Zwycięzcy polskiej „leniniady” – o zapominaniu komunizmu
The Winners of the Polish “Leniniada” (the cult of Lenin) – Forgetting Communism

Summary/Abstract: Whenever domestic art historiography handles the subject of Vladimir Lenin, it is only in the context of socialist realism. It is as if October 1956 contributed to the disappearance of the presentations of the leader of the Bolshevik revolution from the public space of the Polish People’s Republic (PRL). The preserved works of art and documentation of art competitions related to Lenin present a false image of the Polish history of the period from 1956 to 1989. The methodological assumption of this article was the adoption of symbolic caesuras that result from the dynamics of political events, not artistic ones, as it was politics that influenced changes in artistic life and art, not the other way around. The selection of October 1956 and the date of the restoration of the name “Rzeczpospolita Polska” (the Republic of Poland), along with the crowned White Eagle at the end of 1989, as terminus post quem and terminus ante quem is the result of two orders: in the earlier period, the point of reference for all images of Lenin and his presentations in Polish art was socialist realism; at that time, the subject of Lenin was dealt with rarely compared to that of Stalin, who was treated as the main person responsible for the success of the Soviet Union. The focus of the research on the years 1956–1989 is also a response to the attitude of denial, noticeable in the literature on the subject, towards the presence of “Leninists” in the communist art of that period. The author analyses the causes of that puzzling phenomenon by dealing with the issue of the memory of the participation of artists in the communist machine of visual propaganda.

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