Motherhood Quote by Andrei Platonov

The joke lands with a wince, because Platonov is holding up the Soviet project at its most grotesquely successful: not when it feeds people or builds anything, but when it rewires the most basic human loyalties. The line pretends to celebrate ideological endurance, yet the “proof” is a child’s moral amputation. Forgetting your mother isn’t a cute exaggeration; it’s the nightmare scenario of a state that wants to be family, memory, and conscience all at once. “Comrade Lenin” isn’t a person here so much as a portable shrine, a brand name that can survive even when intimate bonds don’t.

Platonov’s intent is double-edged in the classic survival mode of Soviet-era writing. On the surface, it reads like a loyalist quip: look how deep the revolution runs, even the kids know. Underneath, it’s an indictment of what that depth costs. The word “still” does a lot of work, implying that the persistence of Lenin’s image is less reassuring than eerie - a residue left after everything warm and particular has been stripped away.

Context matters: Platonov wrote in a time when the state aggressively cultivated political sainthood (Lenin as secular icon) and demanded the subordination of private life to public doctrine, especially during the brutal modernization drives of the late 1920s and 1930s. Kids were a key battleground because they represented the “new Soviet person.” In Platonov’s hands, that triumph sounds like pathology: Soviet power “here to stay” not because it’s just, but because it has colonized the mind so thoroughly it can outlast the mother.