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1. Revolution: Destruction, Cleansing, and Creation
- University of Wisconsin Press
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I ,%volution Destruction, Cleansing, and Creation • T hough his doctors had ordered him to rest, the enfeebled V. I. Lenin would not allow the German socialist Klara Zetkin to end her visit in 1922 until he had read her a letter sent to him by a class of rural schoolchildren. He began, "Dear little grandfather Lenin, we want to tell you that we have become very good. We study diligently. We already read and write well. We make lots of pretty things. We wash ourselves carefully every morning and wash our hands every time we eat. We want to make our teacher happy. He does not love us when we are dirty:' When he had finished, Lenin turned to Zetkin and remarked, "Do you see, dear Klara, we are making progress in every sphere, serious progress. We are learning culture, we wash ourselves-and every day too! The little children in the villages are already helping us to build up Soviet Russia. And then can we fear that we shall not triumph?" Zetkin left Lenin for the last time, his face beaming "his old, happy smile, which expressed such goodness and certainty of victory:'! Zetkin left us a curious image-the ruthless, battle-hardened Bolshevik enthusing over well-scrubbed schoolchildren. Still, Lenin's comments to Zetkinthat children studied "culture" by washing, that their actions were "building up" Russia, and that hygiene would lead to "triumph"-assigned great importance to individual behavior-especially hygiene. In Lenin's response to the schoolchildren's letter, he made hygiene a powerful weapon in the campaign to transform rural Russia. The peculiarity of the situation dissipates upon closer examination. Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks depended on a rich tradition of utopian literature to plan their society of tomorrow. Utopian theorists constructed their immaculate realms of equality and brotherhood in pristine, gleaming settings and implicitly argued that if society were organized, the conditions of illness-and even disease itself-would disappear. Inspired by fictional 12 Destruction, Cleansing, and Creation utopias and concrete examples of rationalization from the West, the Soviets embraced purity of mind, body, and environment in their fight against capitalist disorder. The battle for people's hearts and minds began by lathering their children with soap and water. In their quest for order, the Soviets defined and categorized the existing world by interpreting political orthodoxy and citizenship in terms of hygiene. The criteria of cleanliness appropriated by Lenin had been used for centuries to define desirable behaviors. As nineteenth-century scientific discourse penetrated bureaucratic institutions, the medicalized understanding of dirt and disease gained influence in the diagnosis of various behaviors; cultural concepts, in turn, influenced medical diagnoses. Science merged with prevailing assumptions about purity and propriety to create a vision of cultured life that included cleanliness, proper behavior, and politics all rolled into one big civilizing project . Steeped in this discourse, the Soviets associated cleanliness with desirable behavior and extended the metaphor of hygiene to domestic maintenance, political opinion, and leisure choices. In the rhetoric of Lenin and political leaders, hygiene became a symbolic system and cleanliness developed into a political statement. In this schema, however, dirt was not always what it seemed. Anthropologist Mary Douglas argues that the fight to eradicate dirt is a battle of more than just hygienic proportions . Noting that the discomfort of civilization with dirt predated the revelations of nineteenth-century scientists like Joseph Lister, Douglas holds that dirt is not an absolute but "exists in the eye of the beholder:' Rituals and efforts to cleanse a body, a home, or a society focus on dirt as a signifier of "disorder:'2 Because of its connection to order and disorder, dirt infiltrates discussions of behavior and becomes part of racial stereotypes, class commentaries , and sexual prejudices. In theWest blacks, the lower class, and women were all associated with disorder and were consequently identified as "filth" in various modernizing contexts.3 For the Soviets the creation of ordered, urban environments and hygienic, modulated citizens served as a critique of moribund, filthy capitalism and those recalcitrant peoples who resisted the revolution.4 Lenin's tale of purity and peasants concealed biases about the groups targeted for domestication.Workers, women, and the peasantry all worried authorities because of their perceived ignorance, intransigence, and general "disorder:' The Bolsheviks took power with the avowed goal of creating a system for and of the dispossessed, but this pledge did not translate into an acceptance of the people as they were. They had to be bathed...