[D66] What Lenin Teaches Us About Witchcraft

[A.OUT]

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/100/268602/what-lenin-teaches-us-about-witchcraft/


Journal #100 - May 2019
Oxana Timofeeva
What Lenin Teaches Us About Witchcraft

    www.e-flux.com
    View Original
    October 21st, 2010


    Oh I believe in miracles

    Oh I believe in a better world for me and you

    —The Ramones

In the 1990s, right after the collapse of the USSR, the Russian tabloid
press burst into a huge series of exposés on leaders of the state
socialist past. A lot of this attention fell on Lenin—as the founder of
the state, he became a privileged target of all sorts of attacks.
Historians and journalists competed to reveal unknown, weird, or
unpleasant facts of Lenin’s biography. This genre is still alive, and
seems to replace—or simply invert—an old Communist legacy: everyone who,
like me, was born in the Soviet Union, can still recollect a number of
stories from Lenin’s life. Among them are stories of: Lenin deceiving
the police officer who came for a home inspection,1 Lenin writing secret
messages to his comrades from prison,2 Lenin inviting a stoveman for a
cup of tea,3 Lenin meeting a beautiful red fox in the forest.4 In these
Soviet legends, the leader is always portrayed as positive and gentle,
whereas post-Soviet texts represent him as a negative or extremely
ambiguous figure. One recent essay of this latter kind suggests that
Lenin’s ancestors came from Western Europe, more specifically from
Germany. A recent article digs further and claims that someone in the
line of Lenins, perhaps the leader’s great-grandmother, was defamed for
using black magic and witchcraft, and was burned at the stake by the
Inquisition.5

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