Response to Responses to Stalinka Revisited

[Daniel Rancour-Laferriere]

19 October 2005

Colleagues,
My, what a tall stack of responses I have received to "Stalinka 
Revisited" (although still not a peep from the Stalinka site managers)!  
This includes the numerous private as well as public responses.

First, some of the positive comments:

"Nicely done" (a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst)

"I think you are absolutely right, and what the 'post-modernists' are 
doing is ... well, bezobrazie.  To me, their attitude towards history 
and towards writing about the past is but a defense against any genuine 
involvement with painful matters." (a professor of Russian history)

". . .there is no doubt in my mind about the essential mauvais fois of 
Foucault as regards historical fact, and I think of the late 
20th-century domination of comp lit and cultural studies in the US by 
Foucault, Derrida and 'izhe s nimi' as regrettable." (unidentified - 
perhaps a graduate student).

"Thanks for the word on Lipovetsky: You can't tell the players without a 
scorecard."  (a Professor of Russian literature)

Now for those who made worthwhile public comments to the list - some 
positive, some negative, almost all interesting and debatable.

Tony Anemone says he is "very uncomfortable" with recent postings that 
urge an avoidance of ideas that might provoke "'some emotional 
distress'."  Well, yes, but then why is he "very uncomfortable?"  Isn't 
that a bit like being emotionally distressed?  Then he goes on to say 
that any posting of this type "reeks of 'samokritika'."  Not so.  That 
term refers to an old Soviet form of self-victimization 
(psychoanalytically speaking, moral masochism).  The postings in 
question, on the contrary, do not call for samokritika, but for 
samoanaliz.  That is a very different matter.  In samoanaliz you 
acknowledge your feelings, your distress, your hostility, your sadness, 
etc., and try to get past them to (more) objective study.

This brings us to the topic of personal feelings and their relationship 
(in this context) to the varieties of violence in Soviet literature, 
culture, politics, history, and so on.  There are many 
scholarly/theoretical ways to deal with the violence inherent in Soviet 
reality and in the various representations of Soviet reality.  But none 
of these ways will be adequate to the task if feelings about violence - 
including the scholar's own feelings - are neglected.  For my own part I 
keep a diary in which I deposit unnecessary and irrelevant associations, 
so that I can get on with the task at hand.  When I wrote _The Mind of 
Stalin_, for example, I also wrote much else about this mass murderer 
which it would be inappropriate to discuss in the present context.  A 
scholar's mental garbage should be kept out of the scholar's published 
research.  I would be surprised if Mark Lipovetsky, Eliot Borenstein, 
Tony Anemone, Rimgaila Salys, Russell Valentino, and any others who have 
studied Soviet violence did NOT experience strong feelings about this 
topic, and I am certain that these feelings would have to be related to 
their own personal experiences in past ontogeny.

In his talk Professor Lipovetsky even mentioned his childhood and 
teenage years, and suggested that "psychoanalysis" might be relevant.  
My impression, however, was that this was just lip-service to an 
influential twentienth-century psychological movement, and not a 
reflection of any samoanaliz on his part.  If this is not the case, that 
is, if he thinks psychoanalysis really is relevant to his theoretical 
edifice, I would like to hear how this is so.

Professor Lipovetsky writes:

> All I said was the following: as long as we assume that a writer is
>working with a discourse (playing with it, problematizing or undermining it),
>we  have to consider others who participate in a more primary fashion in the
>shaping of the discourse. Thus, speaking about discourses of violence in
>Soviet culture, one needs to take into consideration political figures such
>as, say, Vyshinsky, who actively participated in the shaping of this discourse
>verbally and practically. Without this it would be hard to understand the
>approach to violence performed by Soviet writers and, especially, by Soviet
>modernists. Having said that I certainly didn't mean that Kharms and
>Mayakovsky should be perceived in the same way as Vyshinsky or Ezhov.
>
Good.  That last sentence states what I wish I had heard in the oral 
presentation.  More generally, it states what I wish post-modernists and 
similar contemporary theoreticians would make explicit in their 
treatments of Soviet violence.  As Professor Peter Steiner recently 
suggested to me, what is at issue are the illocutionary force and the 
perlocutionary effects of Soviet discourse of violence.  I think this 
distinction from speech act theory would rescue much of postmodernist 
theorizing from incomprehensibility, although I have not studied this 
particular angle myself.  On the other hand, it seems to me that the 
old-fashioned distinction between reality and representation of reality 
is more to the point.  Maybe Vyshinsky's representation of how a person 
is victimized is similar to Babel's representation, but the crucial 
distinction is whether a person is actually victimized or not.  And then 
there is the rather obvious notion that, a priori, Babelian discourse on 
violence ought to be similar to Vyshinskian discourse on violence if 
only because Babel and Vyshinskii emerge from (roughly) the same 
cultural background.  Less obviously, the similarity could in both cases 
be due to defensive identification with some perceived aggressor: Babel 
identifies with violent Cossacks, Vyshinskii identifies with potential 
aggression from Stalin (note that the [Anna] Freudian notion of 
identification with the aggressor cancels the clear dichotomitization of 
executioner vs victim which Lipovetsky alleges I make) .  But still, 
regardless of all the discursive similarities, Vyshinskii sends people 
to their deaths, Babel writes literature/autobiography.

Professor Lipovetsky writes also of the "spiritual foundation for the 
terror," and in his lecture he often mentioned the word "dukhovnost'."  
Is this a serious contention, or just the usual irresponsible 
postmodernist language play?  I do not recall any mention of Patriarch 
Tikhon, the mass destruction of religious icons, the physical 
elimination of believers, etc.  Yet the idea is actually intriguing, and 
I wish Professor Lipovetskii would elaborate on it, not only because the 
Soviet Union was supposedly an atheist state, but also because not ALL 
Russian Orthodox priests were KGB/OGPU agents or even "red priests," 
especially during the earlier stages of Soviet power.  I assume that 
Professor Lipovetsky is aware of the rich "spiritual" "discourse" in 
Russia, which goes back to Rus' and to Byzantium.  Psychoanalytic hint: 
Jesus Christ, who practiced the moral masochism he preached, was always 
a "spiritual" role model for the Russian people (Tiutchev, "Eti bednye 
seleniia...."; Viacheslav Ivanov, "Hic populus natus est christianus").  
So, as Professor Lipovetsky himself says, we cannot "deal with Soviet 
culture as if Russian/Soviet historical catastrophe was caused by an 
invasion of monsters and sociopaths that came from nowhere."  Right on, 
Professor Lipovetsky: they came from Christian Russia, with all the 
sadistic sociopaths and compliant masochists that Christian Russia had 
to offer.  I exclude, of course, those not particularly Christian 
Russians who were not particularly masochistic, but who were just 
ordinary unwilling victims of the sadistic Stalins, Vyshinskys, Berias,...

The work of Rene Girard is very interesting, and I agree with his thesis 
that (as Rimgaila Salys states it), "violence is an essential 
manifestation of the sacred."  Certainly the Soviet victimizers were 
attempting to replace previous ritualized sacred discourses AND 
PRACTICES with a ritualized discourse of violence AND RITUALIZED VIOLENT 
PRACTICES of their own.  Had they not been confronted with the "slave 
soul" (Vasilii Grossman) of Russia, the replacement might not have gone 
nearly as smoothly as it did (see my _Slave Soul of Russia_, NYU Press, 
1995).  As for the latter book, the reader should imagine the reams of 
diary material which it does NOT contain.

Eliot Borenstein doubts that ". . .Lipovetsky, or any of the many 
scholars who approach questions of violence, genocide, and terror in 
terms of discourse, are arguing that actual violence is the same thing 
as discursive violence."  Agreed.  They are not arguing it, they just 
slip up sometimes and imply it.  And as for Borenstein's rhetorical 
question,

> Is there really no connection between actual terror and many  
> intellectuals' acceptance of (and, at times, complicity in) the  
> aesthetic of violence, the metaphor of purgation of the body politic,  
> and the apocalyptic rhetoric of the new/old world? 


- again I am in agreement.  But I would posit defensive identification 
with the aggressor as the most likely psychological mechanism of such 
"acceptance" and "complicity," and I would throw in the word PRACTICE 
alongside the discursive nouns "aesthetic," "metaphor," and "rhetoric."

Well, perhaps that is enough for now.


Daniel Rancour-Laferriere
Emeritus Professor of Russian
University of California, Davis

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