Five years ago in Russia there was a book of the famous American historian Michael David-Fox, “Showcase the great experiment”, dedicated to Soviet cultural diplomacy, 1920-1930 and relations of the USSR with the famous foreigners. “Crossing borders” continues many of her stories, but the question posed here David-Fox,— bigger.This is the question of the Soviet modernity. Can you talk about the Soviet Union as a modern state in the sense in which this word is used in Western countries in the past two centuries? Or, in the absence of democracy, the market, mass culture and other traits of Western modernity, the term is meaningless, and adopted in the Soviet Union progressivist rhetoric hides a deep falling away from the present? This dispute seems rhetorical, almost casuistical, if not to take into account its fundamental importance for the debate within the Western, primarily American Sovietology. Therefore, a large part of his book David-Fox devotes historiography.The main conflict in Sovietology until 1991 was a confrontation between two approaches — historians of the totalitarian school and the so-called revisionists. First seen in the Soviet state, based on terror, oppression and centralization of power. The second tried to complicate the picture — to present Soviet society as a monstrous excess, and as a completely “normal” — in which the private interests of individuals and groups are ultimately more important than ideological considerations.Both these schools looked the same conservative for a new generation of historians, who came in the 1990s and 2000s. they began to talk of Soviet modernity — offered not to oppose Soviet society Western, and to compare them — to locate in the Union’s own project of modernity. In other words, the discourse about the history and about the progress and the totalitarian researchers and revisionists were a hypocritical Convention, here at last was the object of attention. This school, in turn, gave rise to a wave of counter: in response to her findings arose a wave of new revisionists. David-Fox calls them “neotraditionalists”. Their main idea is that Soviet modernity was only a formal cover for the archaic relations of subordination, and in this sense the USSR is hardly different from pre-Petrine Russia, a high-ranking Communists — from the boyars.All of these approaches, says David Fox, simplify the real situation. To understand the nature of Soviet society, it is necessary not to find points of convergence Soviet modernity from the West, and especially not to expose it from the point of view of Western “norms”, and to understand its features. To describe this feature, he proposes the term “intellectual-statist modernity”. Talking about t��m that the roots of the Soviet state lay in the consciousness of the intellectuals of the nineteenth century — a special characteristic of her model of education and dramatic affair with the masses. In the view of Russian intellectuals of the service of the people consisted not in the performance of his real needs, and its radical transformation in accordance with known only to the intelligentsia’s ideal. In this case, due to the Western orientation of Russian intellectuals, ideas are often ahead of and defined phenomena: for example, contempt for mass culture is established before the full emergence of mass culture (which subsequently largely determined the Soviet cultural policy), and the critique of capitalism itself ahead of Russian capitalism (as European critical Marxism became Russian voluntaristic Bolshevism). State power came from the intelligentsia and the intellectuals (those not included in the number of Bolsheviks) saw themselves as potential holders of power — not just professionals but leaders of the masses and the builders of tomorrow. Their cooperation, competition, mutual submission, and the destruction is largely determined by the dynamics of Soviet history.A particularly innovative concept David-Fox doesn’t. It seems assembled from common ideas, seasoned with polemical zeal. Debate with colleagues is the subject of the first half of the book. The second consists of several separate scenes, as if to illustrate the General idea, but in reality quite independent.Nevertheless, each of these small studies are aimed at the complication of the usual picture of Soviet cultural system. Each opens in it the clash of different ideologies and different private interests. The first of these chapters is devoted to a curious history of conflict emerging revolution the Russian Academy of Sciences and the newly established in 1918, the alternative of the Communist Academy. The other two continue past the book of David-Fox and tell about the relationship of the famous aliens from the Stalinist Soviet Union. Their heroes are almost opposites: Romain Rolland, a famous humanist, the most faithful of friends of the Soviet Union among European intellectuals of the 1930s, and the national-Bolshevik Ernst Nikish — German politician-paradoxalist, right-wing opponent of Hitler, fascinated by Stalinist Russia as an Asian power, ready to crush poor West. This last Chapter is perhaps most clearly present project David-Fox destruction too smooth pattern of Soviet policy and ideology of the Stalin era, presenting it as a space not only of ideological struggle and suppression, but the strange alliances of convergence and deviation.Publisher UFO Translation by Tatiana Pereschitat next
