Upon his return from Prague, Yegor went back to Izvestia but was advised to “write less.” Instead he turned to a subject that was hard to ban: Lenin. By the 1970s the official Soviet iconography had produced a Lenin who was completely devoid of any human or even historic features. He had turned into a vehicle, a device for carrying almost any political message. Citations from Lenin could be used to prove diametrically opposite points of view. In the 1930s Lenin had justified Stalinism; in the 1950s and early 1960s he had justified anti-Stalinism. In the 1970s the liberal thinkers adopted him
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