communists loosing all comitees in Russian parliament

[titoman]

dear Ron!

I would like to advise you another book - 'in the dead end' ('v tupike') by V.V. Veresaev.

It describes the early days of the communist regime by a writer who saw it all. It was first published in 1922 and (strange thing) prohibited only in 1924.

"I am surprised that you are surprised that a poet speaks out against bureaucracy because the words poet and bureaucrat are mutually exclusive." - Yevgenii Yevtushenko.

The October Revolution had a tremendously liberating influence on art and culture. A whole new generation of artists, poets and musicians were inspired to new heights by the revolution. But this inspiration did not survive the ebb of the revolution and the suffocating atmosphere of spiritual and artistic repression that accompanied the Stalinist regime. Art and science, more than any other sphere of social life, require freedom to stretch their wings. They thrive in an atmosphere of free thought, debate, discussion and controversy. But they will wither under the dead hand of conformism, routine and bureaucratic rigidity.
The Stalinist attitude to the arts cannot be separated from the mode of operation of the totalitarian state in general. This applies as much to fascism as Stalinism, although the socio-economic base is quite different. No doubt a bureaucratic caricature of Marxism is preferable to the poison of racism, the master race and the distilled essence of imperialism which forms the basis of fascist ideology, just as a regime of nationalisation and planning is preferable to the rule of the banks and monopolies. Nonetheless, in their treatment of art and science, there are clear similarities that are not accidental. A totalitarian state can accept no area of social life which it does not control utterly. Hitler not only banned the Socialist and Communist Parties and the unions, but even closed down the workers' chess clubs.
The Stalinist bureaucracy kept the artists and writers under the strictest control, because, in the absence of parties and unions, the opposition of the workers and intellectuals could be expressed in other ways. Literature was particularly dangerous. But the pictorial arts, and even music, might also be used for subversive purposes. Hence the zeal with which the paid hacks of the state in the leadership of the Writers and Musicians' "Unions" pursued each and every deviation from the officially approved norms of "socialist realism". Just compare this suffocating atmosphere with the bubbling cauldron of artistic life in the 1920s, with its myriad schools of thought and style--Futurism, Acmeism, Symbolism, Imagism, Constructivism, and many other "isms" with the soulless conformism of later decades, and we see how a great opportunity was lost.
The great Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was one of the few well-known writers who had actively sympathised with the Bolsheviks before the Revolution (Maxim Gorky was another). Whereas other famous poets like Sergei Yesenin and Alexader Blok sympathised with the revolution as fellow travellers (the term was invented by Trotsky in the 1920s), Mayakovsky identified with it heart and soul, and this was reflected in his poetry, earning him the nickname "the drummer-boy of the revolution". In later years, his poetry and plays frequently contained biting satirical attacks against the Soviet bureaucracy. In 1930 he committed suicide, which was almost certainly a protest against the slide towards bureaucratic reaction.
Many others did not take their own lives but were swept up in the Purges and perished in Stalin's camps. This was the fate of another great Russian poet, Osip Mandelshtam. From 1932 on, the regime demanded complete submission from the writers and artists. Boris Pasternak stopped writing for a period of ten years. During the war he published some poetry, but then fell silent again in protest against Zhdanov's Purges, writing nothing until the publication of Doctor Zhivago which was awarded the Nobel Prize in Sweden, and promptly banned in Russia.
In the field of music, great Soviet composers like Shostakovich and Prokofiev found themselves humiliated in public, their works denounced by ignorant bureaucrats such as Zhdanov, the equivalent of Vyshinsky in the world of culture. As in the Purge trials, they were compelled to engage in ritual confessions. Even then, some of their best works were banned. This was the fate of Shostakovich's opera The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Prokofiev's sixth symphony, both banned by Stalin and not performed in Russia until many years later.
Under Stalin, science was in the hands of a bureaucracy that decided which theories were acceptable to the ruling elite and which were anathema. Thus, in the field of genetics, Soviet research was held up for decades by the acceptance of the false theories of Lysenko who enjoyed the protection of Stalin. A similar situation existed in the field of linguistics, where the bogus theories of Marr were imposed on scholars for years, until the Boss shortly before his death unexpectedly intervened with his work on linguistics, whereupon it was a question of "About Turn!" in 24 hours.
Worse still, such a key science as cybernetics was denounced as bourgeois reactionary nonsense and virtually banned. This step alone set the Soviet Union back many years in the vital field of computer research. The same was true of resonance theory, for some reason or other. Einstein too was regarded with suspicion, although the physicists generally escaped lightly, since Stalin was anxious to get the atom bomb as soon as possible. Only pure mathematics seemed to get off scott-free, presumably because the bureaucrats could not make head or tail of it! Those who dared to protest found themselves cold-shouldered, passed over for promotion, or even arrested. In such a climate, no one dared to make a move before looking over their shoulder first. Hardly the kind of atmosphere to encourage great advances and innovative thinking.
Add to this the fact that Soviet scientists were largely cut off from contact with the most advanced currents of scientific thought on a world scale, except by reading the digests made available to them, and a discouraging picture emerges. This explains why, despite having a large number of good scientists, they were unable to get the same results as in the West. The freedom to criticise, to experiment, to make mistakes, is essential to the progress of science.
The same situation existed in philosophy. It is a condemnation of the Stalinist regime that for seventy years not one original work of Marxist philosophy or economics came out of the Soviet Union. With all the resources of a subcontinent at their disposal, they were not able to match the achievements of one man sitting alone in the reading room of the British Museum. That alone is a sufficient commentary on the so-called Marxism-Leninism of the Stalinist regime. Small wonder that the rigid, lifeless dogmas that were fed to generations of students under this heading provoked aversion, and only served to discredit the very idea of Marxism in the eyes of a large number of serious intellectuals and youth.
It is no accident that the first stirrings of revolt against the bureaucracy in Eastern Europe were felt among the intellectuals. The intelligentsia is not capable of playing an independent role in society, but it is an extremely sensitive barometer which can reflect the tensions that are building up in the depths of society at a very early stage. This often gives rise to the illusion that students can cause a revolutionary movement, whereas in reality they merely act as the spark which ignites the combustible material accumulated in the previous period. This was the case in France in 1968, and also with the Crooked Circle in Poland and the Petöfi Circle in Hungary in 1956.
This ferment among the intellectuals also existed in the Soviet Union. From the death of Stalin, a section of Soviet writers, cautiously at first, began to assert their rights against the palsied hand of official censorship. The official Soviet literature was dying on its feet. The poetess Vera Inber boldly stated that nobody read Soviet poetry and nobody ever would so long as it was about "the same old dam, the same old steam shovel". In a play published during the so-called Thaw, the dramatist Zorin portrays the conflict between an old revolutionary veteran, Kirpichev, and his son, the Party bureaucrat and careerist, Pyotr:
"'The country has become stronger,' says old Kirpichev, 'and the people have become richer. But alongside the toilers and the willing horses there have appeared, imperceptibly, yet now in great numbers, such people as you; white collar aristocrats, greedy and conceited, far from the people.'
"?'I simply worked side by side with the great toilers of our lands,' old Kirpichev exclaims. 'I worked. And I did not know the taste of power. But you have known its taste since childhood; and it has poisoned you'." (Quoted in Edward Crankshaw, op. cit., p. 108.)
Zorin's play was too much for the authorities. Sovietskaya Kultura protested:
"Only a person totally ignorant of the facts of life and intentionally closing his eyes to what goes on every day in front of us all could talk such pernicious nonsense. Where is the person who does not know that the aim and content of the whole activity of the Soviet organs--ministries, departments, and the rest--is daily concern for the vitally important interests of the working people, and that the very word 'power' has become here, because of this, something lustrous, gladdening, the embodiment of the finest hopes and aspirations of every Soviet man and woman, and that our people regard their popular power with unshakeable trust and warm, filial love?"
It was not enough for the artist or writer to accept the totalitarian state. It was necessary to look upon it with "unshakeable trust" and "warm, filial love". In other words, the artist was expected to prostitute himself, to sing the praises of the state and the bureaucracy, and moreover do so sincerely, with all his heart--or else be condemned as a traitor dealing in "pernicious nonsense". Is it any wonder that such a regime alienated the best of the artists and intellectuals? The so-called Unions of writers, composers and artists were no more than auxiliary arms of the police, run by trusties and agents of the bureaucracy like the old Stalinist Fadeyev, chairman of the Writers' Union.
Zorin fell into disgrace, and by the summer of 1954, all the major literary magazines were heavily censured and the editors of three of them dismissed. The reaction of the regime was not dictated by literary considerations. They feared that the opposition of the intellectuals could provide a point of reference for the accumulated discontent of the masses. And they were right. The appearance of Dudintsev's novel Not By Bread Alone sparked off a new wave of criticism and opposition among the youth which spread to the factories:
"Authority was alarmed. All over Russia students at universities and technical colleges were launching wall-newspapers and duplicated manifestos expressing and demanding revolt--not against the Soviet system itself but against the corruption, the philistinism, and the dreary and oppressive conventions of the Establishment. When the mood spread to the factories, when in the Naval barracks at Kronstadt and Vladivostok wall-newspapers started to appear and official agitators began to be heckled at factory meetings, the situation was clearly serious." (Crankshaw, op. cit., pp. 115-6.)
The young poet Yevgenii Yevtushenko was hostile to the bureaucracy, but always defended the Revolution. In October 1956, he dared to publish verses which called into question the so-called de-Stalinisation campaign:
"Certainly there have been changes; but behind the speeches
Some murky game is being played.
We talk and talk about things we didn't mention yesterday;
We say nothing about the things we did ourselves."
Yevtushenko was expelled from the Komsomol (the Young Communist League) in 1957, when the government cracked down on the students who sympathised with the Hungarian Revolution. With great courage, he hit back in a poem which was somehow published in Novy Mir:
"How terrible never to learn,
To claim the right to sit in judgement
To charge pure-hearted youth, rebellious,
With impure designs.
There is no virtue in the zealotry of suspicion.
Blind judges do not serve the people."

[Globehopper]

The communists lost 10 committees? Great!
Now, I just hope the same thing happens in Ukraine...

[ILay]

2 globehopper:

I don't think it's possible in Ukraine now. At least not before there would be a pro-government majority in the parliament.

[vorosilov]

So the communists are loosing ground in Russia. Of course, they became the new capitalists.

[titoman]

Majority of these "communists" never were communists. Most politicians are people (like they say) that subordinate to the environment. If there is "communism" all capitalists, nazis,... will be CP members. If there are capitalists in charge, majority will run to their camp.....