Aesthetics of Tragedy

Another argument of Fitzpatrick deserves comment. Fitzpatrick’s opinion is that there is an aesthetic dimension to the long Russian revolution. To take the argument one step further, the fact that Stalin killed the original revolutionaries who believed in a socialist utopia is the most aesthetically interesting aspect of the revolutionary experience. It’s one thing for the protagonists to defeat their enemies; it’s another for the protagonists to self-destruct. In the French Revolution, the trials of Danton and Robespierre are the most sacred moments of the entire historical drama. How odd to face the guillotine killed poetically by the very process he had helped to create.

Yet Robespierre’s death—see that beautiful movie, Danton—might be seen as tragic too, since Robespierre was the essence of Revolution, an incorruptible force who may have become intolerable to men who didn’t possess the stomach to remain loyal to the original principles of the Revolution—equality, fraternity, and liberty. Certainly Robespierre’s death—and the death of the cause of the Sans-Coulette—he represented, were seen as the heart of the tragedy of the French Revolution by the Russian revolutionaries.

Although the Communists killed many innocent Russians, the ones who garnered the most international sympathy were the Old Bolsheviks or true believers in the very force that destroyed them. Trotsky’s expulsion from the Soviet Union was sad enough: Once Lenin’s most capable lieutenant, he was first dragged from his apartment and exiled to the distant In the Purge Show Trials, then expelled from the Soviet Union altogether. (Later, we famously met his end by way of an assassin’s ice pick).

Still worse, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and even Bukharin, all implicated themselves; testifying to their own despicable—but false—betrayal of the Communist cause. This kind of self-immolation was harnessed by Western writers such as Koestler, who wrote a horrific tale of a brave true believer who struggles to find a reason to believe that his own admission of guilt and consequent death is historically necessary. Orwell wrote about a similar theme in Animal Farm. The Revolution succeeds but the revolutionaries quickly separate into a new oppressor/oppressed dichotomy.

Soltzheniztyn, despite his own familiarity with non-Bolshevik victims, was also impressed with the tragic dimensions of the Old Bolsheviks, who, even in the gulag, argued relentlessly that their party had made a simple mistake by accusing them but remained a force for good in the country at large. If Stalin could only be told about their unhappy fate in the gulag, he would set things right.

The Soviet Union as a Product of Science Fiction

My generation grew up on George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984. Looking back, high schools across the country must have been concerned that American children needed these books to be properly inoculated against Communism. Don’t get me wrong: both books are excellent depictions of the very real dangers of totalitarianism. In the case of 1984, this wasn’t really science fiction: the Soviet Union was already spying on its citizens, squashing dissidents, redefining words to mean the opposite of what they had originally meant, systemically deceiving citizens through propaganda, and making every effort to engineer human beings to be more amenable to control from above.

Animal Farm wasn’t far off either. The Soviet Union had created a brand new caste of bureaucrats, replacing a traditional aristocratic and bourgeois hierarchy with one that consisted of party functionaries. But before there was Orwell’s 1984 there was Yevgeny Zamyatin’s book, We. We is a science fiction story about a future that doesn’t look all that different from the one Orwell described in 1984. There’s one state, one state newspaper. `In We, citizens are told that individualism is a purely destructive force. For this reason, people don’t have names, only combinations of letters and numbers, like R-13 for example. People are told that “everything is for the good.” They should trust in the state and the existing order of things. Nothing should be challenged.

In Zamyatin’s dystopia, citizens are told that the past is primitive. Rationalism reigns supreme. The state and its people celebrate what they call mathematical-philosophical reasoning, and mathematical equations dominate the text. The people are also told that love is primitive and that they should therefore participate in a system of love-making as a form of lottery. As your turn comes up, you receive a coupon from the government that allows you to select a lover. The next time you receive a coupon, you may select a second woman, and so on. In this world, the government has eliminated most forms of irrationality and emotion. People behave as they should.

Zamyatin’s We was written at an interesting moment in Soviet history. It represented an incredibly rich stage of Soviet cultural and literary experimentation. The novel is forward thinking in terms of both its futuristic content and its innovative style. However, We was produced at a moment when Stalin was tightening his grip on political power and would shortly eliminate most forms of cultural independence. The most interesting thing about We—which isn’t the most lively narrative—is that it reminds readers that the Soviet Union it implicates seemed like a product of science fiction even at its birth. Nothing like it had ever been created previously.

For the first time, the state was actively promoting the idea that it could overcome conflict, produce prosperity, unleash human creativity, enhance culture, and in general overcome some basic human flaws, including jealousy, thievery, disunity, disorder, and irrationality. In We, even the bible is an historical artifact, a product of an unenlightened age. But the moral of We, and indeed the whole of Soviet history, is that Original Sin does in fact exist and cannot be overcome, even if we wanted it to be.