LIONEL ABEL
87
dictator's desire to commit inexpiable deeds, and to position himself,
proud of being unforgivable, in the pages of history.
But I do not want to terminate these reflections without expressing
regret for the judgment I have been forced to make of Lenin, whom
before this, like others of my generation,
r
greatly admired. And regret
occasions recollection. More than forty years back, Harold Rosenberg,
who had not yet ventured into the art criticism which later made him
widely known, confided to me that he had begun to write a play. He
had always wanted to write plays, he said, but the particular play he had
in mind
to
write then was to be about Lenin's burial. His script called
for Stalin and the other Communist Party leaders to follow the hearse
bearing the body of Lenin to the tomb where it is still exhibited. Lenin's
widow, Krupskaya, would halt the procession with the demand that
Lenin's corpse be given a modest grave like any Soviet citizen's. An ar–
gument would then develop between Krupskaya and Stalin, the former
stressing Lenin's identity with the masses he led, the latter pointing to the
propaganda value of investing Lenin's corpse with pharaonic splendor. In
Rosenberg's script, Stalin would of course fail to convince Krupskaya,
and then would have her dragged away by his police . I remember that I
thought the idea a marvelous one, and for some time kept asking Harold
about his script. I urged him to complete it and offer it to a producer,
and in the new period of off-Broadway theater right after the war, an
intellectual play of that sort could have made the stage. But Harold was
afraid,
r
think, of being charged with anticommunism, dropped his script
and turned to his other projects. He did say to me, though, after
Khruschev's attack on Stalin, and the removal of Stalin's body from the
tomb where it had been placed beside Lenin's: "You see, I was right to
connect the positioning of Lenin's corpse with bureaucratic policy....
When there is freedom in Soviet Russia, Lenin's corpse will be given
private burial. ... "
Should this indeed occur, what feelings will be expressed? Rosen–
berg still assumed that the Soviet experiment would succeed and that
when the weight of the regime was lifted, its citizens would be able to
enjoy much better lives than in what was then called "the capitalist
world." But such optimism about the Soviet future is no longer possible.
I believe that Lenin's corpse will be removed from his present tomb and
be given private burial. But this will not take place in an atmosphere of
respect for the Bolshevik leader, rather in one of unrelenting polemic
against his ideas and his deeds. He will not be forgiven for all of those
deeds, and he may even be condemned for an act not his, and for which
he was in no way responsible: the exhibition of his corpse, enshrined like
Pharaoh's, for the masses to worship.
