Silhouette of the Sovereign: From Lenin to Leninism

At the end of Lenin's life and after his death, his figure as the leader of the revolutionary state was doubled in political discourse, ritualized practice and the materiality of his preserved body, becoming a combination of a real mortal man and the immortal embodiment of Leninism. Like doubled figures of rulers in many cultural and historical contexts, Lenin came to occupy the position of sovereign authority vis-à-vis the Soviet state, embodying the foundational truth from which the Soviet project emanated. The endless editing, censorship and revision of Lenin's texts after his death, and the ongoing re-embalming of his preserved body, were two sides of a process in which the doubled figure of Lenin was produced. The third aspect of this process included visual representations of Lenin in images, monuments, sculptures and films. The current paper focuses on that visual aspect, analyzing under what conditions and according to what criteria images of Lenin were produced and evaluated and how they reflected and contributed to the doubling of his figure. The paper discusses how Lenin's images changed over time and what these changes tell us about the nature of sovereign authority in the Soviet system.