And what kind? Were there sappy quotes or apocryphal stories attributed to him? Was he just portrayed as a genius or also a morally good figure like a Ghandi or a Washington?
I am mostly looking for what they taught children and propaganda, but anything would be interesting.
This is a repost from a few days ago, as no one answered the earlier post.
On the one hand, yes. It had some practicality to it, in the sense that Marxist philosophy and scholarship became the way to understand the world. There clearly was a moral dimension to the understanding of Marx(ism).
On the other hand, I don't think Marx was quite the figure of something like Washington with the cherry tree, and never telling a lie, and all those kinds of kids stories. The "Cults of Personality" in the Soviet Union are much more associated with Lenin and Stalin than they were with Marx, despite his fundamental importance to their ideologies.
He would have been portrayed as a genius but not as a cultural hero the way George Washington is in the U.S.A.
If you were to take a stroll through Moscow or even your average city in the USSR around 30 years ago, you would have seen dozens of statues dedicated to Karl Marx, usually coupled with his friend and collaborator, Friedrich Engels.
Lots of responses have noted how Marx was not celebrated in the USSR in the same vein as Washington in the US and Ghandi in India. There is a fundamental problem with these comparisons. Marx's work may be considered the source of ideas that the Bolshevik Revolution brought to prominence in the USSR, but he wasn't the man of deeds that played a central role in the historical path to power of the Communist party.
For the USA, Washington was not the "idea man", in the way that Marx was for the USSR, but rather the "man of deeds" whose place in history and mythology was earned by being the central figure in the struggle for American independence and the new nation's fledgling years. In that vein, Washington's closest corollary from the USSR's celebration of its history was Lenin.
Finding a parallel figure to Marx in the philosophical origins of the American revolution is actually a little hard to do. Maybe the most proximate name to consider might be Thomas Paine, but Paine was not really the source of the revolutionary ideas but just the most influential mouthpiece for them in the American colonies. To find the American Marx, you would have to amalgamate many of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, including Descartes, Spinoza, and other rationalists on the one hand, and Bacon, Locke, Hobbes, and other empiricists on the other.
I don't think you could point to one philosopher of the Enlightenment and say, "that's the US's Marx!" Partially because, unlike the outcome of the Bolshevik revolution, the Constitution and resulting government and economic policy was a big compromise between various political ideologies and philosophies. The USSR, on the other hand resulted in essentially a centralized state with a one-party rule.