Molotov's Magic Lantern: A Journey in Russian History by Rachel Polonsky

Author:Rachel Polonsky
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Europe, Political Ideologies, Travel, Special Interest, Russian & Former Soviet Union, Russia, Literary, Literary Criticism, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, Political Science, Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism, History
ISBN: 9780571258277
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2010-03-18T07:31:41+00:00

A signpost under the trees pointed in four directions: to the library and entertainment complex, the main gates, the drinking gallery, the hydrotherapy pools. A tatty notice on the warped metal door of the pool building reminded bathers to present their dermatological, gynaecological, venereological and fluorographical certificates to the attendant on duty. Another advised swimmers to make ‘subjective evaluations’ of the health of their hearts. A list of eight possible physiological reactions to the waters ranged from ‘a nice pleasurable feeling of tiredness’ to acute fatigue, pain, dizziness, headache and nausea.

Pavlov advocated bromide and prolonged sleep for every variety of psychological stress or disorder. In 1921, Lenin signed a decree setting up a special state committee assigned with creating favourable conditions for Pavlov’s work. Pavlov’s materialist explanations of human behaviour were congenial to the ideologues of Bolshevism. (Later Pavlov would fearlessly denounce Lenin and Stalin, calling the Soviet government ‘shit’, and telling Molotov to his face that collectivisation would never work because it contradicted the psychology of the Russian peasant.) In the same year, Lenin commissioned a detailed report on the state and utility of the Staraya Russa spa. Four years later, it became the first health resort in Russia to work through the winter. In the late 1920s, when Lenin Corners were appearing in nationalised public buildings all over Staraya Russa, Dostoevsky was regarded as a potentially dangerous writer. Just as bromide and sleep inhibited the breakdown of the human machine, Dostoevsky’s writings, which, as he once said, aimed to ‘light up the dark sides of the human soul that art does not like to approach’, threatened to excite internal disorder in Soviet man. The critic Vyacheslav Polonsky was involved in debates about the anti-revolutionary power of Demons, a novel which was never published as a separate volume in the Soviet period. People’s Commissar for Enlightenment Anatoli Lunacharsky cautioned that Dostoevsky was a ‘powerfully active substance which should not simply be placed in the hands of just anybody, especially the younger generation’. Dostoevsky contained too many riddles about the body and the soul, whose relationship the Bolshevik intellectuals were hoping would soon be reduced to a simple materialist formula. Among Molotov’s books (bearing the stamp of a Communist Party Workers’ Club and carefully recatalogued into his private library) is Lunacharsky’s Art as an Aspect of Human Behaviour, published by the State Medical Publisher in 1930. Marked in the margin are the sentences ‘Comrades, I think it very probable that in the very near future we will grasp the human soul and discover what it is. Why, indeed, is it so surprisingly mysterious?’ Molotov admired Dostoevsky, despite the mysteries, and wondered why Lenin had hated the novelist. ‘He was a man of genius, without question, that Dostoevsky,’ he told Felix Chuev, adding that, like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky got things wrong, because the two nineteenth-century writers were stuck in a bourgeois point of view: ‘We have risen above their level.’

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