Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution

by Richard Stites

The revolutionary ideals of equality, communal living, proletarian morality, and technology worship, rooted in Russian utopianism, generated a range of social experiments which found expression, in the first decade of the Russian revolution, in festival, symbol, science fiction, city planning, and the arts. In this study, historian Richard Stites offers a vivid portrayal of revolutionary life and the cultural factors--myth, ritual, cult, and symbol--that sustained it, and describes the principal forms of utopian thinking and experimental impulse. Analyzing the inevitable clash between the authoritarian elements in the Bolshevik's vision and the libertarian behavior and aspirations of large segments of the population, Stites interprets the pathos of utopian fantasy as the key to the emotional force of the Bolshevik revolution which gave way in the early 1930s to bureaucratic state centralism and a theology of Stalinism.

Genres: History, Russia, Soviet History, Nonfiction, Politics, Russian History, Soviet Union

344 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Richard Thomas Stites (December 2, 1931 – March 7, 2010) was a historian of Russian culture and professor of history at Georgetown University.

Reviews

[Sepehr Vakilinia · Rating 5 out of 5]

رویاهای انقلابی

۱- رویاهای انقلابی نوشته ریچارد اشتایتز نویسنده و مورخ آمریکایی، بدون شک کتابی شایسته تحسین است. در این اثر با شیوه معمول روایت تاریخ و بررسی تمام حوادث و وقایع سروکار نداریم. بلکه نویسنده به طور اختصاصی به جنبه های آرمانشهرگرایانه انقلاب روسیه (به عنوان آرمانشهری ترین انقلاب تاریخ) و تاثیر آن بر زندگی روزمره شهروندان در دهه نخست پس از پیروزی انقلاب اکتبر (هنگام زمامداری لنین و پیش از محکم شدن پایه های حکومت استالین) می‌پردازد.
این بررسی دارای چهار بخش است: از رویا تا بیداری- زندگی با انقلاب- ما، جامعه آینده- رویاها و کابوس ها

۲- در بخش نخست با پژوهشی ژرف در تاریخ، آرزوها و فرهنگ مردمان روسیه از دوران پطرکبیر تا پیش از استقرار حکومت شوروی، در عین پذیرش سویه های آرمانشهرگرایانه تفکر مارکسیستی، بخشی از آرمانشهرگرایی دهه نخست آن حکومت را دارای ریشه در آداب، رسوم، فرهنگ و باور های دهقانان و عوام روسیه ارزیابی کرده و نیز آرمانشهر مطلوب هر یک از گروه ها پیش از پیروزی انقلاب را به تصویر می‌کشد.

۳- در بخش دوم با پرداختن به اقدامات آرمانشهرگرایانه بلشویک ها، آنارشیست ها، روشنفکران، دهقانان، کارگران و دیگر گروه ها تصویری روشن و ملموس از فضای روز های نخستین انقلاب و تلاش جامعه برای زدودن «هر آنچه رنگی از گذشته دارد» به دست می‌دهد. اشتیاق جمعی برای نابودی تمام یادگار های نظم گذشته از جمله بناها، کاخ ها، هنر کلاسیک، فرهنگ، دین، هر نوعی از نابرابری و برپایی فرهنگ نوین کارگری از مضامین این بخش است.

۴- در بخش سوم درباره برنامه های رویا بینان و تجددخواهان افراطی نخستین دهه انقلاب (پوچ گرایان فرهنگی، آفرینندگان جشنواره های آرمانشهری، بی دینان، مساواتیان و علاقه مندان به کیش ماشین) برای برپایی آرمانشهر های ذهنی خود در دنیای واقعی و تجربه های آنان در آزمایش ایده های خود در محیط های کوچک یا بزرگ و با شرکت افراد داوطلب به دست می‌دهد. این آرمانشهر ها تلاشی برای آفرینش تصویری باشکوه از بهشت کمونیستی آینده بود که در قابی از فناوری پیشرفته جای گرفته و مردمانی شاد، با فضیلت و دور از رذایل انسانی در آن زندگی می‌کنند.

۵- در نهایت در بخش چهارم و پایانی، به چیستی آرمانشهر گرایی انقلابی روسی و خوش بینی روشنفکران آن تفکر، نسبت به ذات انسان (اصل خوب بودن ذاتی) پرداخته و گزارشی خلاصه از سرانجام منادیان هریک از آرمانشهرها و برنامه های آنان می‌دهد. کوتاه سخن آنکه تقریبا تمامی آن ها همراه با ایده ها، رویاهای بلندپروازانه و نقشه هایشان برای آفرینش بهشتی زمینی و این جهانی با شکست مواجه می‌شوند.
حکومتی که روزگاری برای تغییر نظم جهانی و شکل دادن به انسانی نوین تشکیل شده بود، خود به بزرگترین قربانگاه رویابینان و آرمانشهرگرایان تبدیل می‌شود.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adeptly extracting the Russian Revolution out of its theory-laden critical morass, as all history should be, Stites takes it back to basics by studying the actual context of the event! Holy crap, what an idea!
This is fascinating stuff: Stites digs into all those wacky, pseudo-Fourerian utopian and communal movements of the 19th century (if you read anything about Russia in the 19th century, fiction or otherwise, much of this will be warmly familiar) and shows the roots of "utopian" ideals during the Revolution and its aftermath. There's tons of great stuff on culture, probably the most important and entertaining part of this book: pre-Rev science fiction, Soviet science fiction, music, architecture, "octobering" peasant babies, and so on. Stites does a fine job synthesizing all thus wackiness into a rich continuum of thought, showing how Lenin and Stalin and those mofos didn't simply leap out of a void into another void. It also tellingly reveals why folks were receptive to a lot of their biz.

[Aaron Arnold · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are interested in Russian literature, "fantastic" fiction, Marxism, or Russian history, then this is a must-read, one of those far-ranging critical studies that intelligently sums up a vast field while still giving you plenty of other works to chase down afterwards. It's divided roughly into quarters: a history of utopian thought in pre-revolutionary Russia, of which Marxism was only one variety; a discussion of practical problems the revolutionaries faced in building a new society; an overview of many now-forgotten writers and social movements who explored the many possibilities open for Russian society once the tsar was overthrown; and finally the gradual elimination of those possibilities as the revolution began take its fixed course by silencing dissidents and hardening into Stalinism.

As we know, to outsiders Russia circa 1917 didn't seem like the ideal place to try to realize Marxism as Marx had written it. Poor, rural, barely a generation out of feudalism, it had very few of the modern, advanced, industrial attributes that the 19th century socialists considered sine qua non. However, it had a great number of intellectuals who, much like their counterparts in the West, imagined Russian society transformed by modernity and fed on a wide-ranging frustration with the old order. Stites discusses seminal pre-revolutionary works like Nicholas Chernyshevsky's What Is To Be Done? (an immensely influential work whose title Lenin would later famously borrow), Prince Peter Kropotkin's Should We Concern Ourselves with the Ideal Society of the Future?, Alexander Bogdanov's Red Star, and Edward Bellamy's best-seller Looking Backward, and his summary of Kropotkin's 1873 book is a good example of the kind of thinking characteristic of many other writers: "...he depicted the new Russia as a freely formed federation of self-governing peasant communities in full possession of all the land, commonly held and equally partitioned. All town property has been taken over by workers, including management of factories. The declassé officers, officials, and former owners of land and buildings have been reduced to status of workers or peasants. Schools for useful trades have replaced higher learning, and all castes of intellectuals and specialists have been eliminated. Urban housing space has been thoroughly redistributed. Kropotkin, while outlining a probable system of barter and a stateless community of communities, declined to provide more specific details of daily life since the psychology of each future generation would, he believed, modify current views of equitable life and morality."

The vagueness of many details about the future and the collectivist mentality were characteristic. Stities goes into a lot of detail about Russia's experience with small-scale religious communes based on "sobornost", an attitude of "mystical togetherness" that survived the tumult of the February and October Revolutions and in fact provided the foundation for many future communes and revolutionary experiments, especially in religion. As Stites says, once the Bolsheviks were in charge, "Their responses varied: to denounce God altogether, to use religious imagery in socialist propaganda, to construct a socialist religion, or to abandon revolution and embrace religion." Much like in the French Revolution, a big percentage of the new leaders were atheists prone to uttering statements like "Lamarck and Darwin have killed God, finally and for all time so that He may never reappear after such blows. These great murderers deserve the gratitude of all mankind." But there simply wasn't a way to remove centuries of religious tradition in a short time (Lenin's eventual embalming after his death is a famous instance of pseudo-religious throwback), and in fact many factions initially did not want to, because the myriad small kibbutz-like communes dotting the countryside preached a form of Orthodox Christian socialism that they found quite congenial. Apollon Karelin's Russia in 1930 showed a future Russia as a sea of village communes that resemble nothing so much as medieval cloisters. While there were many groups contesting the future - red Communists, white conservatives, green peasant movements, and black anarchists - many groups did not fit neatly into established categories and sought to create their own utopias with their own rules.

This public ambivalence towards religion applied also to art. Here's a good line: "Some revolutionaries were violent: Bolshevik atheist art was not very successful. It possessed no great anti-clerical painters as did the Mexican Revolution. Most anti-religious posters descended to the level of coarseness, such as the one depicting the Virgin Mary with a bulging belly longing for a Soviet abortion." Stites also has a good quote from the French Revolution that applies equally to the Russian one: "'The revolutions of barbarous people,' said the deputy Barère in 1791, 'destroy all monuments, and the very trace of the arts seem to be effaced. The revolutions of an enlightened people conserve the fine arts, and embellish them, while the fruitful concern of the legislator causes the arts to be reborn as an ornament of the empire.'" Lenin the aesthete, with his 10,000-book personal library, was very worried about this, and sought to preserve Russia's artistic heritage even if it wasn't ideologically congenial as the new symbols, signs, songs, and monuments that were being produced. There's a good section on the renaming of buildings, streets, cities, and even baby names, as the new government tried to introduce new traditions covering birth, death, marriage, and everything in between. The arts, including music, literature, and the visual arts, were not exempt from the revolutionary spirit. Newly formed orchestras "raised the banner of equality not only by abolishing conductors as symbols of old style authority but also by organizing their work in a pattern that insured maximum participation and equal voice in the daily routine of rehearsal and in public performance." There were also public carnivals which were held to ridicule symbols of the old order, but there were chilling effects even then, as the carnivals did not dare to mock the new government.

Newly Soviet sci-fi and utopianism was all about experiment, change, and vision, but slowly rigidity set in as dogmas accumulated. Eugene Zamyatin's We remains famous to this day as a classic dystopia and influenced novels like George Orwell's 1984. V. D. Nikolsky's In a Thousand Years is also interesting and in its cheerful picture of a fully triumphant new order reminds me somewhat of the world of the Highest Possible Level of Development in Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad, where the planet's inhabitants are so advanced there's literally nothing left for them to do. Stites also discusses Jan Larri's The Land of the Happy, another more upbeat novel, which in 1931 was the last utopian novel to appear in Soviet Russia until after Stalin's death. The question of what would have happened in the absence of Stalin has been endlessly pondered despite its unanswerability, remains interesting because of the great opportunity the revolution afforded previously suppressed artists. "In the long perspective of Russian history, the Revolution was one of those times - like the Baptism of Rus in 988 and the reign of Peter the Great - wherein a decisive break with the past is consciously and visibly effected and announced." While for us, nothing could be more natural than grouping communist art into one style, a perfectly understandable habit given the severe uniformity of the later years, the millennialist sea of isms of the time contained a lot of intriguingly different attitudes about the world around them.

Another example of that ambivalence toward tradition is capitalism, which the new society had a surprisingly complicated relationship with. Many new leaders like Lenin glorified the productive and rationalist methods of über-capitalists like Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor, but they had an extremely difficult time trying to avoid the system of pricing and incentives that had allowed those men to do their work, which strikes me as somewhat like applauding the discoveries of Columbus and Magellan but denigrating shipbuilding, seafaring, and astronomy. Literature reflected this too: "In the utopias of communism, rationalism, symmetry, and mathematical efficiency in work were seen as liberating virtues. In the dystopias of capitalism, the darker side of mechanized labor - mindless robotization - were emphasized." Similarly, while everyone applauded the ideal of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need", the quest to eliminate class distinctions frequently had to choose between the crude but easy method of pulling down the former rich or the much more difficult method of pulling the peasantry up via new techniques and lifestyles they distrusted and disliked. Another example was urban planning: was the best method to promote socialism to restructure old cities, to build massive new planned urban centers, or to retreat to small, human-scale communes (summarized by Stites as Urbanists, Superurbanists, and Disurbanists)? These were diametrically opposed visions, which would not be fully resolved until Stalin ended the revolution by crushing alternative paths and channeling as much energy as possible into preserving his regime.

Whatever you think about communism (I'm personally not a fan), the lessons of the revolutionary impulses that this book describes are still important, especially if you're a big science fiction fan. Stites' analysis of the shared cultural values in Russian and Soviet sci-fi as reflecting makes me think about the deeper meaning behind both lighter works like Mark Millar's Red Son or the TV show Firefly, and also less overtly "ideological" science fiction like Foundation, or hard sci-fi like Greg Egan's stuff. As discussed in George Orwell's essay "Why Socialists Don't Believe In Fun", I think that for a lot of people a utopia might be simply the removal of familiar afflictions and not the creation of new joys, which are almost impossible to imagine, let alone describe. As Arthur Koestler's protagonist in Darkness at Noon could have told you, the values of potential revolutionaries - iconoclasm, free-thinking, experimentation, heterodoxy, and doubt - are paradoxically intolerable to revolutions once they finally succeed, and it's a tragedy that the freedom to dream of new worlds that every culture happily indulges in is so fragile and vulnerable to the same forces that it attempts to make obsolete. Stites' closing paragraph, capping an excellent and eminently quotable book, is also worth quoting in full:

"Utopianism is often naive, innocent, and childlike. But what virtue is more admired in the whole catalogue of human art and sensibility than childlike enthusiasm, innocence, and spontaneous love and acceptance? What is more lamented than our loss of youth, romance, openness to change, thirst for adventure, and the absence of refined callousness and cold sense of "reality?" These characteristics of the Utopian imagination appeal to every generation that discovers it; it is the recurring vision and hope for the "good place" even if it is "no place" - for the better world or even for the one world. The warming springtime of human hope does not give in to the wintry smiles of the cynic and the realist; it blossoms and it perishes in the sad autumnal winds. And then it is born again - for ever and ever."

[Chuck · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing book showing how extraordinary utopian visions were put into practice just after the Russian Revolution and up to the rise of Stalin. It is also very well written and the scholarship is incredible.

[Javier · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible volume.

[Neo Mohammad · Rating 4 out of 5]

اگه سواد و مطالعه‌ی قبلیِ سیاسی و جامعه‌‌شناسی ندارید، سمتش نیاید.

[Mohammad Naghdi]

کتاب همه جانبه‌ای در مورد انقلاب اکتبر روسیه
تا اینجا با خودم فکر می‌کنم چقدر عجیبه که تمام انقلاب‌های جهان که به دیکتاتوری ختم میشه انگار تماما به هم شباهت داره و یه مسیر رو طی میکنه.
در کل نزدیک به نصف کتاب رو تا الان خوندم و کتاب خوبی به نظر میرسه، اما من کتاب خوشخوان تری انتظار داشتم باشه

[RYD · Rating 4 out of 5]

My takeaway from this book: There was a lot of experimentation after the Russian Revolution, some of it good, some of it bad, all of it crushed by Stalin.

[Rex · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a truly fascinating survey of roads-not-taken in the Russian Revolution. It is difficult to grasp the magnitude of aspirational and experimental culture in this era of Russian history; Stites mentions countless unique and surprising expressions of it, ranging from science fiction to realized communes. The Bolsheviks by no means had a monopoly on unfettered revolutionary imagination; in fact, they were often suspicious of it, and finally Stalin, in Stites's telling, persecuted it out of existence. Stites is careful to attend to not only the designs of the state and the dreams of the intelligentsia, but also the swath of peasant and proletarian utopias. One can only complain that he is too hurried and a too often dry; we would like to spend more time with some of the bizarre and ingenious creative visions scattered across these pages. Here is a popular history waiting to be written. Meanwhile, Stites does an admirable job of collecting this tremendous range of material for analysis and delectation.

[Stephen Selbst · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book examines the various forms of Utopianism pursued in Russia after the Revolution, and how they were crushed after Stalin’s ascent. The book covers literature, art and music, architecture and urban planning, and social arrangements. Stites shows that this intellectual ferment had its roots in the Russian enlightenment of the 19th century. But the underlying impulse of the Utopianism was freedom and experiment, both of which were anathema to Stalin, who desired to control every aspect of Soviet life through regimentation, fear and repression.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gives forth lost details of the multiverse of possibilities for remaking society post revolution. Alas, they were not to be, at least for decades to come as necessity came first in the form of 5 year plans.

[Spencer · Rating 5 out of 5]

A cautionary tale of the promise and dangers of hoping for a better future.

[Joe Scheip · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterful volume about a time and place that feels unworldly. A must for anyone interested in societal history.

[Sheila · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book rules. It inspired and got me through my 15 page research paper this past semester. If you love utopian/dystopian elements in history or literature this book combines both. It provides evidence that a social experiment emerged from the 1917 Russian Revolution striving to create a new and perfect society; utopia. Stites discusses all aspect of Russian society and culture that were affected by the revolution. He really shows how in depth the new Soviet Union was in regards to building from the ground up--literally and figuratively. A few chapters sound like something out of 1984 or Brave New World; the way behavior was expected out of the society, as well as ideas and events conducted by the government. Stites goes beyond what your textbook will tell you about the Russian Revolution and broaden your realm of Soviet history--to where it all began. Highly recommended for research purposes or individual chapter excerpts. It would be interesting to read for leisure too I suppose!

[Erik Wirfs-Brock · Rating 4 out of 5]

A new perspective on the Russian Revolution, cataloging the veritable explosion of different Utopian practices and dreams rather than recounting events, with all of them eventually being crushed by the planned hysteria of the Stalinist anti-utopia. Honestly many of the Utopian ideas seemed pretty inhumane themselves, early twentieth century versions of techno utopia where man merged with machine, but still a fascinating exploration of the human imagination put into practice.

[Yanick Punter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Complementary to Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, which I yet have to read and maybe never will. Philosopher John Gray is sufficient.

[N. Johnson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read and reviewed this book as part of a course in Soviet history. While the argument is interesting and adds significantly to the typical conversation about the revolution, the book is extremely dense and the argument is excessively complicated by minutia in many parts.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

C:2.8 U:4 P:3.8 A:2

[Caleb · Rating 5 out of 5]

a wonderful book; rich in detail, delicious.