New Vekhi (New Landmarks)

S. Tshernyshov

So finally we have made this long way when we at least knew where we were going. And here we are in delirium on the edge of an abyss, recklessly and thoughtlessly taking the crucial step across the border past the landmark, which will inevitably drag us into something, tragic in its obscurity. But if we should call this something revolution - then we are in for the queerest revolution in the new history.

All the major cataclysms in the European history were prepared by serious intellectual and spiritual activity. The French Revolution was preceded by the French encyclopedia. The triple Russian revolution was born in agony by the three immortal generations of its ideologists.

The cataclysm we are rolling towards is happening in the country which is an intellectual desert.

In this context the initiators of perestroika qualify as normal modern people whose conscience and common sense - under the hard pressure of circumstances - start a tantallizingly slow cracking through the age-old rigidity of social myth and prejudice. The blessed importance of this miracle should in no way be underestimated. But still perestroika is nothing but a tardy and prematurely born baby of exhausted weary Russia.

One should think that in the times called epic even the music of social spheres should evoke an epic mood. We have learned to believe that profound revolutionary cataclysms and social upheavals should necessarily echo up with cultural revelations, tempests and bounties of spirit. Can it be nothing but just a myth?

We "have visited this world in its fateful times", when the future of our Motherland and the viability of the socialist idea are questioned. But we are certainly not up to the high tragedy of our times. We have kicked off an unseemly family quarrel and are head over heels in the sticky mud of mutual accusations and insults. Where does this blatant clash between this "life or death" question and the "hozrastchyot" petty squabble come from?

We are excavating the most traumatic layer of our history, burned through with the fire of morals, all stained with blood-curdling crimes and coarse with the countless tragedies of our fathers and grandfathers. But who is doing the excavation? It looks as if a team of reckless reporters for the criminal column have snatched the job, which naturally and legally belongs to the children and grandchildren of the victims or at least to professional historians and archeologists. Why did it happen so?

And the truth? The question "Who we are, where from and where to we are going" was put many years ago, and it was by no means meant as an academic question. Did anybody really venture an answer? No. The question is still hanging in mid-air. We claim to possess the only true theory of social development, but in reality we have to grope for the way, as the blind, we crawl on through wasteful trial and fatal error. Why?

The question reverberates in emptiness and the echo dies down. The culture is silent, guarding in its very core some fatal curse, some paralizing latent fracture.

It does not at all mean that the silence at least encourages thinking and self-analysis and meditation. No way! Instead of a cultured theoretical dialogue we have a strident journalistic wrangle and ...

In the discussion we are having at the dawn of the third millenium the left wing is seething with pioneering enthusiasm over the necessity of waterclosets, while the right wing is tolling the alarm over the possible disruption of the ideological basis if we give up digging our national earth closets. Can we call such a discussion revealing or history-making? Can we expect a supersonic passenger boost-glide aircraft to come out of the competition between two design bureaus, if the first hopes to reconstruct the national "Ilya Muromets" plane, recklessly borrowing a thing or two from "Duglas-8", and the other unbendingly insists that any modernization should leave the air propeller intact?

The night sea is aflame with blood-coloured ..., it is pierced all across with double forks of horizontal lightnings... But why don't we hear the thunder? Instead we are deafened by the all-muffling fussy squelch of the swamp, which is hopelessly late with its echo of the past storms and gales.

A parcel of big-city intellectuals, drunk on impunity, are romping about among the suddenly fallen dominoes of yesterday's ugly idols. At the same time the victimized top "nomenclatura" is cornered by the ever-growing mob of creditors who demand immediate settling of all the debts over 70 years. But the only virtue of the administrative system - authority and ability to distribute - is impotent, because the source of material and cultural goods to be distributed, which never was very abundant anyway, is speedily drying up.

The market of saving remedies can offer only the varying formula "The West will help us". It is easy to guess that the West is not rushing to help. And all this is covered by a reverberating echo of an old prophesy: "In order to distribute one must have what to distribute, and to have what to distribute one must make, build, produce, create."

Who was the prophet and how fatal is the prophesy for the country?

1

The diagnosis which is more and more frequently voiced at the bedside of the agonizing "national economy" is as follows: "Evident hypertrophy of the principle of distributional justice, suppression of the freedom of production, individual freedom of economic and any other creativity. The notorious dictatorship of the producer over the consumer is not the real problem here. The core of the problem lies in the boundless dictatorship of the distributor over the producer. Those who cannot and do not want to work are ready to starve the country to death but to hold down their opponents, people who can and want to work.

Further on the doctors participating in the concilium fall into two groups. On the one hand, "liberal economists" jointly attack the dictatorship of the distributors who are very comfortable under the banner of the dictatorship of proletariat. In response its on-staff and voluntary solicitors will advance a standing argument about the very first gulp of freedom in the sphere of production bound to cause a very heavy hangover of violating the sacred uniformity of society and its consequent stratification.

On the other hand, some westernized philisophers and other irresponsible humanitarians would insist that the distributional principle suggests emphasizing relations of production, whereas the principle of freedom of production foregrounds the problem of liberating creative powers of personality. Accordingly spokesmen for the distributional approach would recommend as priority for the perestroika deep-going reforms of distributional relations, the long-awaited realization of the second part of the formula of socialism:"To each according to his work". Whereas the personality approach supporters would emphasize the first part of the formula: "From each according to abilities", would appeal to liberate creators, which will make restructuring of relations possible.

The reader today is amazed at the profundity and intensity of foresight which strikes him when he reads "Vekhi" (collection of articles), which was published in three editions in March, May and June 1907, a bit earlier than the April Plenum. The prophesy quoted above belongs to S.Frank, one of the contributors to the book. And this is in no way a coincidence or a chance insight. "Vekhi" are a real collection of ominous prophesies come true.

"Theoretically the religion of socialism has the same utilitarian altruism of striving for the good of the neighbour lying at its foundation. But the abstract ideal of complete happiness in the far-away future kills real human relations among men, a living emotion of love for people and for their everyday needs. The socialist is not an altruist. Truly, he also wants happiness for people, but he stops loving real people and loves his idea only - the idea of happiness for the whole humanity. He sacrifices himself for this love, but he also never hesitates to sacrifice other people. He sees his contemporaries, on the one hand, as victims of the world evil, which he is dreaming to root out, and, on the other hand, he thinks they are to blame for the evil. He is sorry for the former, but he cannot give them any real help, because his activity is to yield fruit only in the far-away future. That is why his attitude to them does not carry any active affect. He hates the latter and he sees struggle with them as his most immediate task and the main instrument to reach his ideal. This hatred for people's enemies makes a real and active psychological basis for his life. Thus a great love for future humankind degrades into a great hatred of people, a passion to organize a paradize on the Earth becomes a passion for destruction..."(Vekhi", 3-d edition, Moscow, 1909, pp 192-194.)

It is no time and no place to make assessments, to square philosophic accounts or try and place "Vekhi" in the development of intellectual culture. The matter is that the clash of two principles - of distributional justice and of freedom of creation - is far from being settled. It is still the first act of a historical drama which is over. It cost the country dozens of millions of human lives and evidently has taken us into a deadend. The next act is to take care of what has got the name of "perestroika".

In this situation the very first idea which strikes you is to kneel before the foresight of the "Vekhi" authors, do away with the treacherous and discredited principle of distributional justice and rush to the opposite. We can prove that it is faulty, but it is easier to show that it is impossible.It is impossible because of the present social realities. Moreover we can contend that the "Vekhi" authors, had they lived till today would have taken a different stand. Berdyayev's "Sources and Meaning of Russian Communism" testifies to that. Berdyayev's personalism went along with his political realism. He would remind continuously that he had foretold the inevitable bolshevicks' victory in his 1907 article, before "Vekhi". This ability to differentiate between the realities of life and the cherished ideal is one of the things we should learn from the "Vekhi" philisophers.

In the brilliant sociological analysis in "Vekhi" the marxist background of the authors often comes through. Intelligentsia, a specific phenomenon of Russian life of middle 19th - early 20th century proved the main carrier of the egalitarian ideal of distributional justice in all the three Russian revolutions.

But this sunny island of consciousness was floating alone in the dark stormy existential seas of the unconscious - a fathomless reservoir of the disintegrating communal way of life, which splashed out city proletariat with its acute inherent feeling for justice.

Creative spirit was entirely lost in this spaciousness. The tzarist administration that opposed the revolutionary forces in no way could be associated with the elite principle of creative freedom. The freedom of production principle has won the minds of a tiny group of intellectual leaders of the Russian "Silver Age", religious philosophers and writers of noble origins.

The feeble bourgeous element did not care much about the sacred principle of private enterprise, to say nothing about the writings by Bulgackov and the Trubetskies. Civil society was scarecely sprouting...

There was no opposition of ideals. The "Vekhi" appeal reverberated in vacuum.

Today Berdyayev, Bulgackov, Struve, Frank and others suddenly became idols for the Russian educated stratum. This stratum is called intelligentsia by mistake - by mistake dating back to the stalinist functioneers from the culture. The authentic intelligentsia, who worshipped Belinsky, Tshernyshevsky and Plekhanov, all perished in the fire of the revolutions it ignited. Its left-overs, locked in the reservations for "bourgeous specialists", were annihilated in the 20-30s trials, in the course of the "doctors-the-killers" case and at the VASHNYL sessions. Contemporary intellectuals have different roots and different idols. Thus in the unannounced journalistic war of the past three years the freedom of creation is clearly getting the upper hand over distributional justice. It looks like perfect time to start publishing "Vekhi of perestroika".

The thin coat of the journalistic foam can only camouflage the turbulent bottom storms of the silent majority. And this majority is starting to break its profound silence. Furious bitterness which splashes out onto shifty cooperators, fires set on leasehold farms, extremist egalitarian demands of strikers - all this testifies to the fact that the ideal of distributional justice is still here and is quite agressive. It has been sublimated from the depth of the communal unconsciousness into the public mass consciousness, which was being in every way encouraged by the ruling administrative system. Abusing the sacred name of the spirit of justice, Stalin set afree the demon of egalitarism, which had been dozing in the depth of the patriarchal system, set him the aim; and the campaign of total "raskulatshivaniye" burned out with hell's fire everything above the wretched and squalid mediocre level of the commonest "serednyak".

Thus today when the nightmare of the egalitarian autogenocide has just dispelled, we should not vest too much hope with the appeal to get free, give way to creativity, set free creative and productive forces of society. And the matter does not lie only in the mass hostility which will face these appeals, but also in the fact that they have no audience. The country tragically lacks people who still can and want to create. This is our main shortage, the source of all the other shortages. The spiritual landscape of our society prophetically shows through in the image of a village of bell-makers, burned down to the ground, in Tarckovsky's film "Andrey Rublev".

And then can the cataclysms we are heading towards have any constructive meaning at all? Is the unique universe of Russian culture really doomed to "thermal death", the victory of social egalitarian enthropy? Can it be possible that we are witnessing death convulsions , but not labour pangs?

The historic argument between justice and freedom started long ago and it is not to be resolved in the near future. This is a universal drama of the whole humanity, it does not concern only Russia, but Russia has a unique role to play in it. The whole point is whether we shall finally be able to play this role consciously, or the strange plot will turn blind fate, a real tragedy for us and for other peoples.

The two struggling ideals do not identify with the black and the white, the bad and the good, when one of them is necessarily supposed to get the upper hand, and the other be uprooted. Controversial and tantallizing coition of masculine and feminine elements, the mystery of birth is closer to the point here. History proves that the overwhelming rule of any of the two principles turns evil, whereas the good balances on the narrow brink between them.

The Russian ethnos, as well as any other, has always embraced both elements coexisting. The spirit of freedom has been hovering over this vast land, nourishing creators and explorers, heretics and free Kossacks. Russian freedom although is closer to the slavic notion of "volya", than to English "liberty": it means rather wild freedom for everybody than the elite "luxury, wilfulness, freedom" suggested by Plato's Callicle. In Russia it was not freedom for the few, for the elite, for the nobility. It happened so to a considerable extent because Rossia at the dawn of its history was a heterogenious cluster of many different tribes; and further the Russian ethnos in the process of its moulding got infusions of western, eastern, northern and southern blood, which was constantly changing it. There is such a thing which is called Russian spirit, but there is no such thing as Russian blood. There are few places in the world where the ideas of racism get less welcome.

A dramatic shift towards the reverse happened after the first wave of the great Eastern invasion in the 13th century. It swept the country like a neutron bomb and burned out the entire town culture, way of life, undermined crafts and geography studies which were centered around towns. Rossia, which Scandinavians used to call "a country of a thousand towns", for many centuries turned into a giant village with the Moscow Kremlin in the centre.

Destiny gave Russia the Baikal lake, the biggest lake in the world with the purest fresh water. And Russia itself was destined to become a unique reservoir, a repository of communal equality, which splashed all over the world in the greatest storm of the 20th century. Inside the country the boiling mass of the communal equality element led to the nightmare of repressions and smothering creativity. But in the world at large the splashes it got became aqua vitae of justice, ensured major social victories of working people, helped along the Swiss model of democratic socialism.

The waves of Western invasion came later and in a different form. The Anglo-Saxon socium, the cradle and the domain of the elite ideal of individual freedom, plagued holy Russia with beard-shaving under Peter the Great and two centuries after endowed it with bearded Marx, under whose name and banner - can you imagine that?! -voluntarily rushed into the revolution yesterday communal peasants in "lapti". Marxism which was calling for a leap into the realm of freedom, made an impetuous leap from the West onto the seven hills and founded a realm of the Third International there. Russia burst, turned inside out, like a newborn luminary, whirling about its justice and its freedom into the whole Universe, and in the very core there remained gaping a dark star of iron dictatorship.

So what is the meaning of the new convulsion of the giant body of the country, of the new frontal clash of the two ideals? What will it bring?

Will it bring the final victory of the western levelling justice over 1/6 of land? This would have brought about another and this time final fall into the abyss, which we have hectically tried to get out of, it would cause decline and death of the socium, the realisation of the apocalyptic vision in "Autumn", a poem by Baratynsky:

Or will it possibly bring a sudden victory of the freedom principle, backed by the heavy assistance from the West? This would have meant a rapture in the thousand years history line of Russia, giving up its unique historic mission and transition to the traditional European model of development, which will have to start from zero point, with neighbours centuries ahead of us. The opposites meet.

Pure principles are suicidal. Certainly, we cannot escape the principle of social justice which runs in the blood. It is Russia's historic mission to embody it in its fullness, to generate and to preserve its warmth, to emiss it into the universe of humanity. But the uncompromizing ideal of justice will have to step back, to make room for its opposite - the ideal of producing, creative freedom. Stepping back, but not giving in. Accepting it to a certain degree and under certain terms. Getting into certain relations with it. Which is this concrete relation in different spheres of material and cultural life of our society? - this is the shape the eternal Russian question "What is to be done" is taking today.

2

The tragic post-revolutionary contention between justice and freedom in our history has the absence of subject behind it. This contention compares to a fight for the steering-wheel of a sinking ship. If "history be nothing but activity of man pursuing his aims" (Marx), then building a new society as well as any other human activity should have its own basically new and realistic subject next to a clear ideal. And this subject should be no less clear and tangible than that of any common human activity such as farming, pottery or blacksmith's work. One needn't be a philosopher to realise that the subject of an activity is inseparable from its sense. At the turn of the two epochs we failed to grasp this sense, we lost it, and our history got whirling inside a vicious circle.

The English way to look for the money you have lost is to find a street-lamp and look for it there, in the light. The Russian way to look for the sense we have lost is to... find whose fault it was. We have done away with Stalin. But it did not prove satisfying, we are still blood-thirsty. Authoritative and estimable men-of-letters took up Lenin, flicked a biased reading of the first volume and rushed to share their revelations with the public. Who is to be the next in this looking for a scape-goat? Who was the first to sin? The name of the unforgettable IMELS promts the answer. It is to be Marx. Now it is his turn to appear before court!

The trial has not started yet, the charge is not brought. Marx is only getting out of fashion so far. It is becoming mauvais tone to quote him and to refer to him. He is encircled in a wall of silence. The public opinion is secretly (in the classic stalinist tradition) getting ready to topple its former idol. Naturally (and this is also the way we do it) nobody cares about argumentation.

But the judges are innocently ignorant of the fact that real Marx has very little to do both with the historic western "marxism" and especially with the eastern "marxism-leninism", which are in fact self-nominations of political ideologies. Marx once said in a temper:"I know only one thing for sure: I am no marxist". And Lenin while reading "The Logic" by Hegel wrote in a sudden revelation: "No marxist ever understood Marx".

"The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property". This sacral formula of the "Manifesto" carries our damnation and our salvation. Marx's words did not get a constructive interpretation - in the sense of determining the subject for activity, for historic creation. They were interpreted destructively, as an appeal to fight capitalists and landlords and annihilate them physically. The category of "abolition" instead of getting a European interpretation of removal, overcoming, mastering, winning over, got an Asian interpretaion of killing, terrorizing, "Red Army attack".

And still another warning comes from the prophetic "Vekhi":

"Thus working for people's happiness from this perspective is in its essence no creative and no constructive activity, but boils down to clearing, removing obstacles, that is to destruction...Progress demands no creation or positive construction, but just breaking down the opposing external obstacles... Destruction is not only seen as one of creative devices, but is actually identified with creation, or, rather, has altogether taken its place. Here we are having an echo of the Rousseauism, which made Robespierre sure that it was enough to ruthlessly destroy the enemy and the realm of reason will come."

Marx identified the abolition of private property with the abolition of proletariat, abolition of labour, relations of production - and this is enough to show that he interpreted abolition in the Hegelian, but not in the Stalinist way. By abolition he meant removal, overcoming, integrating into some new developing whole. The abolition of private property means overcoming alienation. This formula embraces the whole Marx and the whole communism. It was this overcoming that Marx was calling "real communist act", "positive abolishion of private property" as opposed to "common abolition" which is symbolised by "man with a gun".

The abolition of labour is a bitter pill that our marxists have to force down many times while reading "German Ideology" and "The Holy Family". In the name of seemliness and chastity of the theory in its castrated academic version, this sin of the classic's youth, as well as many others, is hushed up.

"Communist revolution fights the current type of activity, it abolishes labour."

"Labour is a force that stands above individuals. And as long as it exists, private property should exist too."

"Proletarians ...must abolish the condition of their existence, which is at the same time the condition of existence for the whole hitherto society, that is they must abolish labour."

"Labour has become free in all the civilized countries: the point now is not in liberating the labour, but in abolishing this free labour".

Poor marxists, whose interest in classics confines to fishing out fitting quotations to beautify their own numerous volumes "about" the communist theory! The only thing they can do to save themselves more heart-rending enigmas is to stamp Marx "classified" and hide him away. Fortunately, Marx is not the author much read anyway.

There is only one key to authentic Marx. It is the culture of thinking. "Labour is a form of human activity only during the period of alienation". Labour, according to Marx, is quite a clearly defined, restricted notion, but not an abstract above-the-history virtue, which transforms our hairy ancestor into a bolding decent-looking contemporary. Labour means a concrete historic type of people's activity, which suggests that they are tied and chained to each other through alienated relations, independent of their will. Abolition of labour does not mean abolition of any type of activity with the aim of founding a realm for loafers and lazybones. Vice versa, it means that activity will become really human, because only breaking out of relations of production can open the way for real human relations, when all people will be personalities. There is the same difference between labor and authentic human activity as between wedlock and love. Both labor and wedlock are limited, weighed down by impersonal relations of production. But joint activity aimed at searching for the Truth, establishing the Good, creating Beauty, known since Socrates times, - is truly "devilishly serious work, a most intensive effort", but it is no labour.

"Labour" here seems to share the lot of many Marx's categories, when they are treated from the highly respected common point of view. "But theoretical questions cannot be dealt with from a common standpoint." (Lenin). If we accept the negative, destructive interpretation of the "Manifesto", we make senseless the whole life of Marx. The biggest part of this life was devoted to "Capital", the work which was haunting him through his life, like a curse, the work, which was completed by less then 1/24 part (as we can learn from the "Plan for Six Books"), which was never and nowhere understood by anybody, including Engels, and, most importantly, which is absolutely unnecessary for the armed expropriators of expropriators.

But simultaneously we make senseless our own life, owr own history from the moment when we accepted this western formula in its eastern interpretation. Instead of a natural, conscious movement through historic space, densely packed with layers of alienated public relations, forms of property, instead of conscious creation, inheriting all the material and cultural values of humanity, - the future is expanding into the emptiness of "evil infinity", emerges as an absurd voluntaristic construction on an ostensibly cleared spot of something exemplary, unseen and unheard of.

Instead of the promised realm of freedom we find ourselves in a realm of tyranny. But if "man is the master of everything and decides everything", if there is no law, no history, no God, - all this is no freedom, but "1984". And the archaic-and-infantile social conscience throws itself under the protection and to the mercy of the Great Leader and Teacher, the creator of Statements and Inferences, ersatz absolute truths and final judgements.

The communism which we find in the "Manifesto" has nothing to do with it. The abolition of private property, its positive annihilation, as Marx sees it, passes through the same stages as the development of property relations and it starts from the crown, from the supreme type of property relations and goes down. It means, primarily, that communism in its meaning equals the whole human history before it, not capitalism alone. It is not by chance that Marx called all the human history before communism "pre-history". Communism is no static social utopia, but a forward movement into history, abolishing property relations, an epoch, made up of a number of social and economic structures, held together by one type of development, a new subject and a new sense of human activity. And, secondly, it means that this movement has capital at its outset. The first stage within communism, which Marx calls "vulgar communism", is supposed to socialize the means of production, which means extended, crisis-free reproduction of value on a major social scale.

It appears that the author of the "Capital" was neither obsessed nor too inquisitive, when he dedicated his whole life to the Book. You can't move an inch in really abolishing private property without a thorough knowledge of the subject of this book. The fact that our purely practical activity has not claimed it so far is indicative not so much of the book, as of us: we simply have not even started abolishing private property. We are still in the dark about what and how we are supposed to "abolish". And the most deplorable thing about it all is that unlike Socrates we haven't got the slightest idea that we might be ignorant of something.

Unlike public property private property stands in a specific singular relation to a section of society. This is the ABC of the Marx theory. Thus any state property, irrespective of propaganda pretence of the state to have some mythical property "of the whole people", is a variety of private property; and as such it is liable to abolition, in its turn, alongside the capital. Moreover, it is easy to see that even if our political economy men succeeded in their shamanism and the property "of the whole people" suddenly came out of the blue, it will anyway be a private property. The only chance to call it public is to identify "the people" with the whole population of the Earth.

And as far as we seem to be getting to the core of the eternal Russian "What is to be done" question, its twin question is inevitably emerging: "Who is to blame".

"We tend to say "we" when talking about transition from capitalism to socialism, but we do not have a clear and precise notion of who these "we" are" (Lenin). This is the essence, this is the central issue of perestroika, which hasn't even got a real posing yet. But this is the nature of a concrete truth: on the way to grasp it, you have to deal with the abstract truth first: who is the historic subject, destined to perform the abolition of alienation. Classics teach, that any idea, whenever it tried to realize itself, without having saddled an appropriate material interest, would invariably fail and disgrace itself. Who are indeed the classes or strata in society, most vitally interested in the soonest possible abolition of private property?

The canonic answer is on the tip of the tongue, but the canonic answer is not true. It might seem strange, but there are two such classes. "Self-growth of capital - the creation of surplus value - has an absolutely poor and too abstract meaning. It makes the capitalist another slave of capitalist relations alongside the worker, though, on the other hand, it keeps him on the opposite pole." (Marx). Certainly each party sees its own positive sense (benefit) in shaking off this slavery. Workers are seeking justice in the distribution of the value produced, while capitalists are eager to get rid of the hard strain of the stohastic* unpredictable market economy and the blind fate of crises.

Marx treated this split subject as a purely theoretical phenomenon. He saw proletariat as the only force capable of overcoming alienation. He was certainly right in thinking that bourgeoisie had a lot to lose besides its chains, and, more importantly, it is fatally split by constant fight of each capitalist against all his fellow-capitalists. He clearly saw this centrifugal force, pushing private capitals from each other, and he failed to see any opposing centripetal force, which would braze them together as protons are brazed in atomic nucleus. And thus - Workers of the world, unite! Bourgeoisie cannot unite.

The idea, that workers would win a synchronous victory in all developed countries was a theoretical, abstract truth. In reality they won in one country first. And it was then that the combination of a constant external threat in the persona of the Communist International and the ever-growing working movement at home, aided by the greatest crisis of 1929-33, generated the pressure which urged the financial elite to unite. Thus a "mirror-like", an elite subject for overcoming alienation came into being.

The irony of history lies in the fact that today we have to seriously undertake a reconstruction and further development of the very private property we are claiming to be abolishing, while our opponents across the border, who have proclaimed private property sacred and inviolable have been actually annihilating it since the Roosevelt times. It is certainly doing it in a different manner, Red Army men do not break into sky-scrapers on 5 Avenue. But in effect something more dramatic is happening. The financial elite uses the state mechanism to slowly but unflinchingly monopolize and centralize top forms of economic activity, layer after layer. They haven't gone a long way though. Capital is no object or thing, it's a relation, a self-reproducing value. A partial limitation of forms and possibilities to invest and use capital means its partial abolition: the owner is still handing his candle, but the flame is no longer his. This is the real expropriation of capitalists, as Marx saw it. But the subject here will be different: instead of the dictatorship of proletariat we have the dictatorship of the financial elite. Facing a deadly external and internal threat, it has to unite, shuffle off the classic form of each opposing the whole world and to combat crises it has to centralize the management of the aggregate capital reproduction. The notorious formula about the inevitable downfall of capitalism is no longer popular, but it still ranks among the fundamental dogmas of Marxism. Isn't it time to cross it out? Indeed, it is no longer topical - not because Marx erred, but because there is no more capitalism. And it was the Russian revolution that has directly though unexpectedly helped along its end. There is a basic difference between the state-monopoly capitalism of the times of World War I and the present-day western elitarism: in the first case it was a forcible temporary abolishment of economic relations while the second involves their stage-by-stage removal.

State-monopoly capitalism is an unstable, transitional state, which can end in two ways: either standard monopoly capital is released after the war emergency is over, or there appears a state-monopoly socialism as a result of the power pass-over from the dictatorship of oligarchy to the dictatorship of proletariat. Elitarism is not just an approach to a new type of production, but to a basically new, above-the-structure type of development.

In the early 20th century Lenin, having analyzed the capitalist system, stated, that this female, who had acted a virgin, was actually pregnant and near her time. Since then the riproaring life of the above-mentioned female has known dramatic turbulences and traumatic revolts. But our "omniscient" "marxists", discarding the slightest doubt, declare pompously that our lady is still in the family way (for 70 years), and the whole set of epoch-making changes in the 20th century European history is nothing but some insignificant particulars, which, by the way, they have revealed in still another stage of the general crisis of capitalism.

The social matter has gone far ahead in its usual way, while our restless spirit of political economy "has got stuck in the shit of substances" (Marx), is firmly holding the ground of principle on the battle-fields of World War I.

Our social science is at labour. It is giving birth to historic materialism. When will it deliver another baby dinosaur and what kind of dinosaur will it be this time?

Human pre-history is nearing its end and the world is entering a new epoch, the epoch of overcoming alienation, abolition of private property. But this historic movement will go in two interconnected forms - under the banner of justice and under the banner of freedom, in two opposing each other and simultaneously interdependent systems of communism and elitarism. The conflict in Russian history, revealed in the "Vekhi", does not resolve, moreover, it becomes universal.

The inexorable logic of the country's galloping disintegration demands a very clear understanding and an impeccable logic of thought and action. But we are so short of time and the dragged-out decades of absolute lack of thinking and general slackness leave us so little hope. But our choice is limited: either we think through to the end, or we'll have to drain our cup.

Coming back to Marx from our home-bred "marxism", regaining the real meaning of the "Manifesto", knocks down the dogmatic Goliaph. It turns out that the abolishion of private property in the new epoch does not break us from the opposing system, but unites us with it. The real split is made by the justice-freedom opposition. Communism is abolishion of property relations plus social justice.

It means that for a long time we have been living without any ideal. It is high time we realized it. The spectre of Communism has been roaming the country in the years of the first five-year plans, fading out visibly, until it vanished in the 60s. But Marx never saw and could not see communism as a social ideal. It is a transitional, an interim epoch, the first negation of the inhuman pre-history.

"Communism is the necessary form...of the near future, but communism in itself is not the aim of human development, it is not the final supreme type of human society.

...Even communism does not start with itself, but with private property.

...Communism is humanism still not through with the abolishion of private property. Only after the private property is abolished, which is a necessary prerequisite though, positive humanism starts".

Thus we have the truth one day knocking at the door, the truth which we have passed by a thousand times. Then we scrutinize the strange faces of our real parents. The Kuropaty pits open. Long-forgotten features in the old pictures come through from patches of darkness. Ashes flow back back into manuscripts.

What meaning can this substitution of communism for humanism have for our country, which has lost its ideal? Will it just mean another propaganda cliche? What did this word mean for the young German doctor of philosophy a hundred and a half years ago?

In a journalistic article of 1842 Karl Marx, a 24-year-old young hegelian* opposed uniting around St Humanus to alienation*, to the "realm of bestial absence of spirit".* Those who dare to set out for the genealogy of this Saint, will get a chance to get a glimpse of the mysteries...

"Mysteries", an unfinished, or, rather a hardly started poem by Hoete, is one of the most mysterious works in European culture. The author set great store by the idea of the poem. For the first time "Mysteries" appeared in Hoete's collected works, published in 1787-1790 in Leipzig. The poem was started August 8, 1784, which is mentioned in the author's letters to Mrs Fon Stein and Gerder. On the same day he wrote a dedication to it, which he later used to open his collected poems. The tradition is still kept - the dedication to "Mysteries" serves a kind of an epigraph to Hoete's whole life-work.

But nobody will ever succeed in deciphering the hidden meanings of this song...

About three decades after, November 15, 1815, a group of students in Koenigsberg, who came together to read and discuss poetry, sent a letter to the patriarch of world literature. They asked for his arbitration, as they were divided on what this mysterious extract meant. Quite unexpectedly Hoete responded, and rather quickly, considering the times. He wrote an article "Mysteries. A Fragment by Hoete" which was published in "Morgenblatt" April 27, 1816. The author's commentary by far exceeds the original text. Actually, the reader can learn very few things from the published text of "Mysteries". He learns that a monk gets lost in the mountains and finally finds himself in a pleasant valley, where he meets twelve mysterious knights. And this is all he wrote. What was it that he did not write?

Let us listen to the quiet voice of old Hoete.

"To give you an idea of what I plan to do further, and to give you a general outline and the message of the poem, I shall reveal, that I was planning to take the reader...through different areas of mountaneous and rocky peaks... We would have visited each monk and knight in his hermit and watching climatic and national differences we would have learned that these outstanding men have come here from all over the world, where each of them used to be peacefully worshipping God after his own fashion".

"The reader would have seen that different ways of thinking and feeling, which are developed in people by the atmosphere, country, nationality, requirements, habit, are concentrated in outstanding personalities. Here you see a craving for perfection, incomplete in an individual, but finding its acme in living together."

"But in order to achieve all this, they gathered around a man, Humanus by name. They would have never dared to do that, if they did not feel some similarity with him."

"It would have also turned out that each religion achieves at some point its acme and yields fruit, and then it comes close to its leader and mediator and even merges with him. These epochs were to be fixed and embodied in the twelve representatives for each recognition of God and virtue, whatever strange image they might take, appeared before us worthy of consideration and love."

"And now after a long life together Humanus could easily leave them, as his spirit got into each of them, and since it belonged to everybody, it did not need any longer a separate earthly shell."

Here is the cosmic abyss opening up if we start looking for the lost spiritual roots of our revolution! Here is the genealogy of our home Robin Hoods, who can only expropriate and share out!

Contemporary "marxism" cuts us off from the world of shared human values, makes us an island of wrought ships in the ocean of world history. Real Mars is a centre of European history, an intellectual and a spiritual bridge, which connects us to the past and the future of humankind.

Certainly, the humanistic horizon of Marx is more narrow than the universal * of Soloviev's *, and the moral meaning of humanism is a far cry from the heights of Nikolai Phyodorov's universal resurrection. In his youth Marx had only scanned casually some distanced theoretical peaks, but all his life his gaze was fixed on the mysterious dazzling edge, where the future melts into the past. All the philosophers before Marx would rush to jump over with their eyes closed the abyss between an ideal and reality, their values needed Apocalypse to establish themselves here on the Earth. Marx was the first to aim at combining the ice of reality and the fire of an ideal in "a realistic communist action".

How much is Marx responsible for what Russian champions of justice did on his behalf? We shoudn't hurry with answers here. One thing should be clear: those who sincerely thought they were Marx's followers, inherited his demons and the curse hanging over the Book of his life, but altogether lost its constructive value.

Marx's dream to break though across the realm of realized necessity into the realm of humanism is a most precious gift we got from the West. And attempts get rid of it are groundless and irresponsible. But the dream and the plan should be put back into the whole context of World, Western and Russian culture; the realm of freedom should be reunited with the eshatological realm of Russian religious phylosophy, Marx's category of alienation should go together with Berdayev's "objectivation". The living generation of Soviet people who will never see communism in their life-time, must get back a sense of life, the real meaning of "communism" and "humanism".

The clash between freedom and justice runs through the whole history. It takes root, develops and aggravates throughout the prehistoric realm of natural necessity and polarizes from inside national culturies. Within the upcoming realm of conscious necessity this conflict breaks humanity down into two parts, tearing the man's psycho into two incompatible ideals. And only under humanism it becomes a source to develop each individual and society, constantly broken and restored again on a higher level through the unity of free and equal individuals, * each other in their activity.

Without realizing this truth, without putting it into life, without looking at ourselves in its merciless light, it is impossible to understand what, why and how is being produced and distributed according to the principles of freedom and justice.

ÿ3

The past of our Motherland is hardly more open and understandable to us than the future. We must give back the Russian state its history! She is a stepdaughter of historic materialism and she would not fit into the procrustean bed of theory. Our home forces of production resist immanent self-development, and the relations of production would not hinder them as they are supposed to (as theory demands). The practiced eye of a social sciences author, which is always fishing for agricultural factors and Polzunov's machine, would perpertually stumble in our national history upon perestroikas from above on the will of the Father-tzar, introduced under the threat or as a follow-up of another foreign invasion. Not only the legendary Red commanders became people's enemies in the 30s, but also Karamzin, Solovyov, Klutshevsky, who had noticed this oddity of history, and were labelled idealists for that. As to identifying materialistic historians - even the NKVD proved helpless here. And the fatal stigma of idealism scorched our whole genealogy, making vigilant citizens repudiate its own roots.

The same stigma marks our revolution. Like orthodoxal jews, waiting for the Messiah, did not recognize him in Jesus Christ, orthodoxal western marxists branded it bastard. October 1917 lies at the crossing of all the enigmas of the world history. And the focus, the core, the epicentre of every argument is the inconceivable personality of Lenin. Almost turned a new Confucius by Stalinist priests, he is having his second advent in public conscience now. Even the mausoleum did not escape a major shake-up. The assessments range from Christ to Antichrist. This man, who never got real understanding during his life-time, who knew pagan worship and who was tragically lonely, endowed us with a immaculate understanding of Russian and any other society as a many-element, many-structure one and with an idea of socialist economy as a consciously managed system of interconnected structures. Here lies a key to the mysterious victory of socialist revolution in "one, taken separately, country", not at all prepared for the revolution at that.

Marx's theory allows to build up a Mendeleyev table of social and economic structures, ideal states, which society runs through in the course of its development. But chemically pure structures are far too rare in social nature. A real social body is a contraversial aggregate of interconnected structures. Each of these structures is an embryo of a certain social state. Structures are not just rudiments of the past and embryos of future conditions, but they are also active elements, which determine the current condition of a social system. Marx grasped the physics of these elements, Lenin's theory of many-structural economy started its chemistry and biology, and Hegel developed the logic of interconnection and development of the whole. These are the three components of authentic historic materialism, three axes in the space, where human society moves.

Primarily the borders and limits of the notorious unity and struggle of opposing principles should be set in the vital sphere of economy. It is a matter of life and death, and no topic for scholastic exercises, because we are already behind the schedule, and it is going to become desastrous. After-war experience of developed countries in the West has long ago prompted the answer. The spheres of activity for freedom and justice are, accordingly, producing and reproducing structures. Egalitarian and distributing justice has no place in the sphere of healthy regulated competition of producers, as well as the egalitarian principle "To each according to ability" does not apply to kindergartens, hospitals and asylems. The question about the existence of socialism, which Hamlets of our medieval social sciences are dramatically trying to settle, is simple as life itself. A society is socialist if it has freedom in the limits of and for the sake of justice. A society is anything else if freedom domineers and allows justice for its own reproduction and stability.

Attempts to dissolve a handful of coops people in the mass of population, living on state salaries which are more like unemployment allowances, are naive at best. It was not in 1917 that an old tradition to set fire to a better-off neighbour originated. On the other hand, the situation of a woolf in a herd of public sheep, in which our socialist businessmen find themselves, invites rather robbery than healthy competition. Entreprenership should concentrate around centres of industrial growth, in free economic zones of different types, which will make the "open sector" of our economy. Staying in reservations for free competition will help our legal millioneers to feel the sharp elbows of their rivals, and also will keep them away from the guardians of distributional egalitarianism. Free market zones will survive in the agressive environment, if they don't fail to pay the society a contribution in the form of inexpensive and quality consumer goods.

But where can we get this spirit of entreprenership, which will have to be implanted in the poor soil of our Motherland? We won't be able to settle for mere encouragement of its wilted formalized growth and make up with hopes for tubers and roots of grass, mysteriously preserved under the parched field, growing wild with the weeds of underground economy. These tarded measures will have to be accompanied by accurate and decisive transplantation of social and intellectual tissue from abroad. To do away with the heavy dependence on Western imports we must first of all import and implant the producing element itself.

Where can we spot this element, what foreign structure has given it shelter? Those belle-lettres men in political economy who place it in the age-old classical market structure are certainly deeply and dangerously wrong(deluded). A borrowing from the market structure would have certainly helped our "people's economy" move on an inch, but it would have been at best a leap from the European thirteenth century into the eighteenth, into a deadend, which would have clinched our lagging behind forever.*

A normal man cannot discern ultraviolet rays with naked eye. Unlike this, the eye, armed with the stalinist historic materialism, fails to make out economic structures in the West now, which come higher than capitalism on the scale of structures. For this armed eye they are impossible because they cannot ever be possible. Certainly, the classical capitalism is still here and working in the current economy of elitarism, but it is a subordinate, controlled and exploited structure, rather collectivized (socialized) than alienated force of production. Socialism should primarily borrow, develop, upgrade and employ these mechanisms of planned regulation and management of the market economy, which got a boost in Roosevelt times.

Our archaic economic system is like a short-sighted swimmer, who believes that he is swwimming the same way with everybody. But in reality he is close to hitting his head on the concrete wall of the swimming pool, while his rival has just pushed off this wall, turned around and is swimming back. The trouble is that our theoretitians* have missed the change of basic types of social development. And now we are blindly and stubbornly hitting against this concrete wall of objective necessity to start overcoming private property in the country where it is still to be created.

The challenge seems daunting and hopeless. But it is no more hopeless than the task that was facing the revolutionary forces of Russia in the early 20th century. They were to not only "* of a centuries-long historic development, but to weave together two oppositely-directed revolutions - bourgeous and proletarian. Basically this is the task. In politics it was settled in seven months - between February and October. It took us seven decades to get down to economy and all the rest.

But it means that the damned questions of 1917 are looming large again. Do we have the right to undertake a revolutionary perestroika in a society which is absolutely unprepared for it either economically (the development of property relations) or culturally? Can we throw two incompatible perestroikas into one? Won't it throw the country into another, and this time probably the last chaos and blood-bath?

There is a fundamental difference between that and the current situations which gives us a historic chance. We were pioneers then in the political sphere, in the question of power. We could not get any outside assistance and had to go the whole way through our "thousand torments". As Gontcharov wrote, the first warrior, the pioneer always falls a victim. But while we were suffering along our way to Calvary, an economy was being born overseas in a tantallizing sacrament of labour. And now we have a basically new type of economy, an economy of authentic real socialism. Only we don't have it here, in this country.

The only thing we have to do now is to forget our passion for inventing our own, though impracticable wheel, husk out the above-mentioned economy from its shell of elitarism and make it serve the principle of social justice. This is the almost impossible transplantation that we have to do! We have to install a jet engine on a decrepit waggon. But our chance here, let us emphasize it again, lies in the fact that both the waggon and the engine really exist, unlike the flying carpet of political economy fairy-tales.

Our economic mechanism in many of its basic, structural features does not differ much from the developed planned economy of the Ptolemei dynasty in Hellenistic Egypt. It is hundreds of years back in history. It is true. But all the in-between structures, filling in the evolution scale between these stages, are here, one can see them in the world economy. The only thing we have to do is to understand what and where we have to borrow, and how we should put things together. We have to build a pyramid of structures, relying on one another. In this pyramid the lowest structure is to be floating on the vast sea of non-convertible roubles, and the highest, though very small, should be up to the standards of the world economy. We have to convert the time of structural evolution into the space of controlled many-structuredness. We must convert the variety of our "patriarchal, half-barbarous, and really barbarous" structures from a brake into an engine, use the difference of their economic potentials as a powerful force of production.

A striking variety of living conditions in our country, comparable to the variety of the whole world civilization, provides the main elements and parts for a giant meccano "Make Yourself." The missing parts should be boldly borrowed from the experience and activity of other peoples. And this experience shows that the absence of higher economic structures, a practically vacant place, where we shall have to put up the building of modern economy, is not only a drawback, but aso a great advantage. A break-through into the future from behind the leaders' backs will not get stuck in the mud of alienated relations and traditions. At the time when the Lord Protector was imperiously dozing on the sack of wool, the descendants of fathers-the-founders were speeding deep into the American prairie. The post-war ruins of a totalitarian empire gave birth to a wonderful flower of the Japanese superpower.

Economy should be spiritual. But the creative element cannot exist in the form of a spirit hovering over the waters. It must have a solid reliable embassy on the Earth. It naturally comes through a variety of independent social structures. But in this case both the classic Eastern model of an omnipotent state, leaving no space for a civil society, and the Western, where the latter gets the upper hand over the state and takes it under control, are impracticable. As is known, the Maker did not pass the almightiness test, when he had to create a stone which he himself would be unable to shift. The healthy part of our state body, which has set the mechanism of change going, must do something of the sort: to suppress the involuntary instinct of the administrative system to stifle the newly born civil society and simultaneously keep this irresponsible and wild child from attempts at fathercide.

We have to give up our crown of thorns of pioneering reformers, yield the palm, which we have unrightfully usurped, and give back the tub, too. We should not suffer any complexes here. Our mission is elsewhere. The country has * sea underneath, which is breathing and boiling with virgin waters of social justice. On the surface, though, we see much less real justice than in the West. To let those waters of justice break throgh upwards we badly need an emergent injection of freedom.

There is no pretence at singularity in this special mission, as one can be the most free in the family of peoples, but cannot be the most equal. No matter if we want it or not - we have to accept our heritage as a destiny, as a fact. This destiny is simultaneously a gift and a duty, a curse and a blessing. The belief that our Motherland is destined by the course of history to become a spitirual and cultural homeland for the principle of justice, ideal of equality, its fireplace, radiating warmth and light into the whole world diasporah, is true. And if this fire dies down, some essential balance in the world will be broken, a balance which is equally vital both for justice and for freedom. But the belief that it is the patriarchal and communal way of life that works as a depository of this warmth and light, is not true. Again and again the mythological conscience is trying to push the newly born, helpless baby back into his mother's womb. But there is no coming back. Social justice is to realize itself on our soil, become a fundamental principle for the construction and life of society, whose social and economic structures have to be cut for tomorrow.

Among the mysterious qualities of our old hearth is an ineradicable ability to call to life new generations of creators. The country is fabulously rich with talanted, well-educated and originally thinking people. This statement does not at all contradict the earlier one about the intellectual desert. All these sparks of divine fire are two dispersed to flare up a resurrecting and transforming fire. We have practically no traditional informal seats of reproduction and passing over the creating element - "unseen colleges", Lyceums, salons. The only Russian institution of this kind remains individual kitchens at night. The patronizing state has always been stifling creators in its embrace. The experience of peoples, whom we respect, prompts that a constructive role here must be played by various charitable foundations with an independent source of income.

Like a Russian fairy-tale warrior, who had spent a centennial sitting on the * we have accumulated a great spiritual potential. A powerful intellectual structure seems to be the only realistic force to enact a really quick updating of the country. But this force is still not called for, though we are in our fifth year of perestroika. It's common knowledge, that Shedrin's warrior, who was dozing in the hollow, was eaten by vipers. To avoid this prophesy come true, the country should shuffle off the dull administrative intellectual dozing, which is followed by impotency of action. In the new type of development, which we approached seven decades ago, but are still marking time right at the border, the pre-historic dialectics of alienated forces of production and relations of production, ceases to move society on. From now on the only engine for development will be a conscious subject (personality) who does not only carry one of the two public ideals, but is really putting into life the theory of the abolition of private property. This subject emerging from the tortures of "perestroika" and his intellectual potential are the real questions of life and death for socialism. The time is running out.

To become a subject of one's own development first of all means to realize oneself, to answer Lenin's question "Who are "we". And it's not only courage this answer claims, but also a great intellectual power, the culture of thinking and feeling. It was only in 1983 that at last the question about who we are and where we are feebly sounded through Andropov's innuendoes. This is a dramatically vital question that rings, a cry, which after it burst out, was drowned in the marshes of cowardly silence.

An answer to this question will trigger off a real perestroika.

The truth should be absolutely concrete, as concrete, as the harsh realities of this time and this country. A way between the ideal and reality goes along the razor's edge. A fall into the abyss of historic unmanaged tempests will mean a tragedy for hundreds of millions of people.

"It very often happens that a society just does not have any positive, creative forces of renaissance. And then society cannot escape judgement, then the Heavens rule that a revolution is necessary, then the time is out of joint, discontinuity steps in, forces, treated by history as irrational, burst in and whirl about... Revolution is like death, it means travelling through death...to be resurrected for a new life... But revolution is historic fate, unmanagable doom of historic existence. In the course of a revolution evil forces get their judgement, but the judges themselves do evil; in revolutions the good is brought about by forces of evil, because the forces of good were never strong enough to realize their good in history." (N.Berdyayev. Sources and Meaning of Russian Communism. YMCA-Press, Paris, pp.107-108).

So we are taking the crucial step, we are crossing the border past the landmark. We have no time to look back or to stop to think. What is there ahead the landmark? Is it the time getting out of joint or a managed evolution, is it the judgement by history or people creating their own destiny, is it alienation or renaissance?

25.07.-08.08.89.