Soviet Roulette is on a kind of hiatus. After a few years of obsessive reading, the principal author hit a wall and needs a few months to recover his passion for the Soviet past. If I had regular readers, I'd apologize to them. I am not sure why I've run out of energy these past couple of months, but it happened to me once or twice in the past. Once, living in Scottsdale, Arizona, one of my classes was abruptly cancelled and I found myself unable to read anything. A state of extreme boredom set in. I went to the library and tried to pick up something completely different, a biography of one of my favorite musicians, Yoko Ono. Not even that did the trick. I turned to cooking and started making about three new dishes per day, something I've never done before or since. The crisis reminds me of something that happened to Leo Tolstoy, a man who knew how to exploit anybody and everything to make great literature. Only this time, when Tolstoy hit the wall, he turned from fiction to nonfiction, and began to produce a great number of tendentiousness tracts about ethical living and non-religious Christianity, if ever there was such a thing.
Although I am reading next to nothing these days, I did manage to complete the short memoirs of Tolstoy's oldest daughter a few weeks ago. Her tender, well-balanced description of Tolstoy's family life makes him out to be a reasonably good family man, despite the fact that his marriage eventually collapsed into a state of jealous anguish. The author is kind about both parents, which seems fair, although one could just as easily blame both parents for the discord that led Tolstoy to flee the house at the end of his fruitful life.
At any rate, I'm in a blogger's funk at the moment, and can't make up my mind on a proper response. My older brother says he's determined to spend less time on reading in the future. I'm sure his three children leave him little choice. When I asked him if he meant to turn from reading toward physical activity or travel, he replied with characteristic honesty: "No," he said, "I think I'll just try to watch more T.V." Perhaps my brother's attitude is what lies behind the ancient Hindu custom of dividing life up into distinct phases. In one phase, you work, in another you study, in another, you seek God, in another, you blog, or something like that. I do wonder whether I should divorce myself from all reading for a period of time in order to focus on producing some sustained and creative piece of writing related to the Soviet Revolution. We'll see about that. In the meantime, I'll just put this blog on hiatus, trying to check in from time to time.
Monday, April 16, 2012
Sunday, March 4, 2012
"The Situation Was Under Control"
One of the reasons the Russian radical revolutionaries, and even liberals, acted with such reckless abandon against the regime was their conviction that they could do so with impunity because it was virtually indestructible." Richard Pipes.
"Only intellectuals have universal grievances: only they believe that nothing will change unless everything changes."
"Students of revolutions have observed that, as a rule, the grievances of the people look backward rather than forward."
"It is a mistake to attribute the February Revolution to fatigue with the war. The contrary is true. Russians wanted to pursue the war more effectively..."
"Another advantage of Lenin's derived from the fact that he did not care about Russia."
I used to teach writing and adult learning theory in an adult degree completion program. We followed a specific formula outlined by an educational theorist named David Kolb. Kolb proposed that learning takes place in a continuous loop that can broken down into four discrete phases: in the first phase of the learning circle, we think about some subject in concrete terms; in the second phase, we reflect on the subject; in the third phase, we try to generalize about the subject, or place it into some sort of abstract or theoretical framework; in the fourth and final phase, we test out our newly acquired knowledge, especially in new and unexplored contexts.
In order to "learn about learning," we asked students to write a paper on some learning event they had experienced earlier in their lives. For instance, a student might write about getting fired ten years previously. They would describe the event, analyze it, research it, and then propose some way to test out some general principle of employment in their lives. The Kolb model made a lot of sense, although most students couldn't seem to identify too many areas of their lives in which real learning had taken place, at least by the rather rigorous standards of David Kolb. In the end, a large portion of my students wrote about the death of a loved one.
Theoretically, one can learn from death, but in reality, most of these students were reduced to dry recitals of the "stages of grief" literature. For me, the irony was that many students also discovered that psychologists didn't even agree that being deliberate and self-conscious about the grieving process actually accelerated the so-called "healing process." In other words, we were allegedly teaching students how the learning cycle operates, but in the process we came face to face with the fact that learning was frequently absent from our lives. As a teacher, I also wondered about how I would write one of the papers I routinely assigned. When and where in my life had I learned something important? It was hard to isolate the moments in which real learning had taken place, or could take place even now, when analyzed retrospectively.
Even now, I wonder when and how I actually learn. For whenever I do come up with a true life lesson--like not dating long distance--I am often confronted with the need to do exactly that thing which I had foresworn after so much reflection. The truth is that life is messy and unpredictable and perhaps unknowable. After years of college teaching, I became an administrator and came up against the administrative equivalent of the limitations on learning. In higher education, there is a cult of assessment, and assessment is something akin to personal learning. According to every conceivable authority on institutions of higher learning, colleges and universities should spend vast amount of resources on their institutional learning cycles. It's not enough to improve one's teaching and learning processes: one must document that learning, and implement the learned lessons in new contexts.
Of course, there is an irony here too. Notwithstanding the myriad examples of solid assessment that flood educational journals and conferences, nobody seems to be able to prove that assessment in general, assessment as a general theoretical model, has actually improved those institutions who implement it, or try to. That is to say, we can assess whether one approach to mathematics is succeeding better than another one, but we don't really know whether those who practice assessment are making their institution more effective overall. Intuitively, we might think that an institution that knows which practices work best is by definition going to out-compete the institution which fails to analyze the difference between various practices. But this isn't quite the case. For does the assessing institution really analyze the full opportunity costs of its own culture of evidence? Does it know whether spending money on assessment is more useful than spending that money elsewhere?
The analogy might be the Japanese economic model of the 1980s, before the bubble burst. While the U.S. engaged in a great deal of research and development, the Japanese saved their money and merely copied the American innovations. Which strategy was more effective? While it's true that research and development is a useful enterprise, it's not necessarily true that everybody should be doing it. The problem resembles a similar problem with strategic planning. Although institutions of higher learning are almost always committed to strategic planning, who has ever been able to prove that strategic planning makes universities more likely to prosper or, more modestly, that the cost of strategic planning is justified by the results of strategic planning?
In some ways, these are epistemological problems. Isn't it difficult to know anything with any real certainty? A friend used to joke about this. When you'd ask her whether she thought the X or Y would happen, she'd reply: as I am not even sure I exist in the present, how can I be sure what the future will look like? A student of history, I sometimes wonder whether history isn't one large-scale effort to elide uncertainty about the limits of our self-knowledge. In some kind of social science equivalent of the Heisenberg principle, in which the physical phenomenon is changed by the very act of perceiving it, we tell stories about how we came to be, but have no way to verify those stories, and often seem to get farther from the truth the more we study the sources. In other words, our theories get more elaborately sophisticated as time goes on. And, just as the assessment gurus might end up with more accurate representations of reality of they rested on their "gut" instincts, one wonders if ignorance has its advantages when coming to terms with a complex past. At any rate, I think Richard Pipes' short book of essays, Three "Whys of the Russian Revolution," is Pipes own attempt to go back to the basics with respect to the Revolution.
Although the conservative Pipes is one of the best scholars of the Russian Revolution, he seems to be arguing that the early critics of the Revolution knew more than more modern ones did. As the émigré historians of the 1920s knew, the Russian Revolution wasn't inevitable; Lenin and the Bolsheviks won and maintained power as a result of their commitment to ruthless intrigue and brutal governance; and Stalin was the logical success of his mentor, Lenin, whose policies, aside from the fact that he executed countless Party members, he merely implemented.
In the first instance, Pipes reminds us that the Russian Revolution wasn't pre-ordained. While the Russian Empire was admittedly fragile, not even Lenin predicted its demise. The Tsar had weathered the 1905 Revolution had might have survived 1917 as well had he been interested in power more than he was interested in defeating Germany and defending his Western allies. Here I am reminded of a story I heard from a friend. She had a friend whose husband was always getting into trouble, and yet still she trusted him to take care of her. After a string of similar incidents, the husband got into some trouble with the law. The husband, being an inveterate rascal, never told his wife about his troubles. And when the judge demanded his presence in court, he finally told his wife that he would be gone that afternoon to attend to a small legal matter, a mere inconvenience. His wife, not really alarmed, asked him when he would return. Nonchalantly, he told her to prepare dinner for him. Parting from her, he told her "everything is under control." That very day the nefarious husband was sent away to do a five year prison term. In Russia too, everything appeared to be "under control." As Pipes writes, "If you read the Russian or foreign press before 1917, or memoirs of the time, you find that hardly anyone expected the downfall of the tsarism either. On the contrary, people believed that tsarism would survive for a long time to come." Truly, everything seemed to be fine before World War I, and even after several disastrous seasons of war, the monarchy did not appear to be on its last legs.
Of course, Pipes' argument isn't completely convincing, for even if the Tsar hadn't been a patriot, he couldn't very well have made peace with Russia's mortal enemy without sacrificing whatever remained of the Russian people's respect for him. Even so, Pipes is right to contradict Marx about the inevitability of revolution. On some level, nothing in life can be predicted. Just as nobody predicted the collapse of the USSR, nobody predicted its founding moment. Obviously, the Russian Empire has its weaknesses: it had no business fighting a major European war when it had only barely survived a much smaller conflict with Japan. Yet liberals or even more moderate socialists might have been Nicholas II's successors.
What's striking about Pipes account of the Bolshevik takeover is that he refuses to acknowledge that it constituted a true revolution at all. This is a relatively unique point of view, but one that even Trotsky supports in a roundabout way, for Trotsky once wrote that not more twenty or thirty thousand Bolsheviks in a nation of 150 million had anything to do with the Bolshevik seizure of power. If this be so, Pipes says that we can consider October a coup d'etat. In fact, the Bolsheviks took power bloodlessly, and under the premise that they were only doing so on behalf of the Petrograd Soviet, where in truth they represented only a minority position. Moreover, the Bolsheviks said they would rule only until a Constituent Assembly was called, although Lenin never had any intention of honoring any true democratic expression of the people's will.
Of course, if we attempt to de-certify the Russian Revolution we would be hard pressed to call any other revolution a true revolution either. It's rare enough to see any government overturned by anything remotely related to popular protest, but to see a truly mass uprising that isn't connected to military intrigue or ethnic strife is truly remarkable.
"Only intellectuals have universal grievances: only they believe that nothing will change unless everything changes."
"Students of revolutions have observed that, as a rule, the grievances of the people look backward rather than forward."
"It is a mistake to attribute the February Revolution to fatigue with the war. The contrary is true. Russians wanted to pursue the war more effectively..."
"Another advantage of Lenin's derived from the fact that he did not care about Russia."
I used to teach writing and adult learning theory in an adult degree completion program. We followed a specific formula outlined by an educational theorist named David Kolb. Kolb proposed that learning takes place in a continuous loop that can broken down into four discrete phases: in the first phase of the learning circle, we think about some subject in concrete terms; in the second phase, we reflect on the subject; in the third phase, we try to generalize about the subject, or place it into some sort of abstract or theoretical framework; in the fourth and final phase, we test out our newly acquired knowledge, especially in new and unexplored contexts.
In order to "learn about learning," we asked students to write a paper on some learning event they had experienced earlier in their lives. For instance, a student might write about getting fired ten years previously. They would describe the event, analyze it, research it, and then propose some way to test out some general principle of employment in their lives. The Kolb model made a lot of sense, although most students couldn't seem to identify too many areas of their lives in which real learning had taken place, at least by the rather rigorous standards of David Kolb. In the end, a large portion of my students wrote about the death of a loved one.
Theoretically, one can learn from death, but in reality, most of these students were reduced to dry recitals of the "stages of grief" literature. For me, the irony was that many students also discovered that psychologists didn't even agree that being deliberate and self-conscious about the grieving process actually accelerated the so-called "healing process." In other words, we were allegedly teaching students how the learning cycle operates, but in the process we came face to face with the fact that learning was frequently absent from our lives. As a teacher, I also wondered about how I would write one of the papers I routinely assigned. When and where in my life had I learned something important? It was hard to isolate the moments in which real learning had taken place, or could take place even now, when analyzed retrospectively.
Even now, I wonder when and how I actually learn. For whenever I do come up with a true life lesson--like not dating long distance--I am often confronted with the need to do exactly that thing which I had foresworn after so much reflection. The truth is that life is messy and unpredictable and perhaps unknowable. After years of college teaching, I became an administrator and came up against the administrative equivalent of the limitations on learning. In higher education, there is a cult of assessment, and assessment is something akin to personal learning. According to every conceivable authority on institutions of higher learning, colleges and universities should spend vast amount of resources on their institutional learning cycles. It's not enough to improve one's teaching and learning processes: one must document that learning, and implement the learned lessons in new contexts.
Of course, there is an irony here too. Notwithstanding the myriad examples of solid assessment that flood educational journals and conferences, nobody seems to be able to prove that assessment in general, assessment as a general theoretical model, has actually improved those institutions who implement it, or try to. That is to say, we can assess whether one approach to mathematics is succeeding better than another one, but we don't really know whether those who practice assessment are making their institution more effective overall. Intuitively, we might think that an institution that knows which practices work best is by definition going to out-compete the institution which fails to analyze the difference between various practices. But this isn't quite the case. For does the assessing institution really analyze the full opportunity costs of its own culture of evidence? Does it know whether spending money on assessment is more useful than spending that money elsewhere?
The analogy might be the Japanese economic model of the 1980s, before the bubble burst. While the U.S. engaged in a great deal of research and development, the Japanese saved their money and merely copied the American innovations. Which strategy was more effective? While it's true that research and development is a useful enterprise, it's not necessarily true that everybody should be doing it. The problem resembles a similar problem with strategic planning. Although institutions of higher learning are almost always committed to strategic planning, who has ever been able to prove that strategic planning makes universities more likely to prosper or, more modestly, that the cost of strategic planning is justified by the results of strategic planning?
In some ways, these are epistemological problems. Isn't it difficult to know anything with any real certainty? A friend used to joke about this. When you'd ask her whether she thought the X or Y would happen, she'd reply: as I am not even sure I exist in the present, how can I be sure what the future will look like? A student of history, I sometimes wonder whether history isn't one large-scale effort to elide uncertainty about the limits of our self-knowledge. In some kind of social science equivalent of the Heisenberg principle, in which the physical phenomenon is changed by the very act of perceiving it, we tell stories about how we came to be, but have no way to verify those stories, and often seem to get farther from the truth the more we study the sources. In other words, our theories get more elaborately sophisticated as time goes on. And, just as the assessment gurus might end up with more accurate representations of reality of they rested on their "gut" instincts, one wonders if ignorance has its advantages when coming to terms with a complex past. At any rate, I think Richard Pipes' short book of essays, Three "Whys of the Russian Revolution," is Pipes own attempt to go back to the basics with respect to the Revolution.
Although the conservative Pipes is one of the best scholars of the Russian Revolution, he seems to be arguing that the early critics of the Revolution knew more than more modern ones did. As the émigré historians of the 1920s knew, the Russian Revolution wasn't inevitable; Lenin and the Bolsheviks won and maintained power as a result of their commitment to ruthless intrigue and brutal governance; and Stalin was the logical success of his mentor, Lenin, whose policies, aside from the fact that he executed countless Party members, he merely implemented.
In the first instance, Pipes reminds us that the Russian Revolution wasn't pre-ordained. While the Russian Empire was admittedly fragile, not even Lenin predicted its demise. The Tsar had weathered the 1905 Revolution had might have survived 1917 as well had he been interested in power more than he was interested in defeating Germany and defending his Western allies. Here I am reminded of a story I heard from a friend. She had a friend whose husband was always getting into trouble, and yet still she trusted him to take care of her. After a string of similar incidents, the husband got into some trouble with the law. The husband, being an inveterate rascal, never told his wife about his troubles. And when the judge demanded his presence in court, he finally told his wife that he would be gone that afternoon to attend to a small legal matter, a mere inconvenience. His wife, not really alarmed, asked him when he would return. Nonchalantly, he told her to prepare dinner for him. Parting from her, he told her "everything is under control." That very day the nefarious husband was sent away to do a five year prison term. In Russia too, everything appeared to be "under control." As Pipes writes, "If you read the Russian or foreign press before 1917, or memoirs of the time, you find that hardly anyone expected the downfall of the tsarism either. On the contrary, people believed that tsarism would survive for a long time to come." Truly, everything seemed to be fine before World War I, and even after several disastrous seasons of war, the monarchy did not appear to be on its last legs.
Of course, Pipes' argument isn't completely convincing, for even if the Tsar hadn't been a patriot, he couldn't very well have made peace with Russia's mortal enemy without sacrificing whatever remained of the Russian people's respect for him. Even so, Pipes is right to contradict Marx about the inevitability of revolution. On some level, nothing in life can be predicted. Just as nobody predicted the collapse of the USSR, nobody predicted its founding moment. Obviously, the Russian Empire has its weaknesses: it had no business fighting a major European war when it had only barely survived a much smaller conflict with Japan. Yet liberals or even more moderate socialists might have been Nicholas II's successors.
What's striking about Pipes account of the Bolshevik takeover is that he refuses to acknowledge that it constituted a true revolution at all. This is a relatively unique point of view, but one that even Trotsky supports in a roundabout way, for Trotsky once wrote that not more twenty or thirty thousand Bolsheviks in a nation of 150 million had anything to do with the Bolshevik seizure of power. If this be so, Pipes says that we can consider October a coup d'etat. In fact, the Bolsheviks took power bloodlessly, and under the premise that they were only doing so on behalf of the Petrograd Soviet, where in truth they represented only a minority position. Moreover, the Bolsheviks said they would rule only until a Constituent Assembly was called, although Lenin never had any intention of honoring any true democratic expression of the people's will.
Of course, if we attempt to de-certify the Russian Revolution we would be hard pressed to call any other revolution a true revolution either. It's rare enough to see any government overturned by anything remotely related to popular protest, but to see a truly mass uprising that isn't connected to military intrigue or ethnic strife is truly remarkable.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Victor Serge and the Television Show Hoarders
"Parfenov, you are right to believe in the future. It is the new God, the reincarnation of the oldest divinities, which makes the present bearable."
"So many harsh, terrible tasks must be done."
Like many Americans I am fascinated with the television show, Hoarders. In the show, a psychologist and a team of waste disposal experts confront people with severe psychological disorders. The moment of crisis is often precipitated by a government order related to the condemnation of a property or the threat of removal of minors from unsafe circumstances. Although a great many Americans find it difficult to throw things out, these hoarders are particularly hard cases: their homes are repositories of accumulated trash, junk, rotten food, and hazardous waste. The show is a train wreck of unimaginable filth and physical chaos, but my fascination doesn't really stem from the outlandish nature of the hoarders' obscene living conditions. After all, we all externalize sources of mental stress. Who hasn't found it difficult to part with useless objects that trigger some sort of hidden memory or a general feeling of loss or even mortality? The logic is this: If I throw something out, am I acknowledging my own transitory status on planet Earth?
Although I don't hoard, I do sympathize with hoarders. They don't want to let go. Although hoarders can't stave off death, they can hold on to an enormous amount of physical evidence that attests to the fact that they have lived. I know what it's like to try to hold on to that which is ultimately fleeting. This blog is about Soviet history. But I analyze Soviet history in the light of my own personal history. And, although I apologize for the perpetuation of a tiresome cliche, that personal history is almost all about my mother. When she was sick with cancer, I believe I would have done anything to keep her in this world. Somehow I didn't fully grasp that death and dying were a normal part of life. To this day, I think about how I sometimes behave as absurdly as the hoarder who thinks that by saving enough obsolete objects on the front lawn he or she can somehow trick time or hide from death.
The logic of revolution flies in the face of the logic of hoarding. While men and women often search for order and stability, even when confronted with social and technological change, they seldom throw up their hands and rush headlong into social turbulence and political upheaval. This is what is so extraordinary about the revolutionary moment. It's a unique and almost by definition heroic societal act of bravery. Victor Serge's novel, Conquered City, captures the essence of revolutionary freedom. Serge's novel is critical of revolutionary excesses: in revolution, people starve, lose their property, and get murdered. Yet Serge's description of revolution, or at least the vertiginous moment following the fall of the ancien regime, shows why not even starvation, disorder, and brutal violence, can entirely discredit the work of revolutionaries.
In the end revolution is elemental. When people finally look up from their dreary, routine lives, and throw out everything they have ever known, they are almost above judgement. The revolutionary act is somehow always a noble one. Although nobody--least of all Victor Serge--would doubt that the material conditions of Russia following October 1917 dramatically worsened, neither can they doubt that the people had entered a new and dramatic period of freedom. What happens when people embrace freedom? The old neuroses are rendered obsolete overnight. No doubt they will be replaced by new ones. But for the moment, men and women are capable of envisioning new and different possibilities for themselves. This is why revolutions are largely about dialogue. When the king is murdered, his erstwhile subjects all become kings--if only for a few days or months. And kings--no matter how many of them there are--all have to be heard. Thus the streets are filled with conversations, quarrels, monologues, speeches, debates, and every possible form of discourse imaginable. Things do settle down, disappointments set in--but for a brief window of time people choose freedom over certainty. They throw things out.
The relief of these rare moments in history must be overwhelming, akin, perhaps, to the moment in Hoarders when the previously ill individual sees that the waste disposal team have cleaned her house, leaving clean floors and empty spaces where once there was only clutter and garbage. The garbage will come back. Societies will again seek order, and often at a tremendous human cost. The hoarder, and the hoarding society, remain. But this cleansing moment, or the possibility of future cleansing moments, is one of the best parts of the human condition. We may not be capable of living freely for long periods of time, but we are capable of dreaming of freedom and even of grasping that freedom, if only for a time.
Below are a few quotes taken from Serge's masterful novel. When read together, they seem to show that Serge believed that the promise and terror of revolution are inextricably linked together.
"Plow up the old earth, tear down the old structure. Recreate life anew. And in all likelihood perish yourself."
"You can't see the Revolution is a flame, and the flame will burn us..."
"...with revolting words on her lips and criminal theories under her high forehead."
"You love things too much and men too little." "You love men too much, men and things, and Man too little."
"I'm serving my country. A government, even one composed of madmen and bandits, nonetheless represents the country; and the people who live under it only get what they deserve."
"How sad life is without flying carpets!"
"what an enthusiast! Lytaev smiled in the darkness at the myths that drive men throughout history."
"No commodity is more common and more depreciated than man. Is even worth the weight of his flesh?"
"Man. The thinking reed! They taught him to stop thinking years ago. Today they dry him out, soften him up, and weave baskets out of him for every use, my friend, including the least appetizing. Pascal didn't think of that."
"Well, I'll be glad to lose my soul. Who cares? It would be a strange luxury to worry about it today."
"Simple truths, sure, hard as granite, formulated with algebraic clarity; that is what we need."
"Revolution is a job that must be done without weakness. We are but the instruments of a necessity which carries us along , drags us forward, lifts us up, and which will doubtless pass over our dead bodies."
"So many harsh, terrible tasks must be done."
Like many Americans I am fascinated with the television show, Hoarders. In the show, a psychologist and a team of waste disposal experts confront people with severe psychological disorders. The moment of crisis is often precipitated by a government order related to the condemnation of a property or the threat of removal of minors from unsafe circumstances. Although a great many Americans find it difficult to throw things out, these hoarders are particularly hard cases: their homes are repositories of accumulated trash, junk, rotten food, and hazardous waste. The show is a train wreck of unimaginable filth and physical chaos, but my fascination doesn't really stem from the outlandish nature of the hoarders' obscene living conditions. After all, we all externalize sources of mental stress. Who hasn't found it difficult to part with useless objects that trigger some sort of hidden memory or a general feeling of loss or even mortality? The logic is this: If I throw something out, am I acknowledging my own transitory status on planet Earth?
Although I don't hoard, I do sympathize with hoarders. They don't want to let go. Although hoarders can't stave off death, they can hold on to an enormous amount of physical evidence that attests to the fact that they have lived. I know what it's like to try to hold on to that which is ultimately fleeting. This blog is about Soviet history. But I analyze Soviet history in the light of my own personal history. And, although I apologize for the perpetuation of a tiresome cliche, that personal history is almost all about my mother. When she was sick with cancer, I believe I would have done anything to keep her in this world. Somehow I didn't fully grasp that death and dying were a normal part of life. To this day, I think about how I sometimes behave as absurdly as the hoarder who thinks that by saving enough obsolete objects on the front lawn he or she can somehow trick time or hide from death.
The logic of revolution flies in the face of the logic of hoarding. While men and women often search for order and stability, even when confronted with social and technological change, they seldom throw up their hands and rush headlong into social turbulence and political upheaval. This is what is so extraordinary about the revolutionary moment. It's a unique and almost by definition heroic societal act of bravery. Victor Serge's novel, Conquered City, captures the essence of revolutionary freedom. Serge's novel is critical of revolutionary excesses: in revolution, people starve, lose their property, and get murdered. Yet Serge's description of revolution, or at least the vertiginous moment following the fall of the ancien regime, shows why not even starvation, disorder, and brutal violence, can entirely discredit the work of revolutionaries.
In the end revolution is elemental. When people finally look up from their dreary, routine lives, and throw out everything they have ever known, they are almost above judgement. The revolutionary act is somehow always a noble one. Although nobody--least of all Victor Serge--would doubt that the material conditions of Russia following October 1917 dramatically worsened, neither can they doubt that the people had entered a new and dramatic period of freedom. What happens when people embrace freedom? The old neuroses are rendered obsolete overnight. No doubt they will be replaced by new ones. But for the moment, men and women are capable of envisioning new and different possibilities for themselves. This is why revolutions are largely about dialogue. When the king is murdered, his erstwhile subjects all become kings--if only for a few days or months. And kings--no matter how many of them there are--all have to be heard. Thus the streets are filled with conversations, quarrels, monologues, speeches, debates, and every possible form of discourse imaginable. Things do settle down, disappointments set in--but for a brief window of time people choose freedom over certainty. They throw things out.
The relief of these rare moments in history must be overwhelming, akin, perhaps, to the moment in Hoarders when the previously ill individual sees that the waste disposal team have cleaned her house, leaving clean floors and empty spaces where once there was only clutter and garbage. The garbage will come back. Societies will again seek order, and often at a tremendous human cost. The hoarder, and the hoarding society, remain. But this cleansing moment, or the possibility of future cleansing moments, is one of the best parts of the human condition. We may not be capable of living freely for long periods of time, but we are capable of dreaming of freedom and even of grasping that freedom, if only for a time.
Below are a few quotes taken from Serge's masterful novel. When read together, they seem to show that Serge believed that the promise and terror of revolution are inextricably linked together.
"Plow up the old earth, tear down the old structure. Recreate life anew. And in all likelihood perish yourself."
"You can't see the Revolution is a flame, and the flame will burn us..."
"...with revolting words on her lips and criminal theories under her high forehead."
"You love things too much and men too little." "You love men too much, men and things, and Man too little."
"I'm serving my country. A government, even one composed of madmen and bandits, nonetheless represents the country; and the people who live under it only get what they deserve."
"How sad life is without flying carpets!"
"what an enthusiast! Lytaev smiled in the darkness at the myths that drive men throughout history."
"No commodity is more common and more depreciated than man. Is even worth the weight of his flesh?"
"Man. The thinking reed! They taught him to stop thinking years ago. Today they dry him out, soften him up, and weave baskets out of him for every use, my friend, including the least appetizing. Pascal didn't think of that."
"Well, I'll be glad to lose my soul. Who cares? It would be a strange luxury to worry about it today."
"Simple truths, sure, hard as granite, formulated with algebraic clarity; that is what we need."
"Revolution is a job that must be done without weakness. We are but the instruments of a necessity which carries us along , drags us forward, lifts us up, and which will doubtless pass over our dead bodies."
The Miserable Golovlyovs
In my last post, I briefly speculated about the nature of a Russian novel. The Russian novel is, quite clearly, the best variety of novel. There will never be anything as good as War and Peace or Crime and Punishment in any other language. In fact, one can confidently begin any classic Russian novel secure in the knowledge that one is unlikely to meet up with dull, naive, or optimistic romanticism.
Take Mikhail Saltykov's (aka Schedrin) The Golovlyov Family. As previously stated, most Russian novels are rooted in guilt. This is true of the Saltykov's masterpiece, which seems to be composed of equal parts of satire and tragedy. For the Golovlyov family saga takes place in the context of serfdom. The family's wealth is grounded in serf labor. In some slave societies, the existence of unfree labor is rationalized by the presence of an allegedly productive or useful aristocratic class. We see the mythology in refracted form even today. If America has radical inequality, we should at least acknowledge that billionaires are our best citizens. The nation's greatness is contingent on the energy, innovation, and entrepreneurialism of its leading businessmen.
Using a similar argument, in nineteenth century, the Russian landowning class was often seen as its saviors: if the laboring masses were ignorant and uneducated, its aristocrats were moral, aesthetic, and political leaders. But the Golovlyov's were anything but saviors. They were not involved in the economic life of the countryside, except insofar as family's matron, Arina Petrovna, consolidated property and then skimmed as much wealth from her properties as possible, and had almost no moral or cultural ambitions.
Although wealthy, the Golovlyovs' lives were as brutal and narrow as that of the oppressed workers they so completely ignored. Before or after the legal emancipation of the serfs, the Golovlyovs lived privileged lives of absolutely no utility to anybody but themselves. In fact, Saltykov's vision of rural, landowning life is an example of reductio ad absurdum. For the Golovlyov's take as little interest in one another as they do in their servants or field workers. Their lack of concern with one another is by turns comical and tragic.
And Arina's son and successor, Porphyry, is the embodiment of a shallow, purposeless, miserly, and soulless existence. He's religious, but only in a hypocritical way. For Porphyry, God created the world in all its patent unfairness, so it's practically blasphemous to question his own good fortune. If God had wanted others to be happy, He would have arranged life differently. Porphyry's pathetic, amoral life is made worse by the fact that he constantly lectures those around him. With nothing to say, his endless prattle is pure torture to his unhappy family. One son commits suicide; another winds up in a Siberian prison; two nieces lives a life of alcoholism, lewd acting, and quasi-prostitution; his brother and mother die hating him.
Ironically, the one thing Porphyry never feels is guilt. It's the absence of guilt that comes as the biggest shock to the reader. In this tale of "unmitigated tragedy," the author has created a set of characters who should by all rights feel nothing but guilt for squandering riches and privileges in the service of absolutely nothing, and yet none of them--and least of all the "bloodsucker" Porphyry--feel anything of the sort. This--the absence of guilt in a situation crying out for atonement--is then Salykov's greatest indictment of Russian life.
Take Mikhail Saltykov's (aka Schedrin) The Golovlyov Family. As previously stated, most Russian novels are rooted in guilt. This is true of the Saltykov's masterpiece, which seems to be composed of equal parts of satire and tragedy. For the Golovlyov family saga takes place in the context of serfdom. The family's wealth is grounded in serf labor. In some slave societies, the existence of unfree labor is rationalized by the presence of an allegedly productive or useful aristocratic class. We see the mythology in refracted form even today. If America has radical inequality, we should at least acknowledge that billionaires are our best citizens. The nation's greatness is contingent on the energy, innovation, and entrepreneurialism of its leading businessmen.
Using a similar argument, in nineteenth century, the Russian landowning class was often seen as its saviors: if the laboring masses were ignorant and uneducated, its aristocrats were moral, aesthetic, and political leaders. But the Golovlyov's were anything but saviors. They were not involved in the economic life of the countryside, except insofar as family's matron, Arina Petrovna, consolidated property and then skimmed as much wealth from her properties as possible, and had almost no moral or cultural ambitions.
Although wealthy, the Golovlyovs' lives were as brutal and narrow as that of the oppressed workers they so completely ignored. Before or after the legal emancipation of the serfs, the Golovlyovs lived privileged lives of absolutely no utility to anybody but themselves. In fact, Saltykov's vision of rural, landowning life is an example of reductio ad absurdum. For the Golovlyov's take as little interest in one another as they do in their servants or field workers. Their lack of concern with one another is by turns comical and tragic.
And Arina's son and successor, Porphyry, is the embodiment of a shallow, purposeless, miserly, and soulless existence. He's religious, but only in a hypocritical way. For Porphyry, God created the world in all its patent unfairness, so it's practically blasphemous to question his own good fortune. If God had wanted others to be happy, He would have arranged life differently. Porphyry's pathetic, amoral life is made worse by the fact that he constantly lectures those around him. With nothing to say, his endless prattle is pure torture to his unhappy family. One son commits suicide; another winds up in a Siberian prison; two nieces lives a life of alcoholism, lewd acting, and quasi-prostitution; his brother and mother die hating him.
Ironically, the one thing Porphyry never feels is guilt. It's the absence of guilt that comes as the biggest shock to the reader. In this tale of "unmitigated tragedy," the author has created a set of characters who should by all rights feel nothing but guilt for squandering riches and privileges in the service of absolutely nothing, and yet none of them--and least of all the "bloodsucker" Porphyry--feel anything of the sort. This--the absence of guilt in a situation crying out for atonement--is then Salykov's greatest indictment of Russian life.
Guilt and the Russian Novel
One of the minor tragedies of recent years is the collapse of the Borders bookstore franchise. Where can one sit and work now? Obviously, Borders' business model of selling people a cup of coffee in return for a quiet place to read and write didn't work out. People stayed too long, and destroyed too many magazines without buying them, for anybody to turn a profit. The fact that Borders sold untold amount of random, plastic crap (toys, cheap sunglasses, rulers, etc.) apparently didn't remove the fundamental flaw in Border's business model. Yet there are always opportunities in the midst of tragedy. And so I scavenged among the shelves of more than one store looking for Russian-themed memoirs and novels offered at a seventy-percent discount.
Now, when I read one of these bargains, I feel a sense of guilt. How could I kick Borders when it was down after all of those days I've spent there without buying much of anything? Nothing new there. I feel guilt about everything, primordial guilt. I feel guilt for things I've done, for things I haven't done, for things I've thought about doing, and for things I believe I may do one day. My guilt level seems inordinately high, but I always feel that someday I will do something really terrible and all of the guilt I've felt over these past decades will make sense, all at once, at a snap.
At any rate, one has to hope one will do something terrible or otherwise all of this guilt will seem senseless. I know there are those who believe in previous lives. I'm reminded of the Rodgers and Hammerstein song from the Sound of Music: "Somewhere in my youth or childhood I must have done something good." Perhaps seemingly unwarranted guilt flows from something bad one has done in a previous life. Where did all my guilt come from? Have I suppressed a memory of a salacious criminal life? (I'm watching the First 48 as I write this, so the criminal life is on my mind. And it's interesting, even hardened murderers on the show often display enormous, enfantilizing amounts of guilt notwithstanding their bloody actions--it's as if a guilty ten year old resides inside us all, no matter how brutal and inhuman and experienced the murderer.)
But in my own life, the most guilty action I remember is not helping my mother as she got sick from cancer. Of course, I don't feel objectively guilty about not helping my mother. What can anybody do--but especially a very young teen--in the face of cancer? But they say that kids often feel guilty for emotional events they can't understand or control. Like a newborn baby who doesn't know where his own body begins and ends, a kid may well believe he is responsible for the suffering of others.
I have a couple of isolated memories of guilt related to my mother's illness, though who can tell if I've invented the memory to create a rational explanation for my present day guilt? I remember playing with a friend on a summer afternoon, having fun, staying so late that the sun began to set. And I remember thinking: I should be at home, where my mother is. What if she needs me? What if she's lonely without me? That's all I remember, but it seems logical to assume that I might have also wondered, more generically, and over the four or five long years of my mother's illness, why it was fair for me to be enjoying free time with my friends while my mother was in the slow (but not agonizing) process of dying?
And I did know she was dying. And actually, I'm amazed to remember how guilt is linked even to my first memory of cancer. When my mother came to tell me she had cancer, she told me that the doctors said she would likely have five more years to live. She meant this to be a sanguinary message, but it devastated me. Reacting to my shocked expression, my mother asked me if I wanted to go with her to see the doctor that day for an early treatment. I felt that she wanted me to comfort her, but I said no (probably feeling this trip to the doctor's would make the cancer seem closer, realer) and went to school. At school I felt terrible--guilty--as I still do today when I remember my decision. I suppose cancer and guilt are natural acquaintances.
I also remember being on a trip to Europe, my mother's last treat to herself before she was no longer able to travel or experience life. On the trip, my brothers and I did what we always did, and fought with one another in the backseat of the car. My mother asked my dad to pull over and we did. She sat on a tree branch and cried, telling us that we were ruining her special trip to Europe. I felt terrible, as I still do today, knowing that this really was her last hurrah.
How does all this guilt relate to Russian history? I cannot say. I digressed. I began this blog post intending to comment on the brilliantly titled memoir, My Life as a Russian Novel, by the Frenchman, Emmannuelle Carrerre, which I guiltily discovered at Borders fire sale. The book is Carrerre's attempt to analyze his own crippled love life in the context of a Russian expedition and a Georgian-Russian ethnic and cultural heritage. The book is well-written and honest, but amazingly egotistical and therefore uninteresting: after all, how rare are egotists in one's everyday life?
Disliking the book, I remain impressed with its title. Clearly, Carrerre's life isn't a Russian novel. The life is not intellectual, philosophical, political, or, most importantly, guilt-ridden. It's dark--it opens with the author tracking a Hungarian soldier who stopped speaking and lived anonymously in a Russian mental ward for five decades, and it ends with a double murder and suicide (of the author's documentary film subject and her young son, and the author's cousin, respectively), but it's not really about guilt.
The true Life as Russian Novel is all about guilt. Members of the Russian intelligentsia were obsessed with guilt. They understood that their privileged lives, and the very structure of their state and society, was founded on inequality, oppression, serfdom, the legacy of unfree labor, or indeed on what Marx and his followers would come to call "wage slavery." They dreamed of expiation and redemption, both political and personal. Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, the ultimate Russian novel, is all about a Russian intellectual's attempt to overcome the very condition of guilt by killing an old woman and learning to live without guilt in the wake of this brutal crime. The novel's Christian ending of forgiveness and absolution is nothing like Carrere's decidedly unphilosophical look at love, insecurity, and jealousy. But so too are almost all other Russian novels. One wonders how damaging guilt can be. Would Lenin have been possible if the nation hadn't read so many guilt-infused novels?
Now, when I read one of these bargains, I feel a sense of guilt. How could I kick Borders when it was down after all of those days I've spent there without buying much of anything? Nothing new there. I feel guilt about everything, primordial guilt. I feel guilt for things I've done, for things I haven't done, for things I've thought about doing, and for things I believe I may do one day. My guilt level seems inordinately high, but I always feel that someday I will do something really terrible and all of the guilt I've felt over these past decades will make sense, all at once, at a snap.
At any rate, one has to hope one will do something terrible or otherwise all of this guilt will seem senseless. I know there are those who believe in previous lives. I'm reminded of the Rodgers and Hammerstein song from the Sound of Music: "Somewhere in my youth or childhood I must have done something good." Perhaps seemingly unwarranted guilt flows from something bad one has done in a previous life. Where did all my guilt come from? Have I suppressed a memory of a salacious criminal life? (I'm watching the First 48 as I write this, so the criminal life is on my mind. And it's interesting, even hardened murderers on the show often display enormous, enfantilizing amounts of guilt notwithstanding their bloody actions--it's as if a guilty ten year old resides inside us all, no matter how brutal and inhuman and experienced the murderer.)
But in my own life, the most guilty action I remember is not helping my mother as she got sick from cancer. Of course, I don't feel objectively guilty about not helping my mother. What can anybody do--but especially a very young teen--in the face of cancer? But they say that kids often feel guilty for emotional events they can't understand or control. Like a newborn baby who doesn't know where his own body begins and ends, a kid may well believe he is responsible for the suffering of others.
I have a couple of isolated memories of guilt related to my mother's illness, though who can tell if I've invented the memory to create a rational explanation for my present day guilt? I remember playing with a friend on a summer afternoon, having fun, staying so late that the sun began to set. And I remember thinking: I should be at home, where my mother is. What if she needs me? What if she's lonely without me? That's all I remember, but it seems logical to assume that I might have also wondered, more generically, and over the four or five long years of my mother's illness, why it was fair for me to be enjoying free time with my friends while my mother was in the slow (but not agonizing) process of dying?
And I did know she was dying. And actually, I'm amazed to remember how guilt is linked even to my first memory of cancer. When my mother came to tell me she had cancer, she told me that the doctors said she would likely have five more years to live. She meant this to be a sanguinary message, but it devastated me. Reacting to my shocked expression, my mother asked me if I wanted to go with her to see the doctor that day for an early treatment. I felt that she wanted me to comfort her, but I said no (probably feeling this trip to the doctor's would make the cancer seem closer, realer) and went to school. At school I felt terrible--guilty--as I still do today when I remember my decision. I suppose cancer and guilt are natural acquaintances.
I also remember being on a trip to Europe, my mother's last treat to herself before she was no longer able to travel or experience life. On the trip, my brothers and I did what we always did, and fought with one another in the backseat of the car. My mother asked my dad to pull over and we did. She sat on a tree branch and cried, telling us that we were ruining her special trip to Europe. I felt terrible, as I still do today, knowing that this really was her last hurrah.
How does all this guilt relate to Russian history? I cannot say. I digressed. I began this blog post intending to comment on the brilliantly titled memoir, My Life as a Russian Novel, by the Frenchman, Emmannuelle Carrerre, which I guiltily discovered at Borders fire sale. The book is Carrerre's attempt to analyze his own crippled love life in the context of a Russian expedition and a Georgian-Russian ethnic and cultural heritage. The book is well-written and honest, but amazingly egotistical and therefore uninteresting: after all, how rare are egotists in one's everyday life?
Disliking the book, I remain impressed with its title. Clearly, Carrerre's life isn't a Russian novel. The life is not intellectual, philosophical, political, or, most importantly, guilt-ridden. It's dark--it opens with the author tracking a Hungarian soldier who stopped speaking and lived anonymously in a Russian mental ward for five decades, and it ends with a double murder and suicide (of the author's documentary film subject and her young son, and the author's cousin, respectively), but it's not really about guilt.
The true Life as Russian Novel is all about guilt. Members of the Russian intelligentsia were obsessed with guilt. They understood that their privileged lives, and the very structure of their state and society, was founded on inequality, oppression, serfdom, the legacy of unfree labor, or indeed on what Marx and his followers would come to call "wage slavery." They dreamed of expiation and redemption, both political and personal. Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, the ultimate Russian novel, is all about a Russian intellectual's attempt to overcome the very condition of guilt by killing an old woman and learning to live without guilt in the wake of this brutal crime. The novel's Christian ending of forgiveness and absolution is nothing like Carrere's decidedly unphilosophical look at love, insecurity, and jealousy. But so too are almost all other Russian novels. One wonders how damaging guilt can be. Would Lenin have been possible if the nation hadn't read so many guilt-infused novels?
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Saints, Rituals, Liturgies, and Heretics
Patrick Rotman's 1999 documentary, Faith of the Century: A History of Communism, is a wonderful testimony to the transnational appeal of the Russian Revolution. As the title suggests, Rotman describes twentieth century communism as a great religious movement, akin to the explosive early moments of the Christian, Islamic, or Mormon religions. Communism had its own saints, rituals, symbols, liturgies, heretics, schismatics, pilgrimages, and dogmas. And like other great religions, its message of freedom transcended all international boundaries by promising hope and salvation. The Bolshevik Revolution, for all its faults, became a beacon of hope to people throughout Europe and the developing world.
The communist faith threatened to overtake Germany, Hungary, and other nations in the interwar era, and yet ultimately the Soviet Union was left alone before World War II to guard Marx's inheritance in the face of capitalist encirclement. Building "socialism in one country," Stalin stunned the world with collectivization, urbanization, and industrialization. To the faithful, he seemed to have overcome some of the basic problems of capitalism, including inequality, exploitation, unemployment, lack of economic planning and coordination, and boom and bust cycles.
The Soviet Union in the 1930s built gigantic projects and promoted itself as a paragon of public hygiene, military strength, worker volunteerism, and public enthusiasm. It also promoted working class people into the upper echelons of society. Its support of the beleaguered Spanish communists proved particularly attractive to left-wing and moderate Western Europeans, who little suspected that Stalin was capable of eliminating anarchist allies and ultimately signing a non-aggression pact with Franco's fascist ally, the Nazi Germany. The chief message of Faith of the Century is that communism was never limited to the Soviet Union. In fact, communism might have triumphed in the heart of what came to be seen as the democratic West, France.
The communist faith threatened to overtake Germany, Hungary, and other nations in the interwar era, and yet ultimately the Soviet Union was left alone before World War II to guard Marx's inheritance in the face of capitalist encirclement. Building "socialism in one country," Stalin stunned the world with collectivization, urbanization, and industrialization. To the faithful, he seemed to have overcome some of the basic problems of capitalism, including inequality, exploitation, unemployment, lack of economic planning and coordination, and boom and bust cycles.
The Soviet Union in the 1930s built gigantic projects and promoted itself as a paragon of public hygiene, military strength, worker volunteerism, and public enthusiasm. It also promoted working class people into the upper echelons of society. Its support of the beleaguered Spanish communists proved particularly attractive to left-wing and moderate Western Europeans, who little suspected that Stalin was capable of eliminating anarchist allies and ultimately signing a non-aggression pact with Franco's fascist ally, the Nazi Germany. The chief message of Faith of the Century is that communism was never limited to the Soviet Union. In fact, communism might have triumphed in the heart of what came to be seen as the democratic West, France.
Chinese Communism
If Soviet Roulette had any readers, I imagine they'd be asking why we don't place the Russian revolutionary experience within the context of global history more frequently. Why, for instance, don't we talk more about 1789 or 1848? Why don't we talk about the impact of 1917 on the developing world? While the Bolsheviks may not have ignited successful revolutions in Western Europe, they did inspire successful imitators in China, Vietnam, Cuba, and countless other newly independent nations. But of course China remains the most significant communist victory. Its size, strength, and longevity make China worthy of comment.
So too does the fact that the Bolsheviks were involved in China's internal struggles before and after China's communist party defeated its Old Regime, Japanese, and nationalist rivals. But how does a non-expert approach the history of China in the twentieth century? I began with UCLA Professor Richard Baum's Great Courses lecture series, The Fall and Rise of China. In these lectures Baum notes Mao's political intelligence, charisma, and military prowess, but Baum emphasizes that Mao led his party into a long series of economic and political disasters. Under Maoism, the Chinese people suffered mightily, although they almost always attributed their suffering to internal or external enemies. While Mao successfully confronted American military might during the Korean War, and eventually established political and economic autonomy from the Soviet Union, his large-scale cooperatives and frenetic efforts to industrialize the country, led to massive starvation in the countryside and many, many engineering and economic disasters.
The Cultural Revolution, when launched, destroyed any semblance of political or economic order in the country, and only Deng's masterful political comeback and his slow reputation of Maoist economic principles (if not Mao himself) eventually set China on the path to relative stability and economic progress that we see today. When viewed in the light of the Soviet Union's experience, one can't help but think that Lenin and Stalin's worst crime was to inspire the Chinese Communist Party. For the Chinese Communists, for all their military courage and prewar respect for the peasantry, killed many millions as they did away with any semblance of democracy, political dissent, or economic decentralization.
So too does the fact that the Bolsheviks were involved in China's internal struggles before and after China's communist party defeated its Old Regime, Japanese, and nationalist rivals. But how does a non-expert approach the history of China in the twentieth century? I began with UCLA Professor Richard Baum's Great Courses lecture series, The Fall and Rise of China. In these lectures Baum notes Mao's political intelligence, charisma, and military prowess, but Baum emphasizes that Mao led his party into a long series of economic and political disasters. Under Maoism, the Chinese people suffered mightily, although they almost always attributed their suffering to internal or external enemies. While Mao successfully confronted American military might during the Korean War, and eventually established political and economic autonomy from the Soviet Union, his large-scale cooperatives and frenetic efforts to industrialize the country, led to massive starvation in the countryside and many, many engineering and economic disasters.
The Cultural Revolution, when launched, destroyed any semblance of political or economic order in the country, and only Deng's masterful political comeback and his slow reputation of Maoist economic principles (if not Mao himself) eventually set China on the path to relative stability and economic progress that we see today. When viewed in the light of the Soviet Union's experience, one can't help but think that Lenin and Stalin's worst crime was to inspire the Chinese Communist Party. For the Chinese Communists, for all their military courage and prewar respect for the peasantry, killed many millions as they did away with any semblance of democracy, political dissent, or economic decentralization.
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