Russian revolution: the debunking of myths and nontrivial view
March 8 (February old style 23) marks the 95 years of the Russian revolution, which is believed to have caused many tragedies of the twentieth century, including in Ukraine. However, according to the author, the reasons lie much deeper, and the revolution was only a consequence, as discussed further. Moreover, its nature and even the definition of “Russian Revolution” are still not “generally understood”, and in the assessments Bolshevik or liberal-bourgeois ideological rhetoric prevails. In this essay, an attempt has been made to clear this topic of common myths, to look at the Russian revolution from the standpoint of non-trivial knowledge about society.
About the Russian revolution "common language"
It is known that the revolution began on March 8 (February 23 old style) 1917 of the year. But there is no consensus on the date of its completion ... And, in general, the concept “Russian revolution” used here is not generally accepted.
In the Soviet tradition, it was customary to separate the February bourgeois revolution and the October socialist revolution, which began on November 7-8 (October 25-26 in old style) 1917 of the year. Vladimir Ulyanov-Lenin, relying on the traditions of Russian revolutionism, advanced a very peculiar thesis about the development of a bourgeois revolution into a socialist revolution, which in general contradicts Karl Marx’s views on social processes. Then Leib Bronstein (better known as Leon Trotsky), all his life "fussing" between leftist totalitarianism and anarchism, put forward the idea of "permanent revolution" (which, by the way, is not so stupid!), Which Lenin denounced as "childhood leftism disease in communism. "
But the funny thing is that many Western ideologists - from the Left to the Right and from the Liberals to the Conservatives - in general support the Bolshevik division of the revolutionary process in Russia into a bourgeois and socialist revolution! In their opinion, the February bourgeois revolution relied on large and medium-sized capital, the urban middle class and relatively wealthy peasants, and its goal was to create a parliamentary bourgeois democracy in Russia and remove obstacles that hampered Russia’s final “building capitalism” —the monarchy system, landowner land tenure, etc. Further, in the West, opinions diverge.
The “Rightists” believe that after the February Revolution, Russia had every chance to follow the path of Western liberal-bourgeois democracy, capitalist accumulation and modernization, and, following the example of the “golden billion,” build a country of “common prosperity” - the very welfare state that today in the so-called developed countries, it seems, "is covered with a copper basin". By the way, 5 years ago, on 90, the anniversary of the Russian revolution, the general welfare society was still flourishing, as it turned out, by "inflating financial bubbles", and very few people in 2007 thought that a collapse would begin in a year. Although long before many "not the weakest minds" warned that the organization of the entire earthly civilization on the model of the "golden billion" inevitably leads to a planetary catastrophe, but this is a separate issue.
In the opinion of the right, the Bolsheviks headed by Lenin turned from the "high road of Western civilization". Having created chaos, they carried out a coup, overthrew the legitimate (?!) Government, seized power, and then created a totalitarian — one of the bloodiest in stories. True, the most “advanced” right-wing ideologues in the West still sometimes recall that the Bolsheviks relied on a broad social base; but they immediately add that they have gained its populist demagogy among the masses proletarianized and lumpenized by the First World War, putting forward slogans that were close and understandable to this mass and ultimately deceiving it.
With the fall of the USSR, these ideologies were strengthened here under the influence of liberal-bourgeois propaganda by the media, Western foundations, urgently “recovered” university professors (who in the USSR were following the course of Marxism-Leninism), foreign professors, etc. And there are a lot of things right. But the problem is that we never had a serious critical analysis of the events of the twentieth century, the primitive discourse “Bolshevism or bourgeois liberalism” persistently imposes, and our “total farmer’s” transition to the imposed western stereotypes of thinking ignores the fact that Western social thought is also a left “jet”, which is hardly more powerful than a right one.
The Leftists believe that, having played on a sharp social crisis and the eternal desire for a just world order, the Bolsheviks seized power, but built a fascist dictatorship based on the extreme degree of state capitalism, which had nothing to do with socialism and communism, which, in theory, imply a much greater level of freedom and meaningfulness of being than any, the most liberal bourgeois-parliamentary democracy. Moreover, in their views on the ideal of communism, the best representatives of the left in the West unexpectedly closely agree with religious ideologists and "right-wing reactionary-conservative romantics," but this is a separate topic.
Despite these differences, both right and left, both here and in the West, for the most part, believe that in the 1917 year Russia had two revolutions: bourgeois-democratic and proletarian-socialist ...
"Legends and myths of social science"
Such a “game of definition” or, in Marx’s terms, “illusions of consciousness” often speak of a lack of understanding of the essence of real processes, and more often of a banal “deception of the people”. On the one hand, the bourgeois are equated with capitalists, capitalism and the bourgeois system in the economy are associated exclusively with the market and free enterprise, and in socio-politics with freedom and democracy; on the other hand, socialism is associated exclusively with totalitarianism, the absence of freedom and democracy, and for some reason only the working class and the proletariat aspire to it.
Understand the ordinary chatter. A "capitalist" is an individual who is invested with the purpose of making a profit, exploiting the labor of others or not. The French word "bourgeois" (in German - "burger", in Russian - "petty bourgeois") means only "a resident of the city"; with Marx’s light hand, the “bourgeoisie” was equated with the “capitalists”, although bourgeois citizens can be both capitalists and hired workers, lumpens, hired employees (for example, clerks in offices and banks, who are very proud that they belong to middle class ", but on the socio-economic situation differ little from the miners and tractor drivers), etc. In addition, the capitalist can make a profit in the agrarian business in the countryside, and then he will no longer be a “bourgeois”, but probably a “peyzanin”, which means “peasant” in the same French.
The situation with the proletarians and the working class is no less bizarre. Again, with the light hand of Marx, the proletarians were equated with wage-workers, and this is by no means always the case. In the classical Roman understanding, “proletarian” is a formally free (not a slave) individual of the male sex, which has nothing but children, because, according to Roman custom, children and the family were considered the property of the head of the family. The proletarian can learn the craft and become a worker, and can live on alms, theft, robbery. The modern wage worker of the West, especially in the "high-tech" area, may have higher education, property, real estate, corporate shares, and by income enter the "upper middle class" (part of the middle class with high incomes), significantly exceeding small entrepreneurs, those. proper capitalists. Note that many of these and unspecified problems with the terminology of Marx are not explained by his stupidity, but by the fact that he lived and worked almost 150 years ago, when, for example, the workers were usually the proletariat. In general, the thoughtless use of the terms of the nineteenth and even eighteenth century in the twenty-first century often leads to comic "misunderstandings" that our "great-power-strategic neighbors" call "soft-boiled boots."
Now about the socialist revolution as the "blue dream" of the workers and proletarians. This is one of the controversial moments with Marx, which was partially confirmed, and partly not. The Russian revolution has shown that the proletarians can rise to the revolution, the truth of “socialism” most likely will not come out of this, but here it is necessary to understand the meaning of the word “socialism”, which is discussed further. And a well-paid worker in a country where the economy is stable or seems so (because the "operating principle" of the modern global economy seems to be precisely instability) does not need a revolution, nor socialism (whatever they understand), replace consumption and entertainment. Perhaps Marx’s greatest mistake was that he made a bet on the working class in the matter of “building a bright future”. Russian truth-seeker and political émigré Alexander Herzen led a tough controversy about this with Marx. Herzen ingeniously remarked that the European worker is the same philistine as the petty bourgeois, he does not save from the philistinism in moral and psychological sense, and the working class for the most part is not suitable for finding the highest meaning of humanity. True, here, Herzen, with the "primordially-Russian simplicity," called the "inborn socialists" Russian peasants of the 19th century with their communal land use.
But the funny thing is that the socialist parties and movements often came from classes that Marxists called the “petty bourgeoisie” - small entrepreneurs, employees, teachers, or even capitalists, landowners and noblemen. Just look at the "personnel" of Russian and Ukrainian socialists of various stripes at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Lenin, Lunacharsky, Trotsky, Berdyaev, Martov, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Deich, Plekhanov, Savinkov, Petlyura, Vinnichenko, Grushevsky, Shapoval and others the proletariat and the workers had nothing to do!
Even more fun is the case with capitalism, socialism, totalitarianism, freedom, democracy, the market, i.e. a set of "words", which "juggle" all and sundry. Capitalism is not at all synonymous with freedom, democracy and the market. Although fascist Germany called itself “national socialism,” no one “canceled” capitalism there, but somehow did not work out with freedom and democracy in the Third Reich; the same can be said about Franco Spain, fascist Italy, Pinochet's Chile. Suppose the examples given are “extreme”.
There is very little democracy in the clan-corporate system of modern Japan. So said in an interview with the newspaper "The Mirror of the Week" (No. 3, 2007) a professor of history at the University of Lviv, Yaroslav Gritsak, who has experience there. Note that while in Japan - one of the highest levels of life and that the same can be said about South Korea. True, prof. Gritsak discovered a free market in Japan, but he seems to be mistaken: the market there is at the level of small business, and macroeconomics is controlled by several monopolistic conglomerates. Roosevelt, with the help of very undemocratic and non-market mass public works, took America out of the terrible crisis that created the market-capitalist element that put the country on the brink of a social explosion. The modern Western corporate-state system leaves little room for freedom and democracy, which are understood only in the sense of being able to choose from a generally accepted list of goods and entertainment. In general, the freedom in the developed world is best to ask our "arbayterov". Even well-settled emigrants from the former USSR say curious things: they did not find widely advertised freedom in the West, especially in the USA, if only because every step is controlled through payment cards, a system of visas, green cards, migration control, etc., make senseless the theme of "open society", etc. At the same time, the countries of "developed capitalism" have powerful social assistance systems, and many employees are also co-owners of corporations, which is not capitalism, but socialism. For example, in Sweden, democracy, socialism, monarchy and capitalism peacefully coexist. In general, the current global system under the auspices of "developed countries" has little to do with the declared freedom and market.
More interesting is the "bourgeois-democratic" and "proletarian-socialist" revolutions. Not all significant "bourgeois-democratic" revolutions can be directly linked to the bourgeoisie and democracy. The social basis of the revolution in the Netherlands (which also had national liberation overtones) was largely bourgeois citizens, but the peasants also played a big role, and the most important striking force was the “gyozy”, that is, the lumpen pirates, which Charles de Bonfire in The Legend of Thiel Ulenshpigel. The revolution cleared the way for capitalism, which allowed for a while to make a small country a global superpower, but this revolution can hardly be considered such a "bourgeois" one.
In the English Revolution, the townspeople actively participated, both the haves and the poor; there was a powerful democratic movement against the monarchy, the estate system, large landlord and church land tenure. But at the same time, firstly, the revolution did not bring democracy to power, but a dictatorship led by the Lord Protector, and ended with the restoration of the monarchy and the preservation of the estate system that exists in Great Britain today; secondly, the English Revolution entailed a massive bloody psychosis, which makes talk of freedom and democracy in general senseless; thirdly, the revolution cleared the way for capitalism, but the biggest beneficiaries were the big landowners who drove the peasants off their lands (which is very similar to the current situation in Ukraine); that is why, fourthly, the free-swing peasants, yeomanry, who fought not for a "bright capitalist future," but against capitalism, were the shock force of the revolutionary army of Oliver Cromwell, because he deprived them of the land they de facto owned, even if de jure was feudal dependence; Fifthly, the driving force of the revolution was the powerful “proto-socialist” movement of levelers. Therefore, it is incorrect to consider the English revolution to be unambiguously "bourgeois-democratic."
The French Revolution, unlike the English, was perhaps more “urban” and “bourgeois”, but to call it “democratic” somehow the language does not turn. She begun slogans of Liberty-Equality-Fraternity, led to the Jacobin dictatorship, bloody mass psychosis, naturally ended the dictatorship of Bonaparte, following the defeat which each other replaced pseudo-democracy, restoration of the monarchy, a dictatorship ... And so France "shaken" almost a hundred years, right up to the Paris Commune !
To sum up the interim, we note that the German-Jewish Trotskyist Ivaak Deutscher expressed very aptly in the sense that the so-called bourgeois revolutions hardly guessed that they were bourgeois at least in terms of the driving forces, which were usually proletarian.
This extensive “lyrical digression” was required for the following reasons. First, these revolutions have changed the face of their countries and the whole civilization, therefore they are considered "Great Revolutions". Secondly, contrary to established myths, they cannot definitely be called "capitalist" and "bourgeois-democratic", and talking about the mandatory democracy of capitalism and the bourgeoisie, about the unequivocal bourgeois capitalists and "capitalism" of the bourgeois, as well as the all-time totalitarianism of socialism is empty chatter. Thirdly, along with the English and French, the Russian revolution is also "great", because it radically changed not only the Russian Empire, but the earthly civilization.
The truth about the myths of the Russian revolution
It seems that the division into the February bourgeois-democratic and October proletarian-socialist revolutions is fundamentally wrong. The Russian revolution was a single dialectically contradictory process, which led to a bloody psychosis and a totalitarian nightmare, and there were very few chances for a more or less democratic and humane final.
In Ukraine, the idea of the Russian revolution as a single process was clearly formulated by one of the best, in the author's opinion, historians, Doctor of History, Professor Stanislav Kulchitsky. In one of his publications, he wrote that, having expressed this idea at one international conference, he was very puzzled by historians from Russia who, it would seem, even agreed with him. The author also visited this idea for a long time, and the publications of the famous historian only reinforced the idea that the Russian revolution, like any other, should be considered as "one and indivisible"; the maximum that is possible is division into stages. Paradoxically, but well-trained “cadre” historians such things are often inaccessible due to their commitment to positivistic, linear-causal and Cartesian views. But this idea is quite obvious if you look at the revolution as a mass psychic phenomenon, using knowledge from deep psychology and wave models of the social psyche as an energy-information process, which is discussed further.
Here, the Ukrainian Revolution, which the zealous national patriots are not excessively in demand, is to be separated from the Russian: they say, the most important was the national liberation movement ("national-wise zmagannya"), and the social revolution was brought by the Bolsheviks and the Moskal in general! And the struggle of the Ukrainian peasantry for the land? And the movement of workers in the industrial regions of Ukraine, which could not be inspired only by the Russian Bolsheviks, as the "patriots" now prove? The Ukrainian revolution was an integral part of the Russian revolution (whether anyone likes it or not) and contained within itself a national jet, which was also very heterogeneous.
Moreover, the Russian revolution itself was an integral part of a single dialectically contradictory multivariate (!) Civilization process, the result of not only the history of Russia (especially in the XIX century), but also the world, first of all European, history. Of particular importance was the First World War, which, with its extremely aggravated problems, dragged Russia into no less acute global contradictions. Austria-Hungary and Prussia crumbled, revolutions broke out in Bavaria and Hungary, the British Empire reeled, France resisted from the social explosion, largely due to reparations from Germany, American capital and troops. At the beginning of the twentieth century. there was a crisis of the world system of imperialism - and this is not an invention of the Bolsheviks. By the way, the American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, who is very popular now in the West, after Lenin, argues that capitalism cannot be considered in principle as a simple set of economic states, but only as a global system. The imperialist war in the interests of the ruling state-monopoly cliques developed into civil and national (particularly in Ukraine), and the sharp proletarianisation of the masses in Russia as the weakest link of world imperialism led to revolution. Everyone who has studied “Marxism-Leninism” is familiar with these theses put forward by Lenin back in 1914. and confirmed by history. Here we are dealing not so much with powerful intellect, as with V. Lenin's no less powerful intuition, no matter how they relate to it. The orthodox Soviet ideology could not explain these processes and said that they were “objective”, i.e. no special explanation is required. The historical materialism of the late 19th – early 20th century sample, which was used by the ideologists of the CPSU, as well as the western “political science”, cannot explain the Russian revolution with its “communism”, imperialism with totalitarianism, the West’s overcoming the crisis in the second half of the 20th century, the threat of a new crisis at the beginning of the twenty-first century under talk of globalization, and finally the crisis itself, which did come and develop successfully at the moment.
Was the first stage of the Russian revolution really “bourgeois-democratic”, which means “capitalist” within the framework of conventional stamps? Indeed, there was the general democratic task of establishing civil rights and freedoms, destroying the monarchy and landlordism as a relic of serfdom with the distribution of land to the peasants. (By the way, Prof. S.Kulchitsky expressed a curious and sensible idea that there has never been feudalism in Russia, for European feudalism and Russian serfdom are, as they say in Odessa, "two big differences"). But there was hardly any urgent task to clear the way for capitalism. We repeat that a number of countries of “developed capitalism” with strong positions of democracy and socialism are nominally monarchies to this day, and democratic rights and freedoms are not obligatory for capitalism. In Russia, big capital, including foreign capital, peacefully got on together, even relied on tsarism, and small business also had its niche. Before the World War, the pace of capitalism development was tremendous, the growth of the economy was one of the largest in Europe, the standard of living also increased. (True, all this led to the growth of social contradictions!) The agrarian reform, including the development of capitalism in the countryside (which is debatable!), Was acute tasks, but did not require revolutionary "extreme" and were resolved relatively peacefully before the war. The revolutionary explosion abruptly cut off the development of capitalism in the city and country. Despite social dissatisfaction, at least until the 1905 revolution of the year, Russian society, in addition to a handful of intellectuals, remained completely “loyal”. The war began with an attack of patriotism! Liberals and even many socialists supported tsarism in the "war to the bitter end." And only Lenin with the characteristic Russian nihilistic cynicism warned that this war would not only "end" the Russian empire, but also hack the world system.
Two and a half years of war exhausted the country, opened up and aggravated all the social and social ulcers and contradictions of the rotten system, hidden by the pre-war economic boom. Therefore, the fall of tsarism, which is called the "February Revolution," happened rather peacefully and looked more like a collapse than an uprising. When the 8 of March (February 23 of Art. Art.) The workers of Petrograd protested against the shortage of products, the troops who received orders to shoot at them refused to do so by joining the workers. This process quickly spread throughout Russia. The king abdicated the throne, the power collapsed, the troops refused to obey, the gendarmes hid, crowds decorated with red bows demanded a republic and democracy ... So for centuries the centuries-old tsarism crumbled, which until recently seemed unshakable. It is impossible to interpret all this only in rational terms of sociology and political economy, what more ...
And most importantly: February 1917, the revolution did not "take place" - the Russian revolution was just beginning! Dumping Tsarism was easy, but it was much harder to find a replacement for him. Immediately there were two contenders for power. The liberal Duma deputies created the Provisional Government, which declared the transition to democracy through the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. But the government of the land did not give the peasants, did not stop the war, with the "founding" pulled, and therefore did not have real power and did not differ in its particular legitimacy, because it was chosen by a handful of intellectuals from themselves.
The Provisional Government was opposed by the Soviets of workers, peasants and soldiers' deputies, led by the Petrograd Soviet. The Soviets were a chaotic, but fairly legitimate form of direct democracy, for they were elected by the masses by direct vote. In reality, the Soviets were rather noisy and stupid "get-together" of workers, peasants, soldiers, liberal and radical intellectuals until they were taken under control by the Bolsheviks.
In a war-torn Russia, economic collapse and famine began. By the summer of 1917, millions of armed and demoralized soldiers, leaving the front, rushed home. Full anarchy and chaos ensued. Being in the mass of peasants, the soldiers, with the support of the villagers, began to smash the manor’s estates and divide the land. Russia was being torn apart by national movements, including in Ukraine, and the riots - left, right, peasant, anarchic, gangster, Kornilov, monarchical ...
Here it is - the apotheosis of the revolution! For the “real” revolution is a movement of huge masses, and not just a seizure of power by any party or group. Another thing is that this group or party may be able to use the energy of the revolution ... Or they may not be able to ... And they may not understand and not feel it at all ...
Lenin understood and felt. Talk about the fact that Lenin with the money of the German General Staff, creating chaos, seized power, is an idle chatter. Chaos arose without Lenin. German money may have helped Lenin, but one can hardly be serious about this argument; Lenin did not conceal the fact of receiving money, but rather, it was not the Germans who used Lenin, but Lenin - the Germans. One party simply could not create an anarchy of such magnitude, especially in huge Russia, on 1 / 6 sushi. In order to "pivot" half of Eurasia, no money would be enough. Moreover, the Bolsheviks were a very small and obscure group, although they differed discipline, at least compared to other parties.
The insurgent masses, pissed and brought to moral and material poverty, were least of all interested in the Constituent Assembly, parliamentarism, the constitution, and other "supreme achievements of the Western world order." Very amusing opinions that, say, having scanty support in the election of delegates to the Constituent Assembly, the Bolsheviks dispersed the "founder", insidiously usurped power, burying hopes of democracy in Russia. It seems that everything was “exactly the opposite”: the “founder” did not have special support among the masses, especially considering the huge territory, and generally the idea of “founding” and democracy in Russia in 1917, is utopian, especially considering the psychology of the masses; the most likely scenarios could be dictatorship or chaos. Take modern Russia, where there is a bicameral "founding", but there is no democracy at all. Or the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR under Gorbachev - a wholly-owned "founder" - which ended in anarchy and collapse.
In any case, the councils in 1917 were no less legitimate authorities than the Provisional Government and the failed "founding", because, again, the councils relied on the masses. Lenin understood this better and faster than all, managing to control the council by hook or by crook. The Bolsheviks, headed by Lenin (and without him, they would have remained a gang of demagogues and talkers!), Are proactive in conducting All-Russian congresses of councils in opposition to the Constituent Assembly. Supporting the slogans of "Factory - Workers" that are particularly popular among the masses! Land - the peasants! Peace to the peoples! ", The Bolsheviks managed to take control of the advice and get support from the masses. Everything was almost as written in the textbooks on the history of the CPSU, except for one thing: the cunning of Lenin and the Bolsheviks was that by supporting these slogans to get the authorities, they did not intend to carry them out (see the works of Professor S. Kulchitsky). Suppose the “peace to the peoples” was difficult to give because of world war, then civil war, intervention, although in reality the Bolsheviks were aimed at a “revolutionary war "." Factory - workers "(and this would be socialism! Another de oh whether the workers were able to cope with the management) the Bolsheviks did not even intend to give, and when the workers tried to manage the factories through elected factory committees, the Bolshevik commissars cut them off at the root .With the land it turned out to be more difficult: after the terror and the advanced development, the Bolsheviks still had to the time of NEP to give the land to the peasants, the land was nationalized only at the turn of the 1920-30-s by terror and famine.
Intellect, intuition, obsession and immoral ways of struggle allowed Lenin to accomplish the October revolution on the wave of the Russian revolution and raise the power that was practically "lying under his feet", which Lenin did not hide. Following the traditions not of Marxism, but of Russian revolutionism, he spoke of "the development of a bourgeois revolution into a proletarian revolution." The myth of the "Great October Socialist Revolution," by analogy with the "Great French," they say, was later invented by Trotsky.
What is the character of the Russian revolution? Marx considered a reactionary class. The working class (if considered its proletariat) in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century was extremely small. Lenin spoke of the workers 'and peasants' revolution. It can be argued that the revolution was proletarian, but the basis of its social base was the peasantry (mostly small proprietor, not proletarian), proletarized by war, famine, ruin.
In addition, the agrarian component of the Russian revolution was, if not "proletarian socialist," then at least "anti-capitalist." After all, the villagers took away the land of large landowners, including agrarian capitalists and land rentiers.
Prof. S. Kulchitsky characterized the revolution as also “Soviet”, i.e. one that brought advice to power. According to Kulchitsky, in a number of economic and managerial issues, the councils were real power, but the actual power "on the shoulders" of the councils was received by the Bolshevik party, which made strategic decisions, often without bearing responsibility. A certain “mutant of power” was formed: the intertwining of the totalitarian party and the formally elected power, where the Soviets stood in a prominent place, even the power was “Soviet” and the Union was called “Soviet”, but behind the scenes the main decisions were made by the top party leadership.
According to S. Kulchitsky, the dramaturgy of the revolution is as follows: multidirectional Soviet, democratic and Bolshevik principles clashed; democracy was defeated; under the Soviet slogans, the Bolsheviks seized the Soviets, and in the spring of 1918 of the year, having saddled the revolution, they carried out a communist coup "from above" in order to build a "communal state". Later S. Kulchitsky expressed the idea that the de facto revolution ended by the middle of the 1930-s with the final victory of Stalin's totalitarian society.
Here are a number of comments. For some reason, now they are forgetting about the powerful monarchical and generally great-power-chauvinist movement. After all, the most important element of drama in the civil war was the struggle between the "red" and "white". For some reason, it is believed that if it were not for the Bolsheviks, then democracy would surely be established. But the top of the “white movement” was monarchical and totalitarian, even if its representatives spoke of a constituent assembly and “democracy”. In Russia, it is generally reaching marasmus: they are canonized as the Great Martyr Tsar Nicholas II, probably for shooting a peaceful 9 demonstration in January 1905 of the year or for the millions killed in a senseless world war; the fables are told about the deep nobility of the White Guard officers who brutally destroyed the peasants, including the Ukrainian ones, and the Kolchak people "distinguished themselves" by flooding the local peasants with water and leaving them in the cold (even tearful sentimental songs about "lieutenant Golitsyn" "). The White Terror was no better than the Red. If it were not "red" that won, but "white", then it is likely that not intellectual "founding" would come to power, but the right totalitarian-chauvinistic regime or the "supreme ruler of all Russia", the restoration of the monarchy was also possible. Indeed, of all the countries that emerged after the First World War on the fragments of empires, only Czechoslovakia was more or less democratic.
The Bolshevik state in no way was a "commune." We will not go into existential delights and explain that communism in the highest sense is a perfect society, where people will no longer depend on the irrational forces of society, but will devote themselves to creative knowledge and rational transformation of the world, which echoes, for example, the ideal of the Kingdom of God. in Christianity. When it comes to "perverted concepts", it is better to consider their original meaning. In this case, such is "primitive communism": a community where everyone has equal rights and duties and in the name of preserving the species obey so-called. "rational authority" - the strongest, the wisest. Whereas the Bolshevik state was committed by a different hierarchical structure based on the exploitation and subordination to the "irrational authority" of the closed fascist clique.
According to the subjective opinion of the author, the Russian revolution actually ended in the second half of the 1930s with pre-war industrialization and "accelerated modernization" of the USSR, which were carried out by "cannibalistic methods" of Stalinism. It should be noted that Stalinist fascism not only brutally suppressed the masses, but enjoyed the support of a significant part of the masses. Now, for some reason, it is customary to recall only repressions, the famine and the Gulag, which were the same crimes against humanity as Hitler's fascism. But for some reason nowadays, mentions of the enthusiasm of the first five-year plans, mass heroism, of the discoverers in science, aviation and astronautics, in the Arctic, in the vast expanses of Asia, in the stratosphere, in space ... After all, it is obvious that these achievements cannot be explained by terror alone. On one fear, society "does not work" - it is unscientific. By the way, the modern oligarchic system grew on the sack of what was created at the cost of tragedy and heroism, blood and enthusiasm, hard labor and creative impulse.
Here we come to a number of important questions: why did Russia explode with massive bloody psychosis? Was this psychosis a consequence of only the Bolshevik dictatorship or also the peculiarities of the masses mentality? Is it really necessary for the mass of democracy? Was a democratic or even more or less humane outcome of the Russian revolution possible? Did not the psychology of the masses be rooted in Bolshevism and Stalinism?
The answer to these questions will give a real key to understanding what happened in the Russian-Soviet empire. But this will require some non-trivial, alternative knowledge, which modern social science stubbornly ignores.
Heresy and apocrypha in social science
“Nontriviality” and “alternativeness” do not mean “unscientific”. The knowledge used further has long been used in a number of branches of the natural, human, and social sciences, but historians and most social scientists have persistently ignored them.
We will not comment on the pseudoscientific, near-humanitarian talk of the type "political science" fashionable now. But even serious academic social science is seriously ill with “chronic positivism” and proceeds from such an important assumption of the Cartesian picture of the world: the result of observation is uniquely determined by the nature of the objective world and the perceptual apparatus. And this is not always the case. Natural science, primarily physics, long ago abandoned the dominance of the Cartesian and linear-causality models, and now Einstein's theory of relativity, in which the results of observations, measurements, experiments cannot be considered objective without taking into account the position of the observer. Social scientists cannot understand an elementary thing: research data are not always equal to perception, which is due to experience, language, education, culture. The same stimuli can lead to different sensations, and different stimuli - to the same. Modern philosophy of science rightly believes that science is not dominated by observation, experiment and data processing procedures, but paradigm is a set of a priori beliefs, values, and fundamental metaphysical attitudes about reality and knowledge. But any, the most progressive and convincing paradigm is relative and is not the truth about reality. One set of data can be interpreted differently within different paradigms, and science does not always bring it closer to the knowledge of truth.
Such statements are not a tribute to fashionable nowadays "relativism" and "postmodernism", to which the author is sharply negative, considering them to be intellectual-decadent empty chatter, covered with "smart words". But it is obvious that the abundance of new facts extracted from the archives often does not at all bring us closer to an understanding of the historical truth. The Bolsheviks, carefully concealing their crimes, rightly spoke of mass heroism and enthusiasm, brazenly attributing to themselves the merits in the "leading and guiding role." When at the turn of 1980-90-s the truth about the atrocities of Bolshevism came to light, which, however, had not been a special secret before, it became "indecent" to talk about the enormous achievements of the Soviet system, although the country still somehow emerges and an oligarchy was formed on that base, which was created in the USSR, and "the noble innovation and investment assistance abroad" is idle chatter. But in the light of the now dominant pseudoliberal demagogy, it is not customary to recall that, along with accelerated modernization and accumulation, which were conducted in the USSR by “cannibalistic” methods for about 50 years with a “break” for war, destruction, restoration, construction of “humane” Western civilization , its modernization and capitalist accumulation lasted several centuries, ditched many millions of lives, continues to this day by draining all the juices primarily from the third world, are one of the greatest tragedies on the planet and Degree of "cannibalism" are not inferior to Stalinism.
Quantum-wave holographic models of the psyche and the universe generally lead to a paradox: the abundance of facts gives greater detail, but often interferes with the perception of a holistic picture, whereas with a reasonably small number of facts, the detailing (resolution of a hologram) decreases, but the perception integrity improves. Such things may be difficult for the perception of humanities who do not have natural-mathematical training, but, for example, Fyodor Dostoevsky believed that “they don’t see the general behind the particulars,” and the Vedic religion contains the famous wisdom that one thing, and one thing in everything. " We will stop here, because this topic is very extensive, difficult for perception by the modern primitive-pragmatic mind, and besides, there is still a lot of incomprehensible.
These examples show that in social science de facto is dominated not by factology, but by a paradigm that interprets facts based on a priori beliefs, values, metaphysical attitudes about reality and knowledge. Most even serious scientists not only do not recognize this, but also do not realize it primarily because unconscious mechanisms are involved. This raises the following problem.
Academic science stubbornly proceeds from a common misconception about history as a process directed by the consciousness of people, as well as by certain objective social laws. It is believed that the "objective" law does not depend on the person, but can be cognized and used in practice. The paradox is that the objective social process is a consequence of the subjective, that is, mental, activity of the human masses. The transition of mental activity from the individual and interpersonal level to the mass level, according to the well-known law of “transition of quantity into quality,” leads to the development of the subjective into the objective. (As well as specific psychological empiricism in abstract philosophical speculations, but this is a separate topic). Today, the talk about social "consciousness" is fundamentally wrong; We need to talk about the psyche as a dialectically contradictory unity of consciousness and the unconscious with a continuous energy-information exchange between them and the dominance of the unconscious. By the way, the majority of mass, but completely subjective social phenomena are considered objective due to the fact that, being unconscious, they are not realized. Being modulated by information (ideas, thoughts, arche-and psycho-types, passions, matrices, gestalts, instincts), psychoenergy moves society along complex trajectories. The social psyche as an energy-informational phenomenon is formed by society, and also forms it itself through conscious activity and through unconscious mechanisms discovered by Sigmund Freud.
Let us briefly denote these processes.
Psychoenergy can be modulated with both creative, creative, and destructive, authoritarian and compromising contents. Socium can suppress and intensify creation, as well as compromise, destructiveness and authoritarianism. Human aggression has two types: defensive "benign" biological aggression for survival; "malignant", purely social aggression due to perversions in the psychology of the individual and society, which does not have a rational goal, but serves to satisfy the irrational passions. The relatively autonomous content of the psyche develops into affective-loaded universal and ethno-national "archetypes". In addition, the behavior of people and society unconsciously recreates the stages of birth, which are firmly "stitched" in the psyche: the infantile unconcern of prenatal, apathetic anxiety of the prenatal, destructive struggle on the verge of the birth of the ancestral, hope for a "bright future" postpartum matrix.
Contrary to popular misconceptions, social processes, including revolutions, are driven mainly by the deep unconscious content of the mass psyche, and the parties, the leaders, are only generated by the psychology of society. And since, in addition to the passion for creation, authoritarian, conciliatory and destructive passions play a major role in it, any, even the most noble ideas and ideals, are inevitably suppressed or distorted beyond recognition.
And now we will try to open the deep springs, so to speak, the "insides" of the Russian revolution, which until now no one really did.
Anatomy of the Russian Revolution
To understand the deep meaning of the Russian revolution, one should turn to the psychology of the Russian masses in general and at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in particular.
Nikolai Berdyaev rightly paid attention to the features of the so-called. "Russian soul". Modern social science, which, we repeat, suffers from a severe form of “chronic positivism,” this “term”, or rather, the old-fashioned metaphor, considers unscientific. But it echoes Erich Fromm's ideas about the "social character", Carl Gustav Jung - about the "arche (psycho) types", Stanislav Grof - about the "systems of condensed experience", Gestalt psychology - about the Gestalt ...
According to Berdyaev, at the core of the "Russian soul" lies natural Dionysism, reformed by centuries of Orthodox asceticism. From here steady properties: dogmatism, asceticism; the search for the kingdom of the Outside; striving for the Absolute, for the religious integrity of the East as opposed to the rationalistic fragmentation of the West; religiosity in non-religious issues, including social, which distinguished the Bolsheviks with their "pathological atheism." Berdyaev wrote: "Russians are always orthodox or heretics, schismatics; they are apocalyptic or nihilists." They considered the world as lying in evil, and wealth and power as sin. They did not recognize property as sacred and absolute, denied Western bourgeois civilization, and considered communion to be the most just form of socialization. Even Russian nihilism and Bolshevism as its extreme form, declaring atheism, denying God, spirit, soul, norms, supreme values, was, according to Berdyaev, a frenzied secular religion, turned inside out by Orthodox graceless asceticism, a rejection of a world lying in evil. But the rebellion against the universe is of a totalitarian-religious nature and leads to the creation of a “new world,” even more inhuman and evil. Out of supposedly compassion for people and in the name of supposedly "bright future", Russian totalitarianism is ready for tyranny and cruelty. Paraphrasing Berdyaev somewhat: in order to make mankind happy, the Russian “activist” is ready to blow heads to millions. Here are the psychological roots of Bolshevism, and not in western Marx. Such a curious psychological portrait of Berdyaev is applicable, probably, to the beginning of the twentieth century, and not to the masses, but to the revolutionary elite. By the way, one can rightly blame Lenin, Trotsky Dzerzhinsky, Stalin and others for crimes against humanity, obsession, pathological narrowing of consciousness, moral rebirth, but they are difficult to blame for greed and shkurnichestvo, especially against the background of the current "elite".
The psychology of the masses in Russia at the turn of the century was authoritarian and conciliatory and was distinguished by religious humility, patriarchalism, and belief in autocracy. Great was the proportion of conformism and authoritarian masochism, which led to the fetishization of the king-father, the state and the bureaucracy, stabilizing society. But in the mass psyche accumulated repressed authoritarian-sadistic and destructive impulses, which could be easily activated by social factors. As a whole, even despite mass discontent and even riots, Russian society, up to and including the Russian-Japanese war and the 1905 revolution, remained quite loyal, with the exception of a handful of revolutionary intellectuals. Berdyaev wrote that in Russia there were two real forces - kondovy autocracy and the people.
The phenomenon of the 1905 revolution of the year is interesting. The failure of the Russo-Japanese war and the shooting of a peaceful demonstration in January served as a pretext for it. The reason was the huge socio-economic contradictions and the destructive potential of the mass psyche. A good argument in favor of the fact that the Bolsheviks cannot be considered almost the main cause of the Russian revolution: the Bolsheviks had nothing to do with the 1905 revolution, and rather “overslept” it, like all other intellectuals. It was the 1905 revolution of the year that produced the world-famous words "advice", "Soviet", "sovdep", and absolutely without the participation of the Bolsheviks, who were "far from the people" in 1905. The Soviets were "the revolutionary creativity of the masses", an institution of the so-called civil society, which is now fashionable to talk about. The Soviets were created by the revolutionary masses by delegating power to the deputies nominated by the masses. Revolutionary intellectuals sought to “straddle” the councils, which the Bolsheviks finally did, realizing that the masses would not believe the “bourgeois-intellectual constitutor”, but the Soviets, for they are “archetype”. The Soviets did not have a rational ideology, but reflected the emotions of the people, expressing the age-old search for truth.
The development of capitalism in the twentieth century sharply exacerbated the contradictions due to the unresolved agrarian question, the breaking of the patriarchal structure, the emergence of mass society, overconcentration and monopolization, the ruin of the small proprietor and the proletarianization of the masses, bureaucracy, and corruption. Under these conditions, tsarism had the sense to foolishly climb into World War I, to give the masses weapon and train them in military affairs. The war sharply blew up the accumulated massive destructiveness. If it were not for the war, and the removal of the destructive potential went through social conciliation, there could be no further nightmare. It was a global war with the use of the latest means of mass murder. In 1914, when no one ever thought of a revolution, Lenin warned that "an imperialist war will develop into a civil war."
What is a revolution? It is believed that this is a radical change in the socio-economic and / or political system (the French and Russian revolutions) or, at a minimum, the "shaking of the foundations" (the revolution in Europe in 1848, the revolution in Russia in 1905). Often, a revolution has a national liberation character, for example, the Ukrainian revolution 1917-21, the revolution in Cuba in 1950-60. All this is correct, but somewhat superficial, so we will try to look into the depths.
Since the times of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the meaning of the word “revolution” has come: the return of previously lost freedom, natural and inalienable human rights, the highest meaning of its existence, i.e. all that people were deprived of civilization, which people themselves have created.
At first, Marx believed that revolution is the result of the growth of democracy, the standard of living and, most importantly, the consciousness of the masses, which is generally true: high consciousness will create a society in which revolution is not needed. True, an increase in the standard of living with democracy can lead not to an increase, but to a “fall in consciousness” of the average person, as illustrated by modern consumer society, but here sociology is not enough. The failure of the 1848 revolution of the year, which in France, especially in Paris, had a proletarian character, brought into the work of Marx, who witnessed the events, a large share of extremism, which is clearly seen in the famous Communist Manifesto.
Following the traditions of Russian revolutionism, Lenin believed that revolution is a consequence of the extreme aggravation of social contradictions, chaos, material and moral poverty, when, according to the famous aphorism of the “leader of the world proletariat,” the upper reaches cannot, old Absolutely stupid is attributing to Lenin the merits of "creating chaos" and "carrying out a revolution." Lenin (as if they didn’t treat him now) was much smarter than most of his critics: he absolutely clearly and fairly said that a revolution can only be the result of "objective and subjective prerequisites", that one should not "play plots" but patiently campaign among the masses, waiting for social contradictions to become intolerable, and only then can the masses explode. Lenin went even further and suggested that, having exploded, the masses would not know what to do, so we need a "guiding and guiding force" (which, by the way, confirmed our "orange revolution"). Lenin could not really explain this phenomenon, but it is known that he was fond of the works of French social psychologists Gustave Lebon and Gabriel Tard, who using the example of the French revolution through 100 years after it (!) Showed that the cheers of the revolutionary revolution somehow lead to restoration of the newly overthrown system, and the revolutionary crowd does not know where to send the energy, and unconsciously searches for an idea or a person who will provide such direction. All this speaks not only of Lenin's intellect, but also of his powerful intuition, which is sometimes more important than intellect. True, the mental qualities of the leader resulted in a tragedy ... However, the theme of “genius and villainy” is widely developed in literature, therefore we will not develop it here, but depict Lenin, as is now fashionable, a sort of “idiot” with brains affected by syphilis, - this is the height of idiocy.
According to the author, the psychodynamic view of the Erich Fromm revolution should be considered the most fruitful. Stability of society is retained not only by the repressive apparatus of power and ego-rational considerations. The direction and content of unconscious emotions and passions, which also “cement” society, are very important. Traditional psycho-emotional relations can be destroyed by a sharp deterioration of the socio-economic situation, war, devastation, chaos, outside threat, repression, etc. At the same time, huge amounts of psychoenergy are released, which is transformed from "cement" into "dynamite" and explodes society. Such an approach scientifically explains Lenin’s revolutionary agitation, “The tops cannot, the lower classes do not want,” and is completely consistent with the now spat upon “dialectical and historical materialism,” because this is about the informational processes, the carrier of which is quite a material substance - psychoenergy.
A surge of emotions can destroy the old social relations and create new and better ... Or maybe not destroy ... And can create worse, return the old ...
The released psychoenergy needs to be tied up again, otherwise it will blow up the society, lead to chaos and blood, which happened in the Russian revolution. The same happened in the Ukrainian revolution: one can rightly talk about "nationally-vigorous zmagannyakh", but it should be understood that there really was anarchy in Ukraine, "ataman", "the war of all against all", often meaningless and merciless, which allowed the Bolsheviks to take Ukraine under control.
Sooner or later, psychoenergy will still be connected unconsciously through the compensatory mechanisms of the psyche, but the greater the chaos, the greater the chances that compensation will occur by fascist, cannibalistic methods. Proletarianization and lumpenization sharply activates the irrational psychoenergy of the masses, which can have a creative direction, but more often - destructive, which corresponds to the most "energy-explosive" third "Base Perinatal Matrix" according to Stanislav Grof. In addition, for some reason, no particular attention is paid to the fact that urbanization, concentration and monopolization of production at the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as total world war, which formed huge groups of people, led to the abrupt development of "mass society". Mass psyche is not just a collection of individual mentalities, but a psychological community with a number of specific features, for example, increased suggestibility and rapid spread of emotions, which confirms the ideas of psychoanalysis about the phenomena of “transfer” / “countertransference”, wave models of the psyche and the hypothesis of “biomorphic fields. " The mass society leads the individual "into the ranks" of the party, class, gang, corporation, to the subordination of the generally accepted standard ... Neo-Freudism explained the emergence of unconscious compromising and authoritarian impulses in the mass psyche after social explosions as an objective mechanism for restoring disturbed mental connections. Here lies one of the roots of the Bolshevik dictatorship, the apotheosis of which was Stalinist fascism.
Psychoenergy can be linked with the help of "beautiful ideals" and / or charismatic leaders or those that seem charismatic, really and / or in illusions serve as projections of the expectations of the masses through the "transfer". Theoretically, ideals can direct psychoenergy to creation and nobility, but breaking emotional ties often leads to the destruction of the barrier between consciousness and the unconscious and a breakthrough into the consciousness of unconscious contents. Some of them, in particular, transpersonal or transpersonal content, can also be creative and noble, but often powerful unconscious authoritarian, destructive and opportunistic impulses that drive society in crucial moments, and “great ideas” play the role of rationalizations.
This can be illustrated by the example of advice. Unlike, for example, prof. S. Kulchitsky, the author of these lines considers the democratic beginning of the Russian revolution not to be a “constituent,” namely, advice. But the councils are democracy not in the abstract-western, but in the archetypal-Russian (and in Ukrainian too!) Sense. Overcome with war, hunger and chaos, the masses were little interested in parliamentarism and the constitution. Liberal values and bourgeois virtues in Russia (as well as in Ukraine!) Have always been suspicious, to this day “liberals” successfully “fly through” in elections both in our country and in Russia. The masses wanted to divide the national wealth, first of all the land, on the basis of their notions of justice; she did not want to die in the war of allied duty to the "bourgeois from the Entente"; she did not want to be "cattle" and "channels". But the weakness of the Soviets was in the absence of a rational ideology, and this vacuum was filled by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who, we repeat, advanced close and understandable slogans about earth and the world, and then vilely deceived people.
In addition, naturally, psychoenergy can be linked to terror ...
As a Russian imperialist, Lenin fought for "the one and the indivisible," but under the slogans of pseudo-communism, or rather, "communism as he understood it." Naturally, he fought with the national movements, including in Ukraine
Now for some reason they forget about the most powerful white movement, actually “white totalitarianism”, which competed with the “red”, was no less bloody, and if the Bolsheviks lost, then most likely the “chauvinistic democracy” and Russian chauvinistic fascism would prevail which would have taken Ukraine to the nail, as well as totalitarian Bolshevism. In the USSR, Ukraine had at least a semblance of statehood, in the new “white Russia”, if such had arisen, Ukraine would “not be shining” even that. Which, by the way, confirms the current revival of Russian imperialism.
Prof. S. Kulchitsky also rightly writes that, having saddled the Soviets, from the beginning of 1918, Lenin carried out a “communist revolution from above”.
But besides all this, Lenin struggled with chaos, anarchy, gangsterism, which were not the result of national and social problems, but were purely criminal in nature. In 1918 the situation has become critical. Berdyaev writes that Lenin made inhuman efforts to discipline the people and the Bolsheviks themselves, urged them to work, discipline, responsibility, knowledge and teachings, to build, not to destroy, he made real spells over the abyss, and still stopping despotism and terror with chaotic disintegration Russia. And even though this thought causes many "reaction of rejection, the author considers it necessary to emphasize that, in terms of Jung, Lenin led the fight against the" Shadow "(one of the Jungian" archetypes "), that is, with all the abomination that the bio-psycho -social nature of man in social disasters.
It is against the background of the total anarchy of the Russian revolution that Lenin’s program book “The State and the Revolution” should be considered, which (paradox!) Is still being studied in many Western universities. Marx did not say anything concrete about the forms of communism, it is possible to draw anarchic conclusions from him, denying the state altogether. Lenin discards Marx. In Lenin, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and in reality, the party bureaucracy, means power stronger and more oppressive than in the bourgeois states. The state is an organization of class domination, it will wither away and be replaced with self-organization only with the disappearance of classes, and no one knows when it will be. Here there was a truly tragic distortion of the deep essence of the ideal of communism: from the doctrine of the victory of man over external dominant forces, which in various forms takes place in all religious teachings of the planet, the doctrine of communism turned into a system of enslavement, turning into a powerless screw of dictatorship (Berdyaev). According to Lenin, you first need to go through the iron dictatorship not only in relation to the bourgeoisie, but also to the working-class masses, and only when they learn to observe the elementary conditions, the dictatorship will end. But it is impossible to subjugate the mass, to link its psychoenergy with one force. We need a holistic doctrine, a worldview that holds the symbols together. New faith must be expressed in elementary symbols, and the Russian version of Marxism and the perverted ideal of communism turned out to be quite suitable for this.
It seems that the Russian revolution ended by the end of the 1930-ies after the complete victory of the fascist regime of Stalin, modernization, industrialization of the country and the so-called collectivization of agriculture, i.e. establish the collective and state farm system. It was at this time that the Soviet ideology declared that the Soviet Union was basically “built socialism”. Prof. S. Kulchitsky considers this to be a "revolution from above", typical of the Russian totalitarian society. We agree, but "up to the sign": according to the author, this is an anti-communist, anti-socialist, even misanthropic counterrevolution, essentially a restoration of Asian tyranny, but in even more cruel, even cannibalistic forms compared to tsarism, that nonetheless , allowed to create a superpower.
Under the slogans of "socialism in a single country", Stalin created an extreme degree of state capitalism, when citizens are completely alienated from social life by bureaucracy. Soviet ideology assured that the USSR is a country based on public ownership, where there are no class contradictions and social inequalities, and only friendly working class, peasantry and intellectuals were in the class structure. Actually, under the sign of socialism, we repeat, there was state capitalism. Property was not public, but state owned. The society was antagonistic class, where the ruling class was bureaucracy. The individual was assigned the role of a "screw" of the social mechanism, which was controlled by violence and manipulation. In general, the Bolshevik postulate about the hegemony of the “leading and guiding force” in society, that the affairs of the workers should not be managed by the workers themselves, but by the party, bureaucracy, the nomenclature and other “competent bodies”, was anti-Marxist, anti-socialist, anti-communist, anti-revolutionary and extremely reactionary by definition. A curious detail: the fiery revolutionary and Spiridonov’s “leftist Socialist-Revolutionary”, who had been imprisoned since the beginning of 1920, and executed at the beginning of 1940, noted in 1930 that there is a counter-revolution "in the wild", for prisons, stages and camps are full of revolutionaries. Another thing is that the mental abilities of the masses, or rather, we repeat, authoritarian, opportunistic and destructive character traits did not give chances to this masses to become masters of the country and gave rise to totalitarian power. By the way, with the collapse of the USSR, the flawed psychology of society was the reason that the broad masses did not become masters of their country, and the place of the former Soviet nomenklatura was quickly taken by the oligarch-bureaucracy.
The “secret” of Stalinism lies precisely in the psychology of the masses: Stalin and his clique could not bring a huge country to its knees, tens, hundreds of millions of people. This is unscientific! For Stalinism, millions of performers were needed. Stalinism is a crime of the people before itself. Destructive, opportunistic and authoritarian impulses, whose rationalizations are duty, patriotism, the search for the leader, "class consciousness", the idea (including pseudo-communist), were the cause of the totalitarian nightmare.
In addition, the Bolsheviks masterfully played on social contradictions. By speculating on the centuries-old hatred of the working masses for the exploiters and “playing around” for a number of tactical reasons in capitalism in the form of a “new economic policy” (NEP), the Bolsheviks quickly introduced state property and state management of industry, transport, finance, foreign trade and other “commanding heights of the economy” ". At the same time, the state as an impersonal capitalist, which, as they say now, was represented by managers from the bureaucratic nomenklatura, could often be exploited much more cruelly than the private owner, but the masses did not understand it, and propaganda masterfully introduced ideas of "nation-wide socialist wealth" to the masses . It should be noted here that the nomenklatura, including the higher one, was financially somewhat better than the rest, but led a very modest lifestyle and didn’t stand out against the general background, unlike the modern “lawlessness” of the nouveau riche. Having gained control over all, so to speak, spheres of urban life, including “minds and hearts”, the Bolsheviks were able to hang up the accelerated modernization and industrialization of the country by the methods of the fascist dictatorship.
To do the same in the village was much more difficult. The mass division of land by peasants led to the growth of mass private capitalist entrepreneurship. Trying to find a monopoly in the strategic sphere of food, the Bolsheviks raised the question of the so-called collectivization of agriculture. In reality, it was not about collective economic management, which is akin to a cooperative or joint-stock form of ownership and management, but about creating a state-capitalist command system of an agrarian economy, only covered by the "agricultural charter". It was extremely difficult for even the Bolsheviks with their super-powerful repressive apparatus to do this in a vast village in the vast expanses. Therefore, they went through the old and proven principle of "divide and conquer."
Private enterprise in the countryside was mainly based on family labor. But there were also large capitalist farms of the so-called kulaks, who had large quantities of land and means of production and used the labor of hired labor from among the poor — the so-called farm laborers. Capitalist relations in the countryside led to property stratification and increased social tensions. Now it is fashionable to speak of the "fists" as of noble workers who fed the people, which is partly true. But often the rural capitalists were engaged in the merciless exploitation of their fellow villagers, sometimes even relatives, and among the farm laborers often turned out to be not only quitters, parasites, and drunkards. In any case, the author still found people who survived those times and spoke in the same obscene terms both about the Bolsheviks with the "enkavadists" and about the "kulaks" with the "nepmen". The Bolsheviks undertook "the destruction of the kulaks as a class," including stirring up the social conflict between the poor and the kulaks. When the kulaks were destroyed, the Bolsheviks took up forced collectivization, constantly using destructive social passions on the basis of property inequality in the countryside.
The Bolsheviks obtained final control over the village in Ukraine by organizing a genocide by famine, known as the Holodomor. But again, the Holodomor is not only the "product of creativity" of the Bolsheviks, it is the collective fault of one part of the people before another, since for such a grandiose crime humanity required millions of performers, primarily from among Ukrainians themselves. The Bolshevik terror by hunger relied on the flawed psychology of huge masses of people, when often the executioners quickly became victims. For example, in terms of perinatal psychology, terror by hunger translates the psyche from the state of the 3 matrix, which is characterized by an active, often brutal and destructive struggle for life, to the state of the 2 matrix, which is characterized by hopelessness and doom. In general, this topic requires more research, and it is surprising why so far the Holodomor phenomenon has not been studied in terms of depth psychology.
The goal of terror was not only the suppression, but also the mobilization of people's energy for hard work. Terror alone is not enough for this, we need fastening symbols, religion. The figures of Marx, Engels, and even Lenin were charismatic. Stalin declared himself their rightful heir, although Marx and Engels would not have given him his hands, and Lenin, before illness and death, broke off all personal relations with him. A superpower was created, but at the cost of millions of lives, the perversion of socialism, the building of fascism.
But our "socialism" is not only poverty, terror, famine, fascism and concentration camps, and then "stagnation." After all, there were heroism, pioneers, industry, education, science, technology, art, victory in the war, access to the Cosmos ... You cannot build such a thing on one fear! What allowed the USSR to achieve global success as soon as possible? After all, it is obvious that, say, the feat of the “Papanins on the ice floe” or the conquerors of the stratosphere cannot be explained only by fear and terror. Mass heroism (even if embellished) during the Second World War, for example, the exploits of Nikolai Gastello or Alexander Matrosov can not be explained only by fear, detachments and even hatred of the fascists. Prof. S. Kulchitsky explains this by the fact that by the beginning of the war the Soviet ideology had already managed to raise a "loyal" generation, which, in principle, is true, although somewhat simplified ... Ideological education forms, for the most part, superficial rationalizations, although it can and deeper contents of the psyche. And yet, there are deeper things ...
Psychic energy is ambivalent, i.e. can be directed to good and evil. Herbert Marcuse wittily remarked that the Soviet morality of the times of accelerated modernization is very similar to the work ethic of the Protestants, the goal of which was also to unite large masses of “backward people” into a “new system”. Even being perverted, the idea of communism mobilized the energy of the masses for exploits and routine daily work in the conditions of severe deprivation and fascist terror of Stalinism. Thus, the tragedies of the twentieth century entailed both a feeling of powerlessness and an emotional upsurge, which caused both cruelty and destruction, and creation, sacrifice, a sense of belonging to the significant, a desire for a "bright future."
Post scriptum. The greatest tragedy of the twentieth century is not compounded by the fact that "they built communism", but that it was not built. The greatest tragedies, the highest tension of forces and means, enormous resources — all this was ruined, and at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries there was a return to where from the beginning of the twentieth century they tried to escape. The tragedy of the Soviet "communism" is not only in huge numbers, as it turned out, in vain victims, but also in the fact that civilization did not receive a fundamentally different way of development, returned to the usual road that leads humanity to self-destruction, discredited other ways and search such.
And further. The author constantly referred to the opinion of prof. S. Kulchitsky and argued with him for the reason that this particular historian is perhaps the only one in Ukraine who is trying to systematically and conscientiously explore the Soviet period. The rest - and often the former “major experts” on Marxism-Leninism - more and more slogans are pronounced, but if they used to pronounce Marxist-Leninist slogans, now they have changed them to national-patriotic and / or liberal-bourgeois slogans.
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