I doubt whether Lenin would have had much patience with the posthumous cult of personality erected around him--we have the testimony of Krupskaya that "such things only depressed him"--although, as a realist in matters of acquiring and exercising power he might have felt obliged to acknowledge its effectiveness as an iconic anchor almost infinitely adaptable to subsequent shifts in Party line. Certainly as a visual he is far more appealing--even charismatic--than his ghastly successor (not much rendered graphically once safely dead, whereas Vladimir Illych had the benefit of another four decades of increasingly sophisticated official treatments) whose visage in even the most adoring depictions seems always to convey first and foremost a sense of stolid menace.

I still have in my collection a LOOK magazine from the early 1960s with a glowering Lenin on its cover. "Lenin:" the copy blares "The True Story of the Evil Genius Who Created the Communist Threat to Our World" (it was always reassuring to me, as a child who'd taken an early interest in the Cold War, to know that our free and impartial press could be relied upon to give us the straight poop, whereas those poor devils on the other side were being fed nuthin' but propaganda--I've got a copy of LIFE of roughly the same vintage that includes a scathing assessment of Kerouac, Ginsberg and the Beats: change the names and modify a few relevant details and you could easily pass it off as a Soviet literary apparatchik's sneering attack on "rootless cosmopolitans" in literature--the tone is spot-on). Inside the lavishly illustrated article I remember a photo of young Ulyanov as a tot, and the headline: "The Little Boy Who Had No Friends Grows Up to be a Man without Pity."

Lenin's a difficult figure for me to bring into focus. I'm prepared to acknowledge the purity of his motives, but I think he was one of those characters who, in working tirelessly for the interests of humanity as he saw them, was perfectly indifferent to the sufferings of actual human beings consequent to the working out of this desirable abstract (frankly I think that Ralph Nader is cut from a bolt of similar, albeit flimsier cloth). That his legacy was deformed by Stalinism seems unarguable, but it seems equally true that he was largely responsible, intentionally or no, for preparing the ground from which that poisonous vine sprouted.

cordially,