I think also people fail to understand the reality from which the USSR was trying to waken: a barbaric class society of uneducated virtual serfs. The psychopathology that Dostoevsky describes was really there. Read Chekhov's "Ward No 6" or "In the Ravine" to see the social and historical foundations of the society that they were trying to change.
I grew up with this in Romania. Mind forged manacles. For example my mother, the daughter of a railway porter who worked himself up to a clerical post, was able, due to her "healthy social origins," intelligence, and writing abilities to be given an apartment in a very classy neighborhood. The vice president's daughter lived upstairs, doctors and other professionals inhabited the other apartments....anyway, I remember my mother speaking scornfully of the daughter of some kind of Stakhanovite working man (who also lived in our building) because her father was a simple (uncultured) working man. This shit goes deep and it is not simply the prejudice of the haves against the havenots. It's the toxicity of an entire class-ridden culture that has to be neutralized. This sometimes takes many generations and a conscious effort. The last time I was in Romania was the late seventies, and every bit of this servility and worship of power was still there. Made it relatively easy for the counterrevolution. Joanna ----- Original Message ----- Lenin, from that speech I just linked to: "Of all the socialists who have written about this, I cannot recall the work of a single socialist or the opinion of a single prominent socialist on future socialist society, which pointed to this concrete, practical difficulty that would confront the working class when it took power, when it set itself the task of turning the sum total of the very rich, historically inevitable and necessary for us store of culture and knowledge and technique accumulated by capitalism from an instrument of capitalism into an instrument of socialism." _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
