Totalitarian Politics

I thought that I had learned something about historiography during graduate school, and that is that different historical eras necessarily produced different kinds of history.  That is to say, if modern historians were interested in politics, they bore witness to the story of American history through the prism of that obsession. If they were interested in gender, they saw history in the light of that interest.  To some extent, this is true. Certainly, current modern debates about controversial subjects are carried back into the distant past. Recently, however, I've become convinced that a different phenomenon is also at work in historiography. On my recent Fulbright trip to Russia I thought seriously about modern Russia, as opposed to historical Russia, for the very first time.  Whither was Russia tending?  More importantly for the purposes of this blog, I thought about how the current state of Russian politics--and specifically Putin's brand of pseudo-authoritarian intrigue--would influence how historians looked at Russia's history during the twentieth century.

But if the current debate about Putin's statecraft will influence the way historians interpret the past, it's probably fairer to say that the current state of Russian political culture actually reveals something new about that past.  The difference may be a subtle one.  In graduate school, I would have expected the current state of Russian unfreedom to force Russians to look back into time to discover the origins of authoritarianism.  Now, I believe that Russia's current political bankruptcy requires such an exploration of the past.  If Russian remains corrupt, illiberal, economically backward, imperialist, anti-Western, anti-semitic, and xenophobic, we really do need to explain this set of interrelated phenomena.  At any rate, I like what Evgeny Dobrenko's essay, "The Literature of the Zhdanov Era:  Mentality, Mythology, Lexicon" suggests about the origins of modern Russian totalitarianism.  For Dobrenko seems to suggest that trauma of the 1920s and 1930s are buried deep within the fabric of Russian literary culture (and architecture, everywhere else for that matter).  We need only to look at modern Russian literature, and specifically post-war literature, to understand his point.

Dobrenko admits upfront that it's difficult to study postwar literature.  However, Dobrenko also believes this is precisely the point:  postwar literature is stultifying boring, and almost intentionally so.  Works of socialist realism pervaded Soviet culture, encapsulating the logic of totalitarianism with their very blandness and political quiescence. By definition, totalitarian culture is unified.  Moreover, it exists without conflict or any possibility of critique.  Naturally, a totalitarian state espoused totalitarian culture, devoid of any possibility of dissent or controversy.  Dobrenko's useful examination of Socialist Realism in literature can be found in a wonderful collection of essays entitled Late Soviet Culture:  From Perestroika to Novostroika.

Another insightful essay in this collection from Boris Kagarlitsky, "A Step to the Left, a Step to the Right," compliments Dobrenko's theme by reminding us that totalitarian political culture is, by definition, "neither left nor right" (to use Sternhell's phrase).  Historians waste a lot of energy debating the political orientation of totalitarian regimes, but in reality totalitarian regimes must always occupy the center of the political spectrum, or indeed all of the political spectrum.  Stalinism is certainly the perfect exemplar of this aspect of totalitarian politics.  He adopted leftist and rightest postures whenever it suited him. Today, people may well ask whether Putin's politics belong to leftist or rightest political traditions.  But as Kagarlitsky tells us, the question is largely meaningless.  Putinism now occupies, or attempts to occupy, all possible political positions.  Putin is a nationalist as well an Soviet imperialist, a capitalist as well as a socialist, a conservative as well as a reformer. On minute he sends in troops to the Crimea and receives authorization to invade the Ukraine, another he calls for peace in the Ukraine. Putin is Russia's chief anti-corruption campaigner, imprisoning oligarchs who have profitted handsomely from the early 1990s and overseeing a regime that routinely imprisoned businessmen for graft.  Another minute, Putin and his close friends are seen to have amassed unprecedented fortunes.  Simply put, Putin, inheritor of Russia's embrace of totalitarianism, represents all possible positions on this and most other political positions.

Now why such totalitarianism still thrives in the Russian sun is another question altogether.  But as Dobrekno seems to suggest, we need to look to psychoanalysis and the repressed and un-grieved tragedies of early Soviet rule for a plausible answer.  Russia suffered enormously from the purges of the 1930s, to say nothing of the Revolution, Civil War, World War II, and other events.  But almost as bad as the suffering is the fact that Russians never had the chance to talk about those sufferings.  The literature of the postwar era is important.  Its very silence speaks volumes about the extent to which totalitarianism remained alive and well in the Soviet Union even in the aftermath of Stalinism.  Viewed in this light, Socialist Realism is nothing less that the positive expression of an ethos of power.  For Dobreno, the expression of that power can be found in Socialist Realism's celebration of the past and future at the expense of the present.  For catastrophe has no present.  When disaster strikes, you know what happened before the disaster, and you know what happened after the disaster, but the actual event is a dark mystery.  And so, by endlessly praising Soviet citizens who were willing to sacrifice the present to build a better future, the literature of the Soviet Union reflects a form of totalitarian apocalpse.



 

A Case Study Socialist Realism

"Comrade Stalin can't show every man personally to his place in the firing lines."  Thomas Lahusen cites Batamov to Kovshov in Far From Moscow.

"We know that the positive hero of socialist realism exchanges his private life for his duty to the socialist society."

"The most important feature of Soviet censorship:  it forbids silence..." Thomas Luhusen citing Andrei Siniavsky in "Samizdat and the Rebirth of Literature."

"Anzheave felt the profound need to describe in one way or the other what he had been witnessing."  Simonov explaining Azhaev's whitewashed description of prisoner labor.

"We never ceased for one minute to be communists."  Mitia Promyslov in The Boxcar.

As mentioned in a previous post, with Gene Kuperman, Thomas Lahusen is the editor of a wonderful collection of essays entitled Late Soviet Culture:  From Perestroika to Novostroika.  Thomas Luhusen's own contribution to the collection is a short essay entitled "The Mystery of the River Adun:  Reconstruction of a Story."  In this essay, Lahusen traces the editorial evolution and public reception of one of the Soviet Union's most popular works of literature, the socialist realist novel, Far From Moscow.  The book was originally a paean to Stalinism, but in the aftermath of the Thaw Stalin's presence in new editions was toned down while the anti-semitic--or "anti-cosmopolitanism--" themes were diluted.  The deepest mystery of the novel, however, remains:  how could a former inmate of Stalin's gulag hide the real conditions of such labor camps and in fact glorify the labor of fellow prisoners?  Ironically, the answer can be found in the introduction of a fellow apologist, Simonov.  According to Simonov, anybody who lived through such a terrible experience as the labor campus naturally strove to find real meaning in the experience.  While many prisoners produced 'prisoner camp" testimonies that outlined in grim detail their sufferings, others inevitably sought to tell others about their experience in the language of power.  The result was a betrayal of those who died and suffered from the communists' arbitrary and capricious penal system, but not altogether unintelligible.  Could all of this brutality have been in vain?  Certainly something noble would come out of all of the pain.  Lahusen's close reading of the different editions of Far From Moscow offers up an interesting approach to other forms of Soviet culture.  After all, it's not enough to analyze only the Soviet Union's dissident art forms.  Complexity must be identified even in the state's most prized works of art.

Kremlin Wives

Although the role of women at the pinnacle of the Kremlin society isn't the most important aspect of the history of gender during the Soviet experiment, Larissa Vasilieva's book, Kremlin Wives, is a surprisingly illuminating good introduction to the subject of communist women's history. Published only shortly after the collapse of the Soviet state, Vasilieva was able to interview a number of important Kremlin women as well as to attain relevant files related to their frequent brushes with Stalin's security organs.  Vasilieva, who was herself a relatively privileged member of the Soviet apparatchiki, tells the story of Soviet womanhood through the biography of elite Soviet women.  These women include the wives of Lenin, Stalin, Beria, Budyonnaya, Molotov, Khrushchev, and Gorbachev, to name just a few of Vasilieva's fascinating subjects.

For the most part, the Kremlin wives were highly intelligent leaders in their own right.  Certainly Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, as well as Lenin's mistress, Inessa Armand, made important contributions to the revolutionary movement, and Krupskaya in particular helped to shape the Soviet worldview, especially regarding education.  Even so, both women always put Lenin first, and their willingness to take a back seat to Lenin's political primacy was a portent of things to come.  Although revolutionary history is filled with examples of heroic female Russian revolutionaries, male Soviet leaders were never entirely comfortable  Until Raisa Gorbachev proved that the Soviet Union was able to accept another dynamic, educated, and highly visible woman in public affairs  (and many Soviet citizens retained serious reservations about Raisa's public role), Krupskaya was the last wife of the Party's leader who exercised a clear position of leadership in her own right.  

With the rise of Stalin, the role of elite Soviet women became much more conservative.   Whereas many revolutionaries had at least entertained ideas about free love, female emancipation from child reading duties, divorce, and the link between bourgeois family structures and capitalism, the cult of Stalin soon reconciled Soviet political culture to pre-revolutionary gender norms.  While Stalin's own wife (or his second wife to be more accurate), Nadezhda Alliluyeva, worked, and maintained her own professional identity, her suicide ( if not murder) seemed to mark the limits of Stalin's tolerance for independent women.  

Of course the predominent theme of Kremlin Wives is, almost necessarily, a description of how women dealt with all-encompassing terror.  Marshal Budyonny's second third wife is illustrative. While making the Marshall a happy home by playing the role of a traditional domestic housewife, Maria Vasilievna, also had to contend with the fact that the Marshal's second wife, Olga Stefanovna, had been imprisoned on trumped up charges. Molotov's wife, Paulina Zhemchuzhina, was actually imprisoned even as her husband continued to serve Stalin.  Beria's wife, Nina Beria, had to contend with the fact that her husband was systematically raping young women, in addition to overseeing the state's more formal mechanisms of terrorizing its citizens.  Nina seems to have chosen to live in denial, although the Vasilieva is right to point out that it can be very difficult to pass judgement on any of the Kremlin wives when they were fearful of being sent to the gulag or killed of they voiced any criticism of Stalin or his henchmen. 

With Stalin's death, the daily regime of terror soon subsided.  However, it's difficult to say that the effects of terror didn't last until the very end of the Soviet Union, if not beyond.  Nina Kukharchuk, Khrushchev's wife, had survived the terror by remaining in the shadows.  She wasn't a glamorous woman, but she had once served to promote Soviet power in its infancy.  Born poor,  Nina Kukharchuk remained a stalwart communist functionary who accompanied her husband on a few famous diplomatic missions but mostly strove to support her husband in his domestic life.  Her successor, Victoria Pretrovna, also adopted a low profile, accommodating her husband, Leonid Breshnev, even as he moved from one mistress to another. While not necessarily personally corrupt, Victoria Pretrovna supported her relatives even as they abused the privileges of the communist elite.

Taken as a whole, the Kremlin wives were both similar to, and different from, ordinary Soviet women.  The Kremlin wives were, generally speaking, a confident group of women, at least insofar as anyone living so close to the edge of terror could be considered confident.  The Kremlin women were extremely privileged in many respects, and many made use of the special stores, dachas, and governesses that were available to them.  However, their lives were extremely complicated.  The Soviet Union never fully worked out its attitude toward women.  Were they supposed to work outside the home or in the home?  Were nannies okay or a sign of bourgeois privilege?  Was it possible to play a public role in public affairs?  Did women have an important role to play in the formation of policy related to childhood, education, or family life in general?  How much education, and what type of education, was desirable?  The Soviet Union collapsed even as these debates raged around Raisa Gorbachev.

Some quotes from the book:

"If she doesn't shut her mouth the Party will appoint old Elena Stasova as Lenin's widow in her place!"  Vasilieva citing Stalin.

"Intelligent, beautiful, and as delicate-looking as porcelain, Alexandra Kollontai put women's sexuality at the center of the Communist agenda."

"What is rarely mentioned is that the revolutionaries fought a small detachment of palace gaurds and the Petrograd Battalion of Women.  In other words, the Bolsheviks' victory that night was over women."

"The Kremlin, the seat of Soviet power, was also a vast communal apartment complex."

"Even the best parents ruin their children by bringing them up at home."  Lyadov-Mandelstam.

"Can a collective person be produced in an individual family?  To this we must say a categorical no."  Lyadov-Mandelstam.

"No Kremlin wife's opinion was ever officially welcomed.  Those who challenged that fact--such as Molotov's wife, Zhemchuzhina, as we shall see--were promptly arrested."

"We're creating a new state," she wrote.  "People need us.  It would be hypocritical to deny ourselves the things people always acquire when they come to power."

"Larissa Reisner was a tangle of contradictions.  She could turn simple immorality into an exploit. Osip Mandelstam recalled that Larissa once threw a party solely to enable Cheka agents to arrest the guests."

"She cast her lot with him like a tiny sailboat drawn to a giant ocean-going steamer."  Svetlana Alliluyeva describing her mother's relationship to Stalin.

"He went so far as to offer to shoot his wife, an impulse evidently familiar to many Kremlin men in those days."

"This time she found the beaches empty.  All the fashionable women from last season were now in jail."

"As the Soviet system scythed and leveled its human resources, fear was a daily staple and worked its way deep into the Russian character."

"The personal has no social significance."  Kaganovich.

"A large quantity of male debauchery."  From an official inventory of Beria's office.

"Stalin wanted to create a mighty state, and he succeeded.  Of course there had to be victims.  But no politician then could see any other path that would us to our precious goal without victims."  Nina Beria.

"...Kremlin life is part of a complex distribution system of privilege that must always be kept a secret."

History for Revolutionaries

"Suddenly, it would seem, the official genealogy was not transnational but hermetically Russocentric.  As it were, once Lenin was dead, the Stalins came out to play."

"The Bolsheviks, however, tended to understand by the point of origin in "ancient Greece" not Athens but Sparta..."

"Hence the paradoxical situation whereby during a thaw whose ostensible aim is to save the country from stagnation and conservatism the main focus of the intellectuals was on the past."

In 1993, only shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Katerina Clark published a short article entitled "Changing Historical Paradigms in Soviet Culture" in a collection of essays entitled Late Soviet Culture:  From Perestroika to Novostroika.  This short article by one of the Soviet Union's most sophisticated cultural historians provides a nice description of the way revolutionaries chose to see their own recent past.  It's a cliche to say that revolutionaries, by definition, reject the past in favor of the future.  Even so, it's seemingly impossible for men and women to ignore the past altogether.   If one historical episode, or mode of historical thinking, is rejected, another almost automatically fills the void. 

 So what past did the Bolsheviks seek to revive and which historical actors did they choose to honor?  As we know, at first, the Bolsheviks eschewed ancient Greece in favor of Revolutionary France.  Everything had a French historical analogy. Indeed, Clark points out that the Bolsheviks, as opposed to some other strands of Marxism, talked endlessly about French history even as they rejected most Russian historical precedents. In their first years in power, the Bolsheviks rarely cited the peasant or Decembrist revolts that had so inspired the radical intelligentsia of the nineteenth century.  

Of course, Lenin and his ilk weren't entirely free to choose their revolutionary antecedents.  Clark reminds us that early twentieth century Russian intellectuals were already obsessed with the French Revolution, and indeed Marx and Engels had already argued that the French Revolution as well as the Paris Commune were the most important models for future revolts. Interestingly, the Bolsheviks favored the Commune over 1789, in part because the Commune seemed to be a brief experiment with the world's first successful Dictatorship of the Proletariat as well as a trial run for the Bolsheviks' theory of  "dual government" of government by the party as well as the soviets.  

After the death of Lenin, Bolshevik historical precedents underwent a sudden transformation.  Suddenly, Russia rediscovered the Russian past.  "Socialism in one country" apparently made socialist history from one country as well.  At this time, the Bolsheviks rediscovered Russian authors such as Pushkin and Dostoevsky, and revised the Decembrist Revolt of 1825, as well as the Revolution of 1905 (in addition to the October Revolution of 1917 which had brought them to power).  

As the 1930s progressed, Clark maintains that the traid of 1825/1905/1917 was overshadowed to some extent with an interest in the Russian Civil War.  The militarism of the Civil War apparently appealed to a Party that was engaged in the brutal transformation of the Russian economy and, to some extent, such that transformation as linked to the rise of aggressive and resurgent foreign powers such as Germany and Japan.  Of course, Russia's participation in World War II overhauled that historical mythology and replaced it with an interest in Russian conflicts with foreign invaders such as the Swedes, Tartars, and French.  Internally, of course, official ideology endured that Russia would remain obsessed with the mythical moment in which Lenin had allegedly passed the torch of leadership to Stalin, a man who he apparently personally disliked at the end of his life.  

Clark doesn't spend much time on post-Stalin memory, but does remind readers that by marginalizing Stalin, Russian leaders gave some attention to remembering other Old Bolsheviks who offered more hope for a humane revolutionary future.  

Clark's article was probably penned too soon after the collapse of communism to offer much insight into historical memory in the so-called "democratic" era of Russian history.  She had witnessed an explosion of interest in the victims of communism, but perhaps couldn't have suspected the victimized but extremely nationalistic version of history Putin and company would soon invent.  

The Power of the Powerless

Although it's not possible to write extensive posts about every manuscript or film project Soviet Roulette receives, I am always to receive review copies of English-language books or films related to Russian or Soviet history, literature, and culture.  On some occasions, Soviet Roulette also analyzes works related to the Cold War, comparative revolutions, international communism, Central or Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, or Central and Far Eastern history.  In this spirit, I would like to thank www.agoraproductions.org for sending me a copy of The Power of the Powerless, a documentary that covers the relationship between the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution.  The film provides viewers with insight into the means by which totalitarian states intimidate their citizenry at the local level, and how resistance to such intimidation often functions. Of course, the Soviets used brute force to put down the Prague rebellion, but their Czech allies also suppressed dissent in more subtle ways.  Indeed, it's just as important, and more typical of everyday communism, to see a former faculty member who supported reform describe being punished for her political sympathies by being fired from the faculty and then asked to clean bathrooms at the university. One might have hoped for a little more context to the 1968 revolt against hard-line communism, but the dozens of eye-witness accounts of that revolt and its aftermath, and a detailed description of the events leading up to the Velvet Revolution, make this an important film.

Orlando Figes' New Survey, Revolutionary Russia

One of the most highly regarded Russian historians working today, Orlando Figes has written a new survey of the entire Soviet revolutionary experience.  Entitled Revolutionary Russia:  1891- 1991, Figes' book covers the 100 year period between the great pre-revolutionary famine of 1891--a catastrophe which Figes says irrevocably divided the tsarist regime from Russia's intelligentsia--and ends with the formal collapse of the Soviet Union.  In some ways, such a broad survey of modern Russian history functions more like a textbook than a work of original research.  Even so, like Natasha's Dance before it, Figes' offers readers a wonderful narrative and many fresh perspectives on old controversies.  Figes' overall perspective on the revolutionary experience is of course profoundly negative.

Figes, who wrote another wonderful book on the horrific impact of Stalinism on private life, entitled The Whisperers, is naturally appalled by Stalin's record of economic mismanagement, military error, anti-semitism, and terror.  However, Figes' judgement against the Soviet regime places a lot of the blame for the Soviet Union's record of anti-humanism squarely on Vladimir Lenin.  Figes' describes the October Revolution as a military coup and claims that Lenin was almost eager to enter a Civil War in order to expand the Bolshevik base of popular support and undermine all other socialist or peasant party contenders for that support. Figes' perspectives on Bolshevik leaders isn't generally very original.  However, his analysis of Stalin does place new emphasis on the dictator's essential rationality.  Leaving aside questions of morality, Figes seems to argue that Stalin was almost always acting from rational motives.  Even with respect to the Great Terror, Stalin wasn't merely a victim to delusional paranoia. For one thing, the Soviet Union was in fact surrounded by two viciously expansionist enemies, Germany and Japan.   And certainly the Western allies didn't seem to be offering the Soviet Union a dependable alliance.   In this context, Stalin remembered the lessons he had learned from Lenin and the other Bolsheviks during the Civil War:  external enemies--i.e., the French, the Americans, the Japanese, and the British--often had internal counterparts--i.e., the bourgeoisie, the white army officers, and cossacks.

While Stalin understood that the majority of his victims were innocent, he was willing to trade the lives of many innocent people for the certainty that he would also condemn a few "real" spies and traitors from time to time.  The problem wasn't that Stalin was insane.  Instead, the problem was that Stalin had accepted the Bolshevik proposition that individual lives could be traded for the greater good.  Stalin's henchmen also accepted this logic, which was in fact but the radical expansion of Lenin's original approach to politics.  Lenin had of course advocated for the violent suppression of enemies, and often advocated for the use of force against the innocent as well.  Consider his interest in using hostages to enforce the good behavior of family members, or indeed consider his whole philosophy of making the children of the bourgeois and aristocratic classes suffer for the "sins" of their parents.

If Stalin's essential sanity seems hard to accepts in light of his policy of mass murder, consider the fact that Russians today continue to accept the logic of Stalinism.  As Figes points out in the conclusion of his book, when surveyed, a majority of Russians are expound two seemingly contradictory propositions:  first, that Stalin was responsible for the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens;  and second, that Stalin was an efficient manager who helped to modernize the Soviet Union.

To conclude, Figes' new book is a wonderful introduction both to the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union as a whole.  However, the books real strengths are its coverage of the February and October Revolutions, as well as Stalinism and the Second World War.  The book is weaker when trying to explain the transition to the less brutal dictatorship of Khrushchev and his successors.  And perhaps runs out of steam when moving into the collapse of the regime.  It seems this weakness might stem from the lack historical distance from the subject matter, or indeed from the failure to analyze the collapse of the Soviet Union in light of what we know know about its Putin-dominated successor state. Figes' book is also primarily a political book, as opposed to a cultural history, which is somewhat surprising if one remembers Natasha's Dance, which was dominated by literary and cultural history.

A few quotes from the book:

"Until the end of their regime, the Soviet leaders all believed they were continuing the Revolution Lenin had begun."

"It was not Marxism that made Lenin a revolutionary but Lenin who made Marxism revolutionary."

"There is no God any longer.  There is no Tsar!"  Father Gapon.

"Everything has failed.  Let us build jails."  Mirsky.

"One would think that you are afraid a revolution will break out."  "Your Majesty," Bulygin replied, "the revolution has already begun."

"the commune existed because the peasants were poor, it served to distribute the budern of their poverty..."

"All revolutions are based in part on myth."

"The bread queues became a sort of political forum where rumours and ideas were exchanged by hungry citizens."

"The street generated its own leaders--students, workers, cadets, and NCOs, socialists whose names have never made it into the history books."

"The revolution of 1917 should be understood as a general crisis of authority.  There was a rejection not just of the state but of all figures of authority--judges, policemen, government officials, army and navy officers, priests, teachers, employers, landowners, village elders, patriarchal fatehrs and husbands.  There were revolutions going on in virtually every sphere of life."

"Take power, you son of a bitch, when it's handed to you!"  Krandstadt sailors to Chernov.

"insurrection is an art"  Marx

"Lenin's revolution was as much against the other Soviet-based parties as it was against the Provisional Government."

"The Great October Socialist Revolution, as it became known in the Soviet Union, was in fact such a small-scale action, being in reality no more than a coup, that it passed unnoticed by the vast majority of the inhabitants of Petrograd."

"You are miserable bankrupts, your role is played out;  go where you ought to go-into the dustbin of history!"

"We must make life so uncomfortable for them that they will lose their desire to remain bourgeois."  Lenin.

"For the vast majority of the Russian people the ending of all social privileged was the basic principle of the revolution."

"Lenin was prepared for a civil war and perhaps even welcomed it as a chance to build his party's power base."

"By 1920, 5.4 million people worked for the government.  There were twice as many officials as there were workers in Soviet Russia.."

"His political horizon is restricted, his theoretical equipment primitive..."  Trotsky on Stalin.

"Bolshevism has abolished private life." Walter Benjamin.

"Collectivization was driven less by economics than by politics and a general mistrust of the peasantry."

Sigizmund Krzhizanavsky's Autobiography of a Corpse

Sigizmund Krzhizhanvsky’s Autobiography of a Corpse provides a sophisticated explanation of the impact of war and revolution on the psyche of a Russian intellectual.  One of Russia’s smartest authors ever to put pen to paper, Krzhizhanvsky’s unsettling short story takes the form of a suicide note that the dead protagonist has left to the tenant (i.e., the reader) who is lucky enough to take over the dead man’s flat in the overcrowded interwar Moscow housing market.   The dead protagonist ruminates on a number of different existential subjects but his main concern is that the experience of the World War, Civil War, and Russian Revolution, have created a new type of human being who is isolated from his living peers, but strangely connected to his dead ones.

 If the protagonist can be taken as representative of the new Soviet man, this Soviet man is profoundly disoriented and, consequently, profoundly depressed.  The narrator recalls the original source of his confusion as the First World War.  For the narrator, the shock of the war was enduring.  If you were lucky enough to have survived the war, you never forgot the experience.  The narrator recalls one ostensible survivor who travelled light for the rest of his life, preferring not to carry material possessions that weighed any more than his rifle did.  The death statistics of the World War were astounding, something to be continuously but fruitlessly pondered.  What could all of this death ultimately mean?  Nobody could make sense of it.  The author’s removal from the front lines of war didn’t necessarily make things easier for him.  Were the living--who had escaped the central fact of the modern age--more “alive” than the dead, who had squarely confronted this central fact of modern life by, ironically, dying on the battlefields of central Europe?

 The dead protagonist also speculates about the general dissolution of identity following the war.  What did it say about your identity when the new revolutionary authorities or their opponents in the Civil War, constantly tried to assess you, to verify who you were and what you stood for?  How stable could your consciousness be, when an increasingly intrusive state (as well as the state’s enemies) wanted to check your papers at every opportunity? 

The protagonist’s depictions of the revolution proper, as opposed to the state of post-revolutionary consciousness, are also instructive.  In many ways the Revolution reinforced the themes of the war.   The Revolution was violent, shocking, and all-consuming.  It had “jagged edges” that cut everyone.  More than that, the Revolution shook up the traditional relationship of the dead and the living.  In the Great War, the newspapers did their best to document who was dead and who was alive, but the very process of attempting to document death on such a scale revealed something arbitrary about the division that separated the living from the dead.  Similarly, the protagonist sees the Revolution blurs the boundaries that traditionally separate the living from the dead.  For the dead narrator, the Revolution was the world’s first revolt of the living against the dead.  Presumably, he means to follow Thomas Payne’s understanding of revolution as the rational expression of living men and women who are striving to break the arbitrary and archaic chains of the distant past.   But surely he also means that the Revolution is also a protest against the mass death of the First World War, an act of revenge on the part of the dead against those who had sent them to their deaths.   Viewed in this light, we might say that Stalin’s purges were payback for the original sin of World War.  Or we may at least say that the dead called out to their loved ones to do something more dramatic, more limitless, than reform in order to justify or sanctify the nation’s limitless loss.  And Krzhizhanovsky uses this very language to describe the process of revolution.  He said the Revolution removed all thresholds.  Without thresholds, Russians moved directly from the ancient regime to the modern world.  There was no intermediary stage of political evolution.  The Revolution did what Dostoevsky said atheism would do:  it made everything possible.

Some quotes from Autobiography of a Corpse:

“He knew that on the metropolitan chessboard, squares and not been set aside for all of the chessmen.”

“Naturally you have come ‘to conquer Moscow’; you have the energy and will ‘to gain a foothold,’ ‘to make your way in the world.’”

“I ordinarily sit in a splayed armchair, among my books and boredoms.”

“Space, I reasoned while in earliest youth, is absurdly vast and has expanded—with its orbits, stars, and yawning parabolas—to infinity.  But if one tucks it inside numbers and meanings, it will easily fit on two or three bookshelves.”

“In the country’s northern latitudes the population per square mile is .06 person.  It stuck in my mind like a splinter.

“We lived like separated drops.  Like waifs.”

“The city in which I lived changed hands thirteen times.”

“The more they made certain of my identity, the less certain I became of it myself…”

“Thus from the very first day newspapers and rifles divided us into those who would die and those for whom they would die.”

“But it’s fair to say that the war’s dialectic forced those who were more or less alive to go to their death, and those who were more or less dead the right to live.”

“Even then one sensed the approach of this new, as yet unnamed regime. It was as though the oxygen were being pumped out of the air by a slow, gigantic plunger.”

“The Revolution crashed down like lightening.”

“But then, when the revolution was still new, we were all, willingly or unwillingly, inflamed or burnt by its jagged, all-consuming course.” 

“In an instant, all thresholds had been removed—not only from rooms, cells, and studies but also from consciousness.”

Question 41:  “Ought a burial to take place after sunset? No.  For it is the reward of the dead to see the sun at the hour of their burial.”

“So I’m a corpse.  So be it. For I too shall see the sun at the hour of my burial.”

“Meanwhile the March fury was surging higher and higher, and many were frightened by its violent rise.  What had to happen, happened.”

“Life…seemed to favor the dead.  They better suited the existing order.”

“…and then began the planet’s first struggle or, rather, revolt of the living against the dead.”

“New eyes have appeared.  And people.  They have a new way of looking at you:  not at but through.  You can’t hide your emptiness inside;  they will bore into you with their pupils.”

“We’ve riddled all of Russia with bullets, but here she is again.  Patched—“