ABSTRACT
Stalin had Lenin's remains embalmed and placed on show in Moscow's Red Square for the benefit of pilgrims. The practice of carrying in procession huge portraits of Lenin and other leaders-like khorugvi-persisted. George S. Counts documented the abasements of the Soviet intelligentsia to the personality cult at the time that Orwell was writing Nineteen Eighty-Four. Alexander Schmemann contrasts Solzhenitsyn's internal historical portrait of Stalin with Tolstoy's externalized Napoleon. Solzhenitsyn's failing is an inability to keep his own voice out of the frame. Sarcasm constantly intrudes like a scalpel, puncturing the illusion that we are resident in Stalin's head. A characteristic of Solzhenitsyn's prose is its rapid, often seamless, alternation between inner and exterior narratives. Solzhenitsyn systematically undermines the hagiographical Soviet image of Lenin. He has Lenin stumble across the realisation that he is capable of anything except real action, making things happen.
