The Other Russia

Lecture 12

The Bolsheviks started by attempting on many things. On the first revolution of the fourth estate in the world. The entire world of the hungry and the slaves had to, after cutting off the higher society classes for their uselessness, liquidating them or scattering over the country, rule the state itself, by means of the Soviets [councils].

This did not happen. Because: first of all the organization that realized and organized the revolution in the name of the fourth estate (proletarians, hired workers) – the Bolshevik party did not disbanded itself and did not transfer all the power in the hands of the Soviets. The Party, on the contrary, gave up just a little bit in the hands of the Soviets and itself took more and more power. Secondly: the party filled the Soviets with herself from within and thus doubled itself at the power. The functions of the Soviets and the party were not strictly delimited, in any case it is not the fourth estate that began to govern the country but the party.

The RSDRP, later the RKPB, VKPB – the party that realized the revolution, was not in any way a fourth estate party, but was a party of misfits, which was already discussed in this book. And precisely because it was a party of misfits it was talented, effective and could carry out the revolution. Like the Bolsheviks’ party, the fascists in Italy and the national-socialists in Germany assembled misfits’ parties and not parties of the proletarians or the bourgeoisie. (That is why they produced such hatred and that is why they were trampled, all of them. Some – earlier, some – later! They did not belong.)

The Great Parties of Europe, including the party led by Lenin were in fact extraordinary armies of mercenaries-voluntaries who set up for the task of seizing the power for the fourth estate. And to set up the power of the fourth estate, its eternal kingdom. Only they called their “entire world of the hungry and slaves” – the fourth estate differently. The Bolsheviks called it “the proletariat” or “the working people”. Hitler called them the “volk” – the people, or the German people, Mussolini – Popolo d’Italia (his newspaper was called that too), but they had in mind the entire fourth estate – the majority of the population. The power of the majority turned out to be absolutely just in comparison to the power of the minority classes: once of the aristocracy, later of the bourgeoisie. But the thing is that, after having seized the power for the fourth estate, the Great Parties did not leave. They stayed at the conquered power and governed de facto for the sake of the interests of the party, for the party. So no revolution for the proletariat or the volk happened. Happened a revolution for the party in the first place. And a bit for the proletariat (for the volk), so that the doctrine could at least meet ends. In Germany the enchanted power of the national-socialist party triumphed, of those activists and conspirators who gathered together in 1918-1933 under the leadership of Hitler. (Actually, a part of them died in the fratricide slaughter of 1934.) Later representatives of big capital in Germany joined the power. If the first revolution of 1933 (30 January, during the elections) was directed against the leftists and this revolution triumphed, then the second revolution – against the rightists, and it was demanded by the commandos headed by Ernst Rem in 1934, just as it was demanded by the leftist brothers Schtrassers – did not happen in the end. In Italy things were even worse: there the fascist regime of the misfits managed to share the power with the capital and even with the king.

And so, personally the power of the proletariat (the working people), the people (volk), the popolo – did not happen. That was the failure and the lie of the Great Revolutions of 1917, 1922, 1933. And in large part the self-deceit of the Great Parties.

They wanted to remake the world thoroughly and to set themselves for a long time in this “millenary Reich”, in “the communist future”, in “the Italian Mediterranean civilization”. They wanted to create a new man.

They were not able to create the soviet man. Some amount of individuals was subjected to a powerful suggestion, that they are soviet people. But the influence did not last for long. After the forced chopping of the Soviet Union in 1991 on republics, referendums in republics showed how unstable was this new man, how ephemeral. They did not create the soviet nationality of blood. Everything laid on suggestions, thin air.

They did not understand that the small people are slowed-detonation mines, put under the Soviet civilization. Already from the 20s they allowed to every insignificant tribe to cherish its “adats”, its ancestors’ customs. Thus the center in Moscow even helped them! The all-Russian budget gave money for the existence of newspapers, journals, books, typographies on the languages of the USSR peoples. For those, the shabbiest ones who didn’t even had writing, our scientists even developed the writing and wrote down their oral legends. By this, broadening the isolation of these peoples, intensifying their difference, giving rise to international conflicts.

When for a hundred years they should have relentlessly physically mixed the USSR peoples, creating a single, ethnically soviet people. They had to, like it is done now in Saudi Arabia to conduct single demonstrative many thousands’ marriages of northern peoples with the southern, western with the eastern or even select couples at random, or to draw the grooms and the brides in a daily All-Union lottery. To change their names and families on Ivanovs, Petrovs and Sidorovs. They had to starve all languages except Russian. They had to do everything in order that the Latvians, Lithuanians, Kazaks, Kamchadals and others forget their history, if they had one. It was not necessarily to burn historical books and dictionaries. It would have sufficed not to republish them. If the Bolsheviks had started to do this from the first year of the revolution – they would have done the job in 70 years! But not only did they not mold them together, no, they encouraged discord, they encouraged to each man – his. They continued to teach in schools the Tatar yoke, the Kulikovo field, without realizing, indifferently, how was this for the Tatars. So why were they surprised that Tatar nationalism started to come out of the woodwork the moment it became possible. They had to write such history textbooks that would have molded us together! There was no Fomenko/Nosovsky at the time, well they had to invent them!

I remember with shame that ten years earlier I bowed before Stalin as a radical leader. He had a cruel will, but he did not have brains. I looked at Stalin through pink glasses! With his resettlement of ethnicities, hostile to the soviet people – the Crimea Tatars, Ingushi, Chechens and others who dared to fight against the Soviet people on the side of the Germans, a resettlement only to Kazakhstan, in the country interior, he just intensified the problem. And set up a foundation for intertribal conflicts in the future. Because children, grand children were born… They remembered the offense, they survived, they served in the Soviet Army, they learned from the officers of the Empire how to fight. How could this be allowed to happen? At least don’t take them, the offended, in the army, don’t teach them war! They taught Mashadov, they taught Dudaev. If there would have been among the leaders of the Soviet State an expert in Roman history then he would have said: “The Empire perished when it started to accept in its legions barbarians and to teach them military art”… They had to solve the question more radically. They did not succeed in mixing the soviet people, where would have been included the Chechens and the Ingushi and the Crimean Tatars, so they had to solve the question more radically. To banish the incorrigibles peoples from soviet territory. To force them out into Turkey. Who would have dared in 1944 or 1945 to resist the Soviet Army, discharging the resettlers in Turkey? Nobody. After all the tsars already have forced there the Chechens and the Crimean Tatars. There were many there. There would have been even more. And to return would have been far more problematic than from Kazakhstan. They had to disperse the peoples. Among the majority of those who had to be dispersed there was no such powerful nation core as there was for the Jews – the most dispersed people in the world – Judaism. They would have dispersed. They had to encourage mixed marriages. To marry by force, by force to drive them through the country. To introduce planned replacements of population of entire regions. With the power that the Bolsheviks possessed this was realizable. Easily.

The Germans, actually also did not create a new man. Although they set to work vigorously. The SS incubators did not last long. The millenary Reich was allowed only for 12 years. There were, actually, good ideas, like for instance two women for a fool-blooded German. (The Muslims, actually, have a healthy tradition of four wives). But the Germans at least were not allowed so much time. The soviets had 70 years and they did not manage to do it!

The revolution of 1917 did not destroy the most reactionary cell of the old society – the family. And now in 2001 we see how the family – a heavy anchor or a stone – pulls energetic promising adolescents to the bottom. How at every step the interests of the family conflict with the interests of the State, how in the name of the family are committed crimes of corruption and embezzlement. In the chapter “The red-eyed monster” all of this was already discussed. Inessa Armand, Alexandra Kollontai, Larisa Reisner – wanted new relations of man and woman. A free, not a private-property love for the comrades would have brought sexual comfort to the collective of the revolutionaries. Two-three hours of guaranteed affection per day would have given a feeling of happiness to the young society. However they rejected the experiments of the first years of the revolution and in the end the most uncomfortable and unhealthy kind of sexuality prevailed. Wretchedness, dissatisfaction, the torture of conventions, the impossibility for the young comrades to get sexual comfort right away (this takes years!) generates neuroses, psychic illnesses, deformations of the mind. Vices and perversions are generated in the tight rotten atmosphere of the family. In a commune there are healthy relations between comrades. In a commune it is always possible to find oneself partners by temper and the quantity of partners for affection is very high. Whereas sexual comfort is a huge size, it is a component of happiness. The right for sexual comfort is more important than the right for work and one should fight more for sexual comfort than for a salary. This kind of a society system in which the person is guaranteed sexual comfort by this society itself will always enjoy a huge attraction. The family gives one partner, the commune gives many. The 1917 revolution did not solve this problem. They had to introduce polygamy, promiscuity, to encourage all types of sexual unions. None of this had happened. The spirit of extremism was suppressed. They did not reach sexual equality. Only in a commune, the free common living of men and women, a free equality is possible.

They did not create an Invincible Army. While the Army was leaded by misfits – everything turned out well. The red Army was created by misfits who had never fought before, such as Trotsky, Frunze. They appointed commanders by the literacy and the talent of the individual. Some sixteen years old Arkady Gaydar became the regiment commander and his 20 years old comrade – the commander of a division and the 30 years old commanded over armies. And they routed the high-school students of tsar’s generals and the interveners, graduates of the best military schools of Europe. Vassily Chapaev, who became the protagonist of Furmanov’s book, a movie and later of unjust jokes in real life this person forestalled the military thought on a quarter of a century, minimum. Already during the First World war he understood what the next war would be and already during the Civil war created a shock armored division from trophy tanks and armored cars and led tanks before the infantry, distrusting the cavalry. De Gaulle understood the same thing in 1934 and Huderian in 1936 – these are the best vanguard military minds of Europe. And Chapaev did in 1934 at 30 years of age. The Second World war was fought like he foresaw it! That is the quality of leaders that the Russian Revolution had awakened.

Alas, the new generation of leaders, selected by Stalin for the governing of the State and the army was worse in quality than the first set of misfits. Stalin favored his drinking partner from Tsaritsin – Voroshilov (They were once pitilessly ran down by Lenin during the defense of Tsaritsin). And Voroshilov, like Budenny continued to think that the cavalry would be the most important in the next war!

Gradually the wild army of the paradoxical commanders Frunze or Trotsky, the army of genial nonprofessionals, non-ortodoxes, which had defeated all the staff generals together with the interveners, ceased to be marginal. They built up military schools and academies, invited coward military specialists and they started to teach the red youngsters the art of defeat, which they learned themselves on the fields of the First World war, where they were crushed by the wild German. Misfits and lunatics stopped to go in the army. Therefore in 1941 and 1942 a few dozens of selected Germans drove before them our war prisoners by the thousands. The Russian prisoners were two millions because of that bad training of the military specialists. In 1943, 1944 and 1945 – death in the eyes of the Germans and the machine guns of the barring detachments behind – revived madness. And the penalty men from prisons gave to the war a mystical character of ritual murders. That’s how they won the war by a mystical effort, growing our fanaticism to the level of black spots on the moon. And breathing out death, they won.

And again the military specialists started to teach defeats. And the misfits got discharged in the reserves and went into security guard and alcoholics. The truth that for a war one needs completely crackpot people and that to win a war one has to find them and to make them commanders – nobody saw this truth in Russia even today. Therefore our generals are just bureaucrats in stripes. One should give to fight to the lieutenants and all kind of talented folk. To the robbers. (Remember this, boys! War is a too serious affair to entrust it to generals!)

The promised with pump, in imitation of the French Revolution, equality did not happen.

Well, all right, State leaders have to live in special places, they have to be guarded – all of this is clear. However hundreds of thousands of local and central chiefs put themselves arbitrary as leaders and grew thick with privileges. And already in the beginning of the 20s an angry heresiarch like Dolcino was needed, who would have called to them for poverty and misery. In prisons we have a real poverty, worse than in a monk cell, but in real fact we’ve got everything, although there is nothing too. Why did the Russian revolution instantly got bourgeois and at Lunacharsky’s house they played piano and Lila Brik explicitly defended to Mayakovsky – a revolutionary poet, to come to Moscow without a “little Ford”? Well because initially all of these some thousands of misfits were not joined in a mystical brotherhood by the sacred chains of socialized property and socialized bodies like in the congregations of Dolcino and John of Leyden.

The education was left old, tsarist, changing only two-three disciplines. By leaving the old education they ensured by it the reproduction of the Old Adam until the end of times, forever. This was already mentioned in the lecture “Schooling: they stole your childhood”.

The culture preached was old, but safe. XIX century’s. This is discussed in the chapter: “Ptomaine of the XIX century”, new culture trends were left behind the USSR borders, stopped by the iron curtain and thus left the soviet person without instruments of understanding and knowledge of the modern world. All revolutionary experiments in Russian art were stopped. In art with the help of the government only socialist realism won. By itself a bright, iconic, symbolical style – socialist realism obviously could not be used for everyday vile goals of lie and propaganda. And that is precisely how it was used for a half a hundred years. In art as in literature. As a result they devaluated it.

It’s too bad that the bold experiments did not make it, did not become the State style of art. After all during the first anniversary of the revolution Tatlin and co. painted the trees on Red Square in a bright-red color from pulverizers. After all the tower of the III International still today is a masterpiece of extreme radical art. After all there was the extraordinary architect Melnikov, he should have been allowed to build. After all the best cavalrymen of the 1st Mounted Army as a reward for bravery during the Civil war were given red leather riding breeches. Indeed they had enough fantasy!

I already said that the Bolsheviks did not destroy “adat”. Peter I, the tsar-revolutionary if he did not terminated all the “adat” of the shabby Muscovite Russia, then he crushed the two thirds of it. Well done, Petrishe! That’s a revolutionary! That’s a radical! After 1917 the characters of the serfdom world met all together again: the sadists and masochists, hangmen and victims. It is precisely from the “adat” that our pensioners inherited the mentality of submissive serfs, and our functionaries – the mentality of autocratic lords and our cops – the mentality of thick-skinned oprichniks. He who would set his goal to create a new Russia at any cost will have to be ready to break the spine of the Russian adat. So that the tribe of the submissive, coward people, quivering before the authority does not reborn again and again.

And finally, the last. Already Stalin openly strangled the Revolution. Once got rid of the genial spirit of the misfits he began after the war to directly restore the elements of the imperial regime destroyed in 1917. He turned his face to the already destroyed Orthodox Church, restored the officers estate, stripes, uniform, returned to classical-model education, began to build imperial buildings. Only his death stopped the Restauration.

Kruschev stopped the Imperial Restauration started by Stalin. However he fixed the USSR into an even more dangerous direction, he returned the country in the context of the bourgeois world civilization by the fact that he invented competition with the West. Doing that he did not understand with his down-to-earth mind of a shorty in a straw hat, fat-ass, that by competing you accept the standards of competition and inevitably become similar to the one you are competing with, the one who dictates you these standards. Kruschev completely landed, lowered the Russian revolution by the fact that he forced it to measure itself in the terminology of the gross national product, in kilowatts of energy, in tons of wheat. When it suited her to be measured in the amount of conquered territory, in quantities of wars, in the joy of acquiring new subjects, in the sexual comfort of the population, in the quantity of the people taken to the enemy, in the quantity of extreme historical scenes, in exploits, in the quantity of booty from military campaigns, in poems, in marches, and tragedies. Kruschev has banalized us all.

Subsequently, after Kruschev, the general Secretaries of the KPSS did not feel the capacity of their State anymore and did not feel their relation to the Revolution. What do the shaking Brejnev or Chernenko have in common with the cavalrymen in red riding breeches, charging with meter-long razors in hands against the polish ulans in Warsaw? Nothing. Such a sas story it is.

The future is well known. Introducing Russia to the context of the global association of States (partly this was done by Stalin) Bolshevist cesars started to preach the productivity of labor and not the world wealth of people of labor. Passing on the terminology of capitalism they passed unnoticeably for themselves on the practice of capitalism as well. Until 1985 it was still a State capitalism, in 1991 the thuggish, predatory one rushed in.

They had to stand firm. They had to categorically refuse to play in western games. Because the setting up of a single world economic space automatically involves after itself the apparition of a single world political space as well. That’s what happened inevitably. A single world government appeared. These are the seven most economically developed counties of the world and their leaders. Such a globalization, as it is called nowadays, destroys the liberties of particular countries and entire regions. When the regionalization, autonomy and separatism contribute to the freedom of peoples (and individuals). Remember the failure of the 1917 revolution always!