous burial issue, including all other corpses buried near the mausoleum with Lenin. Another analyzed factor is the nowadays status of Lenin's mausoleum in a context of Russian spiritual and national revival. The role of a Soviet proeminent political figure is still a matter for discussion in the nowadays Russian culture in search for the Russian spirit among the reminiscences of socialist and communist propaganda.

Мир России, 2020

Citation: Marshall A. (2020) The Shadow and the Substance of Lenin after 150 Years. Mir Rossii, vol. 29, no 4, pp. 134–149. DOI: 10.17323/1811-038X-2020-29-4-134-149 150 years since Lenin’s birth marks an anniversary that raises questions around Lenin’s meaning today and his ultimate historical legacy. By distinguishing both Lenin the man, and the cult of commemoration that for 60 years surrounded him, from the core method behind Lenin’s own thought, this article addresses the question of if and why Lenin still matters in Europe today. It does so by arguing for an Ilyenkovian reading of Lenin’s main ideas and contributions. The current condition of European politics is, to a significant degree, still a by-product of the rejection of ‘Leninism’ after 1989, Leninism having evolved after 1924 into a sociological construct designed predominantly to facilitate the accelerated industrialization of backward societies. The rejection of Leninism as an alternate form of modernity led, via a c...

100 Years On: Revisiting the First Russian Art Exhibition of 1922, 2022

In 1922, the Russian artist El Lissitzky (1890-1941) was living in Berlin. One of his many undertakings was the design of the cover of the catalogue of the First Russian Art Exhibition.

Platypus Review, 2011

The principal mistake made by those who contemplate Lenin's political thought and action is due to assumptions that are made about the relation of socialism to democracy. Lenin was not an “undemocratic socialist” or one who prioritized socialism as an “end” over the “means” of democracy. Lenin did not think that once a majority of workers was won to socialist revolution democracy was finished. Lenin was not an authoritarian socialist. Socialism is meant to transcend liberalism by fulfilling it.[2] The problem with liberalism is not its direction, supposedly different from socialism, but rather that it does not go far enough. Socialism is not anti-liberal. The 20th century antinomy of socialism versus liberalism, as expressed in Isaiah Berlin’s counterposing of “positive and negative freedoms” or “freedom to [social benefits] versus freedom from [the state],” or the idea that social justice conflicts with liberty, travesties (and naturalizes) and thus degrades the actual problem, which is not a clash of timeless principles—liberalism versus democracy—but a historically specific contradiction of capitalism. To clarify this, it is necessary to return to a Marxist approach, such as Lenin’s. The error consists of addressing a dialectical approach to politics such as Lenin’s in an undialectical and eclectic manner, as if there were a number of criteria to be checked off (anticapitalism, democracy, etc.), rather than a set of intrinsically interrelated historical problems to be worked through together. The actual dialectic of the historically interrelated developments of capitalism, democracy, and the struggle for socialism demands a dialectical approach in both practice and theory. The reason that various moments of Lenin’s thought and action can appear contradictory is due to an undialectical interpretation of Lenin, not to Lenin himself. Lenin is subject to the same interpretive problem as Marx: the question of Lenin cuts to the heart of Marxism.

Counter Memory: My mother, an active Solidarity member, keeps bringing home various publications produced underground. We see pamphlets, manifestoes, and whole books occasionally-"bibuła" in the underground lingo. All documents have sketchy fonts and low-quality paper. My grandmother and father worry out loud that this is dangerous. We will all go to jail, says my grandmother. I am young, but I understand that we have access to illicit stuff. I read a lot of those materials. This is my introduction to defying the communist regime. December 2011, an uncanny emergence: the gigantic head of Lenin appears on La Brea Avenue, a major artery running through Los Angeles. This glistening creation of stainless steel is a sculpture placed in a public space-on the street, in front of the new, but yet to be opened at that point, Ace Museum of Contemporary Art (see Figure 31.1).1 Titled "Miss Mao Trying to Poise Herself at the Top of Lenin's Head, " the sculpture is the work of Beijing-based brothers Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang, referred to as "two of the most incendiary figures in China's contemporary art world. "2 Gao Qiang remarked on the fact that their art is often thought of as shocking: "It is fine if people get shocked by the work or think it's sensationalist, but that's not the intention. I personally never get shocked by art because life itself in China is shocking enough. "3 The brothers are known for their controversial, politically challenging art, specifically for their various provocative renditions of Mao, still a sacrosanct figure for some Chinese. Headless Mao, naked Mao, feminized Mao with huge breasts, a firing squad of Mao figures shooting at Christ, repentant Mao in a kneeling position with a hand on his chest-these are some of the Gao Brothers' best-known pieces. Their Mao performance in Moscow at the Kandinsky Prize ceremony

Platypus Review, 2011

Lenin’s Marxist politics has been profoundly misconstrued and distorted, both positively and negatively, as supposedly having wanted to strip capitalist society of its deceptive veneer and assert the unadorned proletariat as the be-all and end-all of “socialist” society. Certainly not merely the later Stalinist history of the Soviet Union, but also practices of the Soviet state under Lenin’s leadership in the Civil War, so-called “War Communism,” and the Red Terror, lent themselves to a belief in Lenin as a ruthless destroyer of “bourgeois” conditions of life. But, then, what are we to make, for instance, of Lenin’s pamphlets on The State and Revolution (1917) and “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)? For they emphasized both the necessary persistence of “bourgeois right” among the workers in the long transition from socialism to communism, requiring the continuation of state mediation, and the fact that Marxists had understood their effort as trying to overcome capital “on the basis of capitalism” itself. A prime example of Lenin’s insistence on the mediation of politics in society was his opposition to Trotsky’s recommendation that labor unions be militarized and subsumed under the state. Lenin wanted to preserve, rather, the important non-identity of class, party, and state in the Soviet “workers’ state,” which he recognized as necessarily carrying on, for the foreseeable future, “state capitalism” (characterized by “bureaucratic deformations” due to Russian conditions). Lenin thus wanted to preserve the possibility of politics within the working class, a theme that reached back to his first major pamphlet, What is to be Done? (1902). Lenin’s “last struggle” was to prevent the strangling of politics in the Soviet state, a danger he regarded not merely in terms of Stalin’s leadership, but the condition of the Bolsheviks more generally.

2017

The article presents a biographical reconstruction of the life of the painter I. I. Brodsky (1884-1939) through the lens of his painting “Vladimir Lenin in Smolny” (1930). Brodsky (and his work are shown against the background of the terror of the 1930s, an ideological rupture in his artistic vision and his attainment of personal success. The diaries of P. N. Filonov help us to see Brodsky from an unusual angle. The impulse to write articles was an exhibition of “old art” (“Ars Nobilis”), wich was held in the exhibition halls of Volkswagen in Berlin from 18 to 27 October 2002. Two portraits of Lenin by Brodksy were displayed there: “Vladimir Lenin in Smolny” and “Lenin reading Pravda” (1930) from the private collection of Otto von Mitzlaff.