The End and the Beginning: The Revolutions of 1989 and the Resurgence of History

Cătălin Avramescu: Communism, the Experience of Light Electrification, and Legitimization in USSR and Romania before 1989

căTălin aVramescu Communism, the Experience of Light Electrification, and Legitimization in USSR and Romania before 1989 Communism was once famously described by Lenin as “the power of the Soviets plus the electrification of the entire country.” It is interesting to note, then, that most histories of Communism have been, to date, only histories of Soviet power.1 From the vantage point of the history of ideas, Communism was an “ideology.” This is perhaps reading too much into the pretences of the Communist doctrinaires. Their intention was, indeed, to provide principles to support a set of policies. However, in the real world of the “workers’ movement,” ideas and arguments were blurred in the distance , eclipsed by more pressing concerns. Socialist parties and governments were rarely motivated by abstract ideals of equality and fairness . When they were not busy simply with staying in power, they were often concerned with overcrowding, long working hours and security of jobs. This was a movement that was conservative at heart, notwithstanding the fiery rhetoric of some of its self-proclaimed leaders. The modernizing drive of the revolutionary Socialist movement was always marred by this duality. It made possible a hybrid regime where, like in the Stalinist 1930s, repression and abstinence were married with a nascent consumerist culture. It zigzagged between the dogmatic affirmation of revolutionary Marxism and fascination with Amerikanizm.2 The electrified cityscape of Socialism was a field of cultural synthesis. 1 One exception is Anindita Banerjee, “Electricity: Science Fiction and Modernity in Early Twentieth Century Russia,” Science Fiction Studies vol. 30, no. 1 (Mar., 2003): 49–71. 2 See Hans Roger, “Amerikanizm and the Economic Development of Russia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History vol. 23, no. 3 (Jul., 1981): 382–420. 382 THE END AND THE BEGINNING The purpose of my article is to re-establish the importance of the experience of light in the context of the Communist state. I will show that light was a central element in the collectivist experience, as it was understood both by the Communist leaders and their subjects. Light, therefore, was not just the object of a policy. It had a deeper, existential , meaning. Even before the rise of modern Communism, light was an important dimension of social experience. The introduction of public lighting in seventeenth-century Paris was a significant step forward. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we witnessed the spread of the panoptic schemes, “total institutions,” as Foucault calls them, that use light to promote surveillance, discipline and control.3 In Victorian London, Crystal Palace awed visitors with its massive structure of iron and glass, a cathedral of light in the Industrial Age. The rhetoric of Enlightenment had already paved the way for the association between Light, Progress, and Truth. The spread of public gas lamps was made possible by the construction of a centralized system of pipes. Finally, the construction of a network of electrical distribution signified the dawn of the “era of administered light,” to use the expression of Gaston Bachelard.4 The advent of artificial light precipitated a severe disruption of traditional work patterns. The workday of the individual craftsman was regulated by the natural cycle of sunrise and sunset. Modern industrial production required large spaces and integrated operations.5 From the end of the ninetieth century these were flooded by the newly discovered light of electricity. It was in the second part of the nineteenth century that a systematic attempt to connect electricity and Communism was made, in the work of August Bebel, Woman and Socialism. In the third section of this text, “The Communistic Kitchen,” we learn that in the kitchen of the future women’s chores will be revolutionized: 3 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, transl. by Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin Books, 1991). 4 Gaston Bachelard, La Flamme d’une chandelle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1980), 90. 5 Wolfgang Schwivelbusch, Disenchanted Night. The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (University of California Press, 1995), 8-9. 383 Communism, Electrification, and Legitimization The kitchen equipped with electricity for lighting and heating is the ideal one. No more smoke, heat, or disagreeable odors! The kitchen resembles a workshop furnished with all kinds of technical and mechanical appliances that quickly perform the hardest and most disagreeable tasks. Here we see potato and fruit-paring machines, apparatus for removing kernels, meat-choppers, mills for grinding coffee and spice...