Capturing Lenin's Voice

Early sound recordings were key to Lenin's rise to power and Bolshevik ideology. At a time when literacy rates around the country were meager among those outside the (former) aristocracy, sound recordings (as with film) were essential tools in bringing communist teachings to all corners of the vast country.Footnote ⁴ To spread his message, between 1919 and 1921, the leader recorded sixteen speeches in marathon sessions at the Aprelevskii Record Factory just outside Moscow; by the end of his life in 1924, he would record nearly forty.Footnote ⁵ Founded by the German businessman Gottlieb Moll and his son Johann in 1910, the Aprelevskii Factory's recording equipment was nearly obsolete by the time Lenin approached the gramophone in 1919, since they had not imported much technology during the First World War. (Moll was arrested after the plant was nationalized under Tsentropechat΄, the Central Agency for the Supply and Distribution of Printed Works, in 1918. He soon thereafter returned to Germany.)Footnote ⁶ According to recollections in an issue of Tekhnika—molodezhi from 1939, the studio was neither equipped with modern recording technologies nor was it constructed to be acoustically sound. Thus, when Lenin recorded his speeches (which could be no more than three minutes long, due to the constraints of the medium), he needed to stand extremely close to the front of the paper sound horn (not metal, like one might find in more advanced technology at the time). This then cut the recording into the disc. As a result, the recordings were distorted and often difficult to understand—exacerbated by inconsistencies in sound reproduction at the time—and had a so-called “tinny” quality to them.Footnote ⁷ (Fig. 1).

Figure 1. Lenin at the Gramophone (Original image with text overlay in Volkov-Lanit, “Golos Lenina”; unaltered image here from Wikimedia Commons).

Yet even at its tinniest, Lenin's voice was of the utmost symbolic importance to the country. This was especially true in the years immediately following his death when the country recalibrated both its ideology and its leadership. And Lenin's voice, it seemed, was the source of much of his power. Many had written about its hypnotic nature—the timbre, tenor, and diction—and connected its power explicitly with the success of the revolutionary project. As one writer reminisced, Lenin's speaking voice felt like “some kind of omnipotent tentacular creature that grips you firmly, as if with pliers, and from whose embrace you are unable to break free: you must either succumb to it or resign yourself to defeat.”Footnote ⁸

Linguists, writers, and technicians made efforts to analyze and reconstruct Lenin's voice in the decade following his death. Books like the futurist writer Aleksandr Kruchenykh's Methods of Leninist Speech went through multiple editions in the second half of the 1920s.Footnote ⁹ To Kruchenykh, Lenin's words and declamation—both message and medium—were of equal importance. Analyzing transcripts of Lenin's speeches, Kruchenykh determined that Lenin's voice was rooted in a “peasant meter,” a sort of “national in form, socialist in content” for the human voice that recalled the nationalism of Johann Gottfried von Herder's nation-building work in the second half of the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹⁰ One might compare this with the more refined “Old Moscow” dialect of Russian, which found its most prominent audience in the first half of the twentieth century with members of the intelligentsia and actors at the Moscow Art Theatre (MKhAT).Footnote ¹¹ Kruchenykh distilled from Lenin's speeches eleven basic principles, some based on the words being said, others on the nature of Lenin's utterances. The first few were the most easily emulated: phrase repetition, avoiding foreign loan words, and the use of vernacular language. The end of the list, however, was more opaque: “resoluteness,” “activeness,” and “chewing overness” (razzhevyvanie).Footnote ¹² Yet, crucially, for Kruchenykh and others writing on Lenin's voice alongside him in a special issue of LEF, the object of analysis was overwhelmingly text. Kruchenykh remembered Lenin's voice more clearly than any recording, and in it, he heard the origins of the Soviet nation.

“Hearing” Lenin's voice through text on a page was one thing; listening to it—feeling it intimately—was another altogether. But through static, hiss, and skips, the Aprelevskii recordings showed their age. Thus in the early 1930s, engineers at the Central Laboratory at the Moscow House of Sound Recordings set about remastering Lenin's speeches. Their task went hand-in-hand with a new documentary film, Dziga Vertov's Three Songs about Lenin, which featured footage of Lenin addressing eager crowds. Shortly after the film's premiere in 1934, a team at the Moscow Gramophone Record Restoration Factory (Gramplastrest) was tasked with restoring all of Lenin's speeches (not just those used in the film). This, too, was an important step in legitimizing Stalin's power, since he allegedly shared all the “greatest qualities” of his predecessor's voice.Footnote ¹³ Using Lenin's “Address to the Red Army” as a case study, the group experimented for several years with a variety of restoration techniques like frequency manipulation, noise reduction, and volume changes. In 1937, they released an album with the most convincingly remastered speeches, including “Anti-Jewish Pogroms,” “The Middle Peasants,” and “What is Soviet Power?” It sold out almost instantly.Footnote ¹⁴

The occasion gave engineers the opportunity to edit out missteps and inconsistencies in Lenin's speech, demonstrating that the remastering enabled a broader reorientation of the Leninist myth. Their task was less about restoring the authentic Lenin than it was restoring the known, real “Lenin,” in necessary quotation marks. Their editorial changes to Lenin's voice mapped the changing social demands of sound recordings over the course of more than a decade, and would continue to do so for the next half-century.

Take, for example, the case of O rabote dlia transporta (On the Work of Railways). In the original 1920 version, Lenin stumbled over his words in the third line of the speech (transcribed below): he says no voiska (but the troops) before correcting himself with no voina (but the war).

Table 1. Lenin's (Mis)Speech in Pravda 18, (1928)

In the 1937 version, however, the misstep is removed. The change erases the error, of course, but it also changes the tenor, urgency, and impact of the entire sentence. Removing the mistaken “But the troops” and splicing in the corrective changes the stress and cadence of Lenin's words. Though a change of mere milliseconds (Fig. 2), the hastened result adds additional energy to Lenin's condemnation of the imperialists.Footnote ¹⁵

Figure 2. Waveform Comparison.

Though experienced by listeners as a purely sonic alteration, the editing process was rooted in visual manipulation: engineers cut, spliced, and diced Lenin's voice. And the tactility of Lenin's voice—the materiality of the sound format—extended beyond these recordings. Borrowing methods from sound films of the 1920s and technologies like Boris Skvortsov's “talking paper” (which fed paper with electromagnetic ink between a photocell and powerful lamp to create sound), and Evgenii Sholpo's “drawn sound” (an optical synthesizer that used a 35mm camera to read sound off cardboard disks), engineers hypothesized that they could transcribe recordings of Lenin's speeches onto paper, which would allow for more careful retouching before copying them back onto a record.Footnote ¹⁶ In this visual format, they postulated, corrections to the voice could avoid the distortions inherent in sound recording, while syllables and stresses on words that were muddled in the original recordings could be recreated or intensified when necessary. They believed that in the future they could literally “revive” Lenin's voice—ozhivit΄ golos.Footnote ¹⁷

But their desire to reorient oration into the minutiae of format did not stop there. Engineers ultimately hoped that these paper methods would allow them to create a “sound passport” (zvukovoi pasport) of Lenin's voice. The sound passport would serve as a sort of virtual recreation of Lenin's speaking apparatus, which in turn would allow them to create recordings of Lenin's speeches that had never been made in his lifetime, to present his voice in translation throughout the Soviet republics, and to even enable the leader to comment on contemporary events.Footnote ¹⁸ They could, in the uncertainty of the late 1930s, resurrect the leader, even if only in sound.

Lenin Resounds

Amidst the turmoil of the 1940s and the early post-war period, however, many of these restoration efforts stalled as factories directed their resources toward boosting morale and sending records to the front. It was not until the creation of Melodiya, the state recording apparatus, in 1964 under the Ministry of Culture that they would resume. That same year, the Ministry created a monthly magazine of sound recordings called Krugozor (Horizon). Though begun around the same time as Melodiya, the publication, which included flexi-disc records with curated playlists accompanied by explanatory literature and photographs, was explicitly didactic in nature.Footnote ¹⁹ Issues featured speeches from political leaders—both old and new, from around the world—classical and popular music, poetry readings, and even dramatized stories of open-heart surgery and other technological accomplishments. (One issue, published in 1969, was devoted in full to Aeroflot and the Soviet aviation industry.) Officials at the Ministry of Culture and, eventually, Melodiya (where it would be concentrated) deliberately geared the magazine to a younger reader- and listenership. And this audience was substantial: Melodiya pressed over 125 million records in 1968 alone, of which 23.4 million were for Krugozor. This suggests a subscription base of roughly 1.95 million individuals per month.Footnote ²⁰ For many lay-listeners and aficionados, the monthly publication was the primary way they engaged with the Soviet recording industry and, especially for those outside of major urban centers, with Soviet music more broadly.

Lenin, of course, featuring prominently in the earliest issues of the magazine, was presented as a sort of “father figure” for the Soviet recording industry. An issue from the first year of publication, 1964, included a recording of Chto takoe Sovetskaia vlast΄? (What Is Soviet Power?), which was presented as the “unaltered, honest words” of the leader. “Honest,” perhaps, depending on your definition, but certainly far from “unaltered”: taking a remastered version from the 1930s, engineers added reverb, echo, and applause to give the effect of a live speech taking place in a large, open (and well-attended) area (Table 2). The scene, while impressive, was a far cry from the actual original recording, made in a small, solitary, and ill-equipped studio. But through this creative sound design, Lenin's voice resounded—and re-sounded—to thousands of attentive, eager socialists, be they imagined by engineers or listening on record players at home around the country. Audio technology allowed engineers to both reimagine and reinvigorate the early Soviet period—to resurrect Lenin through sound.

Table 2. Annotated opening of Lenin's “What Is Soviet Power?” in Krugozor 9 (1964)

At the centenary of Lenin's birth, however, when Krugozor released an entire issue dedicated to the leader, reverb and echo were nowhere to be found. Why, in 1970, had engineers decided to present Lenin without commentary? Even the opening of the issue, the 1937 version of “What Is Soviet Power?” was neither announced by a host nor contextualized in the written magazine companion. In fact, the issue featured little context specific to the tracks at all. After all, Lenin's voice was Soviet power, and after a hundred years of historicizing the man's origins, there was a certain truth, perhaps, in hearing its age—static, hiss, and all. Through these audio foibles—a sort of sonic carbon dating—listeners could hear the endurance of Lenin's voice—and thereby the Soviet project. At the apex of Leniniana, when cultural actors across the Soviet Union were called upon to celebrate the enduring nature of their founding father, it seems that the editors of Krugozor thought that Lenin could speak for himself.Footnote ²¹ In the mythology of the Soviet nation, Lenin's voice was inevitable. It was always there, crackles and all.

Formaldehyde and Vinyl

What might it have meant, then, to hear Lenin in this way? Death and sound recording, as Jonathan Sterne has pointed out, have long been linked.Footnote ²² And yet, while our instinct might be to assume that recordings are merely preservations of the dead—of corpses long buried or, in Lenin's case, entombed in glass—to do so is shortsighted. Just as death was crucial in establishing the cultural significance of sound recording, so too did sound recording provide listeners the opportunity to “resurrect” Lenin after death. In this way, the remastering—and reviving—process mirrored that of Lenin's body more broadly, which, Yurchak tells us, preserved the body's “dynamic form and not its biological flesh.”Footnote ²³ The substance, quite literally, was less important—less essential in the literal sense—than the form: Leninism over Lenin. Lenin's preservation was thus equal parts aesthetic performance as it was a cultural project: one in which decomposition was forestalled through equal parts formaldehyde and vinyl. To preserve his voice was to preserve the man—and his ideas—himself.

But then again, Lenin's voice was not really about Lenin at all. It was about what the people—in the Ministry of Culture, in Melodiya, in the recording studio, and in the vast reaches of the Soviet empire—wanted Lenin to sound like. At the outset, his recordings served a purpose: as one man, he could only travel so far and to so many places to spread socialist ideology. But after his death, his voice, like his body, was transfigured according to the desires, whims, and demands of those tasked with his preservation. The decisions of editors and bureaucrats alike who participated in the remastering project imposed their own expectations of what the leader should sound like: loud, clear, forceful, and, in the 1964 case, widely adored by the masses. A genealogy of tinkering with Lenin's voice, then, tells us more about what people then wanted him to sound like than it does of the man itself.

Sound fidelity and recording practices make legible networks that extend beyond the audible. Sonic practices are entangled with social practices, and constructed categories like fidelity and liveness both reflect and engage with the ethical values of a group.Footnote ²⁴ As Eliot Bates writes, “Recording work—musical-technological work—is done in relation to and within broader social networks.”Footnote ²⁵ Thus inquiry into audio perception across sound categories—beyond melody and harmony and into quality—allows for the study of sonic subjectivities across institutional divides.Footnote ²⁶ The ways in which ordinary people experienced sound—both as an audible object and as a socio-cultural repository of meaning—were facilitated by recording media. In our endeavor to “listen” to Soviet history, hearing these media as both social gatherings and resonant objects is crucial. In this way, nearly one hundred years after Lenin's death, we, too, participate in the process of preservation—and resurrection.