“Arise, Lenin! They’ve Gone Mad!”

London’s use of a religious analogy is not an accident. The Confession is, whether the filmmakers intended it or not, a deeply religious film.

The title doesn’t simply reference the false confession his torturers wrung out of him. In Marker’s documentary, London visits the set where The Confession is being filmed. Upon seeing Montand’s striking physical transformation into the former version of himself — Montand lost twenty-five pounds to fully inhabit the role — London exclaims, “his attitude, the stigmata of suffering, his exhaustion, all that is fantastic.”

London’s suffering, played with harrowing verisimilitude by Montand, is portrayed as Christlike in its redemptive power. The film’s emotional structure is grounded in the sacramental power of penance, one of the central tenets of Catholic interpretations of Christian theology. The act of confession gives a believer the opportunity to admit one’s sins, receive absolution, and be reconciled with God. One is redeemed and strengthened in one’s faith by telling the truth and making penance for mistakes.

This is precisely what London’s book and Costa-Gavras’s film attempt to do, in their own secular way, for the Communist faithful. As London put it in his television appearance:

If Communists themselves, with honesty and courage, undertake a critical examination of the different stages of socialism, if they examine the errors, lay them bare, in this way they give socialism its purity back. Or to use an expression from my country, they “put a human face back on socialism.”

The Stalinist show trial was a ritual of abuse; to give witness to crimes committed in the name of socialism was a ritual of absolution — including for London himself, who surely must have committed his own share of misdeeds on the path from Spain to a high position in the party-state.

“Socialism with a human face” was the slogan of the Prague Spring movement for democratic reform in Communist Czechoslovakia. The Confession concludes with Gérard arriving in Prague to publish his exposé. But he arrives just in time for Soviet tanks to crush the movement, in a bleak echo of the generals’ coup that crushes hopes for justice at the end of Costa-Gavras’s previous film, Z.

This scene doesn’t quite end the film. A brief coda shows a group of young militants painting the slogan “Arise, Lenin! They’ve Gone Mad!” on a Prague wall. Calls to return to Vladimir Lenin as the original repository of revolutionary virtue were common among critical Communists. London does this himself in Marker’s documentary when he insists that “Lenin always affirmed that the relationship between the Party and the people should be based on absolute trust, on its ability to always tell people the truth and to recognize any mistakes that might be made.”

Lenin did not pursue (and, had he lived longer, likely would not have pursued) the kinds of show trials that were so central to Joseph Stalin’s rule. Lenin was not Stalin, but there is not a bright line separating them either. Under Lenin’s leadership, the Bolsheviks fought to exclude other socialist parties from government participation after the October Revolution and subordinated all institutions of state and society to the Communist Party. Arbitrary acts of repression and violence, carried out through party-dominated organs like the Cheka, began shortly after the Bolsheviks took power.

Historian S. A. Smith, who is sympathetic to the motivations that drove the October Revolution, concludes in Russia in Revolution: “Lenin was the architect of the party’s monopoly on power; it was he who subordinated the soviets and trade unions to the party; he who would not tolerate those who thought differently; he who dismantled many civil and political freedoms; he who crushed the socialist opposition.”

Even if Stalin had lost the struggle for power after Lenin’s death, it is difficult to imagine a fundamentally different trajectory for the Soviet Union or Communism generally unless the fundamental principle of exclusive Communist Party rule that Lenin — backed by Leon Trotsky and Stalin alike — insisted on was abandoned. London’s stance, whatever its limitations, was superior to that of former Communists turned professional anti-Communists. But it’s tragic that he and others like him could not escape the need for identification with an alternative Bolshevism that did not exist.

The Soviet leader most committed to reviving Lenin was, quite ironically, the one most responsible for the system’s demise. Mikhail Gorbachev assumed power in 1985, bent on saving Communism from itself by returning to first principles. In Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, historian Vladislav Zubok describes Gorbachev as “the last true Leninist believer.” According to Zubok, one of his aides reported an occasion when “Gorbachev began to impersonate Lenin, mimicking his style and gestures, his accent and favorite words, his acrimony and ire. This bizarre performance lasted over an hour.”

Zubok astutely observes the deeply paradoxical nature of Gorbachev’s identification with Lenin. In seeking to remake the Soviet Union,

Gorbachev consistently rejected methods and features that were at the core of Lenin’s revolutionary success. He preferred speeches to action, parliamentary consensus to violence, and devolution of power to dictatorship. In a word, his messianic idea of a humane socialist society was increasingly detached from the realities of Soviet power and its economy.

In Zubok’s estimation, Gorbachev’s attempt to conjure the spirit of Lenin — or, more precisely, his idea of what Lenin represented — made him the proverbial “sorcerer’s apprentice; he did not know how to regain control over the forces he had unleashed.” Much the same could be said of Lenin himself, who spent his last years trying and ultimately failing to keep Stalin from mastering the system he founded.

Socialists looking to the Communist movement for a usable past would do well to heed C. Wright Mills’s advice to the young radicals of his day: “Read Lenin again (be careful).” Watch The Confession, too.