Repeating Lenin by Slavoj Zizek

Repeating Lenin by Slavoj Zizek
9/20/11 2:53 PM
Here Stalin spells out the secret of his rise to power: as a rather anonymous General Secretary,
he nominated tens of thousands of cadres who owed their rise to him... This is why Stalin did
not yet want Lenin dead in the early 1922, rejecting his demand to be given poison to end his
life after the debilitating stroke: if Lenin were to die already in early 1922, the question of
succession would not yet be resolved in Stalin’s favor, since Stalin as the general secretary did
not yet penetrate enough the Party apparatus with his appointees — he needed another year or
two, so that, when Lenin effectively dies, he could count on the support of thousands of midlevel
cadres nominated by him to win over the big old names of the Bolshevik “aristocracy.”
Here are some details of the daily life of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in 1917 and the following
years, which, in their very triviality, render palpable the gap from the Stalinist nomenklatura.
When, in the evening of 24 October 1917, Lenin left his flat for the Smolny Institute to
coordinate the revolutionary takeover, he took a tram and asked the conductress if there was any
fighting going on in the center that day. In the years after the October Revolution, Lenin was
mostly driving around in a car only with his faithful driver and bodyguard Gil; a couple of times
they were shot at, stopped by the police and arrested (the policemen did not recognize Lenin),
once, after visiting a school in suburbs, even robbed of the car and their guns by bandits posing
as police, and then compelled to walk to the nearest police station. When, on 30 August 1918,
Lenin was shot, this occurred while he got in a conversation with a couple of complaining
women in front of a factory he just visited; the bleeding Lenin was driven by Gil to Kremlin,
were there were no doctors, so his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya suggested someone should run out
to the nearest grocer’s shop for a lemon... The standard meal in the Kremlin kantina in 1918 was
buckwheat porridge and thin vegetable soup. So much about the privileges of nomenklatura!
Lenin’s slanderers like to evoke his famous paranoiac reaction at listening to Beethoven’s
appasionata (he first started to cry, then claimed that a revolutionary cannot afford to let himself
go to such sentiments, because they make him too weak, wanting to pat the enemies instead of
mercilessly fighting them) as the proof of his cold self-control and cruelty — however, even at
its own terms, is this accident effectively an argument AGAINST Lenin? Does it not rather bear
witness to an extreme sensitivity for music that needs to be kept in check in order to continue
the political struggle? Who of today’s cynical politicians still displays even a trace of such a
sensitivity? Is not Lenin here at the very opposite of the high-ranked Nazis who, without any
difficulty, combined such a sensitivity with the extreme cruelty in taking political decisions
(suffice it to recall Heydrich, the holocaust architect, who, after a hard day’s work, always found
time to play with his comrades Beethoven’s string quartets) — is not the proof of Lenin’s
humanity that, in contrast to this supreme barbarism, which resides in the very unproblematic
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek1.htm
Page 18 of 57