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 to show the inadequacies of the Soviet economic and political system.
