Young Stalin, I’m embarassed to say, was a total DILF (Dictator I’d Like to Fuck). That may be the most uncomfortable sentence I’ve ever typed.
Stalin = hot!
I’m reading Redefining Stalinism, which so far isn’t doing much redefining. Or, rather, it is using ‘Stalinism’ in its classically pejorative sense, where ‘Stalinism’ means something like ’scary totalitarianism’ and ’scary totalitarianism’ more or less means ‘Bad’. Which, if you’re going to play that game – the one where you look at a series of historical events and call them names – is fine, I guess (though, really, is that game even that interesting to play?). But as far as a historical analysis of events, as far as deepening our understanding of historical events (which, to be fair, I’m not even sure is the game that we do play/should be playing with respect to history), doesn’t go far, since in this case ‘Stalinism’ just reduces to ‘Bad’, and questions like “What was Stalinism?” (which seems to be the focus of the book) just reduce, somehow, to “How did such a Bad Thing happen?”, and descriptives become causal explanations, themselves working as a kind of historical apologia, either for History, or for the Everyday Soviet Man (rarely, if ever, for Stalin himself). But, I guess, what is History that we need to defend Its actions (or, is such a theodicy even necessary)? And who are we to try to justify the lives of Soviets (and, implicitly, suggest that their lives need such a defense [and, by way of a lack of such an explanation in the here and now, that our lives don't])?
I’ve been reading (among other things) David Kunzle’s article “Gustave Dore’s History of Holy Russia: Anti-Russian Propaganda from the Crimean War to the Cold War”. In addition to some of the most bizarre academic narrative outside Derrida that I’ve encountered yet, the article had the following great bit:
“1812″ had already figured in Doré’s history as a refrain, a premonition; and afterwards, the date was to be rammed down the Russian throat.
What’s especially nice to me is that it isn’t clear who is doing the ramming – Doré? The imperial, and later Soviet Russian government? France? And what is “the Russian throat”? Does the mythical nineteenth century construct, later revived after the revolution, and again during the Cold War, “The Russian”, have a body now?
Filed under: Russia, Soviet Union, fatalism, historiography, history, samizdat
I’m a bit upset by the following bit from F.J.M. Feldbrugge’s Samizdat and Political Dissent in the Soviet Union:
“Perhaps the most serious aspect of the verbal intoxication with such terms as ‘progressive meaning’, ‘objective inevitability’ and the like, is the failure of the Marxists-Leninists to appreciate fully the absolute inhumanity of Stalinist rule and the absolute necessity for its utter and total rejection. … Another element of irrealism encountered among Marxist-Leninist dissidents is their dream of pure and pristine Leninism, which was unfortunately interrupted by the Stalinist nightmare. … Presumably there is a half-conscious awareness that somehow the succession and the success of Stalin was not purely accidental. … The prevailing mood, however, of the ‘loyal dissidents’ remains that the Revolution was a ‘positive’ phenomenon and that in some way a connection must be found between the ideals of Lenin’s Revolution and the present. … Will a return to Leninism [hoped for by some dissident writers] imply that everything will be done over again including perhaps a return to Stalinism? ” (80)
My upset is kind of connected with the phrase “absolute inhumanity of Stalinist rule”, and it is kind of connected with “the failure of the Marxists-Leninists to appreciate fully”, and a little with the “absolute necessity for its utter and total rejection”. It is also connected with the logic of the argument here: the “succession and the success of Stalin was not purely accidental” and, in fact, “a return to Leninism impl[ies] that everything will be done over again including … a return to Stalinism” – that is, that Stalinism was the historically necessary outcome of the revolution – but, there is also an “absolute necessity for its utter and total rejection”. It is an “element of irrealism” on the part of “Marxist-Leninist” dissidents to imagine any other connection between the revolution and Stalinism than the one Feldbrugge imagines, and imagines to be historically necessary, and yet they are also under the imperative to reject that historically necessary Stalinism. The philosophy 101 argument I want to pull out here is that either things are necessary or they aren’t: If Stalinism is the historically necessary outcome of the revolution, then surely the revolution was the historically necessary outcome of something else, etc. And if this is all the case, then surely the “Marxist-Leninist” dissidents’ reaction to their environments is just as historically necessary, as is Feldbrugge’s attitude toward their reactions. And maybe my own. But assuming that this isn’t the case, seriously Feldbrugge, WTF?
I think, though, the most disturbing thing about this bit (and maybe it doesn’t come across in the heavily excerpted quote above) is the attitude it takes toward Soviet dissidents, as if Feldbrugge, the [admittedly, presumed] outsider is coming in and schooling native Russians who lived through Stalinism on what attitudes they should take toward it. It reminds me of adults who take a condescending attitude toward children and say things like “you need to change your attitude, little mister!” WTF Feldbrugge, WTF?
I’m currently enrolled in a course called “comparative world history”. I have a good feel for the history part of the class, but can’t figure out what, exactly, the “comparative” part is supposed to mean, and only have the vaguest feelings about the “world” part (that, for example, we’re not focusing on a single area or a single period). I also occasionally get the odd pang of discomfort with the ways in which globalization comes up in the course without a critique of either what, precisely, the term is supposed to mean or what negative effects it may have, either as a consequence of our technology (which seems to be the focus) or as a project (which seems not to be a topic for discussion). I’m glad, though, that I’m not the only student who seems to feel this discomfort.
It is an odd thing though. When I’m wearing my Russian history student hat, I often find myself annoyed with, for example, the East/West dichotomy that frequently comes up in discussions of Russia (Is Russia a European country? An Eastern country? Both? Neither?), as if the line were real, the sort of thing given by the geography of the world, or maybe something in the water. I’m annoyed that professional historians still harp on this subject (long after they’ve given up questions like “Who is the Russian?” – as if there’s only one Russian – as if Plato was right, and the form of The Russian was just waiting to be discovered, a discovery that would finally unravel that mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a vest). I’m also annoyed that I still use phrases like “the West”. It seems like this is the sort of class where students could really do some of the work of dissolving that binary, but that doesn’t seem to happen, or hasn’t yet.
I guess that the course is just frustrating because I haven’t yet figured out what’s going on, and the instructor is doing a good job of trying not to just get up in front of the class and say “this is world history”, which is usually nice, but right now blaaargh.
I’m writing a paper about a group of Russian Christian sectarians that got started in the late 18th century and were actually fairly big in the 19th. The guy who started them, Kondratii Selivanov, was one of the many people who claimed to be tsar Peter III (no really, the number of people who claimed to be Peter III is surprisingly large!), castrated himself, claimed to be Christ returned, became a sort of saint-like figure, and started a movement. They called themselves the Skoptsy, and were an interesting group of people. They weren’t, however, well liked. Even the intelligenty, desperate to start a revolution – so desperate, in fact, that they were courting sectarians – shunned them. Which brings me to my point.
I found a great book about them, Laura Engelstein’s Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom: A Russian Folktale. It was engaging from the start, and after a few pages I flipped ahead to see what was in store, and the book opened to a page with two photographs of fully castrated Skoptsy without clothes. At first I was uncomfortable, squeamish, but then I felt bad for these people. Not because they had castrated themselves for God, something I personally think is weird but, you know, at least consistent with the tenets of their belief system. I felt bad because these people, uncomfortable enough with their sexuality in order to physically remove it from their lives, had been forced by Soviet authorities to take off their clothes and pose for photographs. And they had been forced to do so in order to foment disgust toward themselves and others like them, to betray their beliefs for an ideology which sought to destroy them.
It would be comfortable to chalk this up to the inhumanity of the Soviet Union, but I also felt bad because it rang familiar. It resembled ways in which communities and states around the world, mine included, have used members of undesirable subcommunities against others like them, the ways in which the very signifiers of those subcommunities have been manipulated to evoke indignation and hate, and the ways in which people’s bodies are turned against them by states consistently positing them as foreign to begin with.
Back to reading…
