Of course Stalinist promoted a cult of Lenin. They used the real respect that he had created by his ideas and actions to legitimate a butcher's regime whose premises, including, centrally, the cult of personality, were largely opposed to Lenin's ideas. Lenin himself had an inkling about what might happen were Stalin's actions unchecked, and warned the Bolshevik leadership about it in his Testament, suppressed, of course, under Stalin. The Bolshevik leadership Lenin warned was murdered almost to a person by 1940, mostly in the Great Purge of '37.
Although I'm not a Leninist, I never said that Leninists were a cult. I said the Soviet Union under Stalin and after fostered a cult of Lenin. Some self-styled Leninists are cultists, but rejection of the worship of a personality is so fundamental to Lenin's ideas that it is hard to take such people's claim to be Leninist seriously.
I don't think that Lenin ever used the term Leninist or Leninism, any more than Marx ever called himself a Marxist -- we have Engels' word that he expressly rejected the term; Marx called his ideas, collectively, "the materialist conception (or theory) of history"; the term "Marxism" was invented by Bakunin to charge people who admired Marx of following a cult if personality, and was only adopted by the Second International after Marx's death.)
I said I liked the architecture of Lenin's tomb, a red square in Red Square, and found the mummified body of Lenin grotesque, as would he, which we know because of statements he made before his death about how he wanted his body to be handled -- any way but that.
It's a fallacy to suppose that just because Lenin wrote an incredible amount he wanted later generations to slavishly follow his words. Almost all his writings were specific and concrete interventions shaped to the needs of particular situations, accordingly they are not a consistent system and it would not be possible to follow them all. (Marx's and Engels' ideas also, although they are more systematic and often less occasional than Lenin's.)
Lenin said, I paraphrase, that political thinking is precisely about grasping the concrete moment and acting accordingly. If he had known that his ideas would be mummified along with his body under Stalin, I'm sure he would have wished that his writings could be recalled and burnt. He hoped that people would think for themselves (a capital crime under Stalin), along the general lines he was thinking to be sure, but not proceed by treating his interventions as universal and eternal truths.
But we've been having this argument for at least 30 years, haven't we? And we just get older.
Andie
Sent from my iPad
On Sep 6, 2012, at 10:58 AM, c b <cb31450 at gmail.com> wrote:
> andie_nachgeborenen
>
> The term cult of personality was an old commonplace in radical
> discourse, farolder thn Khushchev. Marx uses it, Bakunin used it about
> Marx. Whatever you want to call what the Soviets and other Stalinists
> did with Lenin, it was a lot like a cult of personality.
>
> ^^^^
> CB: Well, I don't want to call it a cult of the personality, because
> it's not a cult. It's like the veneration for Marx, or Darwin or
> Einstein. It is a rational respect for profound ideas, not a religious
> type irrational worship. This respect was held for Lenin before he
> died, and continued afterward. The Stalinists didn't promote worship
> of Lenin's personality. That is a false statement. They promoted
> respect for his thinking , writing and practice in leading the
> Bolsheviks ,Communist Party and Soviet Union.
> ^^^^^
>
> Lenin himself was well aware of the dangers, which was why he made it
> quite clear while he was alive that he did not want to be an object of
> veneration while dead. Which, unfortunately, he was. I didn't make up
> the slogan Lenin Lives! When he was living, no such slogan was
> necessary. Stalin wrapped himself in Lenin's mantel; Trotsky fought
> for it and lost. And the living person, or institution, need not be
> the object of veneration worshiped in the cult.
>
> ^^^^^
> CB: Leninists are not a cult. That's like calling Marxists or
> Darwinists a cult ;It is the complete opposite of a cult because it is
> based on respect for scientific and profound thinking and writing, not
> religious or cultish fervor. It's like Newton saying he stood on the
> shoulders of giants.
>
> ^^^^-
>
> A living person, like Stalin, who of course had his own cult, or an
> institution, like a state or party, can use the cult of the dead with
> very harmful effect. I used to have a whole drawer of pins of Lenin,
> not one of which was made during his life. I like the modernist
> monument in Red Square as a piece of architecture, but found the mummy
> grotesque and pathetic. Lenin, alive, unequivocally said he rejected
> any ancestor worship,
>
> ^^^^
> CB:.The Lenin tomb is inspiring and glorious, not at all grotesque or
> pathetic. Lenin's statements about himself are expressions of
> appropriate personal modesty. He certainly wouldn't have written 60
> volumes of collected works if he didn't want people to continue to
> follow his ideas after he was dead. The claim that Lenin didn't want
> people to continue to follow his most general ideas after he was dead
> is absurd. Lenin certainly followed Marx and Engels ideas after they
> were dead.
>
> ^^^^^
>
> , any worship of himself at all, alive or dead.
>
> ^^^^^^
> CB: Of course,he opposed _worship_ of himself or anybody dead or
> alive. But he did not oppose special recognition of Marx and Engels.
> Lets see I'm sure google has the picture of him at the unfolding of
> the statute of Marx and Engels.
>
> "The great world-wide historical service of Marx and Engels lies in
> this, that they indicated to the proletarians of all countries their
> role, their tasks, their calling: to be the first to rise in the
> revolutionary fight against capital and unite around themselves in
> this struggle all the toilers and the exploited." (Lenin, Speech at
> the Unveiling of a Monument to Marx & Engels, Nov.7, 1918, CW, Vol.28,
> p.65)"
>
>
> Lenin was not opposed to erecting
> statues of important leaders. He promoted dedicated study of Marxism.
> Dedicated study of Lenin's works, not worshipful rememberance of his
> personality, is a big distinction your discussion here ignores.
>
> ^^^^^
> He viewed the Revolution and Soviet state he knew as his monument.
> Revolution and Soviet state
>
> ^^^^
> CB: So, you think there should be a monument to him , just not his
> mummy ? (giggles)
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