
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, January 22, 1994                   TAG: 9401220055
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Hearst Newspapers
DATELINE: PARIS                                LENGTH: Medium

LENIN'S `GENIUS BRAIN' WAS `NOTHING SPECIAL,' SCIENTISTS SAY

The report this week by Russian scientists that Vladimir Lenin's brain was "nothing special," just that of an ordinarily intelligent man, blows the last great communist myth.

But the disclosure that the leader of the Bolshevik revolution and founder of the Soviet state had a normal brain is more than just a footnote to history.

The debunking of the Lenin legend is politically significant, coming at the very moment when neo-Communist parties in several European countries, including Russia itself, are staging comebacks. Unlike fascism or other totalitarian movements, Marxism has always played heavily on its supposed scientific foundations laid by a pair of extraordinary geniuses: Karl Marx and, after him, Lenin.

The political value of stressing Lenin's unique intellect was instantly grasped by Soviet propagandists.

Within 48 hours of his death at the age of 53 following a cerebral hemorrhage Jan. 21, 1924, his brain was removed on the Kremlin's orders so that the "secret" of its power could be ascertained.

Sure enough, a team of neurologists assigned to the task soon announced they had discovered that Lenin's brain was not only exceptionally large but possessed a structure unlike that of ordinary beings. This, they explained, accounted for his superior intelligence.

Even as the Bolshevik leader's mummified remains - minus his brain - were put on display in a marble mausoleum next to the Kremlin, his successor, Joseph Stalin, set up the "Moscow Brain Institute" to continue "research" into the physiological causes of Lenin's genius.

Stalin, although a barely educated thug, understood the need to keep up Marxism's intellectual pretensions by presenting himself as another awesome thinker in the Leninist tradition.

Stalin laid it on too thick to be convincing to any but the most dim-witted party hacks. But his extravagant claims may have unconsciously reinforced the Lenin myth.

Now, the last major piece of communist mythology has been shattered.

"His brain had no exceptional characteristics," Oleg Adrianov, the present head of the soon-to-be dissolved Moscow Brain Institute, declared in its report. "It was like that of any other reasonably intelligent person."

by CNB