M HKA Ensembles

Video, 00:32:00.

Lenin Was a Mushroom was a mockumentary broadcast on Leningrad Television on 17 January 1991 as part of the programme Pyatoe Koleso (The Fifth Wheel). Taking place in the last days of the Soviet era, the film took the form of an interview between artist and musician Sergey Kuryokhin and reporter Sergey Sholokhov. Kuryokhin impersonates a historian, claiming that Vladimir Lenin ate such large quantities of mushrooms to the point that he became one. Constructing a logic around
pseudoscience, circumstantial evidence and quotations, he argues that the Russian revolution of October 1917 was made by people who for years had been taking hallucinogenic mushrooms, which altered people’s personalities, and themselves became mushrooms. Thus “Lenin was a mushroom”. In the era of Gorbachov’s
glasnost the ebbing of censorship was just beginning, and a certain kind of humour emerged named Stiob, a cutting form of satire that playfully used historical cultural material and established formats to create an ironical parallel reality. It seems a large number of its viewers took the broadcast as serious, despite its absurdity, culminating most notably in a complaint from irked party members of the regional committee of the Communist Party, with one of their top regional functionaries stating “Lenin could not have been a mushroom” as a “mammal cannot be a plant”.