“A panorama of a truly new era opens” (Soviet “experiment’’ in the interpretation of N. V. Ustryalov)

The article examines the public and political position of an outstanding personality of the Russian emigration of the “first” wave of Nikolai Vasilyevich Ustryalov. On the basis of various sources, his attitude to key issues of state construction, formed under the influence of a radical socio-political transformation in Russia, is analyzed. The most important among them are the restoration of Russian statehood in new historical circumstances, the essence and evolution of Bolshevism, the cultural and worldview orientation of the intelligentsia, the place and role of the USSR in conditions of aggravation of international relations and the threat of fascism.

Energetika: Gleb Krzhizhanovskii’s Conception of the Nature–Society Metabolism

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the relation between Marxism and the Soviet productivist economy. While historical scholarship rarely explores the intellectual context in which the Soviet experiment unfolded, ecomarxists tend to describe the Soviet Union’s mistaken path as a result of the loss of ‘metabolic’ thinkers following the rise of Stalin. This article challenges the neat, purported divide between a ‘metabolic’ and ‘productivist’ Marxism by analysing the energy-economic thinking of Gleb M. Krzhizhanovskii, a Bolshevik engineer and old friend of Lenin. As chairman of both the electrification commission (GOELRO) and the State Planning Commission (Gosplan), Krzhizhanovskii conceptualised the energy economy as something embedded in the metabolism of nature and society and as the technical-economic basis of the socialist economy. This argument drew its strength from his idea that production is part of the general, ongoing life-process, and the hope that large-scale electrification and electro-chemistry could help govern the metabolism between nature and society more rationally – both arguments commonly found among contemporary natural scientists. Any ecomarxist attempt to recover the concept of metabolism today has to come to terms with its productivist and technocratic history.

Misreading History

Viewing the rise of fascism in the 1930s, to many European intellectuals the Soviet Union seemed the only barrier to Armageddon. But an environment of total war and backwardness scarred the Soviet experiment.

The Ennoblement of Nature: Gleb M. Krzhizhanovskii's Energetika and the Concept of Metabolism

There has been a growing interest in the relation between Marxism and the Soviet Union’s relation to nature. While historical scholarship rarely explores the intellectual context in which the Soviet experiment unfolded, ecomarxists tend to describe the Soviet Union’s mistaken path as a result of the loss of ‘metabolic’ thinkers. This article challenges the neat divide between a ‘metabolic’ and ‘productivist’ Marxism byanalysing the energy-economic thinking of Gleb M. Krzhizhanovskii, chairman of the electrification commission (GOELRO) and the State Planning Commission (Gosplan). Krzhizhanovskii understood human production as part of the general life process and envisioned the energy economy to become an ‘ennobling’ element within nature. His argument rested on the hope that large-scale electrification, district heating and electro-chemistry––realisable under Socialism––could help govern the metabolism between nature and society more rationally. The history of energetika shows thatproductivist and metabolic thinking are more intricately connected than thought before.

The Russian Revolution After One Hundred Years

The Russian revolution was the defining episode of the twentieth century. It led to the transformation of Russia into one of the superpowers on the globe, but one that exhibited a development model that was both different from and a challenge to the predominant model in the West. The Soviet experiment offered a different model for organising society. This was at the basis of the way in which international politics in the whole post-second world war period was structured by the outcome of the Russian revolution. But in addition, that revolution helped to shape domestic politics in the West in very significant ways. All told, the revolution was of world historical and world shaping importance.

The Polish Poet Aleksander Wat about Totalitarian Temptations and about the “Janus-Faced” Russia

The common thread in the life history of Aleksander Wat is his skepticism to­ward absolute truths and their heralds. He was untrue to this principle for only a few years when he followed an “association” that supposedly held the truth – the communist movement. Wat regarded this relatively short “dogmatic sleep” as the biggest mistake of his life. Because of it, he contributed to spreading of one of the most inauspicious teachings of the twentieth century and burdened himself with unforgivable guilt. This disenchantment process was fueled by his longstanding confrontation with Soviet reality. Wat was outsider and an insider at the same time and could observe the Soviet experiment from both a distance and from up close. As a universally educated Central European, he also belonged to the great authorities on Russian culture and had complete command of the Russian language in all its nuances. This made it easy for him to integrate into Russian developments in a general European context, and at the same time to un­derstand the most important characteristics of Russia’s “special historical path”. In Wat’s eyes, Russia is a Janus-headed object. It has both a repulsive – as he put it – “Asiatic” face, and a charming European one. For Wat, Asia did not repres­ent the cradle of civilization, on the contrary. For him it virtually epitomized tyranny and disregard of human rights.