A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

Lenin and Pavlov both paid homage to the influence of Ivan Sechenov (1829—1905), the physiologist who maintained that the brain was an electromechanical device responding to external stimuli. His book, The Reflexes of the Brain (1863), was a major influence on Chernyshevsky, and thus on Lenin, as well as the starting point for Pavlov's theory on conditioned reflexes. This was where science and socialism met. Although Pavlov was an outspoken critic of the revolution and had often threatened to emigrate, he was patronized by the Bolsheviks.* After two years of growing his own carrots, Pavlov was awarded a

* It is tempting to conclude that Pavlov was the target of Bulgakov's satire, The Heart of a Dog (1925), in which a world-famous experimental scientist, who despises the Bolsheviks but accepts their patronage, transplants the brain and sexual organs of a dog into a human being.

handsome ration and a spacious Moscow apartment. Despite the chronic shortage of paper, his lectures were published in 1921. Lenin spoke of Pavlov's work as 'hugely significant' for the revolution. Bukharin called it 'a weapon from the iron arsenal of materialism'. Even Trotsky, who generally stayed clear of cultural policy but took a great interest in psychiatry, waxed lyrical on the possibility of reconstructing man:

What is man? He is by no means a finished or harmonious being. No, he is still a highly awkward creature. Man, as an animal, has not evolved by plan but spontaneously, and has accumulated many contradictions. The question of how to educate and regulate, of how to improve and complete the physical and spiritual construction of man, is a colossal problem which can only be conceived on the basis of Socialism. We can construct a railway across the Sahara, we can build the Eiffel Tower and talk directly with New York, but we surely cannot improve man. No, we can! To produce a new, 'improved version' of man — that is the future task of Communism. And for that we first have to find out everything about man, his anatomy, his physiology and that part of his physiology which is called his psychology. Man must look at himself and see himself as a raw material, or at best as a semi-manufactured product, and say: 'At last, my dear homo sapiens, I will work on you.'¹⁶

The New Soviet Man, as depicted in the futuristic novels and Utopian tracts which boomed around the time of the revolution, was a Prometheus of the machine age. He was a rational, disciplined and collective being who lived only for the interests of the greater good, like a cell in a living organism. He thought not in terms of the individual T but in terms of the collective 'we'. In his two science fiction novels, Red Star (1908) and Engineer Menni (1913), the Bolshevik philosopher Alexander Bogdanov described a Utopian society located on the planet of Mars sometime in the twenty-third century. Every vestige of individuality had been eliminated in this 'Marxian-Martian society': all work was automated and run by computers; everyone wore the same unisex clothing and lived in the same identical housing; children were brought up in special colonies; there were no separate nations and everyone spoke a sort of Esperanto. At one point in Engineer Menni the principal hero, a Martian physician, compares the mission of the bourgeoisie on earth, which had been 'to create a human individual', with the task of the proletariat on Mars to 'gather these atoms' of society and 'fuse them into a single, intelligent human organism'.¹⁷

The ideal of individual liberation through the collective was fundamental to the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia. 'Not "I" but "we" — here is the basis of the emancipation of the individual,' Gorky had written in 1908. 'Then

at last man will feel himself to be the incarnation of all the worlds wealth, of all the world's beauty, of all experience of humanity, and spiritually the equal of all his brothers.' For Gorky, the awakening of this collective spirit was essentially a humanist task: he often compared it to the civic spirit of the Enlightenment. Russia had missed out on that cultural revolution. Centuries of serfdom and tsarist rule had bred, in his view, a 'servile and torpid people', passive and resistant to the influence of progress, prone to sudden outbursts of destructive violence, yet incapable, without state compulsion, of constructive national work. The Russians, in short, were nekulturnyi, or 'uncivilized': they lacked the culture to be active citizens. The task of the cultural revolution, upon which the political and social revolutions depended, was to cultivate this sense of citizenship. It was, in Gorky's words, to 'activate the Russian people along Western lines' and to liberate them from their long history of Asiatic barbarism and idleness'.¹⁸