Lenin in the coffee-shop: the communist alternative and forms of non-western modernity ANDREAS PANAYIOTOU Introduction: questions and terminology One day in 1993, I walked into the leftist coffee-shop of the Greek Cypriot village in which I grew up and I noticed the photograph of Lenin hanging on the walls *amidst photos of the football team of the silloyos 1 / leftist club. My politics but also my intellectual explorations in the 1980s revolved around the themes of the new social movements. My relation to the village community was rather negative *my hippie aesthetics could not be accommodated easily in the seemingly closed world of the village. So, on seeing Lenin, I could feel vindicated *that these villagers were indeed stuck in the past since they still had Lenin hanging there, when his legacy in Moscow was under debate. But my feelings were the opposite. I actually felt profound respect for these villagers, who, out of routine or conscious decision, refused to go with the wave of denouncing the ‘spirit of the revolution’, for the world of the ‘end of history’. I did not like the Soviet Union when it existed; I was actually in a celebratory mood in 1989. But subsequently the transformation of the political democratic revolution into an economic capitalist counter-revolution changed my mood. That encounter produced also a series of questions: why did they keep Lenin or rather what did Lenin mean to these villagers? The Cypriot Left has not been a theoretical movement *there is no Gramsci here. It was in many ways exactly what leftists call themselves, a people’s movement. What was the ‘theory’ informing leftist political and cultural ‘choice’ on the level of the village or the urban neighbourhood? How did radicalism and reformism coexist? How did the leftists preserve a vision of a ‘peaceful coexistence of the two communities’ in the period of nationalist bloodshed? The broader context in the subsequent discussion will be the relation between modernisation, westernisation and the possibility of ‘multiple modernities’. The Left is a key element in discussions of modernity and western power *after all, one of the major historical accomplishments claimed by the Left in the twentieth century has been its pivotal role in anti- colonial movements. But how can one define the Left? The term has existed since the French Revolution and it has been applied to avariety of ideologies and political forms ranging from revolutionary movements challenging power to political-bureaucratic parties administering power. 2 Even though the ISSN 1368-8790 print/ISSN 1466-1888 online/06/030267  14 # 2006 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies DOI: 10.1080/13688790600824989 Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 267  280, 2006