History of a socialist utopia
Excerpt from the Dec. 7 Nobel Lecture by Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel prize for literature. Alexievich is a Belarussian writer whose books describe the everyday stories of the Soviet and post-Soviet peoples.
Flaubert called himself a human pen; I would say that I am a human ear. When I walk down the street and catch words, phrases and exclamations, I always think, “How many novels disappear without a trace!” Disappear into darkness. We haven’t been able to capture the conversational side of human life for literature. We don’t appreciate it, we aren’t surprised or delighted by it. But it fascinates me, and has made me its captive. I love how humans talk ... I love the lone human voice. It is my greatest love and passion.
Many times I have been shocked and frightened by human beings. I have sometimes wanted to forget what I heard, to return to a time when I lived in ignorance. More than once, however, I have seen the sublime in people, and wanted to cry.
I lived in a country where dying was taught to us from childhood. We were told that human beings exist in order to give everything they have, to burn out, to sacrifice themselves. We grew up among executioners and victims. Even if our parents lived in fear and didn’t tell us everything — and more often than not they told us nothing — the very air of our life was poisoned. Evil kept a watchful eye on us.
I have written five books, but I feel that they are all one book. A book about the history of a utopia. Varlam Shalamov once wrote: “I was a participant in the colossal battle, a battle that was lost, for the genuine renewal of humanity.” I reconstruct the history of that battle, its victories and its defeats. The history of how people wanted to build the Heavenly Kingdom on earth. Paradise! The City of the Sun! In the end, all that remained was a sea of blood, millions of ruined human lives.
There was a time when no political idea of the 20th century was comparable to communism, a time when nothi ng attracted western intellectuals and people all around the world more powerfully or emotionally. ( The French philosopher) Raymond Aron called the Russian revolution the “opium of intellectuals.” But the idea of communism is at least 2,000 years old. We can find it in Plato’s teachings about an ideal, correct state; in Aristophanes’ dreams about a time when “everything will belong to everyone.” ... In Thomas More and Tommaso Campanella ... Later in Henri Saint- Simon, Charles Fourier and Robert Owen.
There is something in the Russian spirit that compels it to try to turn these dreams into reality.
Twenty years ago, we bid farewell to the “Red Empire” of the Soviets with curses and tears. We can now look at that past more calmly, as an historical experiment. This is important, because arguments about socialism have not died down.
A new generation has grown up with a different picture of the world, but many young people are reading Marx and Lenin again. In Russian towns there are new museums dedicated to Stalin, and new monuments have been erected to him. The “Red Empire” is gone, but the “Red Man,” Homo Sovieticus, remains. He endures.
My father died recently. He believed in communism to the end. He kept his party membership card. He and others close to me, my friends, all come from the same place — socialism. There are many idealists among them. Romantics. Today they are sometimes called slavery romantics. Slaves of utopia. I believe that all of them could have lived different lives, but they lived Soviet lives. Why? I searched for the answer to that question for a long time — I travelled all over the vast country once called the USSR, and recorded thousands of tapes. It was socialism, and it was simply our life.
I have collected the history of “domestic,” “indoor” socialism, bit by bit. The history of how it played out in the human soul. I am drawn to that small space called a human being ... a single individual. In reality, that is where everything happens.
The Russian Revolution was called ‘ the opium of the intellectuals’