The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

myths, while radio and television programmes presented an incontrovertible view of
Lenin as marked by “messianic omnipotence or omniscience”. 84
Lenin’s image was “reproduced en masse” in a programme of triumphal
memorialism. Busts of Lenin were installed to grace the interiors of countless
educational and public buildings, gigantic Lenin statues were erected as public
monuments in central squares and locations in major cities and in the Kremlin
courtyard, the state library was named in Lenin’s honour, and a network of Lenin
museums was created centred on the Central Lenin Museum in Moscow. St Petersburg
was renamed Leningrad after Lenin. 85 Sites associated with the making of Lenin’s
political life were memorialised. Until the late 1980s, a memorial landscape of Lenin
deification across the Soviet Union was harnessed in the service of the Stalinist
political order. Large Lenin monuments were also built in other European countries
that fell within the Soviet axis. In East Berlin in the former GDR, a sixty‐three‐foot‐tall,
heroic style Lenin statue was built from Red Granite blocks from the Ukraine. In
addition, a huge Lenin‐like monument of communist leader Ernst Thälmann, who had
been murdered at Buchenwald in 1944, was created in order to promote the authority
and prestige of the GDR’s leadership. It portrayed Thälmann as a superhuman,
antifascist hero and not a “suffering concentration camp inmate”. 86 More than mere
symbols of leaders, these monuments were biographic memorials because they
purported to narrate a story of heroic leaders and the making of socialism.
Perhaps the most striking expression of the ‘Lenin cult’, as well as the cult of heroic
leadership in general, was the memorial presence of Lenin’s dead body, which was
placed in Moscow’s Red Square, embalmed in a red and black granite and marble
mausoleum, “preserved against the ravages of nature”. This symbolic “architectural
84 Trevor J Smith, ‘The Collapse of the Lenin Personality Cult in Soviet Russia, 1985‐1995’, pp 325‐
332.
85 Trevor J Smith, ‘The Collapse of the Lenin Personality Cult in Soviet Russia, 1985‐1995’, pp 325‐
332.
86 Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin, pp 201‐203. Ladd notes that memorial sculpture in the ‘west’, in
contrast, commemorated anti‐Nazis as “suffering victims, not conquering heroes” (p 206).
80