the end of the mir

I've always wondered about Communism. Of course you don't understand anything about it, but you've always suspected it's really at heart a version of some rabid, fanatical, puritanical sect of iconoclasts. "Bolshevism is Islam without God" (Iqbal). There is no room for human beings, in all their variety, complexity, ambivalent, provisional commitments and loves. There is, it follows, no role for literature. And none for art either, unless it serves the Cause, the Party. Thinking by slogans; painting by numbers.

The deep, almost mystical, tribal or primitive need for belonging, for a 'we'.  To let oneself go, to passionately dive in, merge with, the other. "Oceanic feelings". Being with. Is that another name for love?

Nihilism: those who lack 'being' hanker for it in another entity. 

Well, call me old fashioned but I still believe in the individual, even if it's the bourgeois individual, that wonderful bulwark against the fanaticism of theorists and fundamentalists of all stripes and persuasion. You know Dougal, maybe I will read Fountainhead after all.

Nationalists, communists, and the religious will all tell you: this is it, the final truth, now be a good chap and follow the line. The party line, devotion to king and country, or unswerving allegiance to the band of brothers. England, my England. America, right or wrong. All boils down to the same thing: unquestioning loyalty, unwavering commitment, the legitimation of violence, torture, a bureaucratic mindset that delights in its own pettiness and easy formulas, a simplifying gaze that drains the world of colour, reducing everything to fundamental categories: black and white, us and them, the saved and the damned (Primo Levi), the pious and the infidels.

The crude utilitarianism involved here. Anyone can be sacrificed for the "greater good". The ends justify the means. If you want to make an omelette...

But what was it actually like living under a Communist regime? Roxana, you're probably too young to remember.


'Chernyshevsky's (a leading Populist) harsh, flat, dull, humourless, grating sentences...his self-discipline, his dedication to the material and moral good of his fellow men, the grey, self-effacing personality, the tireless, passionate, devoted, minute industry, the hatred of style, of any concession to the graces, the unquestionable sincerity, utter self-forgetfulness, brutal directness, indifference to the claims of private life, innocence,...created the image that later became the prototype of the revolutionary hero and martyr. ...

His personality and outlook set their seal upon two generations of Russian revolutionaries; not least upon Lenin who admired him devotedly.'  
---Berlin, Russian Thinkers.