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What is a god? A creator. A guide. What is a god, if not the architect of the world? A hand that draws a line of light through the dark and commands you to follow. But is such figure found in the gates of heaven, the ever-so-graceful paradise, or found within this world, a world so bland and lifeless that we ourselves are destined to create?
These are questions that could splinter the mind, and perhaps they have no single, definitive answer. But if one is to believe, then there must be a reason. There must be a person who, just by existing, makes the concept of the divine feel solid—a bedrock in a world of shifting sand.
Vladimir Ilyich,
On the surface, a man so simple, easily mistaken for just another face in the endless stream of humanity. Maybe that was his power: not in being more than human, but in being so perfectly, reassuringly human that you couldn't help but see something different in him.
Their first contacts with each other weren't that special, atleast not through the eyes of ordinary human beings. A pamphlet, later, a letter, and finally, a physical encounter. He was truly not a god, definitely not your typical leader who catches everyone's attention just by walking in. He was simple. Just like every other person in this world. And yet, how could such an average person create so many new feelings on someone?
He had the gift of purpose; he could grant it to a life as easily as breathing. But what did you call the feeling he singlehandedly created? Admiration? This was something more. It was the first thing in his life that felt entirely his own, and he didn't even know what to call it, what its name could possibly be.
He was not just a drop in the sea, he was the entire ocean. He knew what had to be done, he saw potential in someone so blank, so empty. This is all so new, his head felt like it would explode with thousands of new emotions. And finally, perhaps he had found a single word that could explain it all. A word that fits this person's character better than any other: it's ordinary, but carries a meaning deeper than anything else.
'Devotion.'
For a boy who had only ever known obedience, the concept was a revelation. He had spent his life as a reflection, never a source, his own will a thing he was not permitted to own. That was until he found out about the revolutionary movement, about a cause that could change the present and the future, a fire that promised to burn away the old world. For the first time, he felt the stirrings of a purpose that was his. But purpose without direction is just another form of chaos, and no one was able to fit his definition of direction.
All his doubts were answered when he found Lenin. The mountain eagle of the party. Surely, this person would lead us all to the correct path. This person was the personification of the cause, of the real movement. And if he was devoted to movement, he was devoted to Lenin.
The God he had been taught to fear in chapels was a ghost. Lenin was real. Here, at last, was proof that something divine could hide in plain sight, masked in the quiet humility of an ordinary man. He felt a new resolve harden within him. He would take this man as his blueprint. He would build himself anew from the ground up, using B’s every word as a cornerstone and his every action as a guide. He was once the small Soso, until he became Koba, his boyhood hero, and now, he finally became a reflection of his own God. An identity was born anew, based on a simple man that changed his life completely. He was no longer the frightened, sensitive boy from Gori nor the golden child from his seminary years; he was Stalin.
For years, this was the character he perfected, the identity he painstakingly built. He devoted himself to the man not as a follower, but as a disciple to a living scripture. He collected Lenin's words like catechism, memorized his actions like ritual. He tried to inlay every belief, every gesture, into the very foundation of his soul. But every crack of this foundation was just the start until all of it fell apart.
“Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man [...]”
The words were heresy. A poison poured into the holy well of his belief. His mind reeled back from them.
After a lifetime of worship? After weaving his very soul into the tapestry of this man’s cause? The man he had built, the face he had finally learned to see as his own in the mirror, shattered into a thousand glittering, unrecognizable shards. And all that was left was the horrifying emptiness he had tried so desperately to escape.
But who was he if not Lenin's faithful disciple? If he was not even worthy of the name he had built his life around, then who was he? His loyalty, his entire identity, was being destroyed in front of his colleagues, and he was unable to raise a hand to defend the god who had just excommunicated him.
It was never about the title. He was not afraid of losing a name (or perhaps, just a little bit.) He was terrified of the truth the loss revealed: that the man he had painstakingly built over years was nothing more than a fragile shell. His deepest, most private horror was being laid bare for all to see: that he was not a person, but a mirror, hollow and empty, good only for reflecting what others desired. And it was his own god who had unmasked him. His own god who had held him up to the light to show the world his fraudulence.
He could pray. He could fall to his knees and offer up a thousand frantic apologies to the silence where a man used to be. But it was a confession without a confessor, a prayer sent to a heaven that was now permanently sealed. His words, heavy with all the regret he had attempted to show in life, simply dissolved into the empty air. Was he only a tool? A means to an end? No. He refused it. There had been moments... A shared glance, a rare, unguarded smile... They meant more than that. They had to. A man like that... he couldn't have looked at a love so absolute and seen only its use.
But he could still prove that final, damning judgment wrong. He would become what the cause needed, what the people cried out for. He would carve himself into the shape of their expectations, and if the price was a loneliness so profound it felt like a hollow echo in his chest, then he would pay it. Until his own judgment day, this would be his penance: to live as a ghost haunting a legacy, forever the faithful disciple to the cause, and to the man who was no longer there to see it.