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Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (1989)

Tekijä: Richard Stites

JäseniäKirja-arvostelujaSuosituimmuussijaKeskimääräinen arvioMaininnat
1083250,505 (4.5)1
The revolutionary ideals of equality, communal living, proletarian morality, and technology worship, rooted in Russian utopianism, generated a range of social experiments which found expression, in the first decade of the Russian revolution, in festival, symbol, science fiction, city planning, and the arts. In this study, historian Richard Stites offers a vivid portrayal of revolutionary life and the cultural factors--myth, ritual, cult, and symbol--that sustained it, and describes the principal forms of utopian thinking and experimental impulse.Analyzing the inevitable clash between the authoritarian elements in the Bolshevik's vision and the libertarian behavior and aspirations of large segments of the population, Stites interprets the pathos of utopian fantasy as the key to the emotional force of the Bolshevik revolution which gave way in the early 1930s to bureaucratic state centralism and a theology of Stalinism.… (lisätietoja)
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näyttää 3/3
If you are interested in Russian literature, "fantastic" fiction, Marxism, or Russian history, then this is a must-read, one of those far-ranging critical studies that intelligently sums up a vast field while still giving you plenty of other works to chase down afterwards. It's divided roughly into quarters: a history of utopian thought in pre-revolutionary Russia, of which Marxism was only one variety; a discussion of practical problems the revolutionaries faced in building a new society; an overview of many now-forgotten writers and social movements who explored the many possibilities open for Russian society once the tsar was overthrown; and finally the gradual elimination of those possibilities as the revolution began take its fixed course by silencing dissidents and hardening into Stalinism.

As we know, to outsiders Russia circa 1917 didn't seem like the ideal place to try to realize Marxism as Marx had written it. Poor, rural, barely a generation out of feudalism, it had very few of the modern, advanced, industrial attributes that the 19th century socialists considered sine qua non. However, it had a great number of intellectuals who, much like their counterparts in the West, imagined Russian society transformed by modernity and fed on a wide-ranging frustration with the old order. Stites discusses seminal pre-revolutionary works like Nicholas Chernyshevsky's What Is To Be Done? (an immensely influential work whose title Lenin would later famously borrow), Prince Peter Kropotkin's Should We Concern Ourselves with the Ideal Society of the Future?, Alexander Bogdanov's Red Star, and Edward Bellamy's best-seller Looking Backward, and his summary of Kropotkin's 1873 book is a good example of the kind of thinking characteristic of many other writers: "...he depicted the new Russia as a freely formed federation of self-governing peasant communities in full possession of all the land, commonly held and equally partitioned. All town property has been taken over by workers, including management of factories. The declassé officers, officials, and former owners of land and buildings have been reduced to status of workers or peasants. Schools for useful trades have replaced higher learning, and all castes of intellectuals and specialists have been eliminated. Urban housing space has been thoroughly redistributed. Kropotkin, while outlining a probable system of barter and a stateless community of communities, declined to provide more specific details of daily life since the psychology of each future generation would, he believed, modify current views of equitable life and morality."

The vagueness of many details about the future and the collectivist mentality were characteristic. Stities goes into a lot of detail about Russia's experience with small-scale religious communes based on "sobornost", an attitude of "mystical togetherness" that survived the tumult of the February and October Revolutions and in fact provided the foundation for many future communes and revolutionary experiments, especially in religion. As Stites says, once the Bolsheviks were in charge, "Their responses varied: to denounce God altogether, to use religious imagery in socialist propaganda, to construct a socialist religion, or to abandon revolution and embrace religion." Much like in the French Revolution, a big percentage of the new leaders were atheists prone to uttering statements like "Lamarck and Darwin have killed God, finally and for all time so that He may never reappear after such blows. These great murderers deserve the gratitude of all mankind." But there simply wasn't a way to remove centuries of religious tradition in a short time (Lenin's eventual embalming after his death is a famous instance of pseudo-religious throwback), and in fact many factions initially did not want to, because the myriad small kibbutz-like communes dotting the countryside preached a form of Orthodox Christian socialism that they found quite congenial. Apollon Karelin's Russia in 1930 showed a future Russia as a sea of village communes that resemble nothing so much as medieval cloisters. While there were many groups contesting the future - red Communists, white conservatives, green peasant movements, and black anarchists - many groups did not fit neatly into established categories and sought to create their own utopias with their own rules.

This public ambivalence towards religion applied also to art. Here's a good line: "Some revolutionaries were violent: Bolshevik atheist art was not very successful. It possessed no great anti-clerical painters as did the Mexican Revolution. Most anti-religious posters descended to the level of coarseness, such as the one depicting the Virgin Mary with a bulging belly longing for a Soviet abortion." Stites also has a good quote from the French Revolution that applies equally to the Russian one: "'The revolutions of barbarous people,' said the deputy Barère in 1791, 'destroy all monuments, and the very trace of the arts seem to be effaced. The revolutions of an enlightened people conserve the fine arts, and embellish them, while the fruitful concern of the legislator causes the arts to be reborn as an ornament of the empire.'" Lenin the aesthete, with his 10,000-book personal library, was very worried about this, and sought to preserve Russia's artistic heritage even if it wasn't ideologically congenial as the new symbols, signs, songs, and monuments that were being produced. There's a good section on the renaming of buildings, streets, cities, and even baby names, as the new government tried to introduce new traditions covering birth, death, marriage, and everything in between. The arts, including music, literature, and the visual arts, were not exempt from the revolutionary spirit. Newly formed orchestras "raised the banner of equality not only by abolishing conductors as symbols of old style authority but also by organizing their work in a pattern that insured maximum participation and equal voice in the daily routine of rehearsal and in public performance." There were also public carnivals which were held to ridicule symbols of the old order, but there were chilling effects even then, as the carnivals did not dare to mock the new government.

Newly Soviet sci-fi and utopianism was all about experiment, change, and vision, but slowly rigidity set in as dogmas accumulated. Eugene Zamyatin's We remains famous to this day as a classic dystopia and influenced novels like George Orwell's 1984. V. D. Nikolsky's In a Thousand Years is also interesting and in its cheerful picture of a fully triumphant new order reminds me somewhat of the world of the Highest Possible Level of Development in Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad, where the planet's inhabitants are so advanced there's literally nothing left for them to do. Stites also discusses Jan Larri's The Land of the Happy, another more upbeat novel, which in 1931 was the last utopian novel to appear in Soviet Russia until after Stalin's death. The question of what would have happened in the absence of Stalin has been endlessly pondered despite its unanswerability, remains interesting because of the great opportunity the revolution afforded previously suppressed artists. "In the long perspective of Russian history, the Revolution was one of those times - like the Baptism of Rus in 988 and the reign of Peter the Great - wherein a decisive break with the past is consciously and visibly effected and announced." While for us, nothing could be more natural than grouping communist art into one style, a perfectly understandable habit given the severe uniformity of the later years, the millennialist sea of isms of the time contained a lot of intriguingly different attitudes about the world around them.

Another example of that ambivalence toward tradition is capitalism, which the new society had a surprisingly complicated relationship with. Many new leaders like Lenin glorified the productive and rationalist methods of über-capitalists like Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor, but they had an extremely difficult time trying to avoid the system of pricing and incentives that had allowed those men to do their work, which strikes me as somewhat like applauding the discoveries of Columbus and Magellan but denigrating shipbuilding, seafaring, and astronomy. Literature reflected this too: "In the utopias of communism, rationalism, symmetry, and mathematical efficiency in work were seen as liberating virtues. In the dystopias of capitalism, the darker side of mechanized labor - mindless robotization - were emphasized." Similarly, while everyone applauded the ideal of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need", the quest to eliminate class distinctions frequently had to choose between the crude but easy method of pulling down the former rich or the much more difficult method of pulling the peasantry up via new techniques and lifestyles they distrusted and disliked. Another example was urban planning: was the best method to promote socialism to restructure old cities, to build massive new planned urban centers, or to retreat to small, human-scale communes (summarized by Stites as Urbanists, Superurbanists, and Disurbanists)? These were diametrically opposed visions, which would not be fully resolved until Stalin ended the revolution by crushing alternative paths and channeling as much energy as possible into preserving his regime.

Whatever you think about communism (I'm personally not a fan), the lessons of the revolutionary impulses that this book describes are still important, especially if you're a big science fiction fan. Stites' analysis of the shared cultural values in Russian and Soviet sci-fi as reflecting makes me think about the deeper meaning behind both lighter works like Mark Millar's Red Son or the TV show Firefly, and also less overtly "ideological" science fiction like Foundation, or hard sci-fi like Greg Egan's stuff. As discussed in George Orwell's essay "Why Socialists Don't Believe In Fun", I think that for a lot of people a utopia might be simply the removal of familiar afflictions and not the creation of new joys, which are almost impossible to imagine, let alone describe. As Arthur Koestler's protagonist in Darkness at Noon could have told you, the values of potential revolutionaries - iconoclasm, free-thinking, experimentation, heterodoxy, and doubt - are paradoxically intolerable to revolutions once they finally succeed, and it's a tragedy that the freedom to dream of new worlds that every culture happily indulges in is so fragile and vulnerable to the same forces that it attempts to make obsolete. Stites' closing paragraph, capping an excellent and eminently quotable book, is also worth quoting in full:

"Utopianism is often naive, innocent, and childlike. But what virtue is more admired in the whole catalogue of human art and sensibility than childlike enthusiasm, innocence, and spontaneous love and acceptance? What is more lamented than our loss of youth, romance, openness to change, thirst for adventure, and the absence of refined callousness and cold sense of "reality?" These characteristics of the Utopian imagination appeal to every generation that discovers it; it is the recurring vision and hope for the "good place" even if it is "no place" - for the better world or even for the one world. The warming springtime of human hope does not give in to the wintry smiles of the cynic and the realist; it blossoms and it perishes in the sad autumnal winds. And then it is born again - for ever and ever." ( )
  aaronarnold | May 11, 2021 |
En Revolutionary Dreams, tenemos una obra histórica brillantemente presentada que es a la vez pionera y fundamental en su importante campo. ( )
  BibliotecaUNED | Oct 18, 2017 |
It's hard to fully describe a book like this, except by saying that the author has really outdone himself in surveying his subject. And even that is an understatement. Richard Stites' "Revolutionary Dreams" is by far the best book on Russian utopianism ever written, and it is both impressive in its scope and quality and inspiring in its portrayal.

Stites' book describes the manifold ways in which utopianism, and revolutionary novelty, were introduced into every aspect of life and society in Russia during the revolutionary period (roughly 1917-1928). This goes from science fiction books depicting the utopias and dystopias of the future, to socialist burials and marriages, to children called "Melor" (Marx-Engels-Lenin-October Revolution), to communal living in apartments, to garden cities, to egalitarianism in dress and pay, to popular festivals, and so much more. Stites also pays extensive attention to the various top-down ways in which revolutionary reformation of society was attempted, such as the League of Time, the neo-Taylorists, the Godbuilders, the Atheist societies, and so on, all of which sought to remold the old society into a new and shining future.

The author does a fantastic job of showing how after the October Revolution there was, among artists and intellectuals but even among peasants and workers in Siberia, a general feeling that anything could now be done, that anything truly was possible. Now was the time to build the future on a better basis than anything that had gone before. Because there had been different utopian currents before the Revolution, as Stites describes in his opening chapter, this led to very different conceptions of what should count most in the new society; in particular the struggle between efficiency and modernization utopians on the one hand and the freedom and equality utopians on the other hand was a perpetual one. But in these days it was very well possible for societies to form and try to design and build Russia according to their own views of the future (as long as they were leftist), without this leading to repression or death, such as would later happen with Stalinism. In this, Stites also demonstrates the essential difference between Soviet society in the Leninist period and the later USSR from Stalin on.

We learn all about Constructivism and Futurism in art, about the symphony orchestras without director, about the peasant anti-landlord movement, about the ambivalent attitude towards the architecture and sculpture of the Czarist society, about Lunacharsky and his Commissariat for Enlightenment, about Zamyatin and "Engineer Menni", about iconoclasm and godless religion, and about Mozart's requiem for those fallen in the struggle against oppression. In short, this book is absolutely essential reading for anyone whose heart still goes out to the possibility of a better world. ( )
2 ääni McCaine | Apr 13, 2007 |
näyttää 3/3
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The revolutionary ideals of equality, communal living, proletarian morality, and technology worship, rooted in Russian utopianism, generated a range of social experiments which found expression, in the first decade of the Russian revolution, in festival, symbol, science fiction, city planning, and the arts. In this study, historian Richard Stites offers a vivid portrayal of revolutionary life and the cultural factors--myth, ritual, cult, and symbol--that sustained it, and describes the principal forms of utopian thinking and experimental impulse.Analyzing the inevitable clash between the authoritarian elements in the Bolshevik's vision and the libertarian behavior and aspirations of large segments of the population, Stites interprets the pathos of utopian fantasy as the key to the emotional force of the Bolshevik revolution which gave way in the early 1930s to bureaucratic state centralism and a theology of Stalinism.

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