Stalin in the city

A stand with a portrait of Stalin appeared in the council of the Ryazan district of Moscow. There are other “victory marshals” at the stand; And it is established, in fact, to the 65th anniversary of the great event. The vigilant radio listener, seeing this, immediately informed the Echo of Moscow to the journalists, and this became a small one -day scandal. The scandal, everyone understands, is just a detonator to a much larger controversy - in honor of the Great Victory throughout the capital, street billboards with general scimators will appear, reporting his leading role in the defeat of the fascist invaders. And take it calmly, wave your hand and pay off from the look with a billboard with the words “this is just a story” for many does not work.

Moreover, these victorious billboards continue the line of ideological disputes around the restored Kurskaya station, where Stalin is mentioned on the wall, and the barbecue “anti -Soviet”, which was ordered to rename, so as not to insult veterans. This war by the emblem, names and portraits are quite logical. Where with the real political struggle, multi -party and competition of social projects the situation is difficult, different groups within society, professing different ideologies, exacerbate rivalry at the level of symbols, monuments and street names . But why is Stalin and everything connected with him causes maximum emotions, leads people out of wise balance?

Stalin does not leave us. He is adapted to reality as an “effective manager” in school textbooks: this outrages many. In the rating television series he smiles like a cunning-out-hand master of half of the world. The underground rock groups sing about him. It leads in the lists of the most popular Russians of the past century. What does all this mean?

Democratic control

Twenty years ago, at the democratic rallies "Stalin" - it was such a test. For or against? You could adhere to any national, cultural, religious and even sexual identity, but “your own” from the “stranger” was distinguished precisely by the denial of Stalin and the “totalitarian system” created by him.

By the mid-1990s, in the editorial office of "Tomorrow" this test worked exactly the opposite. Prokhanov, creating the “red-white” front of the sovereigns, proclaimed Stalin, uniting all patriots with a figure. Then there was a naive attempt by Anpilov to privatize all this symbolic capital and get into the State Duma, registering the Stalin Bloc, but such a move did not work. Stalin failed at c fight: he is general, and not someone-t about. He, as a plus or as a minus, needs everyone, and without it almost no one is able to do in a political explanation of himself. I know five portraits of Stalin used in society.

Stalin as a great Bolshevik

From this portrait of the leader, asceticism is radiated close to the masses of the working underground and the politicotorzhanin, artistically executed, for example, in the wonderful play “Batum” by Mikhail Afanasevich Bulgakov. It was Stalin, who was coming from the local Bolsheviks, and not from the theoreticians who had been torn from the life, who had been in exile for too long, was able to separate the realistic from the utopian in the Lenin revolutionary project.

In time, abandoning the adventure of the premature “permanent revolution”, the leader focused on socialism in a single country. He conducted the industrialization of the economy and modernize society on top. He put up, and then abolished the Comintern, who turned out to be an unusable tool of international political influence and a waste of effort. He won the war with fascism. He distributed his political project to half the European Europe, China and North Korea-this was the “world revolution” in Stalin, without any leftist adventurism.

After his death, thanks to the hidden activity of the enemies of the people, “revisionism” appeared inside the party. The bureaucracy began to be fat, to separate from the workers, Oburzhuisuu and infect the entire Soviet people with a virus of Western values, which first led to the weakening of the entire project - primarily a quarrel with Mao and the division of “world communism” into two competing streams - and more than thirty years after the death of the leader and the restoration of capitalism.

According to the dialectics of this portrait, the bureaucracy under Stalin was a progressive phenomenon, because Without it, it was impossible to neither upgrade the economy nor to win the war. But after the death of Stalin, she became a factor inhibitory and reactionary, because The technological base of the company and the level of education changed, and there was no longer the need for so many “bosses”, but the bureaucracy chose the path of self -preservation at the cost of gradual abandonment of previous communist ambitions.

From this moment on, the technological and educational growth did not work on, but against the Stalinist project. If this did not happen, then in the 1960s a certain new "cyberstalinism" with a new leader would have arisen, and all of Europe, and Asia would become Soviet. A good argument in favor of this version of Stalin is a map with a continuously growing field of red influence. From the First World War, the Bolshevik state arose, from the second it came out the strongest superpower, the third promised world domination to the Stalinist falcons. Accordingly, the Stalinists see this sense in the creation of a batch of non -Bolshevik type, capable of implementing an “educational dictatorship” similar to the Stalin, but taking into account new conditions.

Stalin as a grave of socialism

... and the creator of his "deformed" version. He destroyed the Lenin Guard within the party, turned the party itself into an authoritarian structure, deprived the trade unions and nullified all the avant-garde and revolutionary art, going to concession to the bourgeois and pre-revolutionary taste of the crowd. He betrayed the Spanish revolution, curling up the help of those red that refused direct submission to his agents. He molested the entire world communist project, because he did not understand the bold dialectics in Leninsky: the conditions for the world victory arise in the process of the struggle itself, and not given in advance, therefore-the main thing is to get involved in a global conflict and, of course, know how the players will change from this tomorrow. But such knowledge is available only to genuine dialectics.

The semi -socialism created by Stalin (or even “state capitalism”) has almost split the world in half for the century, slowed down the globalization of capital and thereby postponed the world revolution for an indefinite long term, discrediting, among other things, the very idea of ​​communism in the eyes of critical intellectuals. The bureaucracy, "deforming the working state", found in it the perfect leader. He was a living symbol of the exaltation of the party elite over the power of the Soviets, which, according to the initial Leninist intention, had to manage everything.

This deformation, in turn, prepared the restoration of capitalism. The arguments of this version are the long lists of repressed old Bolsheviks, the most famous of which, of course, is Trotsky, as well as the world's authority of the early Soviet art avant-garde, “curtailed” by 1930. Such a portrait perfectly explains the global failure of the world communist project and justifies the plan itself. Accordingly, as a new way to change the world, anti -authoritarian, excluding leadership, network structures are offered.

The last time in the massive use of such Stalin was in the late 1980s, when it was supposed to look for socialism with a human, and not with this cunning narrowed "face of Caucasian nationality." But for most Western left -wing intellectuals and just humanities, it is this version of Stalin that is a long -not discussed dogma.

Stalin as a Russian emperor

Throughout his biography, he felt more and more clearly that Russia could not be anything but the empire, and because the bourgeois and socialist form of democracy was excluded. In the intra -party struggle, not the most intelligent and not the most terrible won, but the one who intuitively guessed about this main secret.

Instead of a democratic addition of individual will, the empire offers a qualitatively different action-the multiplication of everyone by the figure of the emperor, or rather by the utopian principle embodied in Vasilevsa and Pantocrato, expressed as a visant, in the builder of bridges between the temporary world and eternity.

Only with the maximum strengthening of the vertical of this imperial structure, our country is capable of modernizing and overcoming the lag, as under Peter the Great. Actually, the lack of “Stalin’s strong” power explains the fact that, despite the presence of economic conditions in the country, nothing comparable to Stalinist modernization was done in the zero years. In his famous toast for the health of the Russian people, Stalin attributes to him, and not the party or Marxism, the main merit in a military victory . The war allowed the leader to finally understand that the Russian people, being the older brother of all other peoples of the empire, self -preserving, always cuts out of any trouble to his imperial path. Such is his fate given from above, and only in this form he can fulfill his metaphysical mission of the keeper of a special Eurasian civilization.

This version is characterized by conversations about the “collective body” and charisma, organic metaphors of social processes, flirting with mass unconscious and faith in the fate of the nation and the mission of the empire. The leader not just refused left -wing cosmopolitanism up to the “struggle against cosmopolitans”, not just ordered anti -Western nationalism by “anti -imperialism”, not only returned to the practice of state anti -Semitism, traditional for imperial power, and not just reconciled with the Orthodox Church. He was going to gradually restore the monarchy, get married to the kingdom, and turn the party into a harmless circle to study Marxism-Leninism.

After his death, Russia gets the opportunity to return to its imperial essence only now. Aesthetic argument works well for this version - the Soviet Empire. Workers and collective farmers go to the film “Ivan the Terrible” in the shadow of sky -high skyscrapers, replacing them with the demolished bells. In order to present imperial utopia, it is much more often “showed” to the people than they explain, because impressed is much easier than understanding. The empire offers itself primarily as more beautiful, and then as a more fair. Hence the interest of all empires in creating their own great style.

Stalin as an oriental despot

The version of Euro-Moscow and liberals-westers, for whom, that Stalin, that Hitler are creators of the equally “totalitarian” systems. However, there are more victims on Stalinskaya, at least, if we talk about the extermination of the people. Stalin is an indicator of the pathological absence of a “society” separate from the state, i.e. People who distinguish social and state interests as different, and sometimes opposite things.

Stalin was an ideal response to the masochism of the eastern crowd, which loves when the “father” aims at it from the rifle . The Asian crowd understands equality so that everyone is equally bad, scary and dangerous so that in violence there is as little rational meaning as possible, that it simply creates a neurotic atmosphere, distributed in lot. In this sense, the more wagons with people went to the Gulag, the higher the enthusiasm of the Asian mass grew (“Fate is inexorable and insatiable!”), Prone to self -destruction. In the east, the personality is not produced and not cultivated, then the mass uprising occurs, i.e. Permanent bloody performance of continuous sacrifice.

It is necessary to wake up a private initiative and establish mass demand and proposal to independent personalities free from eastern mythology in new and open Russia in the market. Stalin is needed as an antihero and the main proof/reminder of the barbaric nature of the local population, requiring radical “cultivation”. In the extreme version, the meaning of the portrait is as follows: you can trust the solution of your fate only by wealthy and educated (that is, familiar with European humanism) people, otherwise Asian mob will always drag the despot and any revolution, and any democracy will end with the new Stalin.

Stalin as a philosopher in power

In the new century, we had our own elite salon Stalinism for intellectuals: a fashion for Lifshitsa, the Kozhevsk Hegelianism in the form of the NKVD and the provocative texts of Boris Groys. Stalin means the maximum power of the state in our history, and hence the maximum log centrism, the ultimate power of the language over any (economic, military, social) fact, the violent victory of Noumenom over the phenomenon. Logocentrism is the maximum submission of the economy to politics. In the Stalinist space of the medium of the language (order and solution), and not the medium of money (financing and targeted use) makes things and people as they are.

The transition of money from the medium to the medium of the language of the ruling party in the human history of analogues. The leader controls all the power of unique knowledge - dialectical materialism - having reached the greatest heights in the cause of Marxist methane. It embodies the ancient Platonic project of the power of the sages, who think of society in its total and able to rise above the competition of individual private interests, to remove the competition, thanks to which the market is moving, which no democracy is capable of avoiding the costs of which.

Stalin embodied in politics the most daring claims of the Russian avant-garde artists of the beginning of the century, and therefore the Russian avant-garde stopped being needed as an obsolete and embodied claim . Polemic on the issues of linguistics with academician Marr and answering the questions of workers in Pravda, Stalin came to the conclusion that the language is not part of the superstructure set by the class basis, as previously thought. Language is a common means of production of messages and a prototype of public property that is not subject to privatization. The language is a medium between the basis and the superstructure, with the help of which the superstructure affects the basis, transfers the return signal from the investigation to the cause, and this is power in its sterile pure Stalinist form. From the world of natural and familiar paradoxes of human nature, Stalin translated everyone into the world of extremely artificial philosophical total. The philosophical opponents of Stalin began with criticism of the totalitarianism of the language, and later, turning this criticism already to their own world and themselves, invented post -structuralism and postmodernism.

In this very postmodernism, a person on a black and white billboard should be perceived with us cool as a date or as a “Stalin” high-rise “Triumph Palace” on a falcon, where non-poor people buy apartments without thinking about the ideological load of the building. And any meaning of a billboard, except for a momentary reference to a particular event, should be of an exclusively gaming entertaining interest for us. But, judging by the calls on the radio, discussions in the press and street actions, we continue to fill this face with our current meaning. Does this mean that there has never been any postmodernism, but Stalin, on the contrary, has always been?