Lecture 16 PDF - Vasilij Grossman's Everything Flows

Lecture 16 Vasilij Grossman’s Everything flows: an ode to freedom It is impossible to analyse Life and fate (LF) here. This novel is too complex. It is a polycentric writing, which is set in more than 20 different places, and contains more than two hundred characters, among...

Lecture 16 Vasilij Grossman’s Everything flows: an ode to freedom It is impossible to analyse Life and fate (LF) here. This novel is too complex. It is a polycentric writing, which is set in more than 20 different places, and contains more than two hundred characters, among which Hitler, Stalin, Himmler, Eichmann etc. I personally read this novel 4 times. We will consider almost exclusively the second half of Everything flows (EF), and in particular we will try to show two features:  the original and powerful idea of freedom, which the Russian–Jewish author develops in his latest writings,  the way in which he thinks about the dynamics of the 1917 Russian Revolution in his Everything flows. Everything flows is a novel that initially describes the difficult reintegration into society of an ex-convict, Ivan Grigoryevich, who had just returned from the GUlag. There are many interesting things in the first half of this book: above all, the representation of illusions and disillusions of the de-Stalinization era, and the impressive and detailed description of the famine of peasants in Ukraine, in which Grossman underscores the similarities between the Leninist and Nazi political lexicon where they were referring to the enemy. In order to analyze more in detail at least a section of this work, I want to focus only on the last pages, when the novel turns into a historical essay. But let us start from Grossman’s concept of freedom. It seems to me that in his late works Grossman develops an integral and universal concept of liberty, which encompasses both the moral and political spheres. On the moral side, he considers man a liberal being. This is an ingrained liberty of human beings, which no oppressive regime can extinguish. If man is morally free, he also has to be politically free. Human nature demands it, because according to Grossman ‘life is freedom’ (LF, II, 49, 555). For Grossman, liberty is a composition of certain types of liberty. These all make up one liberty in that we are dealing with individual liberties, which were obtained in the West after centuries of fierce fighting, constitutions written in blood, based upon theories and defended by liberal thinkers. In his book, we can find both the concept of ‘negative liberty’ (according to Isaiah’ Berlin Two concepts of Liberty (1958) definition), meaning freedom of press, freedom of speech and freedom of association, and the concept of ‘positive liberty’, which is connected to democratic political participation. Among the ‘negative’ liberties, Grossman insists on the right to be able to have a private and independent circle and on the right to private property: freedom is the right to sow what you want. It’s the right to make boots or shoes, it’s the right to bake bread from the grain you’ve sown to sell it or not sell it as you choose. (…) freedom is the right to live and work you wish and not as you’re ordered to (EF, 10, 84). Liberty, Grossman writes, can also be defined as a right to be different. Liberty is a mould, which can be filled by each of us according to our own wishes. It is true that in Everything flows Grossman shows a significant interest in the problem of political democracy. The fact remains though that his writing is a formidable apologia of liberty as no obstacle, of liberty as spontaneity, as liberty against political power. Grossman’s ‘“liberal’ and libertarian understandings – by understanding we are not talking about political ideology – seem to be contrary to the anti-capitalistic tradition of socialism, especially to Marxism. What Grossman considers true and concrete – individual liberty – Marx retains as unreal and abstract. For Marx, true liberty is social liberty, which can only be possible in a communist society. This is a liberty whose content is predetermined by its very form. From a concept of ‘negative’ liberty strongly anchored to the individual, Grossman comes to the conclusion that communism is similar to Nazism, because, compared to liberty as he intends it, the two totalitarian States are both equally enemies of liberty, even if in different ways, which Grossman points out. Albeit in a schematic way, I hope I have laid the groundwork to conceptually frame Grossman’s point of view on the 1917 Russian Revolution. I claim that the parable of the Russian revolution is outlined, probably unconsciously, with a real historiographical paradigm by the author of Everything flows: the paradigm of the two revolutions. In 1917 Russia – Grossman writes – there were two distinct and opposing revolutions: the February and the October Revolution. The first overthrew the tsar and established a bourgeois government, the second destroyed the new-born bourgeois State and set up the socialist State. Most of the historiography on the revolution explained in this way the revolutionary process through which Lenin’s party finally took power. The Bolsheviks, starting with Lenin himself, had considered the revolution in a manner which was not much different from this traditional interpretation. In the aftermath of the February Revolution, Lenin immediately spoke of the ‘first stage’ of the revolution, which would be necessarily overtaken by a ‘second’, which would lead the proletariat to power, highlighting the fundamental contradiction of the revolution, the dualism of power that opposed parliamentary to the Soviet. Once he had gained power, Lenin distinguished two revolutions: the bourgeois one of February - promoted by the masses but then led by the bourgeoisie - and the proletarian one of October. This paradigm was developed with significant variants by the leader of the revolution and by the Soviet historiography, and took root in a considerable part of Marxist and left wing historiography. In the eyes of the world, of course, the second revolution almost completely overshadowed the first: the real revolution was that of October. According to Grossman, the Russian revolution was going to bring about ‘capitalism and its attendant democratic freedoms’ (EF, 24, 188). Unlike the Bolsheviks, Grossman is very satisfied with this breakthrough, because finally even Russia, aligning with the West, had taken to the road to Liberty. Under the new regime, ‘dozens and perhaps hundreds of revolutionary teachings and creeds, leaders and parties, programs and prophecies’ could finally come out in the open in front of the ‘young Russia’ (EF, 22, 177). ‘In February 1917! – so Grossman wrote – ‘the path of freedom lay open for Russia’, but finally ‘Russia chose Lenin’. This judgment however, is too peremptory, as it is not quite true that Russia chose Lenin. But, in general, Grossman’s interpretation of the Russian Revolution seems to me to be founded on a historiographical-paradigm that, reversing the Bolsheviks’ value judgment on the two Russian revolutions, calls to mind the liberal historiography paradigm of the French revolution, outlined and developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Liberal scholars and thinkers tried with this paradigm to provide an interpretative key of the French Revolution. The aim was especially to explain the differences between the revolutions of 1789 and 1793, between the positive stage of the revolution, corresponding to the establishment of a representative government, the end of feudalism and the Declaration of the Rights of Man; and the negative stage, the years of Terror and the revolutionary dictatorship of the Jacobins. A historiography that, starting from M.me de Staël and Benjamin Constant, was improved in the 20th Century by the historical works of scholars such as Guglielmo Ferrero and François Furet. These historians referred to the two revolutions of opposite signs, libertarian the first, authoritarian the second, to illustrate the two stages of the French Revolution. I do not intend to propose here a comparison between the two revolutions, or only in very general terms, but between two paradigms. Moreover, the French Revolution, the mother of all revolutions, was a model for understanding the past and changing the future for the whole tradition of the revolutionary left. The Bolsheviks, heirs and unscrupulous interpreters of Marx and of some other theoreticians of the revolutionary left, inherited from these also the interpretative models of the French Revolution. The French Revolution was one of the three in Lenin’s reference to the previous revolutions, along with the Commune of Paris and the 1905 revolution, although, of course, the latter two were more important. In the Jacobin movement, Lenin was able to find the nucleus of the ‘party of pure’, the exaltation of revolutionary voluntarism, the centralized direction of the party and the State. Thus, in the years previous to 1905, through what Vittorio Strada defined as a ‘pragmatic analogy’, Lenin ran his party to acting, mutatis mutandis, the role of the Jacobins in the Russian revolution. Once he had gained power, Lenin wrote that the Bolsheviks were in a similar situation to that of France in 1793. He elevated the Jacobin model to a universal category of revolutionary transition from dictatorship to egalitarian society, using the same example as Trockij who had recently converted to neo- Jacobinism, to justify the red terror. Eminent historians of the French Revolution, such as Aulard and, in particular, Mathiez, strove to provide immediately in Western Europe an academic legitimacy to this analogy: it found ample space in both communist and anti-communist historiography, obviously with opposing value judgements. Grossman can therefore be associated with the anti-communism point of view. In fact, he reverses the Bolshevism’s historiographical paradigm of the two revolutions, re-evaluating the ‘liberal’ February Revolution to the detriment of ‘Jacobin’ October. With this, he was not only clearly distancing himself from Stalinism, but also rejecting the new official version of the story, according to which Stalin alone was responsible for the crimes of the entire system. On the contrary, Grossman invites us to think about the Soviet experience as a block, consequential in its internal passages and consistent with the cultural and political presuppositions of the October Revolution. For Grossman, indeed, Stalin is ‘the Lenin of today’ (LF, I, 67, 301). Stalin is a result of Lenin, because he expresses the pure nature of Leninism: ‘his contempt of freedom, the fanaticism of his faith, the cruelty he showed towards his enemies’ (EF, 22, 183) and ‘an extreme veneration of abstract principles’. Lenin gets these elements from Russian revolutionary tradition in pursuit of ‘one end: the seizure of power’ (EF, 21, 172). In this way, he thought he would be able to operate ‘like a surgeon in a hospital ward’ (EF, 21, 169), when he intended to cut off the infected parts of an organism. The essence of Leninism is the ‘fanatical faith in the omnipotence of the surgeon’s knife’ (EF, 21, 169). When Lenin died, ‘Lenin’s work continued’ in accordance with his project, ‘as if Lenin’s life had not come to an end on January 21, 1924’ (EF, 21, 165-66). Stalin’s triumph was not the product of fortuitous circumstances, in the same way that it was not circumstances that gave rise to the red terror. ‘Stalin executed Lenin’s closest friends and comrades-in-army because they were all, each in their own way, hindering the realization of the main goal – of true Leninism’ (EF, 23, 187). Stalin did not construct the State ‘in his own image and likeness’, but ‘Stalin’s image’ was ‘the likeness of the Russian State – which is why he became tsar’ (EF, 24, 190). Grossman pointed out the political and personal differences between Lenin and Stalin. He also highlighted the differences between the Bolshevik generation, loaded with ideological fanaticism but also animated by a great revolutionary passion, that had made the revolution, and the new ruling class, formed by cold-hearted bureaucrats. But a common thread tied the age of Lenin to Stalin, in the same manner in which the Stalin era overflowed to the next, so that each of these moments was a ‘logical result of the October Revolution itself’ (LF, III, 19, 664). There was no longer a need to go on ‘employing the extermination methods’ (EF, 25, 198), but the State continued to be based on the deprivation of liberty. According to Grossman, the main conflict which runs through human history is that between freedom and authority, not the one between social classes. Grossman’s interpretation of the revolution, as well as that of totalitarianism, is founded on this assumption. Under Lenin’s leadership the Bolshevik generation dissolved the Constituent Assembly and destroyed the democratic revolutionary parties that had struggled against Russian absolutism. The Bolsheviks who made the revolution did not believe ‘in the context of bourgeois Russia – believe in the value of freedom of speech or of freedom of the press’ (TS, 20, 163). As a result, they could establish only a totalitarian State. Grossman, therefore, condemns the entire Soviet experience as a tragic historical mistake: nothing can be saved, nor will anything survive when the regime falls. Grossman does not just reject the entire Soviet experience: he also questions one of the main reasons for the October Revolution. ‘The peasantry passionately aspired to be the master of the land’ (LF, 24, 189): the Bolshevik State, abolishing private property, had drowned in blood that legitimate expectation. In Grossman’s view, the revolutionaries should have protected and distributed property, not abolished it, thus completing the process of liberation of the Russian peasants begun with the abolition of serfdom in 1861 by Tsar Alexander II. Russian revolutionary thinkers failed to appreciate (that) the importance of the emancipation of the serfs. The emancipation of the serfs – as we can see from the history of the following century – was more truly revolutionary than the October revolution. The emancipation of the serfs shook Russia’s thousand-year-old foundation (…) the dependence of the country’s evolution on the growth of slavery (EF, 22, 181). Grossman reverses so much of the Bolshevik’s value judgment on the two revolutions, up to the point of saying that the only true 1917 revolution was that of February, because only this revolution was going to give the Russians personal freedom, political liberty and property. Really, only the February revolution made a break from the old tradition of political despotism and economic servitude, later renewed by the Bolsheviks, that had marked the history of Russia. The fact that Grossman indicates as a historical precedent of the 1917 February revolution the czar’s decree of 1861, instead of the 1905 revolution, seems to me to indicate a clear distance between Grossman and the anti-capitalistic tradition of socialism. I think that Grossman’s interpretation is very arguable. On one hand, by putting a line of almost perfect continuity between the ancient history of despotism in Russia and the communist State, Grossman was unintentionally undermining the idea that the totalitarian regime constituted a novelty compared to the previous forms of authoritarian exercise of power. On the other hand, he forgot that in the last decades before the 1917 revolution the Russian state was modernizing, improving its economy and becoming more liberal. Is this really so? Is it not Grossman, in his many pages, who emphasizes the ‘modernity’ of totalitarianism? Yes and no. On one hand, in fact, it is true that Grossman seems to interpret totalitarianism as a quantum jump from anything that preceded it. It is the image of totalitarianism as a ‘surgeon’s knife’, as a tool to reshape humanity according to the dictates of the abstract revolutionary ideology of the nineteenth-twentieth Century, in view of the creation of the ‘new man’. On the other hand, it is also possible to observe how Grossman tends to describe totalitarianism as a regime which, compared to traditional despotism, is characterised by a strong quantitative accentuation of power. The twentieth century then appears to him as ‘an age of supreme violence on the part of the State – supreme violence against the individual human being’ (EF, 26, 202): an increase of oppression in quantitative terms. From this point of view, especially in reference to Soviet totalitarianism, Grossman’s reconstruction of the beginnings of totalitarianism seems too focused on culture and Russian history, too mono-causal. Grossman illustrates very well the derivation of Stalin from Lenin, but his explanation of the origins of Leninism is incomplete. Yes, it is true, Lenin is the heir to the Russian revolutionary tradition, The People’s Will and nihilists, as many scholars have pointed out. However, he was also a Marxist, because, from a certain point of view, Lenin was in the Russia of 1917 ‘the Marx of today’, as much as Stalin was the continuator of Lenin, with some variations. Lenin was able to outperform the other Russian Marxists for the same reason that Stalin got the better of his rivals in the party, because he was better able to embody the true nature of his master. The ‘extreme veneration of abstract principles’, the ‘readiness to suppress today’s living freedom for the sake of a hypothetical future freedom’ (EF, 21, 168-69), that Grossman sees pass seamlessly from Bakunin and Nečaev to Lenin, probably derived from nihilists and Russian revolutionaries of the Nineteenth Century. However, they also have another reliable source: the thinking of Marx and his teacher, Hegel. It seems to me that in the work of Grossman these two different interpretations of totalitarianism, closely related to the interpretive paradigm of the Russian revolution, coexist together, without the author perceiving the difficulty of their coexistence.