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REASON DISPLACES ALL LOVE: Libidinal Economising in the NEP-era Soviet Union

‘Science and industry denounced as metaphysics not merely romantic sexual love, but every kind of universal love, for reason displaces all love.’

Theodor Adorno and Marx Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment

‘She had suffered an acute attack of ‘love’- the name given to a disease of ancient times when sexual energy, which should be rationally distributed over one’s entire lifetime, is suddenly concentrated into one inflammation lasting a week, leading to absurd and incredible behaviour’

Vladimir Mayakovsky, The Bedbug

‘The discovery of energy as the quintessential element of all experience, both organic and inorganic, made society and nature virtually indistinguishable. Society was assimilated to an image of nature powered by protean energy, perpetually renewed, indestructible, and infinitely malleable.’

Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor, Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity

In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when scarcity and barter returned to Russia on a scale not seen since the early 1920s, a tyre factory in Volgograd reportedly paid its employees in dildos. This bizarre and thumpingly literal image (however vaguely) informed my thinking about this paper which revolves around themes of quantifiable, fungible, mechanised pleasure.

In the 1920s, before becoming renowned as the eccentric pedlar of orgone accumulators, Wilhelm Reich argued that Capitalism unhealthily restrains primal sexual instincts, that a genuine political revolution would shatter the constraints of bourgeois sexual morality, unleashing sexual energies through a kind of wild orgasmic release. He was rather scathing of the psychologists he met when he visited the Soviet Union in 1929, one of whom, Aron Zalkind, will be my focus here. In 1926, Zalkind published a strange treatise called ‘12 Commandments for the Sexual Revolution of the Proletariat’ in which he claimed that the capitalist free market is incompatible with what he calls ‘free love’.

But in stark contrast to Reich, Zalkind advocates sexual abstinence as the appropriate conduct for the revolutionary proletariat. Sexual relations during the period of the New Economic Policy (1921-1928) were, of course, being renegotiated for both ideological and practical reasons. As the heroine of Feodor Gladkóv’s 1925 novel Cement observes: ‘everything is broken up and changed and become confused. Somehow love will have to be arranged differently.’ But exactly how love was to be arranged was unclear.

Although the Soviet government legalised divorce and abortion, secularised marriage and de-criminalised homosexuality, and women’s position in the household and the workforce was being concretely transformed, Zalkind’s emphasis on sexual inhibition is characteristic of the ambivalence and anxieties concerning sex in the NEP period:

His Commandments were as follows:

1. Sexuality should not develop too early

2. Sexual abstinence before marriage

3. Renounces sex on the basis of pure physical attraction

4. Sex should only result from ‘deep and complex feeling’

5. Sex should be infrequent

6. Partners should not be changed too often

7. Relationships should be monogamous

8. Every sex act should be committed with the awareness that it might lead to the birth of a child

9. Sex partners should be selected on the basis of class

(Zalkind conceives of class in terms of biological purity, as a kind of ethnicity and he explicitly talks about eugenics which was not uncommon in the Soviet Union at this moment. He says: ‘Sexual attraction to class antagonism, to a morally disgusting, dishonest object is as perverse as the sexual desire of a human for a crocodile or an orangutan.’)

10. No jealousy

11. No sexual perversions

12. In the interests of the revolution, it is the duty of the proletariat to intervene in the sex lives of others

Zalkind relies on an economic conception of psychic sexual energy borrowed from Freud. Zalkind was a major figure in the psychoanalytic community in Moscow which blossomed briefly in the 1920s. The term ‘economy’ for Freud (at least in Zalkind’s rather reductive reading) is a quantitative category, implying a specific volume or magnitude of psychic sexual energy or libido, that Freud often describes as a kind of liquid that might be dammed up or leaked out in various ways. In the interest of self-preservation the fragile organism must protect itself from both external and internal excitations; the tension between pleasure and unpleasure must be regulated through sublimation, repression, cathexis etc. Or in Zalkind’s inelegant phrasing: ‘The body is stuffed with a certain amount of energy, a certain amount of internal stress and excitement, which erupts on the outside.’

In The Future of an Illusion – the last of Freud’s works to appear in Russian translation before the suppression of psychoanalysis in 1930 - Freud explicitly declares that his conclusions are not intended as a comment on the ‘great experiment in civilization’ occurring in Russia. But he is nonetheless dismissive of those who would claim that ‘a re-ordering of human relations’ might overcome the necessarily repressive character of society, stating that ‘every civilization must be built up on coercion and renunciation of instinct’ But, unlike Reich, Zalkind does not contradict Freud on this point. He may imagine repression and sublimation as conscious, voluntary and collective, but he still insists that Communism cannot be built without instinctual renunciation. The oft-repeated Soviet injunction to make sacrifices in the present in order to reap the eventual benefits of the bright Communist future corresponds to Freud’s reality principle, which he defines as the ‘temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure’.

This sentiment is expressed by the ascetic heroine of Alexandra Kollontai’s Vasilisa Malygina (published in English as Red Love): ‘What did she want out of life? Nothing but pleasure?… The revolution isn’t a holiday, she’d remind herself sternly, everyone has to make…sacrifices.’ Eric Naiman also discusses this at length in Sex in Public, quoting one committed Communist as saying the Communist should: ‘Starve with everybody else, walk in rags like everybody else, and feel the pain of others’ deprivation – that is how a Communist should be. That’s the only Communism that can be recognized as such, those are the only real Communists. A Communist should be first in line to participate in the foul, oppressively difficult present; only later will he be rewarded with
a shiny future.’

For Freud, giving the instincts free reign would be dangerous. Civilization is a by-product of repressed instincts and he is not particularly interested in making moral pronouncements on the outcome, stating that ‘it is often merely a matter of opinion when we declare that one stage of development is higher than another’. Zalkind’s argument is more explicitly value-laden. Zalkind’s quantification of energy allows for the commensurability of action - sex and work and class struggle can be reduced to the amount of physical energy they require to perform. And he uses this to make an ideological argument. Actions requiring an equal amount of energy, do not have an equal worth in relation to the building of Communism. He imagines a worker being insulted by his boss. This event, he claims, produces a specific volume of anger – which will inevitably break out. The worker, he says, might erupt and throw a plate at his wife. But instead, he says, the worker could channel the same anger into organiing a revolutionary demonstration or distributing agitationalpamphlets. For Zalkind, the unruly unconscious is not primitive in the Freudian sense; psychic chaos is a product of bourgeois society. Sex is thus morally rather than mortally dangerous; it is wasteful and frivolous rather than primal and destructive.

Zalkind is obsessed with the disorganisation and chaos of bourgeois sexuality with its ‘rampant leakage of energy wealth’ and explicitly equates financial and sexual excess. And this is as much an attack on NEP as it is on Western capitalism. For Zalkind, sex too much, too soon, too often or with too many people results in irrational ‘dis-organized’ feeling, diverting energy that could otherwise be used for building the new Communist society. Zalkind’s Twelve Commandments are thus an attempt to conceive of the maximum productive use of human energy possible.

Attuned to this infamously Taylor-obsessed period, he is thus focused on management, rationality, organisation and discipline. Zalkind was far from unique in this regard. Indeed, according to Richard Stites, some married couples did actually attempt to organize their domestic chores and sex lives on the basis of the Scientific Organisation of Labour. Lenin conceived of excessive sex as ‘wasted health and strength.’ Alexandra Kollontai similarly noted that promiscuity could ‘lower the resources of labour energy available to society.’

Just under half of the Soviet population in this period could not read at all, let alone read rarified debates about psychoanalytic theory, but these issues were not completely detached from concrete everyday concerns. Zalkind’s conception of energy has a physiological dimension that differentiates it from psychoanalysis. He insists that Freudian theory has a ‘materialist essence’, which he rather clumsily grafts onto a Pavlovian understanding of unconditioned reflexes.

After the Civil War, exhaustion was a major pre-occupation. As a result of malnutrition, impotence was widespread. Zalkind’s understanding of energy, however crude and absurd-sounding, should thus be understood in relation to the very real presence of scarcity and hunger. Furthermore, the specificities of the Soviet economy created a direct relation to food, and therefore to this physiological quantified definition of energy. During War Communism when money effectively became worthless, food literally functioned as a general equivalent - the first loan of the NEP period was levied in terms of rye and in villages transactions were accounted in poods of bread grain. Rationing continued throughout the NEP-period, rendering sustenance in neat commensurable tokens.

In Treatise on Money (1930), John Maynard Keynes describes the plight of the Muscovite cheese monger during the hyperinflation of war communism who, upon selling a pound of cheese, ‘ran off with the roubles as fast as his legs could carry him to the Central Market to replenish his stocks by changing them into cheese again, lest they lost their value before he got there.’ Cheese in this period was a more stable repository of value than money. This passage is cited by Lyotard in his strange and occasionally repugnant Libidinal Economy (which, published in France in 1974, was itself the product of a moment of economic crisis). He characterises this period of crisis as a vertiginous ‘time of flight’ in which transactions become slippery and uncertain, without continuity, lacking a stable unit of reference: ‘From one heap of notes to the other, there is no identity, not even simple quantitative difference. Every ‘exchange’ becomes an event, opens up a type of adventure, where death is the stake.’ But writers like Zalkind point to the continued zeal for attempting to find stable units of reference, to quantify and make things commensurable even in the face of such chaos. Cheese, which provides a certain amount of calories, has an unmediated relation to the economy of energy Zalkind is concerned with. There is here a much more literal material connection between monetary and libidinal economies than in Freudian psychoanalysis.

The acute privations of War Communism may have been eased by the introduction of the NEP mixed economy, but Zalkind’s treatise captures something of the ideological uneasiness that accompanied the re-emergence of private enterprise – luxury was condemned, hardship romanticised. Thinness was often related to ideological purity. Kollontai’s ‘thin and under-nourished’ Communist heroine Vasilisa Malygina drinks ‘nothing but water, eat[s] slops, dress[es] in rags’ and once infuriates her frivolous NEP-man lover by falling asleep during sex as she’s so tired from organising a worker’s commune. Conversely, sexual excess was often related to excessive eating, Vasilisa’s red lipped frippery-obsessed rival is notably voluptuous. The NEP-man or woman unable to accumulate Capital simply consumed. If pleasure is a quantity rather than a quality, its visual representation is fat.

These physiological conceptions of energy owe more to Marx than to Freud. For Marx, labour power is conceived of in physiological terms as ‘a definite quantity of human muscle, nerve [and] brain’. Marx describes labour capacity as the ‘aggregate of mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form’, which is abstracted from individual beings under Capital. But, as the NEP-era Soviet economist Isaak Rubin convincingly demonstrates, Marx’s quantified abstracted definition of physiological labour power is specific to capitalism. The equation of different forms of labour is only necessitated by commodity exchange. Value does not exist in relation to labour alone, but only in relation to both labour and exchange value. Abstraction is thus inextricably linked to alienation. Under Communism, Rubin claims, it should be possible for labour to retain its concrete qualitative difference.

Zalkind uses more explicitly monetary language than Freud tends to, but there is nothing explicitly Communist in these rather crude metaphors, which simply emphasise the importance of savings: ‘in this transitional pre-socialist period of heroic poverty, the working class must be extremely prudent. In the use of its energy it must be frugal, even miserly… for the sake of increasing the collective fighting fund.’ Zalkind thus fails to escape the alienation of abstraction identified by Rubin.

I want to make analogy here with a 1967 story called ‘The Adventures of the Rouble’, in which a Soviet rouble narrates a day in its life – it is first given to an industrious carpenter who uses it to buy carnations for his wife on International Women’s Day, but ends up being given as change by a cab driver to an American in whose wallet it meets some arrogant US dollars. They tell the incredulous rouble of their own previous adventures - they had been given to a pilot as payment for successfully bombing foreign cities, then squandered on drinks in a bar, before being found in the hands of a wrongfully accused black man killed in a police dragnet. Our little comrade the Soviet rouble - who takes such pride in his role helping people to acquire simple quotidian items like toothbrushes, ribbons, funeral wreaths, children’s books and buttons - is horrified. He thinks he has nothing in common with these brash green monsters. The rouble thinks of himself in terms of his qualities. But ultimately, even taking into consideration the peculiarities of the Soviet non-equivalent exchange system, there is nothing in the rouble’s form that prevents him from being used for activities just as horrifying as those described by the American dollar.

Zalkind makes a similar assumption to the rouble. But conceiving of revolutionaries as having an abstracted aggregate of capabilities, risks reducing both revolutionary activity and sex (assuming the two are mutually exclusive) to a purely logical universal without any real qualities. What are these revolutionaries supposed to be fighting for exactly? Jacques Derrida’s remarks about Freud’s economic conception of pleasure are apposite here. Freud, he says, implicitly supposes that we know what pleasure is but fails to actually tell us anything about it – ‘Nothing is said of the qualitative experience of pleasure itself. What is it? What does it consist of? … The definition of the pleasure principle is mute about pleasure, about its essence and quality. Guided by the economic point of view, this definition concerns only quantitative relations.’

By the time of the First Five Year Plan, an attempt was made to transgress the physiological limits of the human body. The superhuman feats of the Stakhanovite shock worker or the indestructible socialist realist hero overcome corporeal constraints; the human will functions as a kind of boundless supernatural fuel detached from material necessity. But here there is a shift from internal to external quantities, with success measured in terms of ever more extravagant quotas, delivered in ever decreasing time-frames. Stalinist scientists may have borrowed Engels’ definition of the dialectic as the inherent a priori structure of nature, but Stalinist discourse imagines an energy without entropy (which interestingly is exactly how Reich defined ‘orgone’) and does not incorporate Engels’ strange vision of the death of humanity (with its obvious roots in 19th century discourses of thermodynamics): ‘when gradually even the last trace of organic life will vanish; and the earth, an extinct frozen globe like the moon, will circle in deepest darkness.’ As the heap of corpses grew higher and higher, the finitude of human life, was strangely disavowed.

—-

Alexandra Kollontai’s work is often juxtaposed to the conservatism of Zalkind. Kollontai does attempt to imagine a world of gender equality, of collective solidarity, of love beyond the couple form. But these are formal questions - her pronouncements on the content of transformed Eros are more problematic. During the Civil War, she claims, love was replaced by a coarse form of sexuality that she calls ‘wingless Eros’. But this ‘unadorned sexual drive’ will eventually be replaced under Communism by a new, beautiful ‘winged Eros.’ Ultimately, like Zalkind, her ideal love is restrained, ‘joyful unity and comradeship’ with collective work taking the place of exuberant kissing. Her rather florid vision of the ‘many stringed lyre’ of love – all tender emotions, comradely sensitivity and organic healthiness – superficially contrasts with Zalkind’s mechanical rationality. It may have qualities, but they are difficult to distinguish from the mawkish representations of bourgeois romantic love that she is attacking. It hazily imagines Communist love as final reconciliation and is thus de-eroticised, flaccid, devoid of tension.

For Freud, Eros, or the life instincts are opposed to death. Death, for Freud, is inscribed in life from its inception, lying in the future, but more importantly, in the past. For Freud, life emerged out of inorganic matter and strives to return there.This does posit a time without tension – that is, the time before life began. The death instinct, he writes, ‘was brought into being by the coming to life of inorganic substance’. For Freud, death is not merely an event that happens to a living being it is a state, in a material rather than mystical sense; death is inorganic nature. For Engels, the dialectic precedes life and will outlive it and is thus strangely ahistorical, whereas for Freud tension, dynamism and motion emerge with life. For Freud, the changes that occur in living things are conditioned by the stasis of the inorganic. This dichotomy between dynamism and stasis distinguishes it from Marx’s metabolism in which Subject and Object are mutually constituted. But as Alfred Schmidt argues, the two theories are linked by their insistence on non-identity, the impossibility of a final reconciliation of humanity with nature. Freud’s insistence on the necessity for instinctual renunciation is the psychological counterpart of Marx’s acknowledgement that even after the removal of class antagonism nature ultimately remains external to humanity ‘the hidden utopia of psychoanalysis… is basically the Marxist utopia ‘viewed from within’

In 1925, Zalkind’s colleagues Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria wrote the introduction to the Russian translation of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. They praise the text’s boldness, but are unable to accept the conservatism of the instincts insisted upon by Freud. In a bold utopian move, they attempt to look beyond Freud’s reality principle, maintaining that a radical revolution in external conditions could result in a fundamental transformation of the human psyche. They claim that ‘a dialectician cannot fail to perceive’ Freud’s theory’s ‘enormous potential’. The movement of mental life, they insist, does not proceed evenly or in one direction but ‘sometimes experiences leaps, breaks, is continuities.’ But this is a tepid understanding of the dialectic which crucially lacks lack, negativity. Their attempt to by-pass the death drive drains Freud’s theory of precisely the tension they claim is dialectical, the propulsive conflict between life and death instincts. But as Hegel makes clear to lay hold of life, is really to lay hold of death; love is a shattering confrontation with radical otherness. The idea of love, he says, ‘sinks into mere edification, and even insipidity, if it lacks the seriousness, the suffering and the labour of the negative.’ A really radical transformation cannot be achieved without looking the negative in the face (and exuberantly kissing it)

2:00 pm • 6 May 2013 • 12 notes

FEMEN and (Post) Soviet Islamophobia

Public Veil Burning, International Women’s Day, Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, 1927

‘Take off your (black pall, your coverall), open your face, be beautiful for all! Split and crush your chains to pieces, get rid of them, be free.’

Hamza Niyazi, To Uzbek Women

In her recent article, ‘White doesn’t always mean privileged’, Agata Pyzik persuasively argues that the actions of Ukrainian feminist group Femen should be understood in relation to the post-Communist context from which they emerged. Condemning Femen as racist and privileged for their actions in France that focused on the highly-charged issue of the veil, risks downplaying the brutality, exploitation and hardship many women face in contemporary Ukraine and other parts of the post-Communist ‘East’. Whiteness, Pyzik argues, is not a homogeneous category, but economically inflected, and Eastern European women cannot be straightforwardly aligned with their white Western European counterparts.

Pyzik underlines urgent issues in relation to the oppression of women in Eastern Europe and is right to highlight the colonial practices that have marked Eastern European history. Yet she draws a sharp distinction between Femen’s actions within their post-Soviet context, and their apparently more ill-advised interventions in Western Europe.

Pyzik concedes that Femen is ‘blind’ to the racism implicit in equating ‘Arab culture’ with patriarchy, but contends that post-colonial critics of Femen are too quick to dismiss their fleshy displays as ‘fast-food feminism’, failing to acknowledge the feminist group’s particular geo-political origins. But the implication is that the questions raised by these critics are unique to the post-colonial context in France, that Femen should be let off the hook here due to the successful provocations wrought by their interventions on their home turf. But although Femen’s actions in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus may not have focused on Muslim women, that does not mean that many of the racial and religious issues raised in France are simply absent from the history of their region. ‘Muslim’ is no more of a homogeneous category than ‘white’, and the historical specificity of racism and Islamophobia in the Soviet and post-Soviet context should also not be neglected.

The veiled woman was a central figure in early Bolshevik iconography, a symbol of the supposed backwardness and primitivism the revolution intended to destroy. In the absence of a sizeable urban industrial working class, women in Central Asia and parts of the Caucasus were targeted as a ‘surrogate proletariat’ (to borrow Gregory Massell’s phrase). ‘The dominant administration solemnly undertook to defend this woman, pictured as humiliated, sequestered, cloistered’ – Franz Fanon’s condemnation of the 1954 unveiling campaign launched in Algeria by the French colonial government could be applied to events in the Soviet Union that occurred nearly 30 years earlier. In the late 1920s, the Soviet Union launched a huge coordinated assault – ‘hujum’ – against Muslim practices deemed most oppressive to women, focusing on the veil as the symbol of patriarchal oppression par excellence. Vast numbers of Russian feminist activists arrived in Soviet Central Asia to implement these policies, as part of a campaign to ‘indigenise’ Soviet rule. Huge mass unveiling ceremonies were organised where women, with a range of motivations, theatrically cast off and burnt their veils. In the wake of the campaign, thousands of Muslim women were violently beaten, raped and murdered, usually by their own family members, for unveiling or transgressing traditional gender roles, crimes which though condemned in the press, often went unpunished by the Soviet courts.

The legacy of these policies today is ambivalent. But the post-Soviet narrative still overwhelmingly conforms to the established supposedly anti-imperialist Bolshevik account of the liberation of Muslim women, deviating substantially from post-colonialist discourse in the West. International Women’s Day (once radical, but long mawkish and conservative) is still celebrated in many predominantly Muslim post-Soviet states, and the education and entry of women into the workforce are officially extolled aspects of Soviet rule, glossing over the various complex forms of brutality, coercion, compromise and resistance that accompanied the emergence of these ostensibly positive outcomes. And of course, high female literacy and employment rates never spelled gender equality in any Soviet Republic.

Not only is this history elided in Pyzik’s account, but by highlighting the relative under-privilege of Femen activists in comparison to their Western counterparts, she risks downplaying the racial and religious prejudices, the degrees of precarity, that operate within the post-Soviet states Femen have targeted. Issues which have recently been crudely glossed in Western media coverage of the aftermath of the Boston bomings.

Last month, Putin came out in support of a ban on the hijab in schools in the Stravropol region of Russia, decrying the veil as an ‘alien tradition’. Despite being an ostensibly secular state with a Muslim population of up to 15%, Putin’s close relationship to the Orthodox Church is well-documented. Ukraine’s President Yanukovich was awarded the prize of Patriarch Alexius II in 2011 ‘for the consolidation and promotion of Christian values in the life of society’, and Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko has similarly asserted the authority of the Orthodox Church, and its social role in cementing the ‘Slavonic brotherhood…of the peoples of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.’ The Western media furore over Pussy Riot’s punk prayer, insufficiently underlined the extent to which their protest was aimed at attacking the increasing complicity of Church and State in contemporary Russia, attacking Putin for appropriating the aesthetic of the Orthodox Church (which amassed huge fortunes in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union after being granted the privilege of duty-free cigarette importation) for political ends.

Meanwhile, despite its large Muslim population, planning permissions for new mosques in Moscow are routinely refused. Sergey Sobyanin, the mayor of Moscow, recently claimed that this was because the majority of Muslims in the city were not Russian citizens but illegal migrant workers, apparently undeserving of a place of worship. He claimed: ‘Muscovites now get irritated by people who speak a different language, have different manners, with aggressive behaviour. This is not purely ethnic, but this is connected with some ethnic traits.’ Of course, this is flagrant racism, and suggests all Muslims in Moscow are non-Russians. But the issue of migration from former Soviet Republics to Russia and Ukraine is a pressing one. Once citizens of the same country, today millions of illegal migrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus comprise a kind of informal underclass, often working menial jobs for extremely low pay, facing regular harassment and discrimination from the police, and marginality within an increasingly institutionally xenophobic society.

The kitsch pastoral image evoked by Femen might, as Pyzik suggests, be designed to function satirically as a kind of ludicrous projection of male fantasy, that can function to interrupt the prevailing macho culture when deployed in the appropriate circumstances. But the danger is that Femen participate in consolidating rather than disrupting a stereotyped vision of (white) female beauty. Indeed, Pyzik points to the group’s far-right affiliations in a recent blog post. It might be churlish not to acknowledge the impact of some of Femen’s actions, but the Islamophobic dimension of their protests in France should not casually be written off as a naive intervention in a foreign context with no resonances with the post-Soviet environment from which they emerged. My intention is not to contradict Pyzik, one of the few journalists writing in English who routinely explores the complexities of contemporary post-Communist Europe from a left-wing perspective. She is right to stress the continued colonisation and suffering in the post-Soviet context, but oppression, exploitation and immiseration take many forms, all of which need to be fought against.

7:19 pm • 4 May 2013 • 2 notes

Lenin’s body still lies in its Mausoleum in Red Square. Meanwhile, Lenin’s brain is housed at the Moscow Brain Institute in thousands of wafer-thin slices. Here I trace the adventures of Lenin’s brain from his death in 1924 until 1936 (when a final report on the brain was submitted to the Central Executive Committee, before being buried in an archive where it stayed until the collapse of the USSR).

The 2011 exhibition at the Royal Academy – Building the Revolution – ended with images of Lenin’s Mausoleum. This design by Aleksey Shchusev (originally executed in wood but replaced by a permanent marble and granite structure in 1930) was chosen by the exhibition’s curators to mark the end of the avant garde experimentation that had characterised the early years of the revolution – standing as a Janus-like figure between Leninism and Stalinism. Of course, there are aesthetic reasons that the Mausoleum can be seen to mark this moment of transition, but obviously the function of the building gives it an added symbolic potency.

Perhaps we have become accustomed to the idea of the mummified Communist leader. Kim Jong Il will apparently be embalmed like his father. But it does not require much metaphorical subtly to see how weird this is as a symbol of a supposedly radically new and dynamic Communist society - a dead body, a hollowed out and increasingly synthetic corpse. A ‘totalitarian mummified communism’ in the words of Tsvetan Todorov.

But the rhetoric following Lenin’s death was of immortality. Stalin declared: ‘The Communist body does not decay!’ Despite his death Lenin would remain the eternal leader of the Soviet Union – in the words of Mayakovsky:

Lenin

-lived

Lenin

-lives

Lenin

-will live

Lenin died on the 21st January 1924 of a brain haemorrhage. Following a stroke blood flooded his brain causing his respiratory function to fail. His cerebral blood vessels were weakened due to severe sclerosis. Sclerosis was said to attack the most vulnerable organ in the body. The newspapers thus reported that Lenin’s brain was weakened from thinking too hard on behalf of the people – as the Commissar for Health proclaimed ‘his superhuman mental activity, life of constant agitation and ceaseless activity brought our leader to untimely death.’ Lenin, it was said, sacrificed his life for the revolution.

Lenin’s brain is here understood as a kind of superior thought-producing machine. Thinking was said to have killed Lenin, as though it were a strenuous physical activity. Roland Barthes claims that Einstein’s thought is conceived as ‘a functional labour analogous to the mechanical making of sausages, the grinding of corn or the crushing of ore.’ This observation is perhaps more apposite in relation to Lenin, suggesting a link between neurological theories and the Soviet obsession with Taylorism – of achieving maximal industrial efficiency through the rational organisation of labour. Evgeny Zemyatin’s We (a dystopian novel from 1921 which could be read not simply as an attack on the nascent Soviet Union but as an attack on Taylorism in both its Capitalist and Communist incarnations) suggests the dangers of treating the brain as a machine to be efficiently organised – ‘this precise, clean, glittering mechanism without a speck of dust on it’- the novel ends with its protagonist receiving a kind of lobotomy to prevent him from dissenting – ‘You are perfect! You are mechanised!’

Following the autopsy, Lenin’s corpse was described in gory detail in the Soviet newspapers. One commentator was horrified at the phenomenon, thinking it betrayed crude materialism, reducing the great leader to nothing more than a pound of flesh: ‘Lenin is only matter, nothing more than a combination of a cranial hemisphere, intestines, an abdominal cavity, a heart, kidneys, a spleen.’ It was as if Lenin was nothing more than the sum of his parts. Yet something, it was felt, distinguished this particular conglomeration of organs from others. Lenin may have been treated as mere matter but this matter, it was felt, must somehow matter more. There was a continual emphasis on the apparently impressive weight of Lenin’s brain (1340 grams) – citing the physical bulk of his brain as proof of his metaphysical greatness. Apparently as a baby Lenin’s head was so large that he frequently fell over.

Barthes describes Einstein’s brain as occupying a place between myth and machine – part magician, part robot. Perhaps a similar distinction could be made between Lenin’s embalmed body – a dimly-lit object of veneration - and his brain – an object for scientific scrutiny. While the body seems to belong to what Marx described as ‘the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world’, the brain belonged to science. To conceive of Lenin in this manner suggests that the Revolution itself was endowed with this two-fold character – its origins simultaneously mystical and material.

After languishing in a jar of formaldehyde for two years, German neurologist Oskar Vogt was appointed by the Soviet authorities to examine Lenin’s brain. Vogt was not only an internationally renowned scientist but also had left-wing credentials, being a member of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany. The appointment of a non-Soviet scientist was not an unususal measure in the relatively open atmosphere of the mid-1920s (not only in science but in architecture and engineering, for example, foreign experts were often employed by the Soviet authorities at this time).

Vogt was interested in ‘elite’ brains and claimed to be able to identify the material substratum of genius through histological examination. He was influenced by eugenicist ideas which were far from a preserve of the right in this period. He employed a method called ‘cytoarchitectonics’. This method involved horizontally slicing the brain and analysing sections to determine their architecture. This method made it possible to measure different regions and therefore it was thought it could be used to locate genius through comparison with other (supposedly inferior) brains.

Russian physicians were sent to Berlin for training. Vogt was given a large building in Moscow that had been confiscated from an American business to set up the Moscow Brain Institute (initially dedicated to solely to the study of Lenin’s brain). Attached was a museum with a ‘Pantheon of Brains’ – including Bogdanov, Mayakovsky, Andrey Bely, Gorky, Pavlov… But although headed by Vogt it was still a national Soviet institution. The Institute’s Deputy Director was employed as one of Stalin’s secret secretaries in ‘semi-dark affairs’ who guaranteed to keep Stalin informed of all the research undertaken.

Vogt’s first report on Lenin’s brain demonstrated scant results but did emphasise the singularity and superiority of the brain, concluding Lenin had been a ‘mental athlete’ (again conceiving of thinking as a strenuous physical activity) with an abnormally large frontal lobe containing unusually large pyramidal cells. But a coordinated attack on Vogt began in the late 20s. This was in line with a broader shift in Soviet science. As Stalin consolidated his power and introduced the doctrine of ‘Socialism in One Country’, Soviet sciencebecame increasingly insular. Stalinist science was mobilized to serve new state policies and more rigidly defined what it meant to be a scientist working ‘Under the Banner of Marxism’. Vogt was accused of giving lectures on the brain in Berlin which compared it to those of criminals (this was seen as degrading). It was also suggested that the ‘bourgeois’ press had noted that the large pyramidal cells found in Lenin’s brain were characteristic of mental retardation rather than genius. In 1932 a delegation were sent to Berlin to begin de-seating Vogt. They actually arrived to find that Hitler had done the job for them - Vogt had been removed from his leadership position at the Institute in Berlin and was also banned from leaving Germany. This gave the Soviets a pretext to suggest they carry on without him. In 1932 Avel Enudize replaced Vogt as the head of the Institute – he was head of Kremlin security rather than a scientist.

In 1936 the final report on Lenin’s Brain was presented to the Central Executive Committee – a dense, lengthy and jargon laden report. This report was then buried in the archives. It remains unclear why it was not published…

11:00 pm • 26 April 2013

“The psychoanalytical doctor and above all his patient come from a middle class which until recently had to worry little about its stomach. When Freud’s Vienna became less carefree […] there was a psychoanalytical advice bureau for attempted suicides, where there was also the opportunity to get to know the drives beneath the libido. Because over ninety per cent of all suicides occur out of economic deprivation and only the rest out of love-sickness (which is incidentally unrepressed). However, even in bourgeois déclassé Vienna, the notice hung on the wall of the psychological advice bureau: ‘Economic and social questions cannot be treated here.’ Understandably, little could be thus discovered about the inner life of the attempted suicide, and just as little was done to remove the commonest complex of all: […] the money complex.”

— Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Volume 1

10:28 pm • 26 April 2013 • 1 note

“The first clock was the first policeman, a policeman that thought set up over itself, and which brought with it all those limitations of personal freedom that were to follow… We can love everything - people, animals, flowers, stones - but nobody loves the police! We are also engaged, some more, some less, in never-ending conflict with the clock… through all this I totally forget that I am time; that it is I who sometimes flies with the wings of a bird and sometimes creeps like a snail, and that when I think I am killing time, I am really killing myself”

— Wilhelm Wundt, ‘On Time’, 1862

6:37 am • 22 April 2013

moscowmemories:

Postcard 1971

“Moscow. Kalinin Prospekt in holiday attire” Photo by I. Denisenko
Москва. Проспект Калинина в праздничном оформлении

(via sovietpostcards)

3:57 pm • 25 March 2013 • 96 notes

FILM REVIEW: FOR MARX…

Svetlana Baskova, 2012, Cine Fantom, Russia

‘passions without truth, truths without passion; heroes without heroic deeds, history without events; development, whose sole driving force seems to be the calendar, wearying with constant repetition of the same tensions and relaxations; antagonisms that periodically seem to work themselves up to a climax only to lose their sharpness and fall away without being able to resolve themselves; pretentiously paraded exertions and philistine terror at the danger of the world’s coming to an end, and at the same time the pettiest intrigues and court comedies played by the world redeemers… If any section of history has been painted grey on grey, it is this.’

Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

‘Are we really one nation – the factory owners and us?’ Svetlana Baskova’s For Marx…, screened as part of the Berlin International Film Festival 2013, reposes a question asked by Bolshevik historian Mikhail Pokrovsky. But though billed as a Neo-Soviet film and self-consciously reflecting upon the legacy of the Communist past, For Marx… is distinctly contemporary, exploring the impact of the international financial crisis on Russian industry.

Following the financial crisis in 2008, Russia experienced the steepest decline of all the G20 countries, tied to plummeting oil prices and Russia’s dependence on foreign markets. Between 2008 and 2009 manufacturing fell by 25%, ushering in a wave of factory closures, increased unemployment and the re-emergence of forms of barter prevalent during the 1990s. Wage arrears became a major issue and this is one of the key grievances of the fictional workers depicted in For Marx…

Svetlana Baskova, For Marx… (2012)

Set in 2010, the film focuses on the workers and bosses of a smelting plant in Nizhny Novgorod, following the formation and repression of an independent trade union. The new Labour Code of the Russian Federation, adopted in 2002, saw the right to strike in Russia dramatically reduced, substantially curtailing the rights of workers to organize independent trade unions. Although the right to strike is technically enshrined in the Labour Code, in practice this right is restricted to very specific forms of dispute, with the result that most strikes and protests can be declared illegal and are often brutally repressed. The weary flat-capped men populating Baskova’s film might be less sexy than neon balaclava wearing female punk rockers, but the traditional industrial proletariat extolled in official Soviet culture did not disappear with the collapse of the Soviet Union; For Marx… draws attention to politically urgent issues, even if they are unlikely to generate a media frenzy in the West. But though the film has a political agenda, it is not dryly polemical. Cultural references abound and the film is permeated by dark humour. The workers’ discussions encompass not only political theorists like Pokrovsky but touch on film, literature and theatre.

The factory’s cinema club meet to watch Jean-Luc Godard’s 1970 film A Wind from the East, made under the auspices of the Marxist Dziga Vertov Group which formed in the aftermath of the protests of 1968, and self-consciously aligned itself with the Soviet avant garde. But formally For Marx… has little in common with the experimental style of Godard and Vertov, or with Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike (1925), which also deals with the violent suppression of a workers’ protest. These directors sought to elaborate a distinctly radical and collective mode of cinematic representation, whereas For Marx… is broadly realist, though emphatically not in the simplified grandiose heroic mode of Soviet socialist realism. There are instead echoes of more nuanced Soviet engagements with the difficulties of working life, like Sergei Mikaleian’s The Bonus (1975), as well as of classic American depictions of union organization like Paul Schader’s Blue Collar (1978) or Herbert J Biberman’s Salt of the Earth (1954). Perhaps the formal pyrotechnics of Eisenstein and Vertov are unsuited to the present being portrayed here. The wild heady pace characteristic of the avant garde montage enthusiastically extolled the possibilities industrialization seemed to promise post-revolutionary Russia. Instead, Baskova presents the dirt, decay and dilapidation of the desolate contemporary moment.

Paul Schrader, Blue Collar (1978)

For Marx… captures something of the confusion and cynicism that has accompanied the collapse of a state that represented, at least in theory, the interests of working people against those of capitalism. As Godard’s film proclaims: ‘We are never completely the contemporaries of our own time. History advances in disguise. It fills the screen with the mask of the preceding sequence… We see and hear the past superimposed on the present.’ The workers still rely heavily on their Soviet vocabulary, education and lexicon of references. In a key scene, a group of workers gather in a corridor and discuss Gogol and Belinsky, and debate the theatrical methods of Brecht and Stanislavsky. But the implication of these debates is ambivalent. Certainly, Baskova seems to be underlining the continued potency of these texts but also acknowledges that many stock references were rote learned and can thus be repeated automatically, without reflection. Furthermore, there is a clear generational divide in the film between older workers familiar with leftist theory and their more politically detached younger counterparts, suggesting that this legacy of radical thought might be drained of all vitality. (Although interestingly, this neat generational distinction is less clearly defined in Baskova’s 2011 documentary about Russian trade union movements One Solution – Resistance in which many younger workers are very active participants)

Jean-Luc Godard, A Wind From the East (1970)

The dissonance between past and present in For Marx… is most forcefully shown by the figure of the boss. The young thuggish factory owner is introduced in his bright brittle office, a stark contrast to the dim and crumbling factory interiors. The room is decorated in a crass Corporate-baroque style, the shiny Wall Street furnishings incongruously combined with gilt framed classical paintings of epic Gladiatorial battles. Despite his own penchant for bellicose ‘bourgeois’ tradition, he notes with some bemusement that Western business people tend to collect avant garde art, announcing his intention to fly to an auction in London, where Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Black Square will sell for 30 million. ‘30 million what?’ his incredulous colleague asks. Once radical attempts to transform the world are, the film bleakly implies, easily recuperated. The film’s rather grotesque characterization of the boss almost corresponds to the stereotypical Soviet representation of Capitalists. But the implication seems to be not that the world today can easily be carved into neat moral segments, as in Soviet times, but that the Russian elite now play out their lives as roles, crudely drawn archetypes devoid of depth.

Kazemir Malevich, Black Square (1915)

During their intellectual discussion, one worker invokes Marx’s famous opening lines from the 18^th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: all great historical facts appear twice, first as tragedy, then as farce. For Marx… itself initially strikes a farcical tone. But at a key moment the tone shifts suddenly from satire to savage violence, underlining that farcical appearances are combined with concrete brutality. Although the boss’s adviser suggests that the workers might be easily subdued by conceding to make minor improvements in their working conditions, the boss orders that the activists be crushed. The trade union group leave the factory after their corridor discussion to be greeted by gunfire, leaving most of them dead. On the day of the demonstration, the film’s protagonist, who escaped the shooting, is handed a plastic bag on a stairwell containing human entrails. In terror, he capitulates and decides to cooperate with the bosses. He seems to be motivated by fear, but his actions are hesitant, confused, tinged with cynicism and resignation. His exaggerated yet ultimately hollow-seeming facial expressions betray the disorientation, bewilderment and dislocation that Baskova suggests is characteristic of contemporary Russia.

Even after the shockingly violent suppression of the union, farce persists. Tragedy demands heroes, however flawed. But there are no more heroes any more. The main protagonist is presented as venal, shallow and ultimately powerless. Conforming with Marx’s description in the 18^th Brumaire, people here seem to have become shadows without bodies. Suffering persists without the catharsis or coherence of the tragic form. The funeral of the murdered workers descends into a comically macabre fight scene: one worker slips into a muddy grave, and a made-up and expensively suited corpse slips casually from its coffin into the mud. Eisenstein’s Strike famously juxtaposed images of the violent suppression of the workers with footage of a slaughterhouse; the carnage depicted was framed as part of a grand narrative. The corpses are described as ‘unforgettable scars on the bodies of the proletariat’, as noble and necessary sacrifices made to the grand and global revolutionary cause. In contrast, the deaths in For Marx…, however noble their cause may be, seem eminently forgettable, needless and detached from any broader collective struggle or sense of identity.

Sergei Eisenstein, Strike (1925)

The film culminates in a bloody confrontation on a rooftop leaving both boss and worker dead. In contrast to the film’s hitherto realist style, the closing shot is reminiscent of the silent era and focuses on the protagonist in an open window of a deserted industrial building. He seems frightened and confused. He looks as though he wants to shout, to scream out, but it is impossible. The camera zooms out. A black curtain closes over the window.

2:47 pm • 25 March 2013

“
Moscow. The bustle of the streets and memories, memories! The luxurious Metro with its granite paving, its walls in Ural stone, its exits, huge underground avenues- but without benches for travellers, and expensive. We know how to build subterranean palaces but we forget that a working-class woman coming home from work would love to be able to sit down among all those rich-hued stones.
”

— Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary

9:03 am • 25 January 2013 • 2 notes

architectureofdoom:

Radio building, Osh, Kyrgyzstan

6:35 pm • 26 December 2012 • 132 notes

(Source: nevver, via sovietico)

11:59 am • 8 December 2012 • 165 notes