John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

Reich described plainly what Kollontai, as a woman in a culturally conservative country, was obliged to paint as “winged eros”. He actively encouraged the free expression of sexuality and celebration of the orgasm. He concluded:

In capitalist society today there can be no sexual liberation of youth, no healthy, satisfying sex life; if you want to be rid of your sexual troubles, fight for socialism. Only through socialism can you achieve sexual joie de vivre. Pay no attention to the opinions of people who don’t know anything about sex. Socialism will put an end to the power of people who gaze up towards heaven as they speak of love while they crush and destroy the sexuality of youth. 26

Although popular with KPD youth, the essay went too far. In February 1933 Reich was expelled from the KPD (incredibly, this took place between Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in January and the Nazi crushing of the left in March, when one might have thought KPD leaders had better things to do). A year later, with fitting symmetry, he was also expelled from the International Psychoanalytical Association. His subsequent career in America was a tragic waste.

Reich’s expulsion epitomised the sexual counter-revolution. In March 1934 the Soviet Union re-criminalised homosexuality. In June 1935 an editorial in Pravda informed its readers that “only a good family man can be a good Soviet citizen”. In 1936 abortion was once more made illegal. Stalin himself wrote in the Soviet trade union journal Trud (Labour),

abortion, which destroys life, is inadmissible in any country. Soviet woman has the same rights as Soviet man, but that does not absolve her from the great and honourable duty imposed on her by nature: she is to be a mother. She is to bear life. 27

It would be unfair to ascribe this reactionary sexual legislation to Lenin, who died in 1924, but it flowed easily enough from his criticisms of Kollontai’s positions on love, sex and marriage, which were tolerated by the Bolsheviks for only a few years before the state’s need for traditional family and gender discipline reasserted itself. Stalin took Bolshevik scepticism about her work to its logical conclusion, by reversing it.

In the two decades before the outbreak of war in 1914, Imperial Russia experienced an explosion of artistic modernism entirely at odds with its conservative social structure. That this was confined mostly to the intellectual class of St Petersburg and Moscow does not diminish its significance any more than that of the revolution in French art and poetry of the late 19th century that emerged mainly from the Montmartre and Pigalle areas of Paris. In similar fashion, Russian art broke free from the constraints of bourgeois culture to experiment with representation, form and language. No sooner was the latest work of the French Post-Impressionists and Fauvists displayed in St Petersburg and Moscow art galleries than the “World of Art” movement which championed them was superseded by the more radical experiments of Symbolism and Futurism. Like early Renaissance thinkers trapped inside Catholic Europe, the Symbolists, Cubists and Futurists of Nicholas II’s Russia were seeds of modernity germinating inside an archaic monolith about to collapse. Not surprisingly they yearned for an end to the autocracy and had great emotional sympathy for the political left.

Major figures in Russian and European culture emerged in the years before the war: Blok, Gumielov and Mandelstam in poetry; Bely and Andreyev in the novel; Kandinsky, Larionov, Malevich and Tatlin in art. The entire school of 20th-century abstract art had its genesis in the early works of Vasilly Kandinsky such as Light Picture and Black Lines (both 1913). His written exegesis Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1910), along with Bely’s essays on Symbolism published the same year, eloquently summarised the goals of abstract art and symbolist prose. Larionov developed the Fauvist style into a new Russian primitivism whilst Malevich and Tatlin, the premier Russian artists of the first two decades of the 20th century, fused Abstract Expressionism with Futurism to create “Suprematism”, the precursor of schematic modern art.

Malevich came from working-class stock in Kiev. He arrived in Moscow in 1905 where he distributed revolutionary literature during the December uprising. After its suppression he returned to art, moving rapidly from the simplistic Cezanne-like tableau of Peasants in Church (1910) to his Cubo-Futurist masterwork The Knife-Grinder (1912). During the war he produced several challenging new masterpieces, including Suprematist Composition (1916), Dynamic Suprematism (1916) and Sensation of a Mystical Wave Coming from the Earth (1917), which utilised geometric forms and quasi-architectural diagrams to imprint order on the whiteness of the canvas, much as the Provisional Government and Sovnarcom would attempt to bring order out of the breakdown of the Tsarist Empire.

The new wave of Russian writers, poets and artists rejected the elitism of the World of Art. Kustnesov’s The Blue Fountain (1905), with its impressionistic use of blue, grey and white, set a benchmark for a separate Russian school, the Blue Rose Group, that rivaled French art in vibrant brushwork and yet retained a semi-mystical occultism all its own. By contrast Russian Futurism drew from the Italian artist Marinetti, who visited Moscow in 1909 and whose “Manifesto of Futurism” was translated into Russian that same year. The Futurist Manifesto was a landmark in Western art but its politics were the wet dreams of fascism. “We intend to glorify aggressive action, a restive wakefulness, life at the double, the slap and the punching fist”, declaimed Marinetti:

We wish to glorify war–the sole cleanser of the world–militarism, patriotism, the destructive act of the libertarian, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women. We wish to destroy museums, libraries, academies of any sort, and fight against moralism, feminism, and every kind of materialistic, self-serving cowardice. 1

In Camilla Gray’s opinion, “as with Impressionism and Cubism, the interpretation of Futurism in Russia owes little more than a superficial calligraphy to the Western counterpart”, 2and Russian Futurism preferred socialism to fascism. For Trotsky it was “the revolt of Bohemia […] the semi-pauparised left-wing of the intelligentsia against the closed and caste-like aesthetics of the bourgeois intelligentsia”. 3

In the chaos of war and revolution, traditional divisions between artists and writers began to melt away. Many Russian Futurist writers and poets took their cues from or started their careers in arts and design, which led to experiments in prose and verse. In turn, some of the Futurist poets, most notably Mayakovsky, took their cultural dissidence into politics and became fervent supporters of the Bolsheviks. Even non-socialist writers gravitated to the revolution. The great symbolist Andrei Bely supported the February and October revolutions. In 1918 he wrote Christ Is Risen , a novel in verse that celebrated the revolution as a great upsurge of primal energy. In the 1920s he worked willingly for Soviet cultural organisations whilst trying to retain some space for his experiments in form and style. Others, like the future winner of the Noble Prize for Literature Ivan Bunin, disliked socially committed literature and emigrated from Soviet Russia in 1920.

Futurist poets like Mayakovsky responded not just to the revolution’s rejection of bourgeois culture, but to the idealism and utopianism inherent in Bolshevik ideology. The Russian revolutionary tradition had always had a strong utopian strain. “Land and Freedom” was never just a policy for agriculture. It meant exactly what it said. The SRs were the original inheritors of this desire. Their troubled involvement with the Provisional Government was a testament to how difficult it was to reconcile the organisation of a socialist society with the peasant wish to be left alone to till the soil in complete freedom. Even Lenin, in The State and Revolution , indulged himself in utopian dreams of communal living, free labour and the death of the state. After achieving power his dreams instantly mutated into a dark negative of The State and Revolution –centralised state capitalism, mass electrification and Taylorism in industrial production.