In her compelling and personal collection of essays, Riikka Tanner explores the deep-seated and historical origins of militancy, according to Veli-Pekka Leppänen.
Essays
Riikka Tanner: Lenin’s Revelation Book. Essays on nightmares, history, culture, and politics. Media Hameentie. 298 pages.
It’s regrettable that few youth activists from the 1970s have candidly dissected their political past. This space has been filled by opposing zyskowicz, who have eagerly shared their perspectives from the outside.
Internal perspectives have been provided by Anssi Sinnemäki and Lauri Hokkanen in their books, as well as a Finnish-Swedish article Useful Idiots – Young Idealists, Lenin, and the Seventies (2009), to mention the most incisive ones.
With her book, Riikka Tanner (b. 1949), who was active in cultural militant organizations in the 1970s, is emerging as a documentarian. Tanner’s new Lenin’s Book of Revelation is a compact collection of six essays, examining the events of the 1970s and more. She reveals the historical roots and intricacies of communism, without ignoring her personal experiences of “communism”.
Tanner clarifies that her work is more about narration than investigation. “The collection of writings examines the totalitarian ideology adopted in her youth and its eventual rejection”. The essays are deeply personal and diverge into vast topics, yet always keeping the main theme of accounting for totalitarianism in focus.
V.I. Lenin’s (1870–1924) 100th death anniversary in January was not widely commemorated. It was a different scenario on April 22, 1970, when exactly a century had passed since his birth. Official Finland was involved, as was the SN club, but the growing group of young activists was the most intellectually vocal.
Key texts in Tanner’s work include Mayakovsky’s Lenin and the Komukka Komppi, an essay completed by Arvo Turtiainen in the spring of 1970. It was a quick translation of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s heroic poem Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1925). This poem ignited the rise of the new wave of left-wing youth activists in Finland.
The poem served its purpose, “like a powder keg”. The culture house Lenin 100 hosted a party where Henrik Otto Donner composed songs extolling the October 1917 revolution, based on a proposal by Kalle Holmberg.
“It was a precisely delineated canonized Bolshevik narrative,” Tanner remarks. Lenin had been an influence in her youth.
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“Brecht provided dialectics and historical materialism, Mayakovsky a crash course in Marxism, and Matti Rossi historical studies and a hatred for larks.”
Tanner describes Mayakovsky’s Lenin as the “Messiah who, according to John the Baptist and Marx’s prophecies, will appear on the stage of history at exactly the right time.” As per Mayakovsky’s poem: “And then was born / in distant Simbirsk / a boy, / Lenin.”
At the Lenin 100 party, Tanner shares how young composers and musicians formed a “comic group”. This led to the creation of a genre-familiar group, the Agit Prop quartet.
The political song enlivened militancy. The agitation songs took “dialectics and historical materialism from Brecht, a crash course in Marxism from Mayakovsky, and historical studies and a hatred of larks from Matti Rossi”. Tanner traces political-aesthetic lines in a unique way.
Some essays originate from further afield, such as Andrzej Wajdan’s film Katyn (2007), but they are also rooted in Finnish history. Tanner’s knowledge of culture and history is exact and insightful.
The pinnacle of the book is a monograph on Latvian Jewish Menshevik Paul Olberg (1878–1960). The title Russia’s 1917 Loser’s Narrative captures the essence – although not entirely – and with Olberg’s visions, Tanner probes the sensitive areas of political and ideological history.
Tanner also connects Olberg, who resided in Sweden for a long period, with the experiences of her grandparents Linda and Vainö Tanner. The study sheds light on a theme best expressed by the title of one of Olberg’s works: Russia’s New Imperialism (1940).
Lenin’s Book of Revelation is a thoroughly considered and carefully prepared book. It mirrors the author’s life stages, lies, separation from her roots, and ruthless analytical abilities. It intertwines broader concepts with deeply personal moments.
The core idea of the work can be succinctly expressed: militancy was not a harmless deviation or a temporary mental aberration, but a deliberate and well-thought-out choice.
