It was the Russian artist and writer Julia Kissina who—during a public discussion that took place at the Literaturhaus in Zurich in October 2017—expressed what would become the Leitmotif of this volume. When asked to give an account of why the Russian Revolution keeps inspiring her nowadays, she gave the following instinctive and unabashed utterance: “Because we are all children of the French and the Russian Revolution. Everything that we now have in our culture, the way we behave, the way our societies function, the values that we all share, are the products of both the French and the Russian Revolution, the products of this last successful revolution that the Russian Revolution was.” Officially, the revolutionary events that took place in Russia were declared accomplished after the mythologized storming of the Winter Palace at 2.10 a.m. on Thursday, October 25, 1917, as the mantle clock in the Hermitage’s “White Dining Room” indicates to this day. Yet, due to the global changes these events set in motion, the Russian Revolution continues to loom large in intellectual debates one hundred years later. This book is about this dialectic: the dialectic that unfolds necessarily amidst the ideal of a revolution, its practical realization and how it keeps living through the events, struggles, theories, and effects it prompted; a dialectic that is inherent not only in the Russian Revolution but in every revolutionary process. By taking the Russian Revolution as the prime example of revolutionary processes, the articles of this volume attempt to acknowledge the legacy of the Russian Revolution, come to terms with its failures and sketch the future of revolutionary thinking and practice in its aftermath.
The different names that were attributed throughout the years to the Russian Revolution bear witness to the different contours that it acquired and help us to better understand the multiperspectivism that accompanies all revolutionary moments. This diversity is indicative not only of the aspirations that the Russian Revolution brought about. It is also indicative of the impact that the different moments and phases the Russian Revolution as a process of events comprise of had on its opponents both in its country of origin and—more importantly—on a global scale. Seen this way and whether in the form of the October Revolution, or in the form of the more bureaucratic Great October Socialist Revolution (as this event was recorded in the Soviet literature), or in the form of the more common Bolshevik Revolution, or the October Uprising, or the Bolshevik Coup, the Russian Revolution remained the proof stone of every revolutionary event and the measure par excellence for generations of perspective revolutionaries all over the world in the years that followed it. Its failures were instrumentalized as furnishing proof of the insufficiency of any attempted revolution and became the knock-out argument against the ideal of change through revolution in general. Its successes were hailed as the self-evidence of revolutionary tactics and as the confirmation of why it is worthy to go against established regimes and ways of thinking. At the same time though, the Russian Revolution’s both successes and failures resulted to the Russian Revolution becoming every revolution’s sword of Damocles. Henceforth, every subsequent revolution would have to measure itself with it, finding itself always either deficient or already one step ahead. Caught between imitation, optimization, continuation, or rejection, Lenin’s Bolsheviks became the scapegoat, the ground and the projection screen that legitimized mistakes, suppression, and interventionism, just as they instigated utopias, hopes, and political change that dominate the political stage until today.
The ambivalence concerning the reception and legacy of the Russian Revolution could not be made more palpable than in the different commemorations that took place or were deafeningly absent on the event’s centennial anniversary. Unlike the broadly celebrated commemorations to, for example, Karl Marx’s 200th birthday or the 50th anniversary of May ’68, the events dedicated—no matter how favorably—to the centennial of the Russian Revolution could be counted on one hand. Though Marx, as the father of modern critique, and May ’68, as the umbrella movement that irreversibly changed everyday life, apparently receive the well-deserved unconditional support for their pivotal historical role, a lacuna is to be observed concerning the Russian Revolution; a lacuna pertaining to the ongoing discomfort of how to address it as an event. Seen this way, it is not just an epistemological gap which is at play here and which forces us to question how we should observe past historical facts, events, or narratives. It is also a matter of self-realization that the events we choose to shed light upon, revisit, and commemorate, come back to us by making us aware of our own socio-political and ideological shifts. From this perspective and in a move that turns the tables, the absence of the Russian revolution from the agendas of universities, galleries, city celebrations, blogs etc. is not to be considered solely as proof of the withering away or always inexistent role of the Russian Revolution. Rather, this absence ought to be regarded, as Karl Schlögel in an apologetic and very personal outcry points out directly at the beginning of this volume, as the missing proof of our own growing disinterest to engage in passionate controversies. To be sure, it is not just us, the ones supposedly living in the revolution’s aftermath, who see ourselves confronted with such an excruciating question. What the Russian Revolution really was, is a question with which even its protagonists just a couple of years after its accomplishment were concerned, since the very legitimization of the revolution depended on answering this question. Given that what really happened and what was thought to have happened was not necessarily in accordance with one another, the revolution, as it supposedly had happened, had to be restaged or—as Sylvia Sasse also in this volume argues—reenacted. Only then could the Revolution forfeit its contingent characteristics, invest in its post facto uniqueness, present itself as the realization of avant-gardist theories and claim its true and designated role: to be(come) the deliberate and not coincidental beginning of a new world inhabited by a new (Hu)man. As ambiguous, problematic, instrumental, ideological, authoritarian, and manipulative as such reenactment(s) might be, for generations of revolutionaries in Russia and abroad it was not the reenacted but, on the contrary, the need for reenactment that was a myth. For what they, the ones living in the revolution or the ones awaiting or preparing the next one, already experienced was not a myth that had to be transformed to reality, but a previously unknown reality. Whether this new reality took on the form of finally belonging somewhere, of being able to experience each one’s sexuality, of feeling awake for the first time, or of freedom and equality as deliverance from domination and exploitation (as authors of this volume argue), the Russian revolution was not a scission that needed to be legitimized. On the contrary, its discrediting was part of a propaganda that needed to be successfully substantiated; a propaganda which became reality when taking into account the subsequent juridicization or habitualization of the revolution as the Soviet state. As such, as the disenchantment of a propaganda being none anymore, the Russian Revolution needed to be eradicated from collective memory and outcasted to a historical limbo from where it could not endanger political history anymore. The difficult situation in which contemporary Russia found itself in regard to the commemoration of this event illustrates the tragicity concerning the reception of (not only) the Russian Revolution.
Given the last considerations, it would appear reasonable—when attempting to retell or reconsider the Russian Revolution—to try to do it in a collective manner. After all, the Russian Revolution, like any revolution, was a collective event. Unlike any other revolution before it, the Russian Revolution developed and broadened the notion of the collective, brought new collectives to light, granted them with right(s), and epitomized collectives, collective action and collective processes as the sole core element and touchstone of (any) revolution. Nevertheless, there is a character to which a paramount role in the course of those events has always been accorded to; a character, who is apparent in every attempt to reconstruct the Russian Revolution or to think of any future ones. This person is none other than Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, a person that, just like the revolution he helped to accomplish, still plays a determining role when theorizing the events that he set in motion. Seen this way, it is not surprising that a series of articles in this volume occupy themselves with him, his deeds, his writings, his role in the course that the revolution took, his influence during his absolute reign, the debates concerning his success, the role he played in forging the Marxism-Leninism doctrine, and, last but not least, how this doctrine was shaped to find the next revolutions and how Lenin, as the revolutionary person par excellence, influenced any later understanding of what a charismatic figure is. In the articles of this volume, Lenin may appear as the main interlocutor of radical feminists trying to implement communist sexual ethics as opposed to a conservative bourgeois morality; as though he brought the law to its conceptual limits by instituting the state as a collective form, thereby rupturing the individualist foundations of conventional bourgeois law; or as having cast an everlasting shadow over generations of critical thinking from the Frankfurt School to Hannah Arendt who fought ardently to keep the revolutionary utopia alive. At the same time though, Lenin is held responsible for putting an end to any discussion concerning how the revolution could be alternatively founded; for betraying the revolution he completed by putting it to sleep; for being so paradoxically optimistic so as to become almost blind concerning authoritarian power structures that congealed the revolution back to what it was supposed to abolish; for universalizing the proletariat and thus undermining its diverse-collectivist revolutionary potential: last but not least, for functioning contra eo as the necessary and missing inspiration for fascists and national-socialists to achieve their goals.
Given the ambivalences observed not only during the actual course of events, but also in its reception, its commemoration and, in the legacy of its leading figure, it would not be farfetched to argue that a gravestone lays heavy over the revolution and the bodies of the revolutionaries buried with it. Did the secret discussions between Lenin and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries during the ten days that shook the world and that would later lead to revoking the peasants’ Nakaz in the context of the New Economic Policy already lay the gravestone of the revolution? Or did the death of the revolution occur later? Or is rather Trotzki responsible for the revolution’s entombment as soon as he ordered Mikhail Tukhachevsky to attack the sailors in Kronstadt on the 5th of March 1921? Were the remnants of the party structure responsible for embalming the already dead revolution when they stood by Stalin during the 1937–1938 trials? Or did Stalin kill the revolution on the 7th of March 1934, when he allowed for Art 121 to be added to the criminal code for the entire Soviet Union that recriminalized and prohibited (male) homosexuality with up to five years of hard labor in prison? Was the Decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Council of 11.23.1955 on the abolition of the prohibition of abortion that was revoking Stalin’s 1936 law banning the right to abortion that the Bolsheviks had legalized for the first time worldwide in October 1920 with their Decree on Women’s Healthcare a revival of the revolutionary process or the awakening of a zombie that was to die again and again a few months later when by 02:00 on October 24, 1956 and under the command of Georgy Zhukov Soviet tanks entered Budapest? Or were—to stay in Soviet Union’s interventions—Budapest, Prague and Warsaw further gravestones of a revolution that continued to be revived in Cuba, Angola, South Africa, the Middle East, etc.? The list could be continued ad infinitum, yet maybe the sheer facts are not necessarily the best or only place to look for the results or consequences of a revolution—especially considering how susceptible the facts are to instrumentalized interpretation and political manipulation. Philosophical contemplation, theoretical differentiation, political-engaged thinking are also loci of revolutionary practices, processes, and action. The revolt against the metaphysically dominated nineteenth century; the insurgency of contingency against prescribed teleology and quietist messianism; the dialectization of theory and practice against the primacy of either theoretical contemplation or practical decisionism; the upheaval of immanence against transcendence; the uprising of new subjects like the working class, the women, the people of color, the (de-, post-)colonialized, the LGBTQA+, or the antihuman actants; the abolishment of the integral and sovereign (supra-)individual agent as a motor of history; the demolition of the “revolution or transformation” dualism; the realization that different forms of revolution are to be accepted alongside the most conventional and traditional forms of a sudden and violent rupture since the form a revolution has to acquire depends at the end on what has to be revolutionized; the visibilization of the invisible, the misrepresented, the underrepresented; the incorporation of the global and the supplementation of the individual with the global etc.; all these developments in theory are forms of revolution and were set in motion exactly thanks to the ambivalences and the failures of the revolutionary thinking that was put into action in St. Petersburg and was monumentalized and domesticated as Leningrad. Furthermore, when nowadays “Leningrad” is conjured neither the Russian, nor the Bolshevik, nor the Great October Socialist Revolution is evoked, but rather the possibility to realize the infinite project of an already commenced but never accomplished revolution. Samuel Beckett’s liberating and unregrettable “Fail again Fail Better” is still accurate and maybe even more relevant in our current anti-revolutionary times, which are dominated by a politics of appeasement. It is in this spirit that the contributions concluding this volume have to be understood. Condoning the powerlessness of both the practical subject and the ideal subject of the revolution the authors of this section attempt to reenable revolutionary practices that are henceforth to be found maybe also beyond the authoritative ideal of a radical transformation qua revolution. Here, revolution lies in grasping its unmediated, unprepared, urgent, and intrusive realization hic et nunc; in the repetition of every day practices that carry within themselves the possibility to change their own course and through that the context within which they occur(ed); in realizing that revolution can only be a holistic, horizontal, inclusive project where communism is to be associated less with the secretive decision-making processes of a politburo but rather with the social-ontological production of a revolutionary subjectivity.
Surely, there are innumerable things to say regarding the Russian Revolution. Nevertheless, the aforementioned makes it plausible to frame a book considering the failures, the legacies, and the future of (the Russian) revolution based on following three phenomenological and somewhat descriptive, rather than normative prescriptive, notions in order to avoid politically colored and emotionally heated debates: reconsidering, retelling, and reenabling.
In the first section, we wish to go back and reconsider the Russian revolution through the eyes of its actors, its agents, its theorists, and its propagandists. The first question to arise is if it is at all possible to reconsider the Russian revolution. As already mentioned, Karl Schlögel asks in his article “Beyond the Horizon: The Russian Revolution Seen from Afar” if the October revolution is drifting away into a past that is can no longer possible be grasped. Taking into account that history takes place not only sequentially, but also simultaneously, we see ourselves—according to Schlögel—challenged to rethink the forms of narration. We must question the linear process of historic development and cope with Ernst Bloch’s “simultaneity of dissimultaneity.” For only then can we get rid of the linearity and sequentiality of the historic processes and admit 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, the take-off and decadence, the military mobilization and destabilization, the apocalyptic nightmares and bright utopias, the discipline of professional revolutionaries and the chaotic events out of control.
With this problematic as a backbone, the articles of this chapter attempt to scrutinize the ambivalences of revolution in four distinctive phenomena that pertain to the revolution’s historicity: forms of sexuality that transgress the conventional sexual practices dictated by bourgeois morality; religion as on the one hand obfuscating and on the other hand as a necessary vector of transformative critique; forms of law that probe whether law could be normatively binding without reverting to oppressive or disciplinary practices; and, last but not least, revolution as a life form and to which extent there can be a continuous temporality inherent to this life form after its establishment.
Concerning the revolution’s historicity, what is at stake here is whether there is a way to differentiate between what really happened, what was thought to have occurred—and what was staged as having happened. As Sylvia Sasse argues in her article “Reenacting the Revolution? Theater and Politics of Repetition” the Bolsheviks found it paramount to create a narrative that was as “realistic” and “documentative” as possible. But—and these are the crucial questions—what is to be done when realism and the document cannot refer to an original? How do you deal with the fact, that when the historical event that is supposed to be repeated never occurred in a manner suitable for remembrance? Starting with Alexander Blok, Yuri Lotman, and Vladimir Mayakovski and by taking similar aesthetic endeavors like Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Konec Peterburga (The End of St. Petersburg), Sergei Eisenstein’s Oktjabr’ (Oktober), and Sergei Bondarchuk’s Krasnye kolokola (Red Bells) into account the article focuses on the work of Nikolai Evreinov. As Sasse argues, 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.
Concerning 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 focused on the human body as a biopolitical factor. ...