The Thinking Reed

Imagine that a house is being built, and when it has been built it will be a splendid palace. But the building of it has not been finished yet, and you depict it in this unfinished state and say: ‘There’s your socialism for you — it’s got no roof on it!’ You will, of course, be a realist in saying that, you will be telling the truth: but it is immediately obvious that this truth is actually a lie.[!] Socialist truth can be spoken only by one who understands what sort of house is being built and how it is being built, and who knows that it will have a roof. A person who does not understand the course of development will never perceive the truth, because truth is not like its actual self [!!], it does not sit still, truth takes wing, truth is progress, truth is conflict, truth is struggle, truth is tomorrow, and it has to be seen like that. Whoever does not see it in that way is a bourgeois realist and therefore a pessimist, a moaner, and frequently a scoundrel and a falsifier — in any case, willingly or unwillingly, a counter-revolutionary and wrecker.130

Such an attitude as this fully justifies the persecution of Mikhail Bulgakov, the hushing-up of actual facts, the practice of censorship, and so on. There is really nothing else to be said on this matter. The division of truth into ‘harmful’ and ‘useful’, ‘needed’ and ‘not needed’, ‘big’ and ‘little’ is false in itself. Moreover, we have to bear in mind that it is the ruling class that has appropriated for itself the monopoly right to decide which truth is ‘needed’ and which is not. This approach to the ‘reflection’ of reality illustrates better than anything else the radical break with Marxism at which the Stalinist bureaucracy arrived. For comparison one can only quote Lenin, when he wrote: ‘We need full and truthful information. And the truth should not depend on whom it has to serve.’131

Socialist realism was therefore not realism at all but, so to speak, promises in the form of art. This art performed very important functions in the Soviet society of the 1930s and 1940s. The Stalinist ideology was not without solid foundations: it was based upon a particular type of psychology, social and individual, which had been formed by a totalitarian regime over two and a half decades. L.S. Vygodsky was quite right when he said that ‘no sociological investigation which is not supplemented by a psychological investigation will ever be able to reveal the most important cause of ideology, namely, the state of mind of social man.’132 In the last analysis, as Plekhanov observed, ‘All ideologies have a common root in the psychology of the epoch to which they belong.’133