IN THE LABORATORY OF THE REVOLUTION
1.
Each year in November the media have for several years now presented us with broadcast excerpts from Moscow, in which the last living awardees of the medal of the Soviet Union Hero, as well as ordinary citizens nostalgic about the Soviet Russia display their attachment to the red flag with hammer and sickle on the anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik coup. In Poland, the October Revolution is one of the events that one is no longer obliged to commemorate officially, and few are those who reminisce about it with tenderness (as a foundation myth, of course, and not as a fact in their lives) and cultivate the memory of the event. And so, anniversaries come and go; the Great October dropped from the official calendar, and from the collective memory. It is therefore difficult to reflect on the Russian Revolution on the one hand, and, on the other, not to take such a good opportunity as the ninetieth anniversary of the storming of the Winter Palace to reintroduce the question of the communist revolution to the collective consciousness. “Polityka” magazine for instance availed itself of this occasion by publishing last spring a separate special edition devoted to the October, but I must confess that I abandoned reading opinion weeklies long ago (except for “Tygodnik Powszechny”, which, it is important to note, is never mentioned in the context of this section of the press market), as I grew tired of the repetitiveness of the critique and publicist statements which they feature; that is also why I do not opt for the ‘nutshells’ editions published occasionally with such magazines. But there are also slightly higher quality magazines, more specialised and not so short-term as the weekly press. Compared with glossy newspaper additions, the editors of such magazines can approach the subject of the Great October in a more fruitful way – as is the case of “Kronos” magazine and its edition (issue no. 4/2007) which appeared in the last quarter of the last year.
2.
The editors decided to approach the scope of issues related to the ‘October 1917’ question from the perspective of a critical reflexion pursued by Russian intellectuals themselves, and to present the writers unknown to Polish readers (the writings by Fiodor Stiepun, Ivan Iljin and Pavel Milukov), but also to revive the memory of one prominent and important writer (the text by Mikolaj Berdiaev, who assumes here a role untypical for himself – the one of the revolution critic).
This strategy proved to be an excellent idea, as the resulting texts are dense, deep and – last but not least – full of passion; they verge on literary interpretation, philosophy, historiosophy and political thought, using the Bolshevik coup and the ensuing events in Russia as a springboard for the analysis of the ‘Russian spirit’, history and the nature of the revolution itself.
For on closer examination of its workings, the revolution appears to be creating merely an illusion of the definite rupture with the old order (introduction of new customs, a new calendar, quasi-religious practices instead of cult practices of the past, a new culture reflecting the spirit of the new times, a supposed change of the political system, a new legal system), and in fact it is a machine which brings to the surface all that which in the pre-revolution society is the darkest, the most vile and the basest. The study by Berdiaev (Spirits of Russian Revolution) is of paramount importance here; the writer conducted a thorough analysis of the revolution facts, employing the tools provided to him by the Russian culture itself, and more specifically by the immortal Gogol, the Dostoyevsky possessed by demons and Tolstoy the social activist and egocentric. Berdiaev saw them as prophets who in their works forbode the events witnessed by the Russians in the first half of the 20th century. Dislike towards the individual, bureaucratization, self-interest, the cult of power and of the ranks of officials, blind admiration of Western ideas and the attempts to transplant them artificially on the ground not fit for this purpose, the nihilism of the revolution – all this became a painful reality after 1917, although it does not mean that these practices had not taken place before this date. The turmoil of the revolution only brought it to the surface. Instead of being a factor for changes (because, obviously, they arrived as well), the revolution became a laboratory microscope, a magnifying glass which allows one to see the demons which possessed the Russian nation. To put it in a more general way – show me your nation during the revolution and I will tell you what is it like...
However, for several years now the Poles have been well acquainted with the notion of the revolution; our country was supposed to become the stage of a great moral revolution, a major transformation, a great terror and fear intended to purify us and direct us towards the luminous future. Alas, it was not meant to be. What have we really learnt about ourselves in the last two years?
It would not be right to claim that the Great October was not great. Indeed, apart from the disastrous consequences of the economic policy, internal fights between the Bolsheviks, the attempts at waging war with the West just after the end of the First World War, the decade of the 20ties brought with itself a great wealth of cultural achievements, which unfortunately were squandered shortly afterwards. People did in fact followed the proclaimed ideas of modernisation, they believed to a certain extent in the avant-garde character of the revolution and in the possibility of creating the heavenly kingdom of the proletariat on earth. At the same time, though, the very same people exhibited equally low moral standards as before the revolution – no one will turn into an angel by decree; the official performatives introduce changes only in the sphere of conventions, but they do not create palpable facts. Thus, on the one hand there is the inimitable post-revolutionary artistic avant-garde (the myth of Majakovsky, the myth of the new art), and on the other the progressive moral degeneration and the top-down stopping of the dynamism of changes by reproducing the old order under a new banner (it will lead to Majakovsky tragic end, and the failure and death of the avant-garde artists). The writings which, thanks to “Kronos” magazine, the Polish readers can access for the first time are the fruit of this dark side of the revolution; it suffices to take a look at the references in the footnotes – all these texts were published in the West – otherwise the revolution would have devoured its own critics...
3.
There is one more article which merits special attention. It is a moving essay by Hanna Arendt from 1968 [Róża Luksemburg (1871-1919)], in which the author of the work entitled About the revolution sketches a portrait of the Polish-Jewish sociodemocrat. In the history teaching in Poland Luksemburg has always been depicted as an activist who evoked, at least, mixed feelings, and to a considerable extent this attitude is not even related to the intensification of the right-wing historical politics of the previous government. The heroine of Arendt’s essay belongs to the history of the Polish socialism or sociodemocracy, the history of the emergence of the workers’ movement, but at the same time the socialist internationalism which she exhibits somehow smacks of an ultra-leftist cosmopolitism, so much disliked in Poland...
Moreover, Arendt carefully points out to the fact that her Jewishness does not make for a suitable context to explain the internationalistic tendencies of this sociodemocrat – it might result in succumbing (not necessarily on purpose) to the vulgarity of easy interpretations and entangling oneself in vastly dangerous stereotypes of perceiving Jews as the ‘eternal others’.
At the same time, Arendt depicts on the margin of Luksemburg’s intellectual oeuvre her greatly moving portrait. Those inclined to think of her almost as ‘Dzierżyński in a skirt’, are likely to change their mind, especially once they have read about the sad fate of the sociodemocrats, the members of the Spartacus Union in the Weimar Republic. Luksemburg was shot dead in the back of her head by the republican police; the killers never received punishment, while such a way of dealing with ideological enemies found its unglorious continuation in Hitler’s Germany. In the fate of Luksemburg there is a certain tinge of sad heroism, this sadness stemming precisely from our knowledge of the dark pages of history that were written after her death.
Luksemburg is perceived by Arendt (who based her study on the biography entitled Rosa Luxemburg by J.P. Nettel) as a committed activist, an untiring publicist, who believes in the revolution; however, Arendt introduces a certain modality to this seemingly unquestionable core of the SDKPiL (The Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania) founder’s personality. In fact, if she became the international revolutionist it was due to the external circumstances; the imperative came as a call from the outside and she had to abandon other paths along which her life might have developed. She is an ardent sociodemocrat, but not a dogmatists; she has the ‘courage of Lenin’ and pays for it with her life, but she also is able to imagine herself as a different person, not necessarily someone active at political rallies and persecuted by the government hostile to the revolutionary left-wingers. The revolutionist is not always a profession which can be noted down in identity papers; it does not have to be a component of a particular human being. Arendt writes that
Although the revolution was as important and real for her as it was for Lenin, it did not constitute for her an article of faith. Lenin was above all a man of action and would have turned to politics regardless of the circumstances. She, in turn, ‘was born to graze geese’, as she jocularly put it herself, and with equal success she could have chosen as her vocation botanics and zoology, history and economics or mathematics, if the external circumstances had not infringed on her sense of liberty and justice.
The revolution has a human face not only because it reveals what is vile. “Kronos” – perhaps a bit in virtue of the law of balance – evokes both the demons of the revolution and the human face and entangled fate of the revolutionists themselves.
Michał Choptiany
Translated by Marta Wójcik