Revolutionary Dreams Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution

by Stites, Richard

• ISBN13: 9780195055375
• ISBN10: 0195055373
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1991-11-14
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The revolutionary ideals of equality, communal living, proletarian morality, and technology worship, rooted in Russian utopianism, generated a range of social experiments which found expression, in the first decade of the Russian revolution, in festival, symbol, science fiction, city planning,and the arts. In this study, historian Richard Stites offers a vivid portrayal of revolutionary life and the cultural factors--myth, ritual, cult, and symbol--that sustained it, and describes the principal forms of utopian thinking and experimental impulse. Analyzing the inevitable clash betweenthe authoritarian elements in the Bolshevik's vision and the libertarian behavior and aspirations of large segments of the population, Stites interprets the pathos of utopian fantasy as the key to the emotional force of the Bolshevik revolution which gave way in the early 1930s to bureaucratic statecentralism and a theology of Stalinism.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	xi
Introduction	3	(8)
Part I From Dreaming to Awakening	11	(48)
1 Social Daydreaming Before the Revolution	13	(24)
Utopian Mentalities	13	(1)
Popular Utopia: Justice, Community, Rebellion	14	(5)
Administrative Utopia: Parade, Facade, Colony	19	(5)
Populism: Vision and Counterculture	24	(6)
Marxism: City and Machine	30	(7)
2 Revolution: Utopias in the Air and on the Ground	37	(22)
A New World	37	(4)
The Dreamer in the Kremlin	41	(5)
War Communism as Utopia	46	(6)
Beyond the Green Wall	52	(7)
Part II Living the Revolution	59	(106)
3 Revolutionary Iconoclasm	61	(18)
Vandalism: War on Luxury	61	(3)
Iconoclasm: War on Signs	64	(4)
Nihilism: War on Culture	68	(4)
Makhaevism: War on Intellectuals	72	(4)
Anti-Iconoclasm	76	(3)
4 Festivals of the People	79	(22)
Days of Revolution	80	(3)
Early Signs of Bolshevism	83	(5)
Moscow: Talking City	88	(5)
Petrograd: Theater City	93	(4)
Ritual and Carnival	97	(4)
5 Godless Religion	101	(23)
Godkillers and Godbuilders	101	(4)
Storming the Heavens	105	(4)
Rituals of a Counterfaith	109	(6)
Proletarian Morality	115	(4)
The Missing Faith	119	(5)
6 The Republic of Equals	124	(21)
Equality and Justice	124	(2)
Russian Levellers	126	(5)
Dress, Speech, and Deference	131	(4)
Utopian Miniature: The Conductorless Orchestra	135	(5)
Privilege and Revolution	140	(5)
7 Man the Machine	145	(20)
The Cult of Ford and Taylor	146	(3)
Utopian Robotry	149	(6)
The Struggle for Time	155	(4)
The Art of Production	159	(2)
Time, Space, Motion, Order	161	(4)
Part III We: The Community of the Future	165	(58)
8 Utopia in Time: Futurology and Science Fiction	167	(23)
Time Forward	167	(1)
Utopia, Science, and Futurology	168	(3)
Maps of Heaven and Hell	171	(8)
Decoding Revolutionary Fantasy	179	(5)
Back to the Future: Nostalgic Utopia	184	(6)
9 Utopia in Space: City and Building	190	(15)
The Antiurban Impulse	191	(2)
The Greening of Russia: The Disurbanists	193	(4)
Supercity: The Urbanists	197	(3)
Socialism in One Building: The House Commune	200	(5)
10 Utopia in Life: The Communal Movement	205	(18)
Native Traditions	205	(2)
Communes on the Land	207	(6)
Communes in the Town	213	(6)
The Laboratory of the Revolution	219	(4)
Part IV Dreams and Nightmares	223	(32)
11 War on the Dreamers	225	(17)
The End of Revolutionary Utopia	225	(2)
Iconoclasm, Festival, Godbuilding	227	(4)
Anti-Egalitarianism	231	(4)
Fantasectomy: Utopia, City, Commune	235	(7)
12 Conclusion	242	(13)
Lunar Economics and Social Revolution	242	(4)
Stalin and the Fantasy State	246	(4)
The Fate of Revolutionary Utopia	250	(5)
A Note on Sources and Abbreviations	255	(2)
Notes	257	(40)
Index	297