Category: philosophy

Gennady Shpalikov: The Soviet Guy Debord

Alexander Ivanov, “Gennady Shpalikov: Being Restless” (in Russian, with no subtitles)

Gennady Shpalikov and Guy Debord were nearly the same age, and their popularity peaked at the same time. But is this the only thing that unites the French philosopher and the Russian writer? Alexander Ivanov, founder of the publishing house Ad Marginem, will show that these two figures were connected not only by the time in which they worked but also by the very spirit of the time, which they saw, felt and were able to convey to others.

Debord’s adage “Love is possible only on the eve of a revolution” could well have been endorsed by Shpalikov.

Debord was the founder of Situationism.

An amazing poet, screenwriter, and director, Shpalikov was the Soviet Guy Debord. Like Debord, Shpalikov had an explicitly spatial mind: he understood space not as a receptacle for bodies but as a way of assembling the soul in the gaps, intervals, and flashes of aimless, unprogrammed, slippery movements around the urban environment. Debord called this mode of movement détournement — a deviation, an illegitimate, reverse appropriation in which the spaces and cultural signs captured by other people’s meanings are reappropriated by turning them inside out semantically or simple shifting their meaning. This was exactly how Shpalikov dealt with the anonymous, official space of the Soviet city: by romanticizing its most banal corners and nooks. Both of these artists conjured the mood of an entire epoch in the late 50s and early 60s.

0:00 Teaser

0:18 Why Gennady Shpalikov is the Russian Guy Debord, and what Soviet existentialism has to do with it

3:32 Guy Debord as the founder of Situationism: “Never work”

6:34 Henri Murger, Guy Debord and Gennady Shpalikov’s characters as bohemians

8:32 Guy Debord’s psychogeography: the drift as a practice for discovering a city’s atmosphere

9:55 Debord’s Paris and Shpalikov’s Moscow

10:50 Alexandria as the capital of memories

12:32 Shpalikov’s poetics and Debord’s Paris: between the real world and the imaginary world

14:07 Sartre’s nothingness as the key to understanding Shpalikov’s poetics

16:20 Sartre’s being-in-itself and being-for-itself, or predetermination and consciousness

18:38 The philosophy of existentialism: existing in a situation as in the fabric of life, which is not defined by personal qualities

20:25 Non-narrative shots from Shpalikov’s films: scenes from I Walk Around Moscow

21:56 Situationist form as a link between Shpalikov’s poetics and the philosophy of existentialism

25:52 Existentialism in cinema: the atmosphere of the movie Breathless

27:08 Shpalikov’s psychogeography for Moscow

30:45 How to reprise Shpalikov’s existential know-how in today’s Moscow

31:45 Détournement: reverse appropriation and distortion of meaning for reclaiming the poetry of urban space

33:28 How Shpalikov rejects Soviet Moscow and appropriates the space of the city in the movie I Walk Around Moscow

37:03 The transformation of Shpalikov’s natural charm into poetry

38:45 The poetic eternity of Nikita Mikhalkov’s character in the movie I Walk Around Moscow

40:42 The dream of an imaginary West as the driver of Soviet existentialism

Source: Peredelkino Dom Tvorchestva (YouTube), 10 October 2024

November 1 is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Gennady Shpalikov, the screenwriter, filmmaker, and poet, one of the symbols of the Thaw era, an extremely popular writer and yet one whose work has been poorly read. Igor Gulin explains how Shpalikov looked for an answer to the question of where good people end up, and how the drama of his characters reprised his own.

Gennady Shpalikov on the set of the film I Am Twenty. Photo: Gorky Film Studio

Screenwriting was an honorable profession in the Soviet Union. Screenwriters were not considered to be craftsmen consigned to the sidelines, but serious writers, and so the screenwriter’s name was listed first in the credits, before the director’s. Nevertheless, not even the best of them were stars. Gennady Shpalikov was an exception. From his very first efforts in cinema, his name was a symbol of the new art of the Thaw — first among his fellow filmmakers, then for a relatively wide swath of the intelligentsia. His death in 1974 was a token of the sixties generation’s demise.

The cinematic Thaw was already in full swing by the time Shpalikov joined the profession. Marlen Khutsiev and Felix Mironer’s Spring on Zarechnaya Street (1956), Mikhail Schweitzer’s The Tight Knot (1957), Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying (1957), and Grigory Chukhrai’s The Ballad of a Soldier (1959) had been released, but these beautiful pictures still lacked something that would instill a sense of decisive reform and renewal. Shpalikov carried out a tiny revolution in Soviet cinema — not alone, of course, but he was its leader. He contributed an open sense of form, showing that a movie could be something other than an itinerary from point A to point B. It could be a stroll, a stroll with no clear goals, from one impression to another, from one funny and touching incident to another.

Almost all of Shpalikov’s scripts from the 1960s are just such cinematic walkabouts: A Streetcar to Other Cities (1962), directed by his friend Yuli Fait (1962); The Star on the Buckle (1962) and I’m from Childhood (1966), written for Viktor Turov; I Walk Around Moscow (1963) directed by Georgiy Daneliya; The Wharf and Summer Holiday, which were never made into films; A Long Happy Life (1966), of course; and Ilyich’s Gate (1962–1964) to a great extent. This film was more complicated, however. Khutsiev’s lofty idealism counterbalanced Shpalikov’s nimble gifts, and it was their confrontation and, at times, conflict that gave birth to a masterpiece. This later worked with Larisa Shepitko, when she and Shpalikov agonizingly co-wrote You and I (1971). To produce something truly significant, Shpalikov needed a co-writer-slash-director — a collaborator and an opponent, not a faithful executor of his ideas.

The stroll was the genre not only of Shpalikov’s creative work but also of his life. He existed in the same way, charming everyone he met, traipsing from one crowd to another, from one idea to another. He wrote the same way: on telegram blanks and napkins, not bothering with punctuation and spelling, and often not worrying whether the text was coherent, paying mind to its intonation and pacing, rather than to the idea and the logic of form. His scripts and songs, poems and prose experiments often seem sloppy to a sober eye. But their sloppiness never irritates: it comes across as organic, as a hallmark of authenticity.

Dozens of memoirs have been written about Shpalikov. Their authors constantly wonder aloud how it happened that this carefree, lively man took to drinking heavily and eventually committed suicide. They often blame the era. There is some truth to this, but it is a little different than is commonly thought. The Stagnation was not only a time of disillusionment after the upswing of the Thaw. It was also a time of complication. The members of the Sixties generation who continued to create and grow learned to resist better. It required them to mobilize their inner strength, making them more reflective and deeper. Shpalikov was a genius of splendid superficiality, of drifting and gliding. He understood this perfectly well. The drama of his art kicked off long before the frosts of the Brezhnev era set in.

Gennady Shpalikov, 1965. Photo: Georgy Ter-Ovanesov/RIA Novosti

The same disturbing intuition — sometimes well concealed, sometimes voiced as directly as possible — was evident in everything Shpalikov wrote. Surprisingly, this anxiety was hardly detected by his contemporaries, who remained under the hypnosis of the myth they had created themselves. It concerns the central figure of Shpalikov’s entire oeuvre. What to do with the fact that the “good man,” about whom he always wrote, so easily goes to the bad? What to do with the fact that charming frivolity quickly turns into grim irresponsibility, moral freedom into immorality, the freewheeling life of the tumbleweed into pathetic escapism, and nonstop wittiness into nauseating clownishness? Committed to the utmost sincerity, Shpalikov had an absolute ear for falsity and from the very beginning heard the rudiments of falsity in himself. Perhaps that is why he seemed doomed (and suicidal notes appear in his texts very early on). Drunkenness, however, made it easier for him to accept his fate.

This intuition is almost nonexistent in Ilyich’s Gate, in which the romantics and the bastards are delineated from each other. But it is already present (for the time being, as a quite vague hint) in I Walk Around Moscow (the young Nikita Mikhalkov’s ambiguous charisma works perfectly in this regard). It is also palpable in The Wharf, Shpalikov’s first major feature. (Its director, Vladimir Kitaysky, committed suicide while working on the picture, and the movie was never completed.) The script of The Wharf is an enchanting, airy text centered on a rather savage deed. Coming to Moscow for a single evening, the main character, a barge captain, decides to kidnap his son from his mother, wanders around nighttime Moscow with the boy for a long while, and when he falls asleep on a bench, simply runs away to his barge. A good guy’s transformation into a scoundrel is amped up to wholly Dostoevskyean cruelty in Summer Holiday and A Charming Man’s Day (another script that was never produced). This trajectory devolves into total despair in You and I, in which a Thawnik’s romantic flight to the Far North is played out as an egoistic escape from his own worthless life, frittered-away talent, ruined romance, and lost friendship.

Shpalikov never judges his characters: their meannesses and downfalls just happen. There is no reflection at all in his art. There is only movement, and this movement has its own laws. At the beginning of the trajectory there is a good, harmonious man, but once chosen, the freewheeling life gradually whittles him down to the ugly figure of a cynic, a vulgarian, a scoundrel. Shpalikov has a very frank poem about this:

Аh the streets, the only refuge
Not for the homeless, but for those who live in the city.
The streets pester and haunt me,
They are my comrades and my adversaries.

I don’t feel as if I am walking them,
I obey them, I move my feet,
And the streets guide me, they lead me
Through a sequence set once upon a time,

A sequence of cherished back alleys,
A sequence of jaunty notions and good intentions.

The same thing happens in Shpalikov’s only directorial work. A Long Happy Life is usually remembered as a light, lyrical picture, but actually it is chockablock with contempt for oneself and one’s kind. It is a movie about how a typical man of the 1960s, a charming unshaven geologist, runs off into nowhere and away from a beautiful woman, and at the same time from any future, from that selfsame long happy life, simply because he cannot help but run. A lighter note is generated by the finale: the famous five-minute scene of a barge on a river is Shpalikov’s homage to Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, his favorite film.

This is Shpalikov’s main gimmick. As intoxication relieves a hangover, so the shame of escape is relieved by yet another escape. And if the body can no longer escape, there remain flights of fantasy. Distracted from the protagonist’s mediocre fate, the gaze follows the barge and loses itself in this marvelous tracking shot. All of Shpalikov’s best poems are about the same thing: not about the joy of life, but about the desire to escape from it to a place that is obviously impossible, somewhere “where mother is young and father is alive.” To leave, but not by sinking into drunkenness, illness, and rows, but to disappear gently, to be weathered away from the world. “My head is vacant, / Like a deserted place. / I’m flying off somewhere, / Like a tree from a leaf.”

Source: Igor Gulin, “Elusive simplicity: how Gennady Shpalikov found no place for himself in the Stagnation,” Kommersant Weekend, 1 November 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader

I Walk Around Moscow (1964). In Russian, with English subtitles

Source: Mosfilm (YouTube)

Max Stropov: The Cop’s Sacred Body

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Max Stropov
Facebook
September 3, 2019

The trials in the so-called Moscow case, in which protesters have been charged with violence against “law enforcement officers” and sentenced to hard time in prison for touching policemen or Russian National Guardsmen, are yet another vivid illustration that violence is not even remotely the issue. The case more resembles lèse-majesté, “doing wrong to majesty,” a modern form of the crime of offending the dignity of sacred authority.

One of the most immediate and common incarnations of this power in the Russian Federation is the Cop’s Body, which has been endowed with more and more mana and has become increasingly taboo. Since the center of power is a void, the ring surrounding the center, the annulus, the sphincter—which, in fact, is the Cop’s Body—has increasingly gained weight. (The numbers of policemen and other “law enforcement officers” in the Russian Federation have been multiplying.)

The Cop’s Body is impersonal, non-individual, and plural. When they are cracking down on demonstrations, law enforcement’s so-called foot soldiers behave like a herd of animals or a swarm of insects. Their faces are concealed. As Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov has argued, they are not citizens.

“In the line of duty,” when “enforcing the law,” their body is transformed into the law’s body. We could also argue, on the contrary, that the law itself is abstract. It means nothing. It acquires reality and efficacy only in the Cop’s Body, which also has no direct connection with the identities of the policeman who constitute it.

Attempts to out and name otherwise anonymous riot cops encounter such resistance not because the cops could get killed, but because they violate the sacredness of their Body.

As for the “physical” and “emotional” trauma they suffer, allegedly, when protesters throw paper cups at them, this trauma is purely symbolic since non-individual, plural, and impersonal power also suffers.

Generally, then, the Cop’s Body does not suffer nor, probably, does it ever die.

Such is the theology of the police. This summer, it would even seem Russian cops have surpassed Russian priests in their sacredness.

Thanks to Max Stropov for his permission to translate and publish this text. Image courtesy of Max Stropov. Translated by the Russian Reader

Kefir the Plough

punisher-it's a lonely row to hoe

I cannot discern grace.

A child of God may have the kingdom of grace in his heart, and yet not know it. The cup was in Benjamin’s sack, though he did not know it was there; so thou mayest have faith in thy heart, the cup may be in thy sack, though thou knowest it not. Old Jacob wept for his son Joseph when Joseph was alive; so thou mayest weep for want of grace, when grace may be alive in thy heart. The seed may be in the ground, when we do not see it spring up; so the seed of God may be sown in thy heart, though thou dost not perceive it springing up. Think not grace is lost because it is hid.

Before the kingdom of grace come into the heart, there must be some preparation for it; the fallow ground must be broken up: I fear the plough of the law has not gone deep enough: I have not been humbled enough: therefore I have no grace.

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Today on The Archers:

At Bridge Farm Susan is keen to start promoting the kefir again now that Christmas is over. However, Helen is far too busy, and insists she’ll have to wait for Tom to return from his conference. Susan devises a market research project of her own, and starts pouncing on customers at the Ambridge Tearoom. Fallon and Emma worry that she’s scaring away customers, and do their best to moderate her zeal. Eventually Emma puts her foot down: the Tea Room is not the place for Susan’s market research.

__________________________________________

What Emma says to Susan when she puts her foot down over the latter’s sinister kefirization of the Ambridge Tea Room:

Take Life or Nonlife in the Anthropocene and the Meteorocene. Geology and meteorology are devouring their companion discipline, biology. For if we look at where and how life began, and how and why it might end, then how can we separate Life from Nonlife? Life is not the miracle—the dynamic opposed to the inert of rocky substance. Nonlife is what holds, or should hold for us, the more radical potential. For Nonlife created what it is radically not, Life, and will in time fold this extension of itself back into itself as it has already done so often and long. It will fold its own extension back into the geological strata and rocky being, whereas Life can only fall into what already is. Life is merely a moment in the greater dynamic unfolding of Nonlife. And thus Life is devoured from a geological perspective under the pressure of the Anthropocene and Meteorocene. Life is merely another internal organ of a planet that will still be here when it is not, when we are not, undergoing its unfolding, creating who knows what. Will Life be a relevant concept there? If not, perhaps Nonlife will finally be freed from Life’s anxiety, freed from being Nonlife, or as Luce Irigaray might have said, from being the other of the same, freed to finally be the other of the other.

Until then perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the emergence of geontopower is mobilizing very similar techniques and tactics that we saw when we were looking at late liberalism. We hear all around us the coming Event, the catastrophic imaginary orienting and demanding action—the last wave, the sixth extinction. And yet pulsing through various terrains is a very different temporality—the river becomes a polluted dump; the fog becomes smog; rock formations become computer components. Is this why the poetics of the quasi-event stitch together the environmental studies of Rob Nixon, the affective optimisms of Lauren Berlant, and the crumbling worlds of settler liberalism? It is most certainly why we see the constant seduction of older late liberal politics of recognition: the sudden realization, the welcoming of an otherwise into what already exists, the extension of qualities we already most value and create most of our value from to the other.

Get out the musical instruments. Put on the robes. Say a mass of remembrance for the repose of the souls of the dead. Cling to life if even in the form of its mass extinction.

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I can imagine listeners will have a lot to say about the further radicalization of The Archers on this week’s edition of Feedback.

Sergey Yermakov: Protest Duckies and the Actionism of Fact

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Inflated rubber duckie at June 12, 2017, anti-corruption protest rally in Petersburg. The duckie was later detained by police. Photo courtesy of The Poke

Sergey Yermakov
Protest Duckies and the Actionism of Fact

The final performances by Voina’s so-called Petersburg faction could be termed “actionism of fact” by analogy with “literature of fact,” a project the LEF mob tried and failed to realize in the 1920s.

Voina took ordinary actions from the repertoire of protest and resistance, actions requiring no special skills—turning over a police car, torching a paddy wagon, dousing policemen with urine—and simply did them in their performances.

What happened to the performances due to their actions?

First, the performances simply were carried out, like ordinary actions, bereft of aesthetic and symbolic depth. (We will bracket the question of Alexei Plutser-Sarno’s defamiliarizing press releases.) “They really did it.”

Second, the actions were glorified by the very fact they were performed by the actionists. They were bathed in an aura of glory, but note that this aura was totally colorless. It had no density whatsoever, and it produced no distortions in the albedo. This was because the actions were as commonplace as could be, actions available to everyone, actions to which nothing was added except their execution. (Well, yes, and the group’s signature.)

The actionist readymade (or “readydone”) and actionism of fact, unlike the classic artistic readymade, have no need of a special aesthetic space, such as a museum. Unlike literature of fact (if this literary project had actually been implemented in the twenties), actionism may well avoid the traps of language and representation.

Voina thus directly took on the issue of politically effective action. There is a certain actionist Platonism to it, but if we bypass Plato (no matter how we regard the violence of his gesture) we cannot ask ourselves about art’s attitude and access to politics.

In the Republic, Plato does not suggest banishing all poets for fobbing off the phantom of excellence (εἰδώλων ἀρετῆς) on citizens instead of virtue (i.e., the thought of action). He would let the non-mimetic poets, who glorify the gods and sing the praises of good men (ἐγκώμια τοῖς ἀγαθοῖς), stay in the city. Voina’s Petersburg faction non-mimetically sang the praises not of citizens themselves, but certain actions as such, simply by performing them. Their implicit message was something like: Look, this is up for grabs for everyone, and yet if you carry out this glorious deed, you will not be unoriginal and overshadowed by us, because this is basically something anyone could do. This is a kind of democratic and non-hierarchical political Platonism.

Voina did these performances before the May 6, 2012, clashes between protesters and police on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow. They seemingly had offered the demos who took to the streets a possible repertoire of elementary actions. (Of course, the total number of such actions is much greater, and not all of them are either criminal or so primitive. What matters in this case is only the dimension itself.) But the demos did not heed their call, preferring to play at making witty posters, from the December 2011 rally on Sakharov Avenue to this day, and exchanging anti-regime memes in the social networks. (That is, the circumstances are in some way symmetrical to the exile of the poets. In this case, however, the demos itself has turned its back on genuinely political artists, immersing itself in the carnivalesque mimesis of the meme.) By rejecting the dimension of the glorious deed, however, the demos has refused to be itself, because it is eventful, rather than substantial, in contrast to the phantasm of the ethnos.

It took Pyotr Pavlensky half a dozen performances to get close to the place where Voina had arrived in the spring of 2011, that is, in order to torch the front door at FSB headquarters in Moscow. In many ways, the performance was a step backwards, for example, when it came to the question of withdrawal. The guerillas of Voina insisted on retreating in a well-conceived way and unexpectedly returning to strike again. (This is the only worthwhile “We’ll be back!” It is a far cry from Navalny and Co.) But Pavlensky, in many respects by way of accommodating an aesthetic impulse, stood his ground to the bitter end. He has thus proven to be a more direct follower of the National Bolsheviks than Voina when it comes to this issue.

So Voina is still waiting for its demos and valiant citizens back in the spring of 2011, scornfully gazing at rubber duckies, meme politics, and witty anti-Kremlin t-shirts.

Translated by the Russian Reader. Sergey Yermakov is a professional translator who was involved in several of Pyotr Pavlensky’s performances. My thanks to Mr. Yermakov for his kind permission to publish this essay here.

A Word from Our Sponsor

And now, a word from our sponsor, the common cause.

english-girls

Constructing life, however, is undoubtedly tantamount to producing culture. The life that man constructs consciously is, in fact, culture. Culture is the totality of man’s advances in transfiguring the world. Culture is the world, altered by man according to his mind’s ideals.

But culture, in this case, includes not only theoretical and symbolic endeavors, as encapsulated in science and art. A significant and essential part of culture are those modes of work that really change the world around us, not merely in thought and imagination. They include economics, production, agriculture, engineering, medicine, eugenics, practical biology, education, and so on. Indeed, an overview of all the current research and trends makes plain that culture’s contents are revealed as the things people actually to change reality using these means. Culture is not only pure science and pure art, but definitely consists in applying them to production, the mining and processing industry, labor, and technology. Hence, we can say that culture’s ultimate meaning and goal are actually to improve and transform the world through nature’s rational management.

The new culture of the future involves nothing other than identifying this universal culture, revealing it as the work of transfiguring the world.

It follows that the first task, which precedes all construction and organization, is expanding the common notion of culture and including in it the modes of human endeavor that have previously been regarded as outside its scope. In other words, what must vanish are the current disjunction between culture and life, and the consequent separation of theoretical and symbolic work, which generates expressions of knowledge and ideal patterns, from work that really, by means of action, changes our environment.

To this end, we must first clearly understand the source of this pernicious disjunction. Its roots undoubtedly lie in the ancient division of the world into the supernatural world, accessible only to the mind and imagination, and the earthly, material world where human action takes place.

Due to the limitations of his outlook and the feebleness of his power over nature, man was unable to effect a real, comprehensive transformation of the environment, and so he marked off a special field of endeavor where he found it relatively easier to enact the kingdom of his reason and his moral and aesthetic ideals. This was the realm of pure knowledge and the similar realm of pure art. Here, in a special world generated by the mind and imagination, man produced the ideas and images he wanted while passively contemplating external reality and acting on it only in his own inner world by enriching his intellect and furthering his aesthetic powers. In this segregated realm, he scored victories over unreasoning, vicious nature, but what these successes lacked was the fact they led to no changes in real life except for producing generations of especially sophisticated, accomplished people who were quite remote from the mass of humanity, who continued to languish in the grip of a life that was impoverished, meaningless, and misshapen. Thus did passive contemplation and abstract philosophizing evolve. They were joined by pure science and pure art. Scientists have engaged in pure theory, forgetting their work makes sense only insofar as it really transfigures the world, and that they, accordingly, are not a self-sufficient corporation, but merely a committee of sorts, designated by humanity for a particular goal: drafting a project for the world’s transfiguration. For their part, artists have surrendered to the symbolism of images and forgotten they only make sense insofar as they are linked to reality, and that art’s purpose is to provide people with an ideal of a better world and assist in actually converting the present into such a future. Consequently, culture has become detached from life and enclosed in the narrow confines of pure creativity, remote from reality.

The outcome of the disjunction between symbolic and theoretical endeavors and real cultural work has been equally detrimental to both. Without thought, action is meaningless; thought without movement is ineffective; while knowledge, since it is applied to nothing, degenerates into abstract intellectualizing; science that has no practical end ultimately turns into an exposition of methods that have no purpose; and art that produces only dead likenesses turns into a harmful amusement. On the other hand, lawmaking and economics, as endeavors that change the material world; medicine and eugenics, which change the nature of living beings; and education, which changes their mental nature, are likewise bereft of a particular purpose and come to serve private and individual interests instead of pursuing the task of transfiguring the world.

The outcome is humanity’s atomization into a number of warring centers. Culture is no longer produced as the common cause of human efforts, while the latter develop, each in its own field, as self-contained strivings. Hence the birth of the destructive particularism we find at the heart of cultural liberalism, which was proclaimed during the Renaissance and has evolved into modern cultural chaos. In this state, the common conscious action of people, instead of blazing a course for itself through history as a single, powerful stream, has trickled away into a thousand rivulets, which have mostly ended up as standing puddles of fetid water. Each man lives only for his selfish purposes. A number of dead ends arise, discrete lives fenced off from the rest. An idol in the guise of personal prejudice or passion is erected in each such dead end. Mutual bloody war erupts in the name of the idols, tearing humanity apart with strife. However, at the same time, people are united by irrational factors, but this unity is usually based on narrow-mindedness and passivity, and crumbles when it encounters consciousness, even in its primary selfish, individual form.

These phenomena have caused the crisis now experienced by European culture. It is clear it cannot stay in a state of modern individual atomization, and just as clear that the way to past attempts at unification, based on extinguishing consciousness, is forbidden to it due to its hypertrophied modern evolution. The only way left is to produce a culture in which consciousness would not be removed from life but would projectively manage it, moreover, manage it not in the sense of separating people from each other, but, on the contrary, in the sense of uniting them as completely as possible on the basis of a common cause.

That was an excerpt from Valerian Muravyov, “A Universal Productive Mathematics” (1923), in Boris Groys, ed., Russkii kozmism (Moscow: Ad Marginem Press,  2015), 180–184

Translated by the Russian Reader

Sergey Yermakov: Revolution or Chernobyl!

Sergey Yermakov
Facebook
December 19, 2015

Back in her day, we recall, Rosa Luxemberg proposed the slogan “Socialism or barbarism!” While not obvious at first glance, the slogan is profoundly and functionally religious, albeit secularized, since it deals with salvation, with socialism as a project of salvation from the consequences of capitalism. In 1916, in the midst of a monstrous imperialist war, it was a secular take on soteriology, the doctrine of salvation.

The “or” is telltale. Although “barbarism” implies the entire subject matter of nineteenth-century Hegelianism and positivism, the theme of progress, as opposed to barbarism, the subject of progress as Bildung, the slogan is, nevertheless, anti-Hegelian. Nothing vouchsafes the Spirit’s final pleroma; the victory of progress is not obvious. Nor is it obvious that the arrow of history is generally pointed towards an increase of the good, and that a “higher” formation will inevitably come to replace the “lower” formation. But because salvation is not vouchsafed, we must work on its behalf and advocate for it. (Whereas, in the Hegelian universe, Self-Development of the Spirit, Ltd., and Progress, Inc., issue you a guarantee in writing, a futures contract for salvation.)

So, dear missionaries and itinerant preachers, boldly introduce the subject of salvation into your sermonizing. When the laymen groan, as they usually do, that the outcome will be bloody and so forth, you tell them, “Revolution or Chernobyl!” (I am serious.)

A regime incapable of maintaining a functioning technosphere, for which it bears responsibility, legitimates its own overthrow. Revolution does not guarantee the emergence of a new technosphere, of course. Politics and science and technics (and even governance and science) hardly run in parallel lines, just as revolution does not guarantee a regime more capable of governance. As a manifestation of the demos, however, revolution, at least for some time, generates a collectively responsible subject, a subject capable of deliberating on its own collective future, including the technosphere.

By the way, for those who find such things crucial, I do not fully understand the meaning of the term “sovereignty” in 2015, but perhaps only revolution is capable of preserving it, simply by generating the dimension of collective responsibility, the sense that “regular dudes are in charge here.” As it is, one ninth of the earth’s land mass has begun to present an excessive danger, given its unpredictability and irresponsibility, toward the other eight ninths, even taking in account the disasters with oil rigs that happen there and monstrously smoky China. God forbid that external management should be required.

P.S. We have to think over whether Luxemberug’s slogan—and the line of campaigning proposed—suggest that revolution (an apocalyptic event towards which the messianic subject is directed) is the katechon, that which holds back (in this case, a technological disaster), because there is an obvious paradox here: the katechon is anti-apocalyptical figure.

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Emergency Shutdown of Second Unit at Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant 
www.greenworld.org.ru
December 19, 2015

An emergency shutdown of the second unit at Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant took place on Friday, December 18, at 1:50 p.m. local time. The cause of the shutdown and emergency cooling of the reactor was a sudden influx of radioactive steam from a faulty pipe into one of the rooms in the turbine section.

Both of the turbines servicing the reactor were shut down.

During the cooling down, the steam generated in the reactor was ejected into the environment through a pipe. A south-southeasterly wind blowing at five meters per second (such a wind is atypical for this locale) carried the radioactive steam toward the Gulf of Finland in the direction of Zelenogorsk and Vyborg. Green World recorded a background radiation of 20 mR/h at five p.m. local time in downtown Sosnovy Bor, five kilometers away from the affected unit.

Saint Petersburg, a city of five million people people that is situated forty kilometers to the east of the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant, was thus fortunate this time round. According to some sources, the background radiation increased only severalfold in the vicinity of the plant.

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In the photo, radioactive steam from the unit drifts towards Vyborg as the unit is cooled down.

The second unit at the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant has been operating for forty years, although it has a projected operating life of thirty years. Its operating life was extended without the legally required public hearings and environmental impact assessment.

At present, all four units at the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant are operating beyond their projected lifetimes. The oldest of the Chernobyl series reactors at Sosnovy Bor is scheduled to be shut down only in 2018 after forty-five years in operation.

The eastern part of the Gulf of Finland is entering into a ten-year period of heightened risk of accidents at nuclear sites. On the one hand, during this period (lasting until 2026), the service life of the RMBK-1000 reactors at Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant will be extended and there will be a greater likelihood of accidents. During this same period, the new (VVER-1200-powered) units at Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant II are scheduled to come online, and there will be an increased risk of accidents due to errors by designers, builders, and inexperienced personnel.

So we are faced with a headline-making increase in the probability of accidents at the Sosnovy Bor nuclear cluster.

Translated by the Russian Reader