Vladimir Lenin

In The Invention of Russia, Lenin appears as the ideological bedrock of the Soviet system the book traces. The book notes that “texts by Lenin and Marx were studied in every high school and university: they defined our approach to history and view of the world,” with the battles of Soviet newspapers fought “with the aid of citations from their sacred texts” — establishing the Marxist-Leninist canon as the shared scripture of Soviet public life.

Lenin also supplies one of the book’s load-bearing quotes on media power: “of all the kinds of arts, the most important for us is cinema.” The book uses this to argue that in an idea-centric Russia, images could reach people’s consciousness in a way words could not, and could “sell” more effectively because there was less noise in the marketplace than in America — a through-line for the book’s thesis (see Arkady Ostrovsky) that controlling the “means of mass information” is how power is built and held in Russia.

Context: Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) led the Bolsheviks to power in the 1917 October Revolution and founded the Soviet state, becoming the canonical theorist of Marxism-Leninism.

Where this appears

• The Invention of Russia — named as the ideological root of the Soviet order and quoted on cinema as the most important art form for shaping mass consciousness.