FUNERAL WREATH TO THE LEADER: GRIEF FOR LENIN AND THE PRACTICES OF SOVIET SELF-REPRESENTATION

Abstract

The article deals with the experience of early Soviet identity self-representation related to the situation of funeral and state mourning for Lenin. The 1917 decree disavowed the former estates, ranks and identification markers that determined a person’s status in society. In the fluid conditions of civil war and new economic policy, social status was also unsustainable. The period of mourning for Lenin became a certain point of rupture in the continuum of the short Soviet history, a time of reflection on the past, future and one’s place in it. The “political grief” for the leaders, encouraged in the 1920s, in the specific case of mourning for Lenin, contributed to the formation of a space for expressing more than just grief itself. The space was used by citizens, collectives, communities to develop, to articulate and affirm their own identities. One of the means of self-representation were funerary wreaths brought “on the leader’s coffin”. The article considers both traditional forms of wreaths and the reasons for their prevalence, as well as new, unusual forms and the claims they contained for expressing and asserting identity. The most common method of self-representation was to affirm labor and professional identities. Moreover, individuals and collectives who were not classified as “workers” used verbal and non-verbal markers of funerary wreaths to add themselves to this desired and safe category, thus constructing their own identity and asserting their place in the new Soviet society.