Sri Ramakrishna Math : The Vedanta Kesari, USSR : Myth as Reality

Liliana Malkova, Secretary of `Ramakrishna SocietyVedanta Centre', is a senior researcher of Film Art Institute, Moscow, a member of the State Film Expert Board of Ministry of Culture, Russia.

It is difficult to find a nation, which would not aspire to give a special message to the world or fulfil some world-wide mission. At least what we used to call 'great nations' are such and Russia is no exception. Its attempt to build a communist civilization was initially a global project and resulted in the appearance of the socialist world embracing one third of the planet. It could hardly survive the XX century but still remains to be the hottest subject of discussions in modern Russia.

'Moscow is the third Rome and the fourth Rome would never be'--this national conception was originally formulated in the letters of Philophey, a hermit from the Pskov monastery (1420-1480). In the Middle Ages monasteries were the centres of ideology and education in Russia and the culture was spiritually based. Ancient Russia took to Christianity from the Greek Orthodox Church together with the idea that Rome had fallen into sin trespassing original religious dogmas. In 1453 the Turks occupied Byzantium (the 'second Rome') and after that Russia held high the Orthodox ideal. Its special mission in the world was, according to Berdyayev, to maintain the holy Christian spirit in purity.

Personally I doubt if that idea was still alive after Tzar Peter's times. Peter the Great, the founder of the Russian Empire, was called the Antichrist by Church which lost its independence with his reforms in XVII century. Peter declared himself to be the head of the Church in place of the Patriarch and introduced the Holy Synod, a state department for religious affairs. He personally cut the beards of the highest nobility, made his court wear western dress and learn foreign languages.

Since then the country has undergone several foreign influences--German, French and to a less extent British. The liberal ideal was imported from France on the return of the victorious army of Alexander I who had defeated Napoleon. The young officers brought home new values of 'Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite'. This ideal inspired the Russian literature of the Golden Age but its conflict with the state ideology can be seen in the biographies of our greatest writers. Pushkin's poetry was censored by Tzar Nicholas I himself, Gogol went mad, Turgenev spent the last quarter of his life abroad, Dostoyevsky escaped death penalty by pure chance, Tolstoy ended his life ex-communicated from the Church. The critical attack of the western scientific thought on the traditional values resulted in the decay of morals and religion. Russian thought got divided into two wings: the 'westerners' pointed at the need of reforms for the outdated social and political system, the 'slavyanofils' stressed on the special mission of 'the Holy Russia' as the last guardian of spirituality in the agonizing godless civilization. The Marxist line in the national philosophy was not strong. However nobody else took the interests of the working class seriously in the country of peasants. Generally Marxists lived in exile abroad, but they were determined to bring their programmes to every factory and plant and organize the workers into a party.

To my mind the hidden connection of the communist ideology with the mythical Eden is so strong that it has actually overpowered the differences in the national mentality. In the USSR the myth was used to make politics intelligible to the masses who could neither understand communist programmes nor imagine the suffering they themselves should go through in the revolutionary transformation. Socialism presupposed a certain level of mass culture and in Russia it was far below the grade. Plekhanov, the leading Russian Marxist, whom Lenin considered to be his teacher, refused to support the revolutionary plans of the latter. Dark, illiterate masses according to him were not ready for the new system, not ready to take the power and govern the country. Before their cultural growth the revolution would be a national disaster. But Lenin took the risk in October 1917.

The consequences are only too well known: civil war, red terror, famine, suppression of any opposition be it military, economical or ideological, the dictatorship of Stalin and so on. Horrified intelligentsia saw the start of apocalypses in Russia. Gorky, a friend and a strong supporter of Lenin, now attacked his government for the total destruction of culture. He preferred to emigrate and so did the best Russian philosophers, writers, artists and scientists. Russia was left without its best brains and those who stayed were doomed.

The level of public thought dropped considerably. Lenin's conception of the cultural revolution was linked with two other major directions of development; to build up a self-sufficient economy, heavy industry ('industrialization') and collective farming ('collectivization') were needed. So the cultural revolution really meant a basic mass culture: propagation of sanitary norms and hygienic rules, primary education, skills how to use simple technical devices etc.

The pathetic resolution 'to publish a newspaper for the illiterate' reflected the need of the time. Lenin declared: 'Of all arts the cinema is the most important to us'. Cinema could show new ways to the illiterate people, it could touch the heart without words. The film-makers invented a new cinematic language to express revolutionary ideas. Eisenstein developed his 'montage of attractions' in the world-famous films 'The battleship Potyomkin', 'October', 'The Old and the New'. But those were feature films. Dziga Vertov dealt with 'cinefacts' of the socialist construction and used contrapoint cutting of filmdocuments for the 'communist deciphering of the world'. He called it 'Kino-pravda', or 'cinema-verite' as Godar interpreted it in the French avantgarde cinema of the 60-s. Vertov was the first to put his 'cine-eye' in direct opposition to the 'delusion of the ordinary eye' claiming that the cinematic reality was more real than the physical. He used montage for awakening of the consciousness of people from religious deception and destroyed temples on the screen even before they were ruined in reality or transformed into 'palaces of culture' in the 30-s.

The most debated topic now is the time of Stalin's dictatorship. Was it really the time of total state oppression of its own people when the whole country was turned into a concentration camp? This is the opinion of Solzhenitsin, once a dissident author of 'The Archipelago Gulag' and a Nobel Prize winner. If so, was it an inevitable form of the socialist system or a criminal result of Stalin's personal dictatorship? These questions arise from the assumption that the communist ideology has indeed determined the Soviet reality. Others claim now that it had no such paramount significance and beyond all the communist phraseology life continued to run in its traditional way. The socialist system had to conform to the autocratic structure of the Russian Empire while the General Secretaries of the CPSU replaced the czars on the throne. Stalin was just another Peter the Great. Both had used monasteries as prisons for undesirable elements.

I am not inclined to overestimate the ideological component of the soviet history. Still I'm sure that its cultural content was something very special, opening a new turn of the public mentality whatever name we may give to that social system now.

The communist ideas got a mythological interpretation in a cluster of images, symbols, slogans that expressed the inner urges of the people for whom politics was too complicated to grasp. The dark side of this myth is manifested in the growing enemy image. The attractive communist Eden could not be immediately realized. Not only 'exploiters' opposed the expropriation, but also millions of peasants wouldn't sell bread at the minimal state prices and were prosecuted, killed or sent to Siberia. People died of famine even in the beginning of the 30-s. All this was attributed to 'the hand of the enemy' working at all levels of the state and party system and purges went non-stop during Stalin's rule. A series of political cases were brought into trial and once famous revolutionaries were prosecuted as traitors and foreign spies. Enemy hunting was in the air. Newspapers were full of criticism and mutual political accusations.

The atmosphere changed with the return of Gorky in 1928. Living abroad he confirmed his views about the crisis of the bourgeois culture. Gorky considered fascism to be a sign of the agonizing petty-bourgeois psychology that may lead to the end of the whole western civilization. This made him change his outlook on the Russian revolution. He looked at the socialist experiment with a new hope and pointed the need for a change in propaganda.

According to him, criticism diminished the achievements of the socialist construction and negative approach to the present made people forget their historical mission. He called his first magazine 'Our Achievements'. It was designed to be a model for the Soviet press. There was no fiction in it; it was a documentary taking information directly from the main construction sites of the first five-year plan and focussing on the new human experience. It became so popular that soon the whole press took up its special styles and heroic pathos.

Gorky managed to unite Soviet writers on the platform of 'socialist realism' and that was a hard task indeed. In the 20-s, there were so many artist groups, which hated each other and went ahead of the communist party in their political programmes. Jealousy and envy accompanied the self-expression of these writers who may have been illiterate a few years back. One may not admire their books now but they really expressed the proletarian culture as it was.

As a creative method, the Socialist Realism of the 30-s was not bound by the sphere of literature and arts but rather destroyed the boundary between this sphere and the life itself. Gorky said: 'The socialist realism asserts the existence as a performance, as a creative act'--so it rather constituted a general outlook on the existence, on the world and the man. It was a response to an urge of the public mind, which could not be satisfied by the official materialistic and atheistic doctrine. Before the revolution the 'spiritual' was synonymous with the religious and as such in the 20-s the term was turned into a negative stereotype. Gorky returned a positive meaning to it covering the realm of arts, literature, science and culture.

For communists the priesthood represented the most disgusting type of oppressors who used religion as a tool of mind-control. But there were God-seekers in their midst. Lenin's intellectual boldness to deny the very need of any superhuman mind or God was rare indeed. Gorky once was influenced by the 'God-construction theory' of another Marxist, A. Bogdanov, who claimed that everyone was free to have his own idea of God. In the socialist construction people joined their forces on the way to God. Lenin in his article 'About A.Bogdanov' criticised Lunacharsky, later a minister of culture, for sharing these ideas; the very word 'God' for Lenin was a sure way to self-deception.

Gorky interpreted the God-construction in the man-building sense of the socialist realism. And in this sense the USSR attracted many foreign intellectuals. Romain Rolland was a personal guest of Gorky in 1935 and Gorky initiated the translation of his collective works including the books on Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. The new system was aimed to produce a new man in whom all human potentialities would be realised in its fullness. To reach this ideal one must work in total self-abnegation for the common benefit.

Actually, it was a way of Karma-yoga, only people were deprived of God. Priests were prosecuted. Temples were reconstructed into Palaces of Culture. Monasteries became either prisons or mental asylums. People in general were left without any spiritual ministration and politics would not capture their minds if the culture were not based on eternal mythology. Gorky called writers 'the engineers of human souls' and the whole culture turned into a system of spiritual engineering.

He knew the power of the myth. No doubt, the party had the full control over culture but were not the members of the party inspired by his legends? In 'The legend of Danko' he put forward a hero who sacrificed his life for his people. Danko took out his heart flaming with love and carried it as a torch showing the way out of darkness. 'It is not true,' Gorky said, 'that the war produces heroes. The war kills heroes. But our socialist reality produces heroes every day.' His phrase 'The socialist work as the organiser of the new man and the new man as the organiser of the socialist work!' became the motto of the 30-s. Records in the industrial and agricultural production were encouraged by the press. Workers fulfilled their personal 5-year plans in 3 years and became famous in a day. The myth came true with the state title 'The Hero of the Socialist Labour'.

Gorky stressed on the paramount historical significance of any fact of the Soviet life because these everyday facts were like stones in the basement of a new civilisation. History is today. The present should be recorded keeping in mind 'the third reality'--the desirable and the probable. Thus, the real and the ideal were mixed in the 'socialist realism'. In 1937 a documentary film 'The Zalomov family' was made. It was about the happy life of the prototype of 'The Mother', a novel written in 1905. Real 'Nilovna' was still alive, a great-grandmother whose family was working at the plant once depicted by Gorky. She was honoured by all, taken in the car to a public demonstration under the big photos of Lenin, Stalin and Gorky.

The real and the ideal went hand in hand. Not only would they record everything that was built but they would also build everything worthy of recording. Cultural and economic plans were co-ordinated and a special attention was paid to the development of women, national minorities and children as 'the only privileged class'. Schoolteachers and doctors - mostly women-graduates of the best national institutions would go to far away villages or newly built plants and serve people. The new feeling of social kinship gave them the power to transform not only themselves but also even nature by their joint effort. Man conquered five elements. They built channels in the Asian deserts; hydrostations would bar the current of mighty rivers bringing light to cut-off villages. New industrial giants appeared in Taiga and in the northern regions where temperature was below minus sixty degrees Celsius in winter and they were connected with plants in Central Asian republics by railways built across the country. They went into the air and were the first to fly across the northern Pole. In 1961, Gagarin went into the open space. Moscow metro was an underground palace, which would make it pleasant for a worker to go to his plant and back home. Parks surrounded industrial cities; you can still see the transformation of reality in old documentary films.

The state was interested in the education and professional growth of people. By the end of the 30-s primary education (4 classes) was given to everybody. It was compulsory not only for children who were not allowed to work but also for adults in villages, at factories and plants. In the 50-s general education (7 classes) was given to everybody. It was free of charge--even the university education. So was the medical care.

The graduates of Russian universities are still in demand all over the world and the level of our science and technology is high. It is a tangible result of the socialist myth coming true. Let us not forget that just 150 years back people were sold in this country as cattle and the wealth of landlords was counted in the number of human souls they had in their private property. What we cannot grasp now is the 'every man for himself' psychology of the free market. Three Soviet generations thought it was very bad to put oneself ahead of others. In the 90-s some people decided it as normal in the free world and divided all the state property among them leaving nothing for others. Now a scientist gets no more than $30 per month. There are over 3 million homeless illiterate children under 10 years in Russia. About 1 million die a year. Intelligentsia is searching for a new national idea, which would correspond to the global village mythology. With the Soviet myth condemned as a lie people are left without any ideal. What is real now is a great national shame.

What are the cultural shifts and trends of civilization? Are they a change for the better or for the worse?