THE LENIN CULT

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 420, 3 January 1933, Page 2

THE LENIN CULT

o SOVIET CEREMONIAL UNENDING PROCESSION PAST EMBALMED BODY OF LENIN TOMB IN RED SQUARE. New ceremonial tends to be grotesque. Generally speaking, men have to do a thing a great many times before it becomes graceful. Thus, newfounded religions and institutions usually try to avoid ceremonial altogether. The Soviet Government, for instance, avoids it. Stalin appears in public in the simplest of costumes and behaves on the platf orm with less formality than the average city councillor. This is not so much virtue as wisdom. Were he to play the important personage in the traditional manner his chances of continuing to be important would be so much the smaller. One ceremonial, however, the Soviet Government has instituted, and it has been a remarkable success. Every -afternoon from 2 till 4 o'clock a procession flies continuosly through Lenin's marble tomb and past his embalmed hody. A soldier stands with fixed bayonet on either side of him; his shrunken head rests on a scarlet pillow — beard carefully trimmed and mouth firmly set. The tomb is dark except for a light beating directly on to him and silent except for the sound of shuffling feet. No one says anything; no one does anything. People just walk past, look sideways at him, and then go into the Red Square and about their business. Expressionless Faces. They* must do this habitually. Only so is it possible to account for the uending procession on every afternoon of every day of the week. Beyond taking off their hats and putting out their cigarettes they make no gesture of reverence. They might be tourists filing through a museum or an art gallery — just expressionless faces passing continuously by the embalmed body of a little man with a red beard and a bald head who has lain thus exposed in his tomb for some years now. The idea is not, of course, new. The Pharaohs were embalmed and sealed up, along with their household eauipment, in enormous pyramids and in tombs in a remote, desolate valley. But their last resting-places were intended to be secret. No one was to see them when they lay dead amongst their golden furniture and exquisite vases and ornaments and curious statues. It was to that extent a half hearted gesture of protest against a half-hearted vindication of their claim, when alive, to be more than human. Lenin's Body His Monument. Again, i'n Leningrad the preserved body of a saint is exhibited — contemptuously now — whose ossified finger was kissed bare by millions of devout lips. He, they say, was naturally embalmed. Certain qualities in the earth of his burial place prevented his body's decay. The bodies of statesmen and of soldiers have sometimes lain in state for a few days, and the Greeks had a curious custom of feasting a dead friend in the flesh; it is quite common for death-masks to be taken of the emine.nt, and the poet Donne, when he knew he was dying, sat for his portrait in a shroud; but Lenin provides with his body his own public monument. He is the materialist conception of history. Lying in a sealed vacuum, he demonstrates the fundamentals of the philosophy that he taught and that has had so great an influence. on his times. His memory is preserved in the most literal manner possible- — by preserving his body just as it was when he lived. It is as though his disciples, fearing that the magnitude of his achievement might lead to his being defied, decide to make. available for ever an absolute proof that he was a man like themselves. The. thing has a peculiar fascination. Varying Moods. It is difScult to cross the Red Square on an afternoon without joining the queue waiting to see. Lenin. And according to one's moods, so the little embalmed man is impressive or tawdry or even revolting. His face has a kind of saintliness; at the same time it is practical. The eyes are, of course, shut, but the. expression is none the less determined. It is the expression of theorist possessed of great energy, of a fanatic theorist He wears a plain khaki jaclcet with a red ribbon pinned. to it, and his hands — delicately shaped — are halfclenched. If an outsider's mood varies, what do the others — Siberian and Mongolian peasants, soldiers and factory workers, liquidated hourgeoisie — make of him. What is in their minds as they pass through his tomb? Do they visit him to renew their faith, to find fresh inspiration? Or is it just habit? Or does society expect of them this small observance in honour of the Revolution? Whatever may be the reason, there is no denying that they do visit Lenin's tomb in large numhers and frequently. Here, then, is the single retrospective gesture encouraged in Soviet Russia. Everything except Lenin is in the future. To pause and look backwards is permissible only in this case. Apart from Lenin the past has no existence.