A Cabinet of Soviet Curiosities
Paul R. Gregory: Lenin's Brain
The New York Sun, May 21, 2008
Moscow, February 1991 © Andrew Stuttaford
Sometimes the smallest of things can illuminate the largest. A fossil tells the story of massive planetary change, a line or two of poetry does more to explain trench warfare than a dozen history books, and the miniatures of Nicholas Hilliard bring Gloriana's long vanished England back to iridescent, dangerous life. In writing "Lenin's Brain" (Hoover Institution Press, 163 pages, $15), Houston University professor Paul R. Gregory has mined the Hoover Institution's extraordinary collection of Soviet archival material to come up with 14 brief, deftly chosen tales that brilliantly illuminate the cruelties, the absurdities, and the failures of the USSR's malignant, broken-backed utopia, with a precision and a concision that have rarely been equaled.
Professor Gregory's book is as grim as it is fascinating; the nearest it comes to offering any sort of relief is with its account of the fate of its eponymous red-gray matter. The Soviet leader's brain was not the source of much laughter in the course of Lenin's lifetime, but the absurd, darkly funny story of its subsequent fate is a farce that would have delighted Mikhail Bulgakov and must surely, one day, tempt Tom Stoppard.
The saga begins with the removal of the brain in the immediate aftermath of its owner's death, to be poked and prodded, examined and venerated. From there it went on a long, strange trip from skull to jar to slide, ending up divided into 30,953 carefully selected slices. (I am unclear whether this total includes the portion that was dispatched to Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.) A German brain specialist was put in charge of the project for a while, but he proved unacceptably foreign and irritatingly independent. In the end, however, Stalin's Politburo got the result it wanted from a team of more biddable experts, "proof" that Lenin was smarter than just about anybody else — a mixture of pseudoscience and elitism that was all too typical of the Bolshevik project. As the episode reminds us, the Soviet leadership believed that the masses were inherently unreliable: Without an "enlightened elite to manage [them], there would never be a peasant-worker paradise. By this logic, the creators of this dictatorship must themselves be head and shoulders above the rest."
The rest of "Lenin's Brain" shows the society these geniuses created. It was a civilization where mass murder was commonplace ("the Leningrad troika sentenced 658 defendants to death in a single day"), where history (such as the truth behind the massacre of Polish officers at Katyn) was almost infinitely malleable, and where, in 1944, 180,014 Crimean Tatars were exiled from their ancestral homeland "without incident," a comment from the secret police chief that, in just two words, shows how brutal and brutalized this paradise had become.
And so it goes on. Mr. Gregory introduces his readers to the notion of "former people" (byvshie liudi), individuals whose background, behavior, or associations (such as who they were related to) meant that "they were no longer [to] be regarded as human beings." We read how debate was suppressed (even at the Party's highest levels), and are given details of a paranoia that ran so deep that the notion of "anti-Soviet agronomists" could be taken seriously. In the end, ironically, the result was that the Kremlin's bosses no longer had access to the information they needed to run their empire efficiently: The chapter describing how the decision was taken to invade Afghanistan is a devastating portrait of a secretive and fumbling gerontocracy seduced by conspiracy theory and ancient ideological assumptions into a disastrous international adventure.
But of all Professor Gregory's stories, the most haunting is that of Vladimir Moroz. After the arrest of his parents and older brother in 1937, Vladimir and his younger sibling were transferred to (separate) secret police-run orphanages. There he made the mistake, records show, of expressing "dissatisfaction with the arrests" of his family. He was then arrested himself, tortured, and sent to a corrective-labor camp. He died there six months later.
He was 17 years old.