Two different “spectres” of Lenin at the Twentieth Congress

In the article we published three days ago, [*] Isaac Deutscher summoned Lenin’s “ghost” to the podium at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU. He begins by quoting the following words of Anastas Mikoyan:

[T]he Leninist spirit and Lenin has permeated all our work and decisions, as if Lenin were still alive and here with us! How he would rejoice if he could see us now …

These remarks are highly characteristic. For the “new” CPSU leadership under Khrushchev justified the steps it took in the mid-1950s by invoking the rhetoric of a “return to Lenin”. The aim of the new leadership was to place the system of bureaucratic privileges -overshadowed during the Stalin era by the constant fear of purge- on a safer and more predictable footing. Under Stalin’s rule, bureaucrats could fall from favour at the most unexpected moments and be imprisoned, exiled, or even killed. The “new” party leadership, by contrast, promised the Stalinist bureaucratic caste a stable order in which, provided they observed the rules, they could enjoy their material privileges without fear.

A photograph from the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU

The party leadership acknowledged that certain serious “excesses” had occurred in the past and proclaimed that the solution lay in fidelity to Leninist principles. Yet what was presented as “Leninist principles” amounted to little more than the refashioning -and, in many cases, the outright distortion- of Lenin’s theoretical legacy in accordance with the interests of the bureaucratic caste.

In this atmosphere, Nâzım Hikmet composed two poems welcoming the CPSU’s new orientation.

The first is dated March 1956:

Nâzım Hikmet (1956)

    Lenin came to the Twentieth Congress,
    his blue almond eyes were smiling.
    Before the opening session he entered the hall.
    He sat on the step
    at the foot of the podium
    and began to take notes.
    Unaware even of his own statue.

    To be under the same roof as Lenin,
    to feel, in our hands, with a sense of relief,
    the humanity of his intelligent hand.

    Lenin came to the Twentieth Congress.
    Over the Soviet Union,
    like white clouds at dawn,
    lay a mass of fertile hopes.

In this portrayal, Lenin appears as a figure who oversees the congress, takes it under his wing, whose very “presence” signifies that the dark days are over, and who embodies hope. No criticism is voiced of either the Twentieth Congress or the situation within the CPSU. The tone of the poem reflects the belief that the congress and the CPSU have entered upon a course in keeping with Lenin’s spirit. This approach is consistent with the framework set out in Mikoyan’s speech: Stalin’s excesses were an unfortunate deviation; now the Leninist line is being restored.

By contrast, the Lenin imagined by Deutscher adopts an entirely different perspective. This Lenin sharply rebukes the delegates; he mocks being referred to as the “Great Lenin”; he regards his transformation into a “protective saint” as an insult; he describes himself as an icon laden with dynamite. This Lenin mercilessly condemns the congress’s silence, its conformism, and its break with revolutionary principles.

Nâzım Hikmet’s second poem on the Twentieth Congress, written shortly after the first, makes this contrast even more explicit:

    A Few Words to the Communists

    Communists, I have a few words for you:
    whether you stand at the head of the state or in a dungeon,
    whether you are a rank-and-file member or a party secretary,
    Lenin must be able, at all times and in every place,
    to enter your work, your home, your whole life
    as though they were his own work, his own home, his own life.

Soviet Union magazine
(No. 3 - February1956)

In this poem, Lenin becomes an almost transcendent, quasi-sacral moral guide. He is an inner arbiter who must be admitted into every sphere, a figure of conscience, a supreme point of reference. Were one to replace the word “Lenin” with “God”, and “communists” with “believers”, the result would be a strikingly religious mode of address.

It is precisely at this point that Deutscher’s spectral Lenin steps in. He addresses the delegates with the following question:

Have you made of me your harmless and ridiculous patron-saint, to whom you burn stinking candles?

No such objection appears in these two poems by Nâzım Hikmet. Nor is there any indication that he was even aware of such a question, still less that it troubled him. On the contrary, Lenin’s “arrival” at the congress is presented as a moment of hope, purification and release. The problems within the party are conceived -just as the CPSU leadership in 1956 maintained- as matters that can be resolved through “fidelity” to Lenin.

Accordingly, Nâzım Hikmet’s stance at the 1956 moment is clear: to demonstrate allegiance to the line of the “new” CPSU leadership, which promised the privileged bureaucratic caste a safer and more stable order in which state terror no longer constituted a two-sided threat. Serious mistakes had been made in the past; yet the party was now identifying these errors from within and returning to the Leninist course. Nâzım Hikmet’s two poems thus constitute a literary reproduction of this official propaganda.

[*] With the exception of its introductory paragraph, this text is taken from the introduction by Gonzalo Pozo to Isaac Deutscher’s unfinished work, Lenin’s Childhood, published in English by Verso Books in 2024 and translated into Turkish. The English edition can be accessed here.