Westerman's Engineers of the Soul

“Our tanks are worthless if the souls who must steer them are made of glass. This is why I say:  the production of souls is more important than that of tanks.”  J. Stalin.

There is an Andrei Tarkovsky film about a few forlorn humans who make their living by trying to navigate mysterious, unintelligible, alien-crafted zones. In these zones, the normal laws of physics do not apply. Nothing is predictable.  

These zones, utterly bereft of our ordinary understanding of cause and effect, reminded me of something a former colleague once told me about an old employer of mine.  He said:  "Derek, take everything you've learned over the years;  take your three graduate degrees, years of college teaching experience, and decade of administrative experience--take all that you have learned from mentors of the years, and...set all of this aside. These experiences are of no value to you here."  He meant that trying to be good in a truly bad place didn't work, and in fact might make both my life and the place itself worse than it had been.  Ia bad place, even good intentions can be mistaken for cynical ploys and interpreted as aggressive overtures.  

I think sometimes of what Afghanistan must be like, 1960s Vietnam, or Iraq.  Without, I hope, descending into xenophobic, cultural short-sightedness, I think it's safe to say that from time to time a place lapses into prehistoric, moral anarchy.  In such situations, it's impossible, or almost impossible, to tell right from wrong.  Does one side with a criminally corrupt central government, a reprehensible rebel group, a vicious warlord, a distorted religious creed, a foreign colonizer of incalculable power, or one's own backward and bloodthirsty clan?  

In such a moral vacuum, isn't any decision to side with one group against another bound to be a bad one?  And what if the landscape of alliances changes from one year to the next?  What then?  What is right this year might very well prove to be wrong next year. And even if, like Demosthenes, I've managed to encounter  a good man with whom to ally, if that good man in turn is allied to criminals, is my alliance a worthy one or not?  The answer isn't easy to discover, even if one is, against all self-interest, inclined to honesty.

I've worked in such conditions here in America, even though American civilization isn't, as a rule, bereft of morality, or at least moral checks and balances.  We have, after all, an active press, free elections, an independent judiciary, separation of church and state, a written Constitution and Bill of Rights, and a reasonably healthy tradition of civil rights.  So, having worked in places where moral decisions are seldom made, I wonder how much worse things were in places like the U.S.S.R., where no leader was bound by anything other than the fear of Party hierarchy or state authority.  

Reading Frank Westerman's book, Engineers of the Soul:  In the Footsteps of Stalin's Writers, I wonder how sensitive souls navigated even the most pleasant years of the Soviet regime, the period of the so-called Thaw.  Westerman's book reminds us that most Soviet writers were obligated to celebrate Soviet civilization, which more often than not meant praising its most conspicuous hydraulic engineering projects, namely its many canals.  Even Maxim Gorky--who almost always tried to wed his tremendous writing talent to moral causes--wound up writing a paean to a canal, and one that had been built by slave labor.  Paustovsky also wrote about a massive engineering project.  And if Plotonov failed to get much work related to these Stalinist engineering feats, it wasn’t for lack of trying.  Of course, the best Soviet authors found a variety of ways to remain more or less connected to their own understanding of objective (as opposed to Socialist Realist) truth, their own dignity, and the dignity of literature in general.  Some, like Pasternak, avoided poetry and focused on the ideologically safer work of translation, although he famously also took the approach of writing clandestinely.  Some, like Paustovsky, wrote different types of books, some directly pleasing to the apprachniks, others more personal.  But all Soviet writers, with the possible exceptions of Solzhenitsyn a few others, made significant moral and of course aesthetic compromises.  The Ghetto Boys famously rapped that “the world is a ghetto.”  For Soviet authors, the world they knew was “a gulag.”  And it’s a prison or prison camp that most clearly conjures up the perfect collapse of a morally intelligible universe. 

Your Mother Was a Communist!

Maxim Gorky's 1905 play, Mother, was an international phenomenon: his most popular play, Mother captured the imagination of liberal and socialist audiences who recognized the Russian autocracy the play critiqued as one of the center of European conservatism and even despotism prior to the First World War. Perhaps inevitably, in 1926 Gorky's polemical play was turned into a Soviet film, which received a soundtrack and score when it was restored by Mosfilm in 1968.

The film revolves around a personal drama of political radicalization. As the film opens, a drunken and impoverished father, Vlasov, terrorizes his miserable wife in his search for money to feed his alcoholic addiction, but the outraged son eventually drives him off with a hammer. Later, Vlasov inevitably finds himself in a tavern whose unsavory patrons are plotting to brutally suppress a strike. The father, who pathetically offers the bartender a domestic iron he has purloined for a drink, is soon recruited by the "black hundreds" goons who recognize his size and strength. When the son, Pavel, declares his solidarity with the strikers, the stage is set for a family conflict in the midst of a wider drama of political and economic confrontation.

At first, the two sides are decidedly unequal. The workers, while numerous and determined, are unarmed. In contrast, Vlasov and his right-wing partners carry arms, including brass knuckles, and enjoy the confidence of the armed police as well as the wealthy factory owner. The organization of the workers proves to be almost a match for the forces of reaction. However, a military force overawes the strikers, and strikers die. Soon, strikers are on the run, and Pavel heroically decides to hide weapons and other contraband in his home to aid the cause of resistance to tyranny. When the tzar's gendarmes arrive to search the house, Pavel's mother is distraught. She seeks to save her son by revealing the weapons cache in exchange for her son's freedom.

Unfortunately, she has naively underestimated the brutality of the government and its representatives, who ignore her deferential bows and take her son away, to be put on trial. The trial, attended by bourgeois spectators who enjoy the courtroom drama as entertainment and spectacle, is fixed in advance. The judges are prejudiced, one expressing his lack of interest in justice by drawing doodles as the evidence is heard; the defense lawyer is young, inexperienced and so nervous that he hiccups throughout the trial. When her son receives a sentence of hard labor, in her melodramatic anguish she cries: "Is this justice?"

The mother, watching the proceedings in horror, moves to a rupture with the old regime. As things get worse for her son in prison, who confronts the prospect of eating bug-infested food, the mother becomes an active opponent of the regime for the first time by distributing fliers and joining a May Day protest at the prison, which soon frees Pavel and the other prisoners. The film provides viewers with a visual metaphor for this revolutionary act by showing river ice breaking up in a spring thaw. Pavel, now free, dramatically flies across the ice to escape the tzar's troops and join his comrades.

The final rupture between the mother and the government occurs during the last sequence of the film. With Cossack cavalrymen charging revolutionaries, Pavel is killed by a bullet and dies in his mother's arms. But rather than collapse in grief, the mother valiantly confronts the charging Cossacks, flying the red flag of revolt and daring the soldiers to trample her to death. Her transformation into a stoic revolutionary is complete: free from all illusions about the the nature of autocratic government and exploitative capitalism, she is prepared to die for her son and the revolutionary cause he supported.