Madhavan Palat: Utopia and Dystopia in Revolutionary Russia. Lecture commemorating the centenary of the Bolshevik revolution
Utopia is a place or
as it literally means, a no place, in Thomas More’s Greek pun, one that does
not exist, cannot exist, but ideally
should come into being as the good place, the Eutopia. Many utopian projects,
be it beauty that never fades or the return to Eden, cannot be realized because
nature does not permit them. But utopia was a dream, it provided orientation
and hope, it allowed people to think that life could be beautiful, happy, just
and inspiring rather than ugly, miserable, oppressive and squalid. The ideal
was ahistorical and the vision was static; outside time, it did not belong to
the past, the present, or the future; as a concept it was and is often still
regarded as dogmatic and closed. As a place it was located beyond normal life, isolated
and secluded, the better for creativity and purity free of the miasmas of our
polluted world. It entailed more often than not an extraordinary journey to a
remote abode, to an island far away, to a forgotten settlement in the empty
steppe, to a remote mountain retreat.
But from the end of
the eighteenth century, in the course of the revolutionary convulsions of the
age, it was increasingly imagined as something that could be made to happen,
more as the good time than as the good place, an euchronia rather than utopia
or eutopia. As human society acquired ever more resources to control and
transform the natural world, to shape it according to its wishes, utopia seemed
a possibility.
More than anybody else
H.G. Wells summed up the distinction between the earlier utopias and the modern
one. From an ahistorical ideal it was transformed into a historical pursuit, as
a historical future. From a static vision of a place fixed in time and space,
it became a dynamic objective. It imagined the human species as mobile and cosmopolitan,
liberated from the fetters of the local and the provincial. It privileged
individualism over the communistic ideal so beloved of his predecessors,
especially Thomas More and Plato. In his forceful style he anticipated Max
Weber’s contrast between bureaucratic standardization and stability on the one
hand and charismatic transgression for change on the other. “Each man and
woman, to the extent that his or her individuality is marked, breaks the law of
precedent, transgresses the general formula, and makes a new experiment for the
direction of the life force. It is impossible, therefore, for the State, which
represents all and is preoccupied by the average, to make effectual experiments
and intelligent innovations, and so supply the essential substance of life.”
The Russian
avant-garde and the cultural intelligentsia generally, soaked in Nietzsche,
would have concurred… Download the full essay here
see also:
Alexander
Rabinowitch: The
Bolsheviks Come to Power in Petrograd: Centennial Reflections
Marcel van der Linden: Why Leninism and Bolshevism Are Not the Same
Marcel van der Linden: Why Leninism and Bolshevism Are Not the Same
