A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

The cult was reminiscent in some ways of the ancient cult of the divine Tsar. It went back to the medieval practice of canonizing princes who were prematurely killed whilst serving Russia. But the Lenin cult was new in the sense that it also fed into folklore myths of the popular leaders against the Tsar, such as Stenka Razin or Emelian Pugachev, blessed with magical and Christ-like powers. Here was the mixture of peasant Christianity and pagan myth that had long associated revolution with the hunt for truth and justice (pravda) in the popular consciousness. The orchestrators of the Lenin cult consciously played upon this theme. 'Lenin cannot be killed', declared one of his hagiographers on I September, 'because Lenin is the rising up of the oppressed. So long as the proletariat lives — Lenin lives.' Thus Lenin as the Workers' Christ. Another propagandist claimed that it had been the 'will of the proletariat' that had miraculously intervened, like some crucifix or a button on his chest, to deflect Kaplan's bullets from causing a fatal wound. Poems were published depicting Lenin as a martyr sent by God to suffer for the poor:

You came to us, to ease

Our excruciating torment,

You came to us a leader, to destroy

The enemies of the workers' movement.

We will not forget your suffering,

That you, our leader, endured for us.

You stood a martyr ...

A biography of Lenin for the workers was rushed out after the shooting. With the sort of title that one more readily associates with the cults of Stalin or Mao,

* According to Bonch-Bruevich, Lenin disapproved of the cult (Marxist ideology negated the significance of any individual in history) and put a brake on it when he recovered (Bonch-Bruevich, Vospominaniia o Lenine, 337—40).

The Great Leader of the Workers' Revolution, it depicted Lenin as supremely wise, a superhuman God-like figure, beloved by all the workers. A similar pamphlet for the peasants, The Leader of the Rural Poor, V.L Ul'ianov-Lenin, was printed in 100,000 copies. It read a bit like the Lives of the Saints, the favourite reading of the peasants. All sorts of myths about Lenin, the fighter for truth and justice, began to circulate among the peasantry. Photographs of him appeared for the first time in remote villages. These were often placed in the 'red corner', the 'holy spot' inside the peasant hut where icons and portraits of the Tsar had been traditionally placed.⁶⁹

Lenin's failed assassin, Fanny Kaplan, was a young Jewish woman and former Anarchist turned SR, who told the Cheka that the plot to kill him had been all her own. She said that Lenin had betrayed the revolution, and that 'by living longer, he merely postpones the ideal of socialism for decades to come'. Kaplan was detained in the same Lubianka cell as the British diplomat, Bruce Lockhart, whom the Bolsheviks had also arrested on suspicion of involvement in the plot. He described her entering the cell:

She was dressed in black. Her hair was black, and her eyes, set in a fixed stare, had great black rings under them. Her face was colourless. Her features, strongly Jewish, were unattractive. She might have been any age between twenty and thirty-five. We guessed it was Kaplan. Doubtless the Bolsheviks hoped that she would give us some sign of recognition.

But she did not. Soon she was removed to the Kremlin, where she was almost certainly tortured before being shot (and her remains destroyed without trace) on 3 September. According to Angelica Balabanoff, soon to become the Secretary of the Comintern, Krupskaya wept at the thought that, in Kaplan, the first revolutionary had been killed by the revolutionary government.⁷⁰ One wonders how much she wept for the thousands of other revolutionaries shortly to be killed in revenge for the wounding of her husband.

Although Kaplan had always denied it, she was at once accused of working for the SRs and the Western Powers.* It was yet another 'proof in the paranoiac theory that the regime was surrounded by a ring of enemies; and that, if it was to survive, a constant civil war had to be waged against them. The Bolshevik press called for mass reprisals. Having drummed up a rage of adulation

* It later emerged at the SR Trial in 1922 that Kaplan had been recruited by the SR Combat Organization, an underground terrorist outfit not officially connected with the SR Central Committee (most of whom had moved to Samara by August 1918) but supported by some of its members (e.g. Gots) who remained in Moscow. The Combat Organization assassinated the Bolshevik Commissar Volodarsky on 20 June. It also tried to murder Trotsky on his way to the Eastern Front; but he foiled the plan by changing trains at the last moment.