Антропология революции

Stanislav Savitsky (St. Petersburg, Smolny College of Liberal Arts and Sciences). «Revolutionary train and historical experience». Revolutionary historical experience consists of a variety of social, ideological and cultural realities. One of the keys to understanding it might be an apposition of three planes: mass culture symbols; avantgarde ideologemes, realised though experimental artistic forms; and documental and autobiographic works that that contain elements of socio-psychological analysis. The author chose as his material the political, artistic and social portrayals of trains. Karl Marx’s metaphor portraying revolution as a «locomotive of history» is linked to the way the intellectuals of the second half of the 19^th century perceived new communications technologies. Later, for the Futurists the fullness of experiencing history took a form of progressist or pro-urban ideology. The Futurist train does not stop, it is a symbol of being enraptured with speed. Its passenger seeks to lose oneself in its purposeful movement to take part in history. In Soviet propaganda the train is always a sign of the «only true» Utopian Communist idea. For the followers and «junior fellows» of the Futurists who were trying to comprehend the legacy of the revolution — e.g. for a pupil of the Formalists Lidia Ginzburg — the train no longer was connected either with a faith in technical progress or with being enraptured by urbanist speed or Marx’s formula. For her the railroads serve as a metaphor of a society. Her journey described in an essay «Going home» is an attempt to describe socio-psychological reality. Historical experience here presupposes a position not of a participant of revolutionary events but that of a self-conscious observer of an unpredictably changing society.

In Marina Raku’s (Moscow, State Art Studies Institute) article «„Music of the revolution“ in search of a language» a question is posed as to what transformations the musical image of revolution underwent in the minds of an educated part of the Russian population in the 1910s-1930s: from the romantic and visionary project of the Silver age — through forming a peculiar musical mythology of the 1920s — and ending with a developed musical «Soviet street» culture, that travestied the image of revolution. What became the real «music of the revolution» in the early Soviet period was not the neo-Romantic symphonic works in the tradition of Ludwig van Beethoven, Richard Wagner and Aleksandr Scriabin, but rather the sentimental and politically nihilist popular songs that were often based on the jazz interpretations of criminal and déclassé folklore. It had to do with the fate that the revolutionary era contributed to the collapse of traditional social identities and to the formation of various forms of fluctuant transitory social consciousness.

Nikolay Mitrokhin (Bremen, Centre for East European Studies, University of Bremen). «Revolution as family history: from the interviews and memoirs of the CPSU CC staff functionaries of the 1960s-1980s». Using the interviews with the former С PSU CC staff functionaries (who used to work there in the 1960s-1985) and their published memoirs the author studies the social background of this specific social group, «the apparatchiks» as the Soviet jargon of the time used to call them. The study focuses on the attitude that the families of the future apparatchiks held toward the revolution of 1917 and the subsequent major events of the Stalinist period of Soviet history. It also covers the impact that family upbringing had on their children forming a behavioural model in relation to the Soviet regime. During the study it became clear that the majority of the respondents belong either to the families of active participants of the Civil War who later were given minor or mid-level administrative positions or to pre-revolutionary middle-class (including nobility and clergy) who were able to «convert» their social status into a Soviet one after the revolution.