Just a few quick thoughts that come to my mind as I take a break from the overwhelming magnificence of the Hermitage museum.
This is a charming city. Unlike Moscow, were people appear truly serious and walk with a seeming purpose, people here walk up and down the avenues, the Nevsky prospekt being a favorite, with a bounce in their step, smiles in their faces, and the sounds of lively ongoing conversations. The city has a youthful feel. Now, I've never been to France, but I imagine that this is like the Versailles of Russia with some chunk of its Paris thrown into the mix. I haven't been to Italy or Austria either, but it is clear that the tsars needed to show Europe that they could up the ante. The grandeur is, as I said, overwhelming, and there seems to be design in that. Clearly said: These motherf**k**s wanted to scare the hell out of their subjects. Not only scare them, of course, but also awe them, fascinate them, turn them into a mush of confusion and admiration for what they couldn't even fathom, make them feel small and powerless by comparison, fully pleased and proud of being the base a pyramid with such a shiny tip stood. "Look how big we are, how big we think, how near gods we are. Do not even think about overthrowing us." Even when their power came all from the sweat, blood, and tears of those tiny people they so despised and squeezed and needed. The tragedy here is that the Effect persists. It is huge. People who should know better, take all this in admiration, not for those whose hands made it all possible, since those hands were attached to brains fogged by the immensity of the apparent power of the parasites that prayed on them. Judging by a few disconnected conversations with young Russians and by observing faces, i.e. insofar as I can guess what's being said in Russian, the visitors of the museum, the kids that school teachers bring in groups, etc. are here to be taught, to have their Pavlovian reflexes reinforced, that this is all to be taken in admiration, in awe of the grandiosity, the fanciness of those who oppressed their great great grandparents. See? Our greatness as a nation, as Russians, flows from this. No! It doesn't. It flows from those who put the hands and the sweat, those who executed the plans in the heads of those Italian, French, English, Russian artists, sculptors, painters, designers, and architects. Now, this also gives one a sense of how dramatic, what a historical break the February revolution. The collapse of this empire must have been a thing to behold. I would have enjoyed especially the reactions shown in the faces of those peasants and workers who believed the tsar was a sort of a God. See? Gods fall. Temporarily at least. As for the October revolution, well... It's late already and tomorrow morning I have to rush back to Moscow and then to New York. So I will miss the former Museum of the Revolution, pitifully renamed with the neutral sounding name Museum of Political History. I will still try and get tickets to some concert or ballet tonight, but I'm getting worn by the cold and the long walks. The Neva melted a bit in the middle of the day and now it's back to solid ice. Anyway... as for the October revolution, the effect felt so thick in Moscow and here, the Cradle of the Revolution, it just... well, let me qualify this: I've been here for not even 48 hours. Still I can't avoid feeling that here, it seems as if October was a thin crust that even an insect like Yeltsin, and what came after him, almost undid completely. Of course not, the other side of me argues. Who undid October were not Yeltsin and what came after him. It wasn't even Stalin. It was the depth of -- to put it in Lenin's terms -- the Russian backwardness. And that dovetails with my initial thought about the overwhelming illusion and reality of alienated labor power. It concentrates power at the top and alienation at the bottom. And it grips the souls and bodies of people like a seemingly invincible force. Revolutions have only managed to shake this grip slightly loose, only to find the grip tightened when the initiative of the masses recedes. To end, I should plug a discussion that S&S sparked recently with a review, by Lars Lih, of Richard Day and Daniel Gaido's compilation, _Witnesses to Permanent Revolution_. Lih's review appeared in the October 2012 issue of S&S. I believe that the followup discussion will appear in an upcoming issue of S&S. I am not giving anything away by saying that a huge concern of Parvus, Luxemburg, Riazanov, and Mehring, which are the authors of the articles compiled by Day and Gaido, was precisely how to maintain or provide with continuity, increasing independence, and organization the political initiative of the masses, and how they view that as the structural purpose of the party. So, the form of the party had to be dictated by that purpose. Time to step out into the cold. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
