Celebrating Europe: An Asian Journey

4. Soviets of the Mind

4 Soviets of the Mind Comrade life — Vladimir Mayakovsky And yet, and yet, a global event does not mean the same thing everywhere. Soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, two elderly Indians were drowning their sorrows at a streetside tea stall in Calcutta. One of them was despondent and wondered how such a calamity could occur and question the inevitability of socialism. The other, dyspeptic, retorted: “Where does it say in Das Kapital that you and I shall be sitting here today, in this stall next to a running drain, drinking this horrible tea? If this can happen, so can that.” He added: “But if the counter-revolution can occur, so can the next revolution. We are old, but the dialectic is still young.” After all, Zhou Enlai had said, when asked about the impact of the French Revolution: “It’s too early to tell.” Had he not? Had not Roland Barthes declared that history is not a good bourgeois?1 This elderly Indian was taking the long view of contingency and change, but all optimism was gone. The Soviet Union had been erased from the map. A young Indian, a cousin of a friend of mine, could not handle Soviets of the Mind 51 the catastrophe and developed a mental disorder from which he suffers to this day. The two older comrades knew that they were living and would have to live in a moment of post-communist time — till, they hoped and believed, the ramparts of capital would be breached again at some unsuspected turn of the dialectic. They looked back at Soviet time with a tenderness that was almost physical. The seven decades of world history that had followed the Bolshevik ascendancy had formed the most ambitious intellectual challenge ever posed to rump Europe. The fall of the Soviet Union represented the destruction of an alternative version of European modernity from within the Enlightenment tradition. “Communism was not a type of oriental despotism, as generations of Western scholars maintained,” Gray writes. “It was an authentic continuation of a Western revolutionary tradition, and its downfall — after tens of millions of deaths were inflicted in the pursuit of its utopian goals — signalled the start of a process of deWesternization .”2 A non-Marxist such as me probably will never fathom the depths of belief created by serious reading of the classical texts. But even to me, it appears that at the heart of the Marxist-Leninist project was a desire that was profoundly simple: the desire to remove man’s economic fear of man. This fear gone, men could be collaborators and not competitors in history. They would come together to enlarge the ambit of humanism beyond the rehearsed rituals of companionship and even intimacy that bourgeois life permitted. They would achieve a restorative world that would rehabilitate what Walter Benjamin calls the “war- 52 Celebrating Europe disabled of competition”3 , victims of bourgeois life as an organized act of social and economic violence. The socialist project was an act of restitutive hope. It could be comprehended, therefore, only on its own terms. Benjamin, writing immediately after his visit to the Soviet Union in 1927, embodied this recuperative empathy when he said of Moscow that “every step that one takes here is on named ground”.4 Here, in Russia, “you can only see if you have already decided”. “Only he who, by decision, has made his dialectical peace with the world can grasp the concrete. But someone who wishes to decide ‘on the basis of facts’ will find no basis in the facts.”5 Benjamin observed in the same spirit of empathy that “Bolshevism has abolished private life”;6 that there is “no knowledge and no faculty that are not somehow appropriated by collective life and made to serve it”.7 Lenin himself was a part of the project of collectivization. Benjamin looked tenderly at a portrait of the leader sitting at a table, bent over a copy of Pravda. Lenin’s posture embodied a dialectical tension: his gaze was turned to the horizon, but “the tireless care of his heart” was turned to the moment.8 Lenin was a part of the same dialectic that he had led his people into; he was nothing less, he was nothing more. However, there is always a danger of the dialectic fraying. Avisiting English trade union delegation averred that Lenin would be pronounced a saint...