Pages

Wednesday, April 15, 2020

Fleeting thoughts: The philosophical and historical premises of the violation in the USSR


The Marxist project for a communistic society to be built is eschatological. It was more suitable a medieval society as what the Russian was then.
Violation is the yearning of “sense” to become an “idea”, to end and accomplish, to identify itself with the ideal, to create “God’s Kingdom on earth” accelerating time so that the temporal to be transformed into eternity. One can find an immediate relation between the acceleration of time, the eschatological consciousness and the political terror as the relevant mean for the transformation of the temporal and imperfect into the eternal and perfect.
Furthermore, the violation urges the “others” to become a part of “us” somehow at any cost as soon as possible. Subordination legitimates some intersubjectivity as to individuals or groups including them in some more extended “us”.
Authority has two faces: the one addresses the future and the “others” as violation; the other, the past and “ours” as subordination. Power as legitimate domination meets submission, but the rejected power can triumph only by some form of violation.
Stalin’s rule formed a synthesis of the political terror and the traditional subjection in Russia urging time to the eschatological aim of communism. Thus the “left” in the USSR was fundamentally different from the “left” in Western Europe.
No legal and democratic tradition has ever existed in Russia. Thus the second “face” of any political project could be grounded only on the Orthodox and autocratic, collectivistic and communal tradition there to be created some Orthodox “left”.
Stalin’s rule is rather close to the “ideal type” of an original politically “left” relevant to Orthodox civilization. He transformed the autocrat into the “Secretary General”, Orthodoxy into Marxism-Leninism, the peasant communities into the Party and totalitarian grassroots organizations as soon as possible by means of monstrous terror.

Key words: the USSR, Orthodoxy, Russia, Stalin, terror, Marxism-Leninsm

No comments: