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Brave
New Worlds By
Aileen Kelly Revolutionary
Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution by
Richard Stites Oxford University Press, 307 pp., $35.00 Revolution
and Culture: The Bogdanov-Lenin Controversy by Zenovia A. Sochor Cornell University Press, 258 pp., $29.95 1. The exiled Russian historians
Aleksandr Nekrich and Mikhail Heller, in the introduction to their book Utopia
in Power, wrote that in the great wars of history, defeat for the losers
has always meant more than extermination or slavery. It has meant, and means, that
the conquerors write the history of their wars; the victors take possession
of the past, establish their control over the collective memory.[1] In the Soviet utopia, they argued,
manipulation of memory in the service of power was carried to a level
previously unknown to mankind. Following the formulas of Marx, Lenin, and
Stalin, history was rewritten in order to deprive citizens of the faculty of
memory, which makes people human, and to allow those who controlled the past
to do what they wished. Their book was written in 1982.
The dramatic changes that have happened since then owe much to the efforts of
Russian historians such as these two to keep the national memory alive. In a
tenacious guerrilla warfare against the official version of the past, they
recorded testimonies, rescued documents, fought for the physical preservation
of monuments, and sometimes even managed (as Nekrich did with his book on the
German invasion of Russia, which appeared toward the end of the thaw) to
print accounts of the recent past which questioned the wisdom of the top
leaders. These historians must find ironic
satisfaction in the fact that the official Soviet press is now energetically
engaged in the reconstruction of the national memory. Pravda publishing house
has embarked on an ambitious project to reprint the works of previously
banned Russian thinkers. Bukharin, who challenged Lenin's and Stalin's vision
of socialism, has been rehabilitated, his works published and discussed. The
official version of history as the inevitable and triumphal march to the
Soviet utopia has been quietly abandoned; with encouragement from above, the
Soviet intelligentsia discuss paths that were not taken but might still be
open, and even alternative utopias, visions of hope in the current confusion. This ferment of interest in
history's losers has affected Western historians of Russia as well. Steven
Cohen's book Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History since
1917[2] has been
followed by a number of studies suggesting that the outcome of the Russian
Revolution was by no means as predetermined as has been believed; that there
were other strands in Russian radical thought, and in the Bolshevik party
itself, which might have resulted in a more humanist form of socialism. In
Russia, the search to find pointers to the future by resurrecting the past
makes sense: ideas and movements have a better chance of succeeding if they
are rooted in a national experience. Russian intellectuals, painfully aware
of their ignorance of their own traditions, are turning to Western scholars
for help (for example, Cohen's book on Bukharin was published and was widely
read in Russian translation in Moscow two years ago). It is disturbing therefore that
some of the most stimulating recent work in the West on the history of the
revolutionary period is intensely partisan, proceeding on the often unargued
assumption that the idealists who challenged the utopia in power were not in
danger of being corrupted themselves. Two recent books on alternative Russian
utopias—one by the Georgetown University scholar Richard Stites and the other
by Zenovia Sochor, who teaches at Cornell—share this assumption. "The utopian vision,"
Stites writes, "…was the best thing that nineteenth century Russian
intellectual and cultural history bequeathed to the twentieth century, and
not the disaster that some critics have called it." The subject of his
book is the social and cultural experiments that took place during the immediate
postrevolutionary period, when, as one observer put it, all
aspects of existence were opened to purposeful fashioning by human hands.
Everywhere the driving passion was to create something new, to effect a total
difference with the "old world" and its civilization…. The storm
passed nobody by; neither those who treated it as a blessing nor those who
spurned it as a curse. Stites's enthusiastic and highly
entertaining book attempts to recreate the extraordinary atmosphere of Russia
between 1917 and 1928, when extravagant hopes flourished against a background
of civil war, economic breakdown, rural backwardness, and social misery, and
people in government or in sympathy with it attempted to fashion a human type
previously unknown to history. The Bolshevik revolution was the first in
modern times to attempt the fundamental reordering of all aspects of social
life. Stites argues that, until Stalinism, the "utopian propensity"
of Russian society fused with the Bolshevik programs to modernize Soviet life
and to bring about social justice, and that this fusion added emotional force
to the attempt to build an earthly paradise. His book is concerned mainly with
specific experiments in "culture building." It discusses attempts to
create a new aesthetic by revolutionary artists such as the Futurists; new
values, as in the efforts to replace bourgeois and peasant morality with a
more proletarian and egalitarian one; new rituals aimed at supplanting the
Orthodox Church, such as the cult of Lenin in the 1920s; and new patterns of
personal and social behavior, inspired by a revolt against deference and the
urge for social leveling. The book also gives a brief survey
of visions of the ideal society expressed in architecture and in social
theories and experiments in collective living by proponents of the
"Urbanist" school, such as L.M. Sabsovich, who envisaged
"industrial-agrarian cities" formed from complexes of communal
buildings: and the "Disurbanists" such as Mikhail Okhitovich, who advocated
the dissolution of cities altogether. Stites also evokes the fictional
fantasies of ideal communities of the future by novelists and popular
science-fiction writers such as Okunev and Nikolsky, now mostly forgotten. Stites gives an impressive account
of the range and inventiveness of the millenarian fantasies circulating after
the Bolsheviks came to power; but he tries also to convince the reader of the
moral incorruptibility of these fantasies. He argues that the utopian
experiments of the Twenties gave the Revolution its "human
dimension," a sense of justice and dignity that was swept away when
Stalin declared his war on the utopias. While he admits that Stalinism was
itself a utopia (in the sense that it was based on a myth of well-being and a
cult of the benevolent ruler) he believes that its bureaucratic
authoritarianism distinguished it from even the least libertarian of the
social visions of the Twenties. But this view is not supported by the
evidence in his book. There seem to have been remarkably
few libertarian visions of the ideal society in the Soviet Union during the
1920s. A number of anti-Bolshevik (mostly anarchist) attempts to establish
communal societies were snuffed out soon after the Revolution. The most
significant of these was the commune of sailors on the naval base of
Kronstadt. Between 1917 and 1921 they formed a virtually independent
community whose methods of decision-making were inspired by the traditional
Russian village assemblies. Their attacks on the Bolshevik
"commissarocracy" and their demands for democratic control by the
workers led to their bloody repression by the Soviet army under Trotsky. The story of the Kronstadt
rebellion has been well documented as have the adventures of the "mobile
army" organized in the Ukraine by the anarchist leader Makhno. But it
would have been interesting to be told more about other libertarian models of
which Stites notes only that some were eccentric and bizarre, others serious
and practical. Kropotkin is the only serious social the orist mentioned who
is also clearly a libertarian. In outlining his ideal of a stateless
federation of communes, Kropotkin declined to provide specific details, on
the grounds that the needs and aspirations of a future generation could not
be predicted or prescribed. Yet he is mentioned in only two paragraphs,
rather less than is devoted to the "conductorless orchestra," which
flourished throughout the 1920s, and whose sev-enty musicians formed an
anarchist utopia in miniature. The paucity of evidence of the
anarchist spirit in the utopias of the period gives the reader the sense that
the single factor uniting the most diverse of them in the creation of a new
culture was their hostility to that spirit. These utopias were opposed to the
unruly, unregimented, and unpredictable elements of life. The visions of a
new world that dominated Russia in the Twenties were for the most part
founded on a cult of reason, and on the virtues of urban life, technology,
and the machine. They were variations of the view of the socialist future
described by Lenin in State and Revolution (itself an adaptation of
Marx's utopia to Russian conditions). In such a future a system of rational
harmony would replace the conflict of egos; there would be communal sharing
of resources in work and life, and technology would triumph over nature. The
machine was perceived by writers, artists, and ideologists as the creator of
modernity and happiness, the instrument of the victory of social justice over
greed and hunger. Celebration of the magic of the machine reached its heights
in what Stites calls "the Soviet madness of Taylorism," the
time-and-motion theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor which had led to an
efficiency craze in the US a few years earlier. Some small communes set up by
idealists in the early 1920s to live the communist ideal were in fact
"Taylorist." They strove to regulate scientifically every aspect of
life through strict timetables that permitted no private time or space.
Stites points out that these experiments in living were intended to get rid
of passivity, sloth, and indiscipline, which were the source of much of the
traditional misery of Russian life. He takes an equally favorable view of
similar experiments in writing: the technological utopias of popular science
fiction of the 1920s. But he mentions only obliquely that one
prerevolutionary dystopia, by an obscure author, had already opposed to this
optimism a nightmare vision of societies of conformity and repression founded
on a cult of machine technology. Among the most prominent of the
cultist writers of the Twenties was Aleksei Gastev, who also ran an
experimental laboratory of human robotry until 1938, Gastev usually is given
no more than a footnote in any history of Soviet literature, but Stites
believes that he represents a convergence common in the Twenties, between the
revolutionary pragmatism of the Bolsheviks and the utopianism of the Russian
artistic avant-garde. The Futurist and Constructivist movements identified
with the Bolshevik revolution, seeing it as a continuation of their own
revolution in literature and painting. Although much influenced by European
modernist currents, they were specifically Russian in their conceptions of
social conscience and even Leninist in the political discourse in which they
framed their ideas; they saw art as ancillary to industry in the task of
creating the new socialist society. The fervor of the Constructivist
and other allied artistic movements was initially welcomed by the state; for
the first time in modern history artists and writers were invited to help
fashion a new society in alliance with the reigning political power. New art
schools were established, staffed by avant-garde artists, and theories and
manifestoes proliferated: the Left Front, formed by the Futurists, including
Mayakovsky and the artist Rodchenko, declared its intention to
"reexamine the theory and practice of Left art, to free it from
individualist distortions, and develop its communist aspects."
Constructivism, or "production art," which grew out of the
experiments of the painter Vladimir Tatlin, declared "war" on
"pure art" as a form of escapism for which there was no place in a
socialist society, rejecting easel painting in favor of the technical mastery
of the properties of "real materials in real space." Taking to the streets, the
squares, and the countryside, artists and writers set out to satisfy the
"social demand" of the revolutionary epoch by designing agitational
posters, composing revolutionary poetry and slogans, decorating cities for
the festivals that celebrated the new order, Gifted artists such as Lyubov
Popova strove to reach the masses by constructing sets and scenery for the
theater, and they applied their ideas in textiles, porcelain, and dress
design. Attempting to embody his own ideal of the
"artist-engineer," Tatlin turned to the design of workers' clothes,
a woodfueled stove, and plans for the Tower of the Third International, an
information and community center twice the height of the Empire State
Building and capable of being rotated. Avant-garde literature, art,
architecture, music, dance, theater, and film of the Twenties were all
suffused with technological fantasy, exalting functionality, speed, and
efficiency. The theater director Meyerhold developed a theory of organized
movement, "biomechanics," as a means of creating the new
"high-velocity man." Unfortunately, though much
exciting art and design emerged from those years, idealism was not sufficient
to turn these artists into engineers. Like the glider on which he worked for
many years, Tatlin's tower was no more than a potent symbol of his faith in a
future in which human creativity and machine technology would form one harmonious
whole. Clearly, though, because of their
visionary energy and self-appointed role as propagandists, Russian
avant-garde artists helped to stimulate and guide the utopian imagination of
the mass of Soviet society; but the images, ideas, and personalities of their
leading representatives are given only the briefest of mentions in Stites's
book. While he remarks that the Russian avant-garde has been treated
extensively by scholars in recent years, he omits to note that most of that
treatment has reached conclusions on the relationship between political power
and the artistic avant-garde sharply at variance with the blandly harmonious
picture he presents of a "rich interaction between…life and art, one
imitating the other and each reshaping both." In fact, as the book acknowledges
elsewhere the early Bolsheviks were sometimes downright hostile to artistic
experiment which they saw as irrelevant to the urgent task of raising the
level of literacy and social consciousness; but this, according to Stites,
was understandable: "No one should blame revolutionary leaders for not
succumbing to all the rosy appeals of utopia as they faced the gruelling and
exacting tasks of state-building." In the resulting sunny picture of the
1920s, the Bolshevik leadership, while more "hesitant and
tentative" than the intelligentsia in its attitude to utopian
experimentation, is united with them in pursuit of the "dream of human
liberty and the pathos of renewing mankind." The view that the political
culture of the Twenties was, in its alleged openness and tolerance,
qualitatively different from what followed is no longer widely supported by
Western historians; and Stites would not have been able to state it so
unequivocally had he been a little more specific about the careers of some of
the writers and artists he mentions in his book. Mayakovsky, leader of the
Futurists, is called "the irrepressible bard of the Russian
Revolution": there is no reference to his suicide in 1930, the outcome
of pressures that began over a decade before with the discovery that his
vision of the renewal of mankind differed fundamentally from that of the
Bolsheviks. 2. To most of the Russian
avant-garde, 1917 was a part of a universal revolution of the spirit against
the "old world" of fixed and hallowed forms, closed and prejudiced
minds. The Russian word byt (variously translated as convention, the
daily grind, the established pattern of life) became in Mayakovsky's poetry
the symbol for the bourgeois values that must be liquidated to make place for
the new world. Through their innovation in language and visual imagery the
Russian modernists sought to transform perception and thereby create a new
type of human being and a new social environment. This process of destruction
and creation had no predetermined path or final goal; these artists and
writers saw the revolutions in art and politics as a voyage into the unknown
and infinite sphere of human creative potential. For all their fascination
with futurology, utopia for them was not a final destination, but (to quote a
contemporary utopian philosopher) "an endless process—an endless,
proliferating realisation of Freedom."[3] The Bolsheviks had a contrary
view: for them social and economic transformation would be the cause, not the
effect, of a revolution in consciousness. Lenin had little to say about the
nature of the new Soviet person who would emerge, he believed, only in the
distant future; but we can deduce from his writings that the dominant
characteristic of such a person would be not dynamic creativity, but
conformity to a set and final pattern of social existence, historically
predetermined and legitimated by science and reason. Stalin's bureaucratic
centralism was not a betrayal of Leninist idealism but could be described
instead as the set of practices that ultimately proved to be best suited to
Lenin's theory. The fate of experimental artists
and writers under such a system began to be decided in 1920, when Lenin
signed a resolution authorizing the establishment of the Soviet successor to
the Moscow College of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture as an institution
for "the training of artists for the benefit of the national
economy." The members of the avant-garde who were eager to serve that
goal did not secure for themselves the Party's favor for very long. They were
soon challenged by a number of organizations of writers and artists, calling
themselves "proletarian," who exalted the new collective man and
his tasks in artistic forms that were modeled on the realism of the past and
were thought to be easily accessible to the newly literate. Few of these
writers and artists are known today in the West. They formed the powerful
Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) and, with the increasing
support of the Party, attacked the avant-garde for "bourgeois"
individualism and decadent modernism. Mayakovsky, the most flamboyant
and vociferous of the modernists, came increasingly to suspect that
technological progress and spiritual revolution were two different, and not
necessarily connected, things. His play The Bedbug, written in 1928,
is a satire of a future Soviet society built on machine technology. But there
was no way out for him, as is clear from his contempt for the irrational,
unreconstructed human being of his own day who, in the play, survives into
the twenty-first century in a frozen state. Mayakovsky's fate provides a very
different perspective on the faith in the fusion of man and machine, of the
artist and the collective, that is often seen as the main source of creative
inspiration in the Russia of the 1920s. This faith led Mayakovsky to exalt a
collective society in whose future perfection he had little belief, and whose
conformist mediocrity in the present he despised. As Trotsky commented in a
perceptive essay, the real hero of Mayakovsky's revolutionary epics is
himself: even the "hundred and fifty million" (the title of one of
his poems) assume the personality of the poet. Increasingly hounded by RAPP
for not fulfilling the "social demand"—his own definition of the
primary function of a writer—he finally capitulated by joining it. Two months
later he shot himself; his suicide note contained the line, "Love's boat
has smashed against convention." As Trotsky put it, Mayakovsky's
poetry flowed enthusiastically into the Revolution, but did not merge with
it. None of the other major artists and writers of the avant-garde achieved
such a fusion; but many lived in hopes of it, repudiating their own gifts in
theory if not always in practice. Without conscious irony, Lyubov Popova
cites as an inspirational example for the revolutionary artist Tolstoy's
"brilliant discrediting" of art after his religious conversion. If,
as was held in radical circles, every living organism is governed by the
principle of expediency, "then why the hell should the most…uncertain of
all subjective judgments—the notorious aesthetic judgment—be able to
serve as a criterion?" Of the three major avant-garde
movements that flowed into the Revolution only one refused on principle to
merge with it. This was Suprematism, which both as a Russian and a European
movement was at least as important as Constructivism and Futurism, producing
painters of the quality of Malevich and El Lissitsky (whose works represent a
combination of Suprematist and Constructivist ideas). Kandinsky was also
closely associated with the movement before his emigration in 1922. Radical and
visionary, it had a pervasive influence on the design and architecture of the
Twenties. (Inexplicably, it is not mentioned in Stites's book.) Suprematism was founded by Kazimir
Malevich around 1913. The first systematic school of abstract painting in modern
art, it attempted, through the geometric simplification of forms, to create
self-referential harmonies devoid of associative meaning. There was a
mystical element in Malevich's painting that he describes as a
"sensation of infinity." Like the other modernists, he sought to
create a new language that would enable mankind to discover "things
still outside of cognition," allowing art for the first time in history
not merely to represent the existing world, but to take part in the
construction of a new one. His weightless primary forms float in a space that
is not determined by the laws of gravity, expressing what he described as
mankind's yearning "to be free of the globe of the earth." In 1920
he published a pamphlet on the possibility of interplanetary flight, and of
mastery of the cosmos through satellites and space stations. In Vitebsk, Leningrad, and Moscow
he taught in the art schools founded after the Revolution to work out a
theoretical approach to art in a socialist society. There he began to investigate
the possibilities for a Suprematist architecture in a series of idealized
sketches, while his followers applied his ideas in the design of a variety of
objects including teapots. But unlike the Constructivists he emphasized the
spiritual, as opposed to the utilitarian, function of art, insisting that if
the artist saw himself as a craftsman fulfilling a social demand, he would
cease to create the ideal forms from which new design emerged. This led to a break with Tatlin
and his Constructivist followers in 1921 on the question of the social
function of art. This event has been seen as being of historic significance
for Russian art. It was historic in another sense too, as the first open
confrontation in the new state between utopia as the "ever proliferating
realization of freedom" and the systems of control erected by utopia in
power. Malevich argued his case at length
in an article published in 1928. There should be a place both for
Constructivism and Suprematism in Soviet culture; but their goals should not
be confused. Utilitarian functions were historically relative; the value of
artistic form was constant and invariable: The influence of economic, political, religious,
utilitarian phenomena on art is the disease of art…. Our contemporaries must
understand that life will not be the content of art, but rather that art
must become the content of life, since only thus can life be beautiful….
Not one engineer, military leader, economist or politician has ever managed
to achieve in his own field a constant, beautiful, forming element such as
that achieved by the artist. [my italics] Malevich was notorious for the
impenetrability of his theoretical writing; but this defense of the
independence of art could not have been more clearly put. In the historical circumstances
in which he wrote, its unambiguousness represents an act of great courage.
His polemic with Tatlin had drawn on him the wrath of the
"proletarian" and realist artists and writers; in 1926 the
institute he directed was accused of "counterrevolutionary
propaganda" in the Soviet press; it was closed shortly afterward. In
1929, he had his last public exhibition; the catalog stressed the alienation
of his art from current ideology. In much of his work in the late Twenties he
returned to figurative art; but this was no concession to the current
"social demand" for inspirational icons to mobilize the masses. In
his "peasant series," painted at the time of the death and
deportation of millions of kulaks, figures with featureless faces stand with
chilling monumentality against a landscape composed of stark strips of
primary colors. Malevich's vision had none of the
other-worldliness of traditional aesthetic idealism. He believed that the
proper understanding of art as an end in itself would lead not to
philosophical or religious escapism but to a revolutionary transformation of
human societies far beyond what politics alone was capable of doing. He
insisted on the global significance of the change to non-objectivity in art.
It had reversed a process of thousands of years in which art had been tied to
the representation of visible reality. In their rejection of representation,
"Constructivism, Futurism and Suprematism have established an immediate
link with the world," freeing the imagination from its historical
clutter, and opening the way for a renewal of life through artistic form. In
1916 he declared: "Objects have vanished like smoke." A new
artistic culture was emerging in which the principle of creation as an end in
itself would lead to domination over nature. The modernist vision of the
relation of art to society is summed up in a phrase from Malevich's manifesto
of 1919, New Systems in Art: "Art must grow on the stem of the
organism, must give it form." In seeking to serve rather than to shape
the aspirations of a historical class and state, Malevich believed that the
Russian avant-garde had turned its back on the most significant discovery in
the history of art. His ideal of a dynamic world where art has transformed
human perception, freeing it from subservience to authority and routine, is
far more abstract and unattainable than the machine utopias that many other
modernists settled for. And yet, as he observed with satisfaction, both
before and after 1917, the guardians of the status quo saw his dream as a
serious threat. In 1915 he ironically records the horror of the Russian
artistic establishment when faced by his famous Black Square: In my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of
the objective world, I fled to the form of the square…. The critics moaned
and with them the public. "Everything we have loved we have lost;…before
us stands a black square on a white ground." This was a parody of the following
outraged reaction to the Black Square by the artist Alexander Benois,
who had led the critical attack on Suprematism: Black Square on a White Back-ground is not just a joke, not a simple challenge, not a small
chance episode. It is an act of self-affirmation of the principle of vile
desolation. In its pride, arrogance and desecration of all that is loving and
tender, it flaunts its desire to lead everything to destruction. In the eyes of the modernists
during the years before the Revolution, Benois was a man of the past. They
were mistaken. In the 1920s, despite the protests of the
"proletarian" writers and the avant-garde, the Party gave
encouragement to many "fellow-travelers" (as Trotsky labeled them),
artists and writers in the prerevolutionary realist tradition, who
sympathized in general with the aims of the Communist leaders, who in turn
saw their style as a model for an art and literature that could be harnessed
to propaganda tasks. Benois was one of several such artists popular in the
Twenties. But Malevich's art was useless as
an instrument of propaganda; worse still, its effect on the imagination could
not be predicted, channeled, or contained. Malevich's painting, described by
the critic Nikolai Punin as "a rocket sent by the human spirit into the
sphere of non-existence," is an eternal protest against the entropy of
utopia in power. To those artists who yearned to be workers in the idealized
universal factory of the "machine utopia," he retorted: "Is it
not my brain which is the true factory, from which the new, iron-transformed world
runs, and from which there flows the life which we call invention?" The social dreaming of the Russian
1920s was thus not the euphoric harmony that has been claimed. There were
many other dissident voices whose utopia of freedom could not be reconciled
with utopia in power. One of these was the poet Osip Mandelstam. He greeted
the Revolution as a cosmic event; but, unlike Mayakovsky's bardic oratory,
his poetry of the 1920s expresses the silences of those whose voices (as he
writes in his famous poem against Stalin) could not be heard more than ten
paces away. It is rich in veiled allusions to the Revolution's brutality and
corruption, and his fears for the survival of poetry's "sacred,
senseless word in the Soviet night." He died in a transit concentration
camp in 1938, but (as his widow notes in her memoirs) Soviet journals, with
remarkable unanimity, refused to print his poetry as early as 1922.[4]
The poems in praise of Stalin which he wrote in exile in the mid-1930s have
been seen as a last hopeless attempt to find an authentic voice for the poet
as prophet of the national destiny; but his was the kind of vision which, as
Joseph Brodsky has put it, "casts doubt on more than a concrete political
system: it questions the entire existential order."[5] 3. It was indeed Stalin who declared
allout "war on the dreamers" after 1928; but the ostracism and
petty persecution of many of them started much earlier, as the zealots in the
Party and in writers' and artists' unions began to identify those who would
never conform. Sometimes such people became rebels against their will. The
painter Pavel Filonov tried very hard to turn himself into a
"proletarian" artist, but could not suppress his powerful vision of
human alienation in the claustrophobic chaos of the modern city. An
exhibition of his paintings was not permitted to open in 1929; but he had
begun to be persecuted in the mid-Twenties, when his intricate and hypnotic
canvases were denounced for their "bourgeois pessimism" by the
dominant "realist" school. Only one of the dissident voices
who discerned the shape of things to come appears in Stites's book, in a
reference to Evgenii Zamyatin's famous futurological satire We. Its
monstrous United State, whose citizens are known as Numbers, is represented
as a satire on the general tendency of political power to misuse technology.
But Zamyatin (who held views close to Malevich's on the power of artistic
innovation to transform perception) devoted much of his writing during the
Twenties to an analysis of what he saw as the disease of the Soviet system in
particular: fear of the power of the heretical word. Insisting that the
purpose of art was not to reflect life, but to organize and build new forms
of it, he deplored the eagerness of Soviet artists to take on the functions
of journalists and propagandists. One could not imagine Tolstoy writing about
progress in the question of sanitation. "The revolution needs writers
who do not fear the whip, who disturb rather than reassure." Zamyatin
perceived that the intelligentsia of the Twenties was not collaborating with
the state in building a dream, but colluding with it in creating a myth of unanimity
that could end in nightmare. Nadezhda Mandelstam, writing much later, had no
doubt of that generation's moral responsibility for what followed: There are now many people who would like to bring back the
twenties and recreate the self-imposed unity of those days. Survivors from
those times do their best to persuade the younger generation that this was an
age in which everything—science, literature, the theatre—flourished as never
before, and that if everything had continued to develop on the lines then laid
down, we should by now have attained the height of perfection…. In other words, they deny responsibility for what happened
later. But how can they? It was, after all, these people of the twenties who
demolished the old values and invented the formulas which even now come in so
handy to justify the unprecedented experiment undertaken by our young State:
you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. Every new killing was excused on the grounds that there
would be no more violence, and that no sacrifice was too great for it. Nobody noticed that the end had begun to justify the
means, and then, as always, gradually been lost sight of. It was the people
of the twenties who first began to make a neat distinction between the sheep
and the goats, between "us" and "them," between upholders
of the new and those still mindful of the basic rules that governed human
relationships in the past…in reality it was the twenties in which all the
foundations were laid for our future: the casuistical dialectic, the
dismissal of older values, the longing for unanimity and self-abasement.[6]
Nadezhda Mandelstam believed that
the myth about the 1920s would be shattered once the facts were known; but
the appeal of myth can be stronger than rational proof. It is possible to contrast the
spirit of the experimentation of the Twenties, carried on in an atmosphere of
coexistence, with Stalinism, which abhorred experimentation and tolerated no
rivals. But Stalin exploited the utopian enthusiasm of the time to launch his
programs of industrialization and collectivization, and huge numbers of
Russians willingly cooperated in creating the cult of the leader. The
question of the collusion of utopia with power deserves to be explored in any
future cultural history of the 1920s. Many utopians of the Twenties
tolerated rivals only because they did not have the power to eliminate them.
This was the case with Proletkult, a movement founded to create a new
proletarian culture through the intensive training of working-class writers
in literary "studios." While it produced some of the most
interesting cultural experiments of the age, its most militant members also
fought to exclude the nonproletarian intelligentsia (whose experiments tended
to be of a higher artistic quality) from cultural life. During the late
Twenties the movement's successors tried to enlist the Party's authority in
enforcing their demand for control over Soviet literature—a nasty case of the
kind of collusion which Nadezhda Mandelstam had in mind. Another case of utopian
inventiveness which was less innocent than it seemed is
"Godbuilding." Created before the Revolution by Gorky and
Lunacharsky, it deified the collective force of the proletariat as a way of
inspiring a religious sense of community. Though condemned by Lenin as a form
of philosophical idealism, Godbuilding became (thanks to Lunacharsky's
position as commissar of enlightenment) an ingredient in the rituals of
Communist festivals. Stites sees this movement as the expression of a strong
subconscious bond between intelligentsia and working class—"a common
utopian spirit of hope and humanism"—but he notes that these festivals
soon lost their spontaneity and became instruments of political manipulation.
This is not surprising: there was nothing spontaneous about Godbuilding,
which was specifically concocted as a manipulative myth by Bolshevik
intellectuals in the wake of the failed revolution of 1905. Dismayed at mass
desertions from the Party, they hit on the idea of inspiring enthusiasm for
the cause by inventing (in Lunacharsky's words) "an infinite higher
force…on which [the individual] can place his hopes." It would be hard for a student of
the culture of the Russian 1920s not to see ironies of collision and
collusion at every step. The science-fiction writer Gastev is a case in
point. A genuine idealist, he found favor with Stalin for his ideas of social
engineering, while himself endorsing the Stakhanovite movement as a logical
outcome of his system. The dream came to an end in 1938, when he disappeared
into a camp. He is now best remembered for having provoked Zamyatin's We,
one of the greatest of modern dystopias. According to the mythological
version of the 1920s, the system that destroyed such people was fundamentally
hostile to their ideals. In reality, it derived both its claim to legitimacy
and the justification for its violence from a belief that the revolutionary
leaders of the Twenties, with the willing collaboration of huge numbers of
the intelligentsia, had sought unremittingly to inculcate in their society:
that the goal of progress was to establish a single, correct (because wholly rational)
system of social existence, and that total identification with the system's
collective goals would give individual existence its meaning and purpose. Nadezhda Mandelstam writes that
the need to belong, not to be isolated from the main current of history, was
the dominant psychological cause of the moral capitulation of writers and
artists to the principle that might equals right. Indeed the conflict between
the creative imagination and the desire to serve narrowly defined political
goals is crucial to an understanding of the Russian art and literature of the
Twenties; but only in discussing the gruesome inventions designed to replace
the festive rituals of capitalist societies does Stites note that spontaneity
and humor were crushed by "the need to moralize, self-congratulate,
teach, speechify, punish and organize." The picture of the intelligentsia
of the Twenties that he represents is an extraordinarily attractive one of a
creative dissonance. Every aspect of the new society became a subject of
passionate debate, from architecture to morality and dress. Among the major
responses to the last problem were "to dress up, to dress down, to dress
equally, or not to dress at all" (the proponents of the last option
believing that the only egalitarian apparel was the human skin itself—a point
which they made in street demonstrations in 1922). But the other side of the
picture is missing from the book: the unceasing pressure for conformism, the
desire to establish once and for all the right way to build, think, behave,
and dress. As the Twenties progressed, these debates were resolved by an
implicit consensus among the police (who removed the nudists from the
streets), Bolshevik moralists, and the radical intelligentsia, rejecting all
forms of dress and behavior that smacked of "bourgeois
individualism" or "hooliganism" in favor of neatness and
discipline. The colorful feminism preached by Alexandra Kollontai was a
short-lived phenomenon: full sexual liberation being an impediment to the
task of socialist construction. In the ending of experimentation which marks
the prelude to Stalinism, it is difficult to separate the elements of
pressure from above and voluntary conformism from below. Stites claims that Russian
utopians en masse believed that mankind was inhibited only by bad
institutions from expressing its natural goodness in a state of brotherhood;
while stalin's system held that man is wicked, lazy, and stupid, and must be
controlled by coercion. A closer consideration of the
record suggests that the difference between the two views corresponds to a
difference between utopias in the mind and utopias in power. It may be true
that the utopian propensity is "the mechanism whereby mankind protects
its most sacred values"; but Stites's argument would have been more
balanced had he been less reluctant to acknowledge that utopian thinking has
also been the source of some of mankind's most horrible crimes. He finds it
depressing that our self-consciously brutal age tends to scorn ideals of
perfection, universal justice, harmony, and peace. Even liberals, he asserts,
fear that people will still be attracted by sweeping visions of perfection
and try to bring them about by the violent creation of totalitarian states. But this seems to me a healthy
fear, one that should not be too easily laid to rest by "warmhearted
visions of a lovely land…graced by justice and prosperity." He believes
that the skepticism of Western commentators about such visions is motivated
mainly by attachment to privilege and fear of the unknown, but he should not
discount another motive: the view that rationalist utopias of the type he
describes embody a concept of freedom irreconcilable with the ideals of
classical liberalism. 4.
The importance of this distinction
between "two concepts of liberty" and their vastly differing social
implications, was stressed in Isaiah Berlin's famous essay of that name.[7]
Berlin's argument helps to introduce some much-needed clarity into the
discussion of whether any of the utopias conceived in the 1920s might be a
genuinely humanist alternative to the "utopia in power" whose
demise is currently under way. Berlin outlined the tortuous path
by which the Enlightenment's vision of freedom as rational self-direction—the
historical root of liberal individualism—became the ideological justification
of totalitarian despotism. In attempting to free people from subordination to
divine powers, rationalist metaphysics in turn made reason quasidivine as the
"true" eternal core of human nature. The authority of reason was
identified with freedom, on the grounds that in conforming to rational
necessity the individual was obeying the laws of his own nature. This had the
effect (as in Kantian ethics) of dividing the personality into two parts.
Freedom was seen as self-mastery, the bringing of the "lower" part
of the psyche, the passions and desires, into line with the
"higher," rational self. According to the socialized version of
this ethic (the basis of all rationalist visions of the Golden Age), reason
being universal, all valid human values and goals must be ultimately
compatible, fitting into a single, harmonious pattern. If all people were
sufficiently rational, social conflict would cease. From this premise it is
only one step to the argument that in the present imperfect world it may be
the duty of the more enlightened to force the less enlightened to be free, by
coercing their lower, animal natures into patterns of action consistent with
the demands of their own higher, rational selves. Berlin argues that the belief in a
single solution to all social problems has no basis in empirical experience,
which suggests that conflict is an inalienable feature of the human
condition. But it seems that the desire for wholeness and unity is just as
fundamental. And he sees this metaphysical need as the source of the
unacknowledged tension in much contemporary liberalism between a commitment
to pluralism and diversity for its own sake (based on the belief that people
should be permitted to pursue as many ends as possible with minimal
interference, and with no assessment of their value except insofar as they
frustrate the needs of others for self-fulfillment), and the belief that
societies are moving toward one correct way of life, when all their members
will acknowledge the primacy of reason over the passions, and will freely
choose conformity to widely shared norms over chaotic individualism. But
Berlin argues that those who recommend, for whatever reason, that individual
liberty be sacrificed to some more desirable goal, such as fraternity or
justice, should not deceive themselves into believing that they are thereby
defending liberty in some much deeper sense. To say that in some
all-reconciling synthesis, duty is self-interest, the authoritarian state
enhances freedom, or benign despotism promotes humanism, "is to throw a
metaphysical blanket over self-deceit or hypocrisy." Berlin believes that many
liberals, with the best of intentions, have blinded themselves to
irreconcilable differences between their own deeply held values of plurality
and tolerance, and the values of collectivist democracies whose sense of
purpose they admire. In the current reassessment of the Russian past, a
number of thinkers seem to be profiting from such a metaphysical cover-up.
One of the most notable is Alexander Bogdanov, the subject of Zenovia
Sochor's study. Bogdanov, a philosopher and
economist who was trained as a medical doctor, and was the author of two
utopian novels about collectivist society on Mars, was Lenin's main
intellectual rival in the Bolshevik party. His philosophical ideas (which led
to his expulsion from the Party in 1910) became the theoretical inspiration
of Proletkult. His activities in this organization after the revolution and
the linking of his name with dissident groups aroused Lenin's hostility, and
he turned increasingly to medical research. He died in 1928, as the result of
an experimental blood transfusion he performed on himself. Like another
Bolshevik dissident, Nikolai Bukharin, Bogdanov has been rescued from
oblivion by the recent interest in the different and more desirable paths that
Russia might have taken to socialism. Zenovia Sochor seeks to demonstrate
that his ideas represented such a path. Bogdanov had an impressive record
of independent thinking. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1904 because, unlike
more orthodox Marxists, Lenin emphasized the role of human will in making
history; but he opposed Lenin's view of the Party as a vanguard interpreting
Marxism for the masses. He was one of the first to predict that a "new
class" would appear in the Soviet Union, arguing that the capitalist
"fetishes" denounced by Marx would survive into socialist society,
and would produce new exploitative relationships, unless the economic
transformation of society were accompanied by a revolution in human
consciousness. His philosophy, "empiriomonism," rejected all
universal laws and eternal truths, together with all self-appointed
interpreters of such truths. He believed that truth corresponded to the
experience of the most progressive class—the proletariat—in its revolutionary
struggle. He attempted to sketch out an ambitious "organizational
science," that would draw on new developments in technology and would
replace all hierarchical relationships in the productive process by
cooperation, thereby eliminating the fragmentation of knowledge. In the new "proletarian
culture," the insights of the sciences and the arts would be
systematized into one coherent body of knowledge. Sochor presents Bogdanov's ideas
as a "grassroots" challenge to authoritarianism and the rule of
dogma. But she admits that there is a curious disjunction between, on the one
hand, his protest against coercive norms and, on the other, his theories
about proletarian culture, where individual deviations from the
"collective consciousness" would not be tolerated. Still, she
believes that Bogdanov's ideal of cooperation represented a clear alternative
to the despotic path chosen by Lenin and Stalin and that the difference would
have been even clearer if he had managed to rid himself of the vestiges of authoritarianism
that ran counter to most of his thinking. A reading of Bogdanov's work,
however, leads to a different conclusion: only by renouncing his democratic
leanings could Bogdanov have been wholly true to his basic ideas. It is not
surprising that the "Godbuilders" Gorky and Lunacharsky were among
his enthusiastic fans; his philosophy was based on an extreme version of the
rationalist idealization of man that is the soul of Marxist utopia. What
principally distinguished him from other Marxist ideologues of the time was
the mystical fervor with which he expressed his longing for transcendence and
for a new age when the "illusion of the independent ego" would give
way to the reality of the omnipotent collective. Knowledge and being would
then form a seamless whole, and mankind would achieve its goal:
"all-understanding" and "all-mastery." He believed that
with a little persuasion from him and other sympathetic intellectuals the
proletariat was on the verge of fashioning the new, undivided consciousness
whose ten commandments, as set out by him, included the precepts that it
should recognize no coercive standards, worship no authorities, yet wholly
identify with the collective in "mind, will, and feelings." He saw
no reason why the originality and initiative that he demanded of proletarian
art should conflict with this collectivism; when it did, he attributed this
to the remnants of bourgeois individualism persisting in the psyche. He
defended the instincts of the proletariat against the Party's attempts to control
them, but it was he who defined what those instincts were. It was Bogdanov, not Lenin, who
demanded, some years before the Revolution, that the Bolshevik party should
have a single line in philosophy—his own. During the NEP period, Proletkult's
millenarian impatience led it to accuse the Party of not being authoritarian
enough and to object to the tolerance of "fellow-travelers" in
cultural life, on the grounds that the arts were primary instruments in the
ideological battle to create a collective psyche. As Proletkult proclaimed in
1920: "Art can organize the feelings in exactly the same way as
propaganda organizes thought." The enthusiastic support of
Proletkult's successors for Stalin's class war would seem to indicate a
natural symbiosis between its collectivism and the Party's authoritarianism.
What puzzles Sochor is how Bogdanov could reconcile his humanistic vision of
social harmony with his "rather chilling" indictment of deviant
groups. She is troubled, it seems clear,
because she identifies Bogdanov's ideal of harmony roughly with the liberal
goal of mutual tolerance. That she can do so is evidence of the ambiguity in
contemporary liberalism noted by Berlin: an unresolved contradiction between
the defense of pluralism and the attraction of some liberals to a rationalist
utopia in which all ends will coincide. There seem few empirical grounds
for Bogdanov's belief that the human psyche was undergoing a revolutionary
transformation in the direction of "collectivism" in the early
years of this century; the Bolsheviks, most historians now agree, owed their
success in 1917 less to proletarian solidarity than to their skill in
exploiting the selfish interests of separate groups. Yet Sochor takes
seriously Bogdanov's claim that his vision coincided with the decline of the
"bourgeois" mentality in favor of "comradely cooperation"
and "universalism" and could therefore not be seen as coercive. She
claims there is a fundamental difference between the Stalinist conception of partiinost
(the view that adherence to the Party line established the validity of
beliefs and actions) and Bogdanov's collectivism, which she interprets (with
some reservations) as a consensus of free spirits, a "willingness to
explore and tolerate diversity." Yet at other points she seems to
recognize her own contradictions. She suggests that the very notion that
there is one best way to act contains an "authoritarian
implication." Unfortunately she does not keep this suggestion in mind
when she stresses the differences between Stalin's control of culture for the
purpose of consolidating power, and Proletkult, whose conception of
self-transformation was designed to enhance human dignity rather than
submissiveness. Such distinctions prove nothing, except that Bogdanov was
less of a realist than Stalin and a nicer man. Some of his disciples, who
were not nice men, took his ideas to their logical conclusion, and joined the
ranks of Stalin's executioners. Sochor's defense of Bogdanov
serves to illustrate Isaiah Berlin's claim that contemporary liberals are
insufficiently aware of the conflict between the urge for transcendence and
the liberal values of pluralism and tolerance. She seems to interpret the
current mood in Eastern Europe—weariness with a controlled society, the
desire for democratic discussion, for humanist values—as a demand for such
pluralism, And yet, as an answer to those who still have hopes of
"socialism with a human face," she proposes the ideas of Bogdanov,
whose own face was resolutely turned away from the empirical world of diverse
and conflicting purposes, and toward the abstract unity that he saw as the
only true reality—the omnipotent collective. Isaiah Berlin reminds us that if
there is "enough manipulation with the definition of man," then
"freedom can be made to mean whatever the manipulator wishes."
Bogdanov and most of the Russian utopians of the 1920s were, intentionally or
otherwise, engaged in such a game of manipulation. The admiration of Sochor
and Stites for the spurious "collective consciousness" which was
perhaps the most imaginative invention of that period may reflect a more
general insecurity among liberals about the moral validity of classical
liberal individualism. In 1974, when Solzhenitsyn, newly arrived in the West,
lectured Western liberals on their moral bankruptcy and on the need for a
cohesive moral society the respectful liberals in the audience were rarely
willing to attempt a counterblast. The situation has now changed dramatically:
the events in Eastern Europe show that the traditional vision of utopia as a
convergence toward a single truth, whether religious or rational, does not
correspond to the needs of modern societies. In their search for a new
political language in which conflict and pluralism can be expressed as
ineradicable elements of the human condition, many Russian intellectuals are
now turning to the West's traditions of liberal thought, not to criticize it,
but to learn from it. There is certainly a risk that Western liberal
academics will, out of selfish materialism, be scornful of Russian utopian
traditions. But the more real danger is that, with no direct experience of
the effects on the liberties to which they are accustomed, they will continue
to preach the attractions of "new paths" that are essentially more
of the same thing. Stites sees an inspiring example
in Lev Kopelev, an early Communist and one of Stalin's victims who, while
expressing bitter disappointment in the ways the communist vision
"degenerated in some men into the desire to serve as executioners,"
reaffirms his faith in the ideals themselves. But many other Russians will
want to reexamine those ideals. Under the conditions of glasnost, the utopian
inquiry broken off at the end of the Twenties is beginning to be resumed; and
Soviet intellectuals will have to rely heavily on sources such as Stites's
book, with its richly detailed reference to materials not easily available in
Russia and the West. But in the common effort to
reconstruct the Russian national memory, Western scholars are offering not
only facts, but interpretations, and in the present state of ideological
confusion in the Soviet Union, this places a greater responsibility on them
than many are used to. Some of our perspectives, if not as partisan as
official Soviet versions, are based on assumptions that need to be revised in
the light of the recent revolutions in Eastern Europe. Now that some of the
losers of 1917, or at least their spiritual descendants, may be due for a
second chance, we should reflect on whether our attachment to them owes more
to the heart than to the head, and take a cooler look at the concept of
freedom underpinning the ideal of a golden age. With the failure of the
greatest utopian experiment in history, we are at a turning point when a
problem raised by Berdyaev in 1924 seems a particularly suitable subject for
reflection: Utopias have turned out to be much more realizable than
seemed possible before. Now we are faced with another tormenting question:
how to avoid their being realized in full. Notes [1] Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Utopia in Power:
The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present (Summit Books,
1988), p. 9. [2] Oxford University Press, 1985. [3] Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge
University Press, 1989), p. xvi. [4] Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope: A Memoir,
translated by Max Hayward (Macmillan, 1976), p. 138. [5] Introduction to Osip Mandelstam, 50 Poems, Bernard
Meares, trans. (Braziller, 1977), p. 15. [6] Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, pp.
167–168. [7] Isaiah Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty," Four
Essays on Liberty (Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 118–172 |
