Lenin’s Last Stand

National Review Online, April 22, 2001

© Andrew Stuttaford

Shrines should be for saints, not killers, but no one seems to have told them that at Gorki Leninskiye. There, twenty miles outside Moscow, a holy place still stands, a tribute to a tyrant, and an insult to his victims. It is paid for by a state unable to cope with the truths of its terrible, barely acknowledged past. Its citizens have a better understanding. They know what is celebrated there and they prefer to avoid it. "Why would you want to go there?" I am asked, "there is nothing to see." "I'm interested in Soviet history." There is a shrug in response, no words, just silence. Navigation is difficult; there are no signs pointing the way, no billboards, no fluttering flags or excited crowds, just country roads, a few disheveled hamlets and the stillness of the Russian plain. Finally, after an hour or so, we drive up to a statue, more than twenty feet tall. Massive, monumental and an eyesore, Lenin still stands, eternal, hectoring, damaged now in one leg, forever gazing out at that radiant future that was never to come, still signaling to visitors that they had arrived in Gorki Leninskiye, the place where the father of the revolution was taken to die.

© Andrew Stuttaford

Before the Bolsheviks, Gorki (the "Leninskiye" came later) had been one of those pleasant country estates that are the backdrop to our sunny image of aristocratic Russia before the Fall: silver birches, a river, a yellow stucco manor house in the neo-classical style. In 1909 the widow of an early financier of the revolutionary cause bought the manor. Ungratefully, the revolutionaries nationalized the place in 1918. Lenin first came to stay that same year, despite, according to his wife, "exquisite embarrassment" over the size of the accommodations.

The Lenins evidently got over this shame and their frequent visits made Gorki a natural choice when the time came to find the Bolshevik leader somewhere to recuperate after a series of strokes. Despite the efforts of a team of foreign doctors (the Great Man eschewed the "usual Soviet bunglers"), recovery proved elusive. Deteriorating rapidly, Lenin spent most of the last 18 months of his life effectively confined to Gorki, and it was here, on January 21, 1924, that the "genius of geniuses" finally succumbed.

Past the statue, we find the road toward our objective. We are alone. There are no tour buses, no wheezing, dirty Ladas or struggling rusty Volgas, no Red Army trucks, no determined pedestrians. It was not always this way.

In the old days, half a million pilgrims would come to pay their respects each year. It was a patriotic excursion, a break from the factory, school, or barracks, a day in the country for all those young pioneers, kindergarten Octobrists, Komsomol kids, Party members, and plain, ordinary working folks.

Now there is just us. As we get closer, the site appears abandoned, the route to its empty parking lot blocked off by a needlessly locked gate, a gate without fences.

To reach the first, and newest, part of the shrine, the Political History Museum, it is necessary to climb up a slight slope. At one time, this must have been a reminder to visitors that to be worthy of their destination they were expected to elevate themselves to some higher level, an impression that the temple-like architecture of the museum was clearly designed to reinforce. It fails. Thrown up, with exquisite timing, in the later Gorbachev era, the building would have embarrassed Albert Speer. It is a gimcrack Parthenon, worthy only of some Neanderthal Olympus. Grass now peeps through the cracks of its empty, stone steps, but an open door signals that the faithful are still welcome.

They are not, however, expected. My wife and I are the only visitors. Sold our tickets by an astonished attendant, we walk up a sweeping staircase past a large statue of a pensive-looking Lenin. Another attendant switches on a wind machine and a red flag begins to flutter behind the marble revolutionary. As we reach the top of the stairs, the machine is turned off. It is a pattern that is repeated in each exhibit room. On our approach, an attendant darts ahead to switch on the lights, and on our departure the room is plunged back into darkness. Lenin used to say that Communism was "Soviet power plus electrification." It is a mark of progress that his successors have to contend with utility bills.

The exhibits themselves are worthy of that most bureaucratic of revolutions, production statistics, in addition to pamphlets, philosophical treatises, and proclamations. There are also some banners and photographs of the Communist leadership looking like Communists should, sullen, discontented, and filled with self-importance. Of the camps, the prisons, the mass graves, the famines, the torture chambers, there is nothing.

It is a disgusting omission, all the more so in an institution that is funded by the Russian state, but it is also typical of a country where there is no shared understanding of Communism's savage history. When the Soviets fell, too many of their myths were allowed to survive. An exhausted people and a compromised governing class had no wish to examine the past, preferring instead to reveal a few glimpses here, an archive or two there. The spirits of the gulag dead were to be appeased by no more than a few half-measures.

So, it should be no surprise that when, in 1994, the decision was taken to empty out Lenin's old Kremlin apartment (it had been a tourist attraction for privileged visitors during the Soviet era), the contents were neither destroyed nor placed in context in some proper place. Instead, they were taken to quiet, damp Gorki Leninskiye and dumped not far from the Political History Museum, in one of the original buildings of the Morozov estate, waiting, perhaps, for better days — out of sight, but not, quite, out of mind.

To reach this building, one must trek through silent woodland with only the crows for company. Unlike in the years of more closely shepherded visits, there are few signs to point the way, but another helpful Lenin (red granite this time and hoisted, appropriately enough, on the shoulders of the proletariat) tells us that we are on the right track. It is not a long walk, fifteen, twenty minutes at the most, and at the end of it we are back in the early Soviet era.

"It was all moved, almost overnight: 40,000 objects put into trucks and not even catalogued," the attendant explains, shocked by the sacrilege. She is a pleasant, educated woman, one of those intellectuals caught on just the wrong side of a changed Russia, with a degree, perhaps, in Marxism-Leninism and, maybe, a doctoral dissertation on some forgotten revolutionary. Too rooted, it seems, in the old order to adapt to or even understand the new one, she prefers to recreate the past, cataloguing, listing, and displaying the relics that she so loves, comfortable in this building that no one comes to visit, a place where it is still January 21, 1924, and where every clock is stopped, literally, at the moment of Lenin's death.

And what a treasure trove there is to see, souvenirs of the public man (complete with wall maps of the young Soviet Republic, the telephones, the long meeting table) and the private. We see Lenin's furniture, his bed (and, in a separate room, that of his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, dull, shrill, and neglected, a Rodham avant la lettre). Wait, there's more. Lenin's desk! Lenin's piano! Krupskaya's briefcase! A monkey bust from Armand Hammer! There is not much on the walls: a family photograph here, a pin-up of Marx there, but little else. We are led down corridors deep into the labyrinth of Leninist myth, into the realm of an ascetic philosopher-king. "He could read six hundred pages a day!" There are books everywhere, turgid treatises in plain brown covers, with broken spines, underscored, and filled with scrawled commentary, the giveaway spoor of somebody who had spent too much time in libraries.

The kitchen and dining room feature utilitarian furniture, mismatched cutlery, and a few old pots and pans. The message is clear, and false; we are told that the plain-living Lenin shared the tough times endured by the starving Russia of the early 1920s. That the always well-fed Soviet leader saw famine as just another political weapon ("Desperate hunger will give us a mood among the broad peasant masses that will guarantee us [their] sympathy … or at least their neutrality") goes unmentioned. There is no place here for the real man, the cynical murderer and didactic thief who destroyed a civilization.

No, the Lenin that haunts these strange, transplanted rooms is the Lenin of our guide's Soviet childhood; it is the Lenin of legend, the hero of the Finland Station, the austere visionary. And this, sadly, may be the Lenin of Russia's immediate future. Rather than reckoning with the past, Vladimir Putin is trying conceal it under the façade of a unifying national narrative, a narrative that will include, he says, "the best" from the Soviet years, a narrative that may well devote more time to the 40,000 objects in Lenin's apartment than the more than 20 million killed in Lenin's dystopia.

In the end, President Putin will probably be unsuccessful. The ghosts of the past will not be so easily exorcized. In the meantime, the shrine at Gorki Leninskiye will endure, dishonest and misleading, funded by the state but abandoned by its worshipers; in its own way, a fitting memorial to a god that failed.