The Russian Revolution as Ideal and Practice

Commemoration ceremonies and especially centennials, reflect the changes of perception and interpretations over the years, decades, and generations. As the centennial of the 2017 shows, there is a growing disinterest to engage in passionate controversies. The October revolution is, so the argument of the presentation, drifting away into a past so far away. This is a chance to re-enter an all too well-known field. The falling apart of grand narratives opens the chance to raise new questions and discuss new approaches beyond “pro or contra” and to look around with eyes trained by phenomenology and ethnology for rewriting the so-called “time of troubles.” Taking into account that history takes place not only sequentially, but also simultaneously, we are challenged to rethink the forms of narration. If there is not only the linear process of historic development, and we have to cope with the “simultaneity of dissimultaneity” (Ernst Bloch), conventional forms of narration are under threat. This is the moment to get rid of the linearity and sequentiality of the historical processes and to accept contingency as the center of all things happening. From this follows the challenge, to develop a narrative, adequate to the complexity of the historical process, the simultaneity of shocks and repercussions, the staccato of events and the continuity of longue durée, take-off and decadence, military mobilization and destabilization, apocalyptic nightmares and bright utopias, the discipline of professional revolutionaries and the chaotic events out of control.

After October 25, the Bolsheviks did not plan on making the palace a “major focus of their revolutionary narrative.” Instead, they would later react to the story of the absent defense, appointing an “artistic-historical commission of the Winter Palace” (khudozhestvenno-istoricheskaya komissiya Zimnego Dvortsa) in order to transform the storming into a political-aesthetic event whose political dimension could be compared to the storming of the Bastille. Theater therefore had the task of staging the “storming of the Winter Palace” as an event that could visually and narratively secure the future memory of the revolution. This was also sorely needed, for the first attempts by artists to represent the revolution did not conform to Bolshevik ideas. The Bolsheviks certainly did not want the revolution to be portrayed as a people’s comedy. Rather, it was necessary to create a narrative that was as ‘realistic’ and ‘documentative’ as possible. But what can you do when realism and the document cannot refer to an original? When the historical event that is supposed to be repeated never occurred in a manner suitable for remembrance? Starting with Aleksander Blok, Yuri Lotman, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, taking into account similar aesthetic endeavors like Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Konets Peterburga (The End of St. Petersburg), Sergey Eisenstein’s Oktyabr’ (Oktober), and Sergey Bondarchuk’s Krasnye kolokola (Red Bells) and focusing on Nikolay Evreinov, the paper argues that the “Storming of the Winter Palace” is not a reenactment but rather an as-if reenactment, a staged production that only pretends to be a repetition of a historical event.

The shock engendered by World War I called for the necessity of new political solutions in Central and Eastern Europe to ease the increasing class conflicts between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The following paper examines the new forms of subjectivity appeared between 1920 and 1930 in the wake of certain revolutionary thoughts in the international discourse of sexual ethics. The economic goals of the dictatorship of the proletariat were pervaded by the reform efforts of communist intellectuals and leftist activists, which were apparently successful in the Soviet Union and which focused on the human body as a biopolitical factor. The emancipatory proposals of Alexandra Kollontai, Elfriede Friedländer (pen-name: Ruth Fischer) or Wilhelm Reich constituted a progressive sexual ethical system that required a harsh reformist attitude on behalf of the communist believers, politicians, and activists of the time. The paper has its main theoretical interest in deciphering the ambivalence pervading the progressive initiations meant to rearrange the social matrix of marriage, sexual relations, gender roles, sexual morality, prostitution, and parenting. This review of the theoretical assumptions regarding sexual ethics and socialist/communist parties’ attitudes toward the setting up of a proletarian sexual morality, based on the views of Kollontai, Fischer and Reich, shows that the often inconsistent and in many aspects obscure party ideology of the Russian Bolsheviks, the Austrian Socialists and the German Communists thwarted the development of a new sexual political directive as much as they promoted it.

The suspicion that a theological framework informs the leftist revolutionary projects was used to denounce them as crypto religious movements with otherworldly objectives. Evidence from the protocols recorded by Swetlana Alexijewitsch suggests that the post-soviet experience is indeed characterized by a feeling of lost faith in some transcendent goal. I argue that the Russian revolution inherited theological conceptions from the Hegelian concept of history. Contrary to widespread diagnosis, however, such a heritage draws more on the political expertise present in the theological tradition than establishing a transcendent knowledge about the course of history. Hegel and the Marxists knew rather well that an historical project such as a revolution presupposes a goal that is present in the actual world but aims at the profound transformation of this very actuality. Ideas as freedom and equality evoke the vision of a world that is delivered from domination and exploitation. As the religious movements before them, the revolutionaries had to create a community that was devoted to their historical aim in order to reach deliverance from the actual ills. The communist party was the failed attempt to create a militant organization with such universal pretensions.

Lenin formulated the Dictatorship of the Proletariat as a phase of transition from the capitalist state-system to a communist society. The dictatorship was not a state. Moreover, it was neither legal nor illegal; instead it was characterized as extra-legal in nature. How are we to understand the legal character of the dictatorship? In this essay, I elaborate on the alleged juridical foundations as this quasi-state structure and the paradoxes it posed to early Soviet thinkers. I argue for the genealogy of the idea of the imposition of the proletariat’s absolute will in the political concept of “despotism” in Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois. Montesquieu’s despotism is a limiting concept of government, which is marked by an absence of legal institutions and the absolute force of the “prince’s” will, which is unhindered by law. This idea, which remained obscure in nineteenth-century theories of socialism, was resurrected by Lenin in the 1917 work, The State and Revolution. His formulation of the “withering of the state” helps us interrogate the ambiguous situation of the revolutionary context, which lacks any “state” form. Analyzing the conceptual arguments for the extra-legal nature of dictatorship among Soviet legal thinkers like Evgeny Pashukanis, the essay argues for a dialectical understanding of the paradox of law under dictatorship: the rule by decrees in the post-revolutionary context, the role of the soviets in decision-making, and the gradual juridicization of the Soviet state. Through these historical issues, I illustrate the difficulties in conceiving the relation between sovereignty and law in post-revolutionary transitions.

This paper analyzes the scenario for a post-revolutionary society as developed in Lenin’s “The State and Revolution.” Lenin heavily relies on Marx and Engels’s metaphors of waking up and falling asleep: Post-revolutionary society is marked by a grand awakening and a conversion of dreams into reality, while the State is said to fall asleep or wither away. Lenin applies these metaphors yet applies them in a strangely inverted manner. Instead of embracing agency, he argues for a new regime of “habit,” which has sedating effects on humans, while the state survives its demise and returns under the title of “administration.” Lenin’s plea for “habit” and “administration” is discussed in a broader context of other philosophical accounts reaching from Kant to Hegel, Max Weber, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hannah Arendt and beyond. These critical considerations lead to some general findings on the status of moral agency in revolutionary change. Trotsky’s account of permanent revolution with its experimentalist and theatrical implications is a case in point here. The paper concludes by discussing the intricate relation between revolution, democracy, and the state.

In his contribution, Ulrich Schmid traces the reception of the October revolution in Italian Fascism and German National-Socialism. The leaders of both movements were quick to denounce the Bolshevik coup as a foreign conspiracy. Hitler highlighted the Jewish origin of the Russian revolutionaries. Mussolini mistook the Jewish last names for German ones and even mixed up Lenin with the Menshevik leader Tsederbaum; for Mussolini, the October revolution was a German plot. Even though Fascists and Nazis were fiercely opposed to the Leninist ideology, they were deeply impressed with the effective seizure of political power in Russia. Both Mussolini and Hitler were not eager to accept the fact that they were appointed as heads of governments by the king or the president respectively. Rather, they stressed the revolutionary character of their new political systems. At the same time, there were clear differences in the concepts of the state that was to be produced by the self-declared revolutions in the three countries: In Soviet Russia, the state was supposed to wither away; in Italy, the state was the ultimate goal of the Fascist society; in Nazi Germany, the state was expected to transform itself eventually into an eternal “Reich.”

Taking Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden as the point of departure, I analyze how the October Revolution fails to consolidate in the discourses of history and philosophy. Instead, its intellectual consolidation seems to hinge on narrative theory—a proposition implicit to Maugham’s account of the October Revolution, but also to Carl Schmitt, who suggests in Hamlet or Hecuba that explaining political modernity may be premised on a relation forged between narration and revolution. Tellingly, Walter Benjamin identifies a similar configuration in Maugham and Ashenden, with a tacit invitation to examine it against his own narrative theory (of modernity), in The Storyteller. Rather than revealing the October Revolution to be a somewhat disappointing heiress to The French Revolution and to its dazzling effect on modern history and philosophy, this examination shows that the October Revolution confronts twentieth-century modernity with the prerogatives of the English Revolution, as expounded by Schmitt, and possibly exhausts the logic of modernity and of revolution.

This paper explores the theoretical positions of Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse on revolution and the issue of social and political change. A close reading of their main writings and of a selection of posthumously published materials like conferences, discussions, drafts, and letters, testifies that their reflections on revolution must be read as a “dialogue” with the experience of the October Revolution. These thinkers offer a comprehensive analysis of the reasons for the failure of the first successful revolution of the twentieth century to bring about social justice, equality and freedom, on the one hand, by considering the empirical conditions in which the seizure of power occurred, and those which determined the subsequent development of the Soviet state, on the other hand, by considering the role of theory and the weight of ideology whose roots are to be found in Marxian, Marxist and Leninist precepts and ideas. The first part of this chapter will be devoted to these diagnoses. The shadow of October obviously hangs over Arendt’s, Adorno’s, and Marcuse’s pondering of the prospects for revolution. They had to base their thinking on new empirical and theoretical bases in order to avoid the pitfall of October. However, this historical experience was not devoid of inspiring elements, which they borrowed and reshaped after their own fashion. The second section of this paper will explore these conceptions of revolution, which remain enlightening today.

In opposition to the memory politics that seeks to frame the historical narrative of Communism and the Revolution, this article discusses the possibility of a different memory of the Russian Revolution. Taking as its starting point Derrida’s notion of “politics of memory” in Spectres of Marx and Nancy’s existentialist reconfiguration of communality in The Inoperative Community, I propose an understanding of the Russian Revolution as also guided by the idea that it could retrieve a memory of the common as being-in-common. Although this idea was not prominent in official Bolshevik propaganda, I show in close readings how this idea can be found in the literary works of the Russian Soviet writer, Andrey Platonov.

In Russia, the commemoration of the October Revolution is highly ambivalent. On the one hand, symbols of the revolutionary past are visible everywhere. On the other hand, the authorities have only half-heartedly engaged in the commemoration of the event. The main focus of the current commemoration is to reconcile the heterogeneous narratives of Russian history and to emphasize the need for a strong state. In this article, I look at the forms of commemoration or non-commemoration in different social fields (public spaces, museums, academia, and educational internet platforms). Based on media reports, official communications, and my own observations, I analyze how the complex interaction between silencing and performance evokes this kind of blurring. In this way, the memory of Red October is pushed into historical limbo, into a no-man’s-land, from where it cannot endanger current politics.

The experience of politics, for most of us, is increasingly an experience of powerlessness. Not so long ago, the spontaneous relationship to politics was structured by a feeling of revolutionary hope. But today, our relationship to politics is more often structured by a feeling of disempowerment. I argue that this crisis, in terms of the effectiveness of radical transformative practices, is linked to the manner in which the revolutionary ideal functions today, and the way in which it regulates our political practices. We hold on to a certain image of the revolution that guides our political practice. However, this image or idea of the revolution we adhere to (and the diagnosis of the present and future upon which it is based) actually prevents us from acting radically. It prevents us from perceiving and participating in the struggles that are unfolding as we speak. In short, the manner in which we conceptualize the revolution does not allow us to act, but actually makes us feel powerless. How are we to think about politics, action, and radicality today?

What makes a revolution possible? The text understands this as the question for the subject that is able to make a revolution. Any attempt to answer this question is faced with an aporia: The subject of the revolution can neither be identified with its historically produced social form, nor can it be the subject “as such,” as the power of negativity prior to history and society. The article suggests to find a way out of this aporia in the idea of a transcendental turn of subjectivity: The revolution is the transcendental usage of the subject’s historically acquired and socially formed capacities. The possibility of the revolution lies in the revolutionizing of possibilities (as abilities).

This article begins by acknowledging the legacy of both the French and the Russian Revolution in establishing collectivity as the core element of revolutionary process par excellence. Nevertheless and as the paper argues, both “the people” and “the party” as paradigmatic collectivities failed to implement the totality of their goals due to the fact that in the course of the revolutions they instantiated, those collectives were universalized and as such they forfeited their collective, diverse character and fell back to become mere supra-individual entities. Though this can be easily attributed to adhering to a notion of subjectivity that bestows the subject with a metaphysically grounded revolutionary agency, the decentering of the subject that was pursued in the aftermath of May ’68 as a remedy to this problematic is equally insufficient since as soon as there is no subject there is no revolutionary subject—and if there is no revolutionary subject, there is no revolution. With this as backbone, the paper argues that an alternative understanding of the subject as a socially constructed collective subjectivity can serve as an alternative to this conundrum and can be traced back to Marx’ understanding of the subject as being in its “individual existence […] at the same time a social being.” By taking into account similar notions to be found in Judith Butler, intersectionality studies and Jean-Luc Nancy the paper substantiates the notion of a communist, collective subjectivity that becomes capable to engage in collective actions due to its social-ontological production as a collective. The last part is dedicated to the practices that are to be derived from such an understanding of subjectivity and how the collective agency of this subjectivity can obviate the impasses of both the universal-idealist and the hollowed-decentered subject.