The Other Russia

Lecture 11

And so, communism as a doctrine originated in medieval orgiastic sects that preached the community of property and women. As for capitalism, it was born from puritan asceticism. It is the child of syphilis for real.

Let us recall Luther. Martin Luther nails his theses to the door of a church (still a catholic one). 1517. Luther accuses the Catholic Church in insufficient severity, in corruption, particularly in the selling of indulgencies. This is a criticism from the positions of asceticism. Munzer – a scholar-intellectual joins Luther in 1519. But they don’t stay together because they have different critics of the Catholic Church. Luther’s is clear, as for Munzer he does not want to reform anything, his doctrine: the chosen ones have by force of arms to clean the way for the new Coming. Everyone is his own God, everything is common. It is clear that Luther called Munzer’s army “a band of thugs”. They are directly opposite.

It is Luther who did not encroach on medieval society, who can be considered the true predecessor and the first prophet of capitalism. Protestants and puritans, they all came from his 94 theses. It is precisely the ascetic radicalism, the ascetics-extremists who created capitalism. Max Weber wrote well and conclusively about this in the books “Puritan Ethic” and “Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism”. The essence of Weber’s idea comes to the fact that the new puritan ethic of an acute kinship, virtuous way of life, constant labor, money accumulation, thrift, that the protestants permitted themselves to give capitals on interests (until that the Church forbade this activity), created possibilities for the apparition of capital and business activity. The economic successes of French puritans – Huguenots are well known (and their miseries: expulsion from France, etc.). The economical successes of English Puritans are well known: the first industrial revolution took place in England. The political successes of English protestants-puritans are also known. (The puritans – the movement for the cleaning of the English Church. The English puritans acquired a huge influence in Great Britain during the Civil war of 1640-1660 when the Parliament fought with the kings Charles I (he was executed) and Charles II. Then Oliver Cromwell, a puritan, became the commander of the English army and the Lord General in 1653. As for the Puritans they became the first colonizers of North America where they organized theocratic communes-villages and finally created their State: The United States of America, the capitalist State par excellence. The United States of America are still today the flagman of capitalism. The modern world was created under the pressure of the puritan ethic – the world of production and consumption trade.

All this is far from being known to all worlds’ citizens, but the most inquisitive ones know. What is unknown is why it is precisely in 1517 that Luther came out with his ascetic calls for reformation. What, is it at that very year that the Catholic Church pissed him off? And why not later or not earlier?

The answer is simple. It is at this very time that syphilis reached Spanish and Portuguese harbors, where it was introduced by the sailors of Columbus (from America! More precisely from the Trinidad Island) in 1498-1500. Slowly (since then people traveled slowly, on horseback and in coaches, also very few people traveled), it took 15-20 years per country for the disease, syphilis started to cross Europe. The peak of puritan sentiments and sects in Europe happens to be exactly during the syphilis epidemic in Europe. From there come the tight family ties: intercourse with a single sexual partner and severe punishments for disobeying, after all it was a matter of life and death, since people learned how to treat syphilis only in the beginning of the XX century! From there the families went into work, into economy, since once you start to party, you drink and you meet some loosen girls and syphilis and your nose has fallen off. In short, the ideals of everyday life became different. It did not happen that straightforwardly, “syphilis!” and the scared Luther hurries to hang his theses on the church door. But if one is to look carefully on a geographic map, then Holland’s busy harbors are very close to this very same church and its doors.

The Protestants afraid by syphilis hardened their customs and thus the cult of labor was born. It is paradoxical but it turns out that the yoke of labor in the name of productivity, under which the modern world suffocates was given birth and stimulated by a venereal disease! Puritanism is the legitimate child of a venereal disease!

We, the contemporaries of AIDS were just recently the witnesses – in the middle of the 90s – of the influence of the AIDS epidemic on the moral shape of the United States of America. I had lived in the United States for the entire second half of the 70s and I can testify: the manners were so loose that to make love with the first encountered object was as easy as to drink some water. Drugs circulated freely, they were offered on streets and in friends’ apartments. When after a big break of ten years I arrived in 1990 to the United States from France I found a totally different country: contained, cold, the ideas of the New Christians were spread and girls with an iron will insisted on long-term relationships, serious intentions and the use of contraception. AIDS inspired terror, the 70s were considered by society as shameful and blasphemous times of Sodom and Gomorra. People with AIDS were buried quietly. One can imagine what kind of terror and panic reigned in XVI century Europe, when it was invaded by syphilis if at the end of the XX century another venereal disease – AIDS – brought a mythical terror in peoples’ relations! Since this was still a completely undeveloped Europe, there was no medical service, people were still burned on stakes. How did they get scared! One understands that there was cholera, plague epidemics then. But an epidemic of a venereal disease was a Divine scourge multiplied by three, it touched birth giving as well. By the testimonies of contemporaries the terror before syphilis was indescribable. And even in the end of the XIX, the beginning of the XX centuries the terror remained, it was treated with mercury, it did not heal, the cases were dissimulated. At the turn of the XIX and the XX century syphilis became a disease of intellectuals. Supposedly Nietzsche and Wilde suffered from syphilis, Lautrec died from syphilis. A parallel suggests itself with AIDS but a parallel the other way round because AIDS appeared as an intellectuals’ disease, came out of the narrow circle of the New-York-Paris highly refined homosexual circles and only then became popular, came into the people. By the way such coryphees as Michel Fouquet, Rudolph Nuriev and many others had the time to die from AIDS.

The origins of syphilis and AIDS are mysteriously and by all probability related to zoophily. If it is said about AIDS (besides from the fact that it is a virus born in CIA labs) that the virus is transmitted to man from the green monkey in the heart of Africa, then the origin of syphilis from the goats of Trinidad is even more probable. The Indians of the Trinidad Island at the moment when they were visited by Columbus ships had in custom, when going away for a long time to graze their goats on the mountain plateaus, to copulate in case of necessity with these very same goats because their wives stayed far away in the villages. Returning from the pastures the Indians copulated with their wives but this unhygienic custom did not bring a visible damage to the Indians or their wives. But as for the weaklings Columbus’ sailors, they, once having copulated with Indians wives brought syphilis to Europe. So puritan ethic and with it capitalism came from the vaginas of Trinidad goats. It is not a hypothesis, boys and girls, it is an absolute historical (but little known) truth.

Scared by the triumphal march of syphilis through Europe, the puritans later, already in the XVII century landed in North America, on the historical, so to speak, native land of syphilis (well not really of course, Trinidad is an island between the two Americas). People use to think that the Europeans kind of sent their excess of population to America. This is only partially true but it is syphilis that drove the protestants-puritans away from infected Europe. Munzer’s uprising – as the revolt of the flesh in times of plague, I will notice, was the last burst of orgiastic sects’ activity known to us. The terrible reality of syphilis Europe, the infected maiden, fallen noses – all this hardened, cleansed the manners. The idea of socializing women did not look so attractive anymore. Later Marx made capital attractive. It would be nice to trace, if the apparition of restricting puritan sects of Judaism -like those of the “Lubovitchers” for example in Poland and Belarus were not related to the arriving there of syphilis. The disease was getting there from the Iberian harbors maybe for more than a century. Unfortunately from the investigative isolation ward of the FSB of Russia, such research is impossible. But I am certain that there is a link.

In North America the ascetics-protestants founded a State on the principles of labor, virtue and economy: the United States of America. They started to call themselves WASP, this abbreviation is decoded as white Anglo-Saxon protestant. The United States succeeded in imposing the labor cult to the rest of the world. Some peoples are more capable of labor loving, others are less capable, however we all have to spin around like hamsters in a wheel, producing, producing, producing…And feeling sad because of the low gross domestic revenue of the State and rejoicing if it had suddenly risen. And all of that is because of syphilis. Possibly if syphilis had not appeared in Europe it would have consisted today of a conglomerate of orgiastic communes, like the Munzer one. But this did not happen and the next interesting experiment on world transformation was already the French revolution of 1789.

The French revolution, still being really bourgeois, nevertheless had changed the calendar, counted time from itself, some months’ names, brumaire – when there are fogs – or pluviose – the month of rains – please me, they are poetic and tragic. However the French, regardless of their Jacobins (from the hall of Saint Jacob Church where they were meeting) in the most revolutionary times nevertheless stayed in the traditional frames, in what concerned property and family. The toughest were obviously the guys who gathered around Maximilian Robespierre, he himself, his brother and his closest associates Saint Juste and Camille Desmoulins. Robespierre had a tentative to found a new civil religion, he was even proclaimed its prophet and saint, but did not have the time to develop the affair. The 28 June 1794 the head of Maximilien Francois Marie Isidore de Robespierre rolled into the guillotine basket. In Paris in the Museum of Archives, it is located on the intersection of the rue des Archives and rue Rambuteau (really close – in front of it, in the house 54 rue des Archives was located my first apartment-studio in Paris), I once visited an exposition of documents of the epoch of the French revolution. There for the first time I saw Robespierre’s signature. It is striking: red, tangled in a ball like barbed wire, it suddenly broke far down in some instances even on ten-fifteen centimeters. Usually the signature was under a list of names of people, condemned to beheading. The signature itself, one could say, was the drawing of the fall of the head into the guillotine basket. I never saw a more tragic and amazing signature not before, or after. The signature anticipated also the fate of Robespierre himself and could serve as a symbolic image of the years of the Revolutionary Terror. There were radical attempts to remake society’s life by the founders of anarchism the French Fourier and Saint-Simon. A theory of “phalansteries” was developed, communes in which free men and women would have to live on absolutely new grounds. It is known that such communes were organized in the United States (if I’m not mistaking, in the south of the state of Louisiana) and in Russia on the Volga (the writer Leskov has even an amazing novel on this theme) in the eighties of the XIX century. Unfortunately I know little about the Fourierists, Saint-Simonists and the phalansteries and a serious research on that topic in an investigative isolation ward does not appear possible, so I will bypass the topic, just mentioning it.

In Russia as well political radicalism developed together with economical radicalism and radicalism in regard to the sexes. The already several times mentioned Etkind’s work “The Whip” perfectly shows one of the aspects of this process. Obviously Mr. Etkind is a democrat and a liberal and his personal taste taints his judgments of the radical attempts of society reconstruction into hostile hues. However he has made a big work and his book explains a lot particularly how the Russian revolution of 1917 by no means did have only Marxist roots but also sect roots. Not surprisingly that dreaming of the revolution of peoples, of the destroying of the family the Bolsheviks were joined by such free women as Inessa Armand, the prodigal daughter of the general Dovmontovich, Sasha Kollontai or Larisa Reisner. However soon after the arrival to power, the Bolsheviks, alas, rejected many radical ideas of the early bolshevism, including the desire (it was best theoretically expressed by A. Kollontai in her works) – to destroy the family and to create a society of free love. And also the early death of the leader Lenin put an end to many experiments in the area of property and family, the socializing of women and property did not happen. New forms of social life were not created. Here, naturally, played a role the character of the Caucasian Stalin-Djugashvili who replaced Lenin on the post of the leader. Being, as it is said today, a “churka” [an Asiatic foreigner] by origin, Stalin naturally was more patriarchal and reactionary and his tastes were directly reflected on the society model, which he imposed on Russia. The post-revolutionary Russia was forced to live by the pre-revolutionary adat. Again.

In order to truly break and to truly build we will have to follow Dolcino, the adamites, Munzer and John of Layden and not Stalin. The Russian revolution actually did not reach many of its goals, failed in a many aspects. But it would be more adequate to discuss this in the next lecture.