Lenin and Lewis Corey (Louis Fraina)

LEO GRULIOW

^INCE the denunciation of the "cult of Stalin" in 1956,
Soviet propaganda has been hard at work restoring Lenin
to the pedestal from «-hich Stalin had been crowding him.
The Stalin Peace Prizes have been renamed the International Lenin
Peace Prizes, the Stalin awards in science, literature and the arts
have reverted to their original name of Lenin Awards, the prac¬
tice of quoting from Stalin in public declarations and speeches
has been replaced by the older one of quoting from Lenin, and
the Lenin Days, marking the date of Lenin's death, have become
a national holiday.

Part of the Lenin build-up has consisted of dusting off little
known papers and statements of Lenin and publishing them prom¬
inently. They are released to Soviet newspapers and magazines
from time to time by the Communist Party Central Committee's
Institute of Marxism-Leninism (formerly the Marx-Engels-
Lenin-Stalin Institute).

A considerable number of these Lenin documents from the
party archives appeared in Soviet periodicals in November, 1957,
on the fortieth anniversary of the Communist revolution. Inostran-
naya Literatura (Literature Abroad), a monthly devoted to trans¬
lations and criticism of foreign belles lettres, was chosen as the
medium to publish Lenin documents showing his relations with
"representatives of English and American literature—H. G. Wells,
John Reed and his wife Louise Bryant (Reed), who came to
Rus.sia with him, Louis Fraina and Bessie Beatty."

This is an odd assortment of persons to be designated as "repre¬
sentatives of English and American literature." Wells is the only
one to qualify as a representative of literature. Reed, of course,
was the author of Ten Days That Shook the World, the masterly