Prague 2: Lenin on the Streets

Prague might be a seedy old town, especially if you hang out on the tourist strip on either side of and upon the Charles Bridge. But it also has some unexpected corners and surprises.

 Refreshing to see the old man mixing it in with the pastel buildings:

Appropriately, road workers were pulling and repairing tram tracks:

So what’s in Prague 3? That would have to include the Prophets of Prague …

 

Lenin, Religion, and Theology blurb by Paul Le Blanc

Paul Le Blanc has written this rather nice blurb for Lenin, Religion, and Theology, due out very soon:

In reading this book (which he surely would have done), Lenin himself might have been amused by Boer’s own gift for the outrageously funny, and perhaps offended by an all-too-apt detection of the religious dimensions of his revolutionary perspectives. Modern-day readers will learn much about the Bolshevik ‘god-builders’ against whom Lenin so fiercely polemicized, and about the ironic twists through which latter-day Bolshevik ‘god-builders’ turned this secular revolutionary into a deity.  Boer’s genuine respect for the man and his thought intertwines in fascinating ways with an intimate knowledge of Christian rhetoric and theology, resulting in a fresh, provocative contribution – to intellectual history, religious studies, and Marxist scholarship. — Paul Le Blanc, Professor of History, La Roche College, USA; Author, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party and Marx, Lenin, and the Revolutionary Experience.

 

Venerating Mao

Last week, while in Nanjing, I gave a lecture on the veneration of Lenin after his death. I ended by pointing to the increase in support for the Russian communist party over recent years, and the increasing stature of Lenin (and Stalin) in these times. During a lively and fascinating discussion afterwards, someone asked whether that popularity was merely nostalgia among the older generation, the one that can remember what life was like. I responded by pointing out that the support is actually quite strong among young people, and told a story of two of my own experiences in this regard – drinking toasts to the USSR and so on with groups of 20-somethings.

As we finished the session, a young woman came up to me, a postgraduate student, and said:

‘Many young people in China venerate Mao’.

‘You too?’ I said.

‘Of course’, she smiled. ‘We venerate him more than our parents do’.

‘Yes’, I said, ‘That explains a lot. I visited the Mausoleum last year and I was stunned at how many young people were present. In fact, the majority of the thousands there, on a regular weekday, were in their teens and twenties’.

‘I have been twice’, she said.

 

Between Lenin and the Zinzendorf Society

It must be the 60th anniversary of Joe Stalin’s death today that has brought up a somewhat strange conjunction. Only a few days ago I was enjoying the company of some of those involved in the Lenin research group in Nanjing:

Here is to be found a person holding a position to which everyone should aspire: a Professorship of Scientific Socialism.

Needless to say, I gave a lecture while in Nanjing:

 And then, hours later, I was trudging through the snow of eastern Germany:

Climbing a hill called Langsamer Tod (Slow Death):

All in order to get to the evening meal of the Zinzendorf Society:

… as one does.

 

A radical glimpse in Psalm 124

Verse 7 of Psalm 124 reads:

Our life force (nefesh) has escaped as a bird from the snare of the bird-catchers;

the snare is broken, and we are free!

A radical glimpse? These are precisely the types of texts that radicals have treasured, along with famous texts such as Matthew 16:

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Back to the Psalm. I am intrigued by Calvin’s comments:

Of the same import is the third similitude, That they were on all sides entrapped and entangled in the snares of their enemies, even as little birds caught in the net lie stretched under the hand of the fowler; and that when they were delivered, it was just as if one should set at liberty birds which had been taken. The amount is, that the people of God, feeble, without counsel, and destitute of aid, had not only to deal with bloodthirsty and furious beasts, but were also ensnared by bird-nets and stratagems, so that being greatly inferior to their enemies as well in policy as in open force, they were besieged by many deaths. From this it may be gathered that they were miraculously preserved (Commentary on the Psalms, vol. 5. pp. 87-88).

Uncannily reminds me of Lenin, who observes that a revolution is like a miracle. More pointedly, after the victory of the ‘civil’ war, he points out that his was indeed ‘a miracle without parallel, in that a starving, weak and half-ruined country has defeated its enemies—the mighty capitalist countries’.

 

On warming Lenin’s body

Accounts of the early process of preserving Lenin’s body – which was initially done for a short while so that more of the hundreds of thousands of people could pay their respects – usually speak of the duplicate ‘refrigeration’ units constructed. What they fail to note is that in the bitter Moscow winter weather of early 1924, the temperature hovered around minus 40 degrees Celsius. So the purpose of those units was to keep his body warm. It would not do for Vladimir to turn into a frozen block.

It’s a bit like the function of fridges on cold nights: the idea is to keep the stuff in there warm enough to eat. I remember when I was a child, living in country Australia. On cold winter mornings, I would put my hands in the fridge for a minute or two to warm them up.

 

Garage blackboard lectures

I have just returned from one of the best events in which I have participated for a very, very long time: the Garage Blackboard Lectures. I am told that they started when a few students got drunk one night and thought, hey, let’s have some lectures in our beaten up old garage. And so it began.

The setting provided a very different and welcome feel:

As you can see, a good crowd turns up – attentive, relaxed, with sharp minds and sharper questions:

And this goes on for hours (I was there for more than six hours). Two speakers, each for an hour or so; plenty of discussion … and a keg:

In the break we all had soup:

No tired old positions here, since everything is up for debate and rethinking. This is where new ideas and practices happen.

The biggest surprise for me – on the question of Marxism and religion – was the number of theological questions: on grace, miracle, predestination, God, creation …

Thankfully, we were encouraged on our way by a Chinese revolutionary poster:

 

Langston Hughes: communist poet

It’s almost the 110 years since Langston Hughes was born – 1 February 1902. Part of the Harlem Renaissance, called a ‘literary gutter rat’ for writing poetry of black life in Harlem (NY), attacked for sexual ‘deviance’, and red-baited for being  communist, he was one of the leading poets in 20th century USA – as many will know.

Put One More s in the U.S.A.

To make it Soviet.

One more s in the U.S.A.

Oh, we’ll live to see it yet.

In 1932 he spent a long stretch in the Soviet Union, especially in the eastern parts.

Good-morning, Revolution:

You’re the very best friend

I ever had.

We gonna pal around together from now on.

Listen, Revolution,

We’re buddies, see—

Together,

We can take everything:

Factories, arsenals, houses, ships

Railroads, forests, fields, orchards,

Bus lines, telegraphs, radios

(Jesus! Raise hell with radios!)

Steel mills, coal mines, oil wells, gas,

All the tools of production,

(Great day in the morning!)

Everything—

And turn ‘em over to the people who work.

Rule and run ‘em for us people who work.

And then there’s the great ‘Ballad of Lenin’

Comrade Lenin of Russia,
High in a marble tomb,
Move over, Comrade Lenin,
And give me room.

I am Ivan, the peasant
Boots all muddy with soil.
I fought with you Comrade Lenin.
Now I’ve finished my toil.

Comrade Lenin of Russia,
Alive in a marble tomb,
Move over, Comrade Lenin,
And give me room.
I am Chico, the Negro
Cutting cane in the sun.
I lived for you, Comrade Lenin.
Now my work is done.

Comrade Lenin of Russia,
Honored in a marble tomb,
Move over, Comrade Lenin,
And give me room.

I am Chang from the foundries
On strike in the streets of Shanghai.
For the sake of the Revolution
I fight, I starve, I die.

Comrade Lenin of Russia
Rises in the marble tomb:
On guard with the fighters forever – -

The world is our room!

One more, with an echo of the popular Lenin poems and songs in the USSR:

Lenin walks around the world.

Frontiers cannot bar him.

Neither barracks nor barricades impede.

Nor does barbed wire scar him.

Lenin walks around the world.

Black, brown, and white receive him.

Language is no barrier.

The strangest tongues believe him.

Lenin walks around the world.

The sun sets like a scar.

Between the darkness and the dawn

There rises a red star.

 

(ht cp)

 

Lenin in Hackney

A great project is underway on the radical history of Hackney, part of which concerns Lenin’s time in London, including the meeting of the fifth congress in the Brotherhood Church.

 

From Lenin in China to the Blake Prize

A few pieces here and there, on the cusp of the bespeckled-and-bearded madness that is the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature.

First, a piece over at Political Theology reflecting on my experience as a judge of the Blake Prize in Religious Art for 2012.

Second, an assessment of Lenin in China, from a great conference at Wuhan University.