Revolution Every Day

Today, while watching my children play basketball in Hyde Park, I realized that the Smart Museum, only two blocks away from the baseball courts, was hosting an exhibition on Soviet art.  That said, I had no other choice than to quickly duck into the exhibit.  The exhibit was well worth my trip of two blocks, but is also probably worth a visit from any quarter of the city of Chicago or its environs.  Taking its queue from Sheila Fitzpatrick's phrase, "everyday Stalinism," the exhibit focuses on how the Soviet revolutionary project, especially as that project related to femininity.  Focusing almost exclusively on state-sponsored poster art, the exhibit demonstrates that the state was acutely concerned with the role of women in the society it hoped to build.  Perhaps it would even be fair to say that the state was anxious about that role. If the artists' work was any guide, the Soviet Union was deeply interested in ensuring that Soviet women were fully incorporated into its economy.  Soviet propaganda sought to demonstrate to women that they could fulfill almost any technical role available to Soviet citizens, including welding, tractor driving, and pilots.  Soviet women also needed to parents, and happy ones at that.  Thus, women in Soviet posters are sometimes depicted as mechanics, but also sometimes portrayed as idealized mothers. The overall effect of the exhibition is to demonstrated the extent to which Soviet art mobilized avant-garde aesthetics to introduce or reinforce a specific ideology of gender.

Everyday Stalinism

Every ordinary office environment is a window into Soviet political despotism and tyranny. Historians spend an inordinate amount of time asking why radical political ideas associated with liberty and egalitarianism degenerated into political violence and Stalinist terror. But this misses the point: human nature is the natural ally of unmitigated despotism.

Not all men and women are necessarily potential tyrants in the making; but, if given the chance to be political leaders in an undemocratic government, surely one out of every ten office bosses—the despotic tenth to misquote DuBois—has the capacity to set up show trials, launch political purges, and exile or assassinate enemies. Think of that greatest of all office movies, Glenngary Glenn Ross. As Alec Baldwin arrives from “downtown” he strides into the office to terrorize and humiliate his subordinates, and demands that the seasoned salesman played by Jack Lemon put his coffee down, because coffee is reserved “for closers.” Lemon and the rest of the sales staff are incredulous, yet Baldwin proceeds to berate them. “You think I am fucking with you? I am not fucking with you.” In fact, Baldwin tells his hard-working crew of flim-flam men that they’re all fired, but have one week to try to sell enough bogus properties to redeem to regain their jobs.

The film is filled with similar scenes of unbridled masculinity and sadistic insults. Al Pacino’s brazen attack on his weakened supervisor his typical: “Who ever told you that you could work with men?” Kevin Spacey, chastened by his star salesman, has no reply whatsoever. He’s utterly defeated. His only recourse will be to eventually take pleasure in the fact that another salesman, Jack Lemmon, is weaker than he is, made vulnerable despite years of experience, by falling sales figures and a sick daughter who requires care and financial support.

The office, everywhere and at all times, is a playground for the powerful. Why did Bolshevism degenerate into Stalinism? Why did Stalin overcome his rivals? Why was he allowed to create ever more outlandish schemes for disciplining his party and the nation as a whole? Did Stalin suffer from some form of degenerative mental condition that led him to kills friends as well as enemies on a hitherto unimagined scale? These questions are beside the point. To intentionally misquote what a movie producer told a screenwriter in the movie, Barton Fink, we might say the following: “You think you’re the only Stalin around here? I have twenty Stalins on staff.”

Indeed, every office space houses a plethora of hidden dictators, waiting only for the opportunity to thwart conspiracies or anything that even smacks of public opinion or democratic sentiment. More than this, every office houses dozens of potential Molotovs, sycophants ready to praise and support the worst tyrannical tendencies of the newly powerful. If it seems hard to imagine that you’ve overlooked a potential dictator in your own tranquil office of Dilbert cartoons and cat calendars, consider this: not even Stalin was Stalin at first. In fact, if it seems hard to believe that Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamanev and the others overlooked Stalin’s worst tendencies, take comfort in the fact that they weren’t really there. While Lenin’s last testament shows that he was alert to Stalin’s political power and propensity to rudeness, Stalin was generally seen to be a capable and even moderate “team player,” often the most reasonable person in the room. It’s just that over time Stalin gained more power, and came to realize that there were no longer any checks to his own ability to reorder the political world to suit his own neuroses, no matter how fanciful.

Of course, many office leaders terrorize those around them, but even so, they’re brutality is usually tempered by fear: fear of potential lawsuits, whistle-blowers, or governmental or corporate scrutiny. It’s nice to eliminate rivals without cause, but why risk one’s own job security or retirement benefits if there’s a shadow of a chance that the victim will be able to retaliate? But, given the chance that Stalin had, to mete out extreme punishments without any fear of negative consequences, what petty office dictator wouldn’t launch a bloody purge or two?

Insecurity

By happenstance I recently joined a small, informal philosophy reading group. They use the term philosophy relatively loosely. From time to time the group’s reading list intersects with this blog’s concerns. Zizek, for instance, has made their syllabus. Look for a post on Robespierre in the not-too-distant future.

Last week, the group started to read Eric Hoffer’s book True Believer. I’ve skimmed an excerpt from the book and its thesis (partly borrowed from German sociologist Karl Mannheim’s Utopia and Ideology.  I would think) seems directly relevant to the Russian Revolution and its aftershocks in the 1920s and 1930s. Hoffer makes the case that mass movements of any epoch or any political orientation are essentially alike. The participants are motivated by a desire to renounce the fragile, insecure, even wounded “self” in the interest of the quasi-religious ecstasy of self-denial and self-renunciation.

The irony of modern movements is that the ideological substance of specific movements is often less important than its psychological message. For this reason, Hoffer is not surprised that fascists and communists often fought for the same slice of the German population;  that is to say, the parties of either extreme were most successful recruiting people who were looking for some kind of messianic response to their own psychological insecurity. The fact is that a fascist often had more luck appealing to former socialists than he did when appealing to the unaffiliated. Mussuloni's own turn from socialist to fascism is the most famous example of this phenomenon.

There was, at bottom, a psychological if not political unity to interwar mass movements. Hoffer makes a number of useful observations about revolutionary upheaval, although his attempt to equate self-denial with all great social and economic transformations, including the Crusades, the Reformation, and Industrial Revolution, might unnecessarily dilute the descriptive power of his theory of modern mass movements. Hoffer notes, for instance, that the disgruntled must be economically aggrieved but not so oppressed that they have no sense of their own power. This distinction is relevant to the French Revolution. Historians argue that this famous revolt occurred either as a direct result of the bourgeoisie’s rising strength or, as Hoffer prefers, as the inevitable outcome of an emerging Enlightenment faith in the power of human reason.

In the case of the Bolsheviks, this idea that oppression must almost paradoxically be combined with empowerment makes a lot of sense. Certainly the Russian intelligentsia gained a sense of its own strength during the 1905 Revolution and later in the midst of the First World War. More importantly, the rhetoric of working class solidarity and entitlement (in addition to institutions such as unions and soviets) gave workers (whether they had fragile egos or not) a very strong sense that the future would be better than the past.

With Max Weber, Hoffer also knows what Sheila Fitzpatrick and other Soviet historians know, and that is that revolutionary enthusiasm has its limits. The people can be whipped up (or can whip them themselves up) for only so long before they stop being “true believers” and respond only to more traditional motivational strategies such as rewards or coercive action. In any event, the initial phases of the Russian Revolution make no sense without a very deep appreciation for its quasi-religious aspects. Russian Marxists, before, during, and after October 1917, were motivated by faith, self-denial, self-surrender, ecstatic hope, belief that the individual could be and should be transcended in the interest of something greater, etc.

They may also have motivated by insecurity. However, how can one go about proving this assertion? Is it really possible to separate out a religious personality from a non-religious one? Is it possible to say that Leftists were more insecure than political moderates?  And, if this is possible to say, what does it tell us? Is insecurity a bad thing if it leads to the overthrow of unjust institutions?

Hard Cover

Today I descended into the University of Chicago's Seminary Coop bookstore to check out new titles in Russian history and related subjects. Although I feel some guilt, I never buy much of anything at the bookstore: new books are just too expensive, and the plethora of choices overwhelms my decision-making faculties anyhow. I read outdated history--all in English--and even that task overtakes me. There's just too much out there. But looking at recent titles is even more intimidating. There are so many wonderful Russian history books being released each year, plus some classics that get re-translated or just re-published.

When I visit the Russian history collection at the Seminary bookstore, I feel very clandestine. All I really want to do is take a furtive photo of a few key shelves so I can remember what should go on my Christmas list next year. Feeling like a spy, I struggle to try to memorize everything before I leave the building but, sadly, I remember very little moments later. I do recall an entire row of Sheila Fitzpatrick books, Walter Benjamin's Moscow Diary, a relatively new Boym book called the Future of Nostalgia, books by gulag survivors, academic treatises on Soviet memoirs, Blum's book on Russian serfs and peasants, books on Soviet women, something on post-Soviet consumer fantasies, something else on the once-forbidden landscape of the Soviet Union, stuff on Herzen and Trotsky, a collection of Isaiah Berlin essays on the Soviet experiment, etc.

Somebody give me a cool thousand dollars and I'll carry that whole damned section of shiny new hard cover Soviet masterpieces up the cold, dank Seminary Coop steps to freedom.

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.