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Between Instinct and Mind: The Bolshevik View of the Proletarian Self

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Igal Halfin
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Abstract

Anna Krylova questions whether the spontaneity-consciousness paradigm, the standard interpretive approach toward Bolshevik thought in the field of Soviet studies, offers an exhaustive account of Bolshevik discourse. To do that she examines the centrality of V I. Lenin's What Is to BeDone? (1902) in Bolshevik thought and points to the 1905 revolution as the formative event in the Bolshevik conception of the worker. Krylova introduces an overlooked Bolshevik notion of “class instinct” (klassovyiinstinkt, klassovoe chut'ie) and argues that the notion of “class instinct” centrally informed the Bolshevik vision of the worker, structuring her article as a dialogue between scholars of Soviet history and their historical subjects. In the conclusion, she suggests the consequences that such a broadened notion of the Bolshevik conception of proletarian identity—beyond the spontaneity-consciousness paradigm—has for interpretations of Bolshevik and Stalinist culture. In “A Paradigm Lost?” his response to Krylova's essay, Reginald E. Zelnik welcomes Krylova's “class instinct” thesis as a fresh enrichment of and supplement to the spontaneity-consciousness paradigm, but, he argues, if we place this language in its early historical context, we cannot avoid the conclusion that with or without the introduction of “instinct,” Lenin and the Bolsheviks still had to face the same kind of contradictions in their conceptualization of the role of workers in the revolutionary movement. The revolutionary value of particular consciousness or particular instinct still had to be judged in accordance with an external point of reference, the nature of which remained and remains elusive. Igal Halfin, in his response, “Between Instinct and Mind: The Bolshevik View of the Proletarian Self,” argues that the Bolshevik notion of the self indeed deserves careful scrutiny. Focusing on how the official Soviet language characterized the interaction between workers’ bodies and workers’ souls, Halfin argues that the synthesis of the affective and the cerebral was key to this construction of the New Man in the 1920s and 1930s.

Type
Discussion
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 62 , Issue 1 , Spring 2003 , pp. 34 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2003

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References

1 In this connection, Jochen Hellbeck's work on the Soviet diary is pathbreaking. See Hellbeck, , “Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-Era Autobiographical Texts,” in Halfin, Igal, ed., Language and Revolution: The Making of Modern Political Identities (London, 2002), 135–60Google Scholar.

2 My view of the subject relies on the work of Michel Foucault, especially his theoretical statements collected in Rabinow, Paul, ed., The Essential Works of Michel Foucault,1954-1984, volume 3, Power (New York, 2000)Google Scholar as well as on its recent application by historians, especially, David Harlan, “Intellectual History and the Return of Literature,” AmericanHistorical Review %A (1989). For a splendid examination of Foucault's relevance to the Russian context, see Plamper, Jan, “Foucault's Gulag,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian andEurasian History 3, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 255–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Here Krylova diverges from the British tradition of researching a biography of a prominent leader that usually veers toward one of two poles: either political history, where the subject of the study appears as a clever manipulator who exploits the contingencies of his time to gain and retain power, or as an intellectual who invests all his acumen in interpreting his time (as if he had not participated in shaping the events themselves). For the first approach, see the biography by Robert Service, Lenin: A Political Life (Bloomington, 1985); for the second, see Harding, Neil, Lenin's Political Thought, 2 vols. (London, 1977-81)Google Scholar.

4 The move away from narrow political history of the Russian Social-Democratic Party in 1905 was outlined by Reginald Zelnik in his seminal, “Russian Bebels: An Introduction to the Memoirs of Semen Kanatchikov and Matvei Fisher,” Russian Review 35, nos. 3 and 4 (1976) and by Steinberg, Mark in his “Worker Authors and the Cult of the Person,“ in Frank, Stephen and Steinberg, Mark D., eds., Cultures influx: Lower-Class Values,Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton, 1994)Google Scholar. For a brilliant discussion of the notion of consciousness among Russian Social Democrats in 1905, see Morrissey, Susan K., Heralds of Revolution: Russian Students and the Mythologies of Radicalism (Oxford, 1998), 99–123 Google Scholar.

5 Feuerbach, Ludwig, “Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy,“ in Stepelevich, Lawrence S., ed., The Young Hegelians: An Anthology (Cambridge, Eng., 1983), 163 Google Scholar.

6 I discuss this in more detail in my From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness and Salvationin Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, 2000), 96-115.

7 Lenin, Vladimir, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed. (Moscow, 1963–1977), 35: 311–15Google Scholar.

8 Instructions on the Lenin Levy were published in Pravda, 9 and 12 February 1924. The impact of the Lenin Levy is summarized in Partita v tsifrovom osveshchenii: Materialy postalistike lichnogo sostava partii (Moscow-Leningrad, 1925), 43, 69, 73.

9 KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh i resheniiakh (Moscow, 1983), 1:822, Rigby, T. H., CommunistParty Membership in the U.S.S.R, 1917-1967 (Princeton, 1968), 130–31Google Scholar; Obichkin, O. G., Kratkii ocherk istorii Ustava KPSS, 2d ed. (Moscow, 1986), 78 Google Scholar.

10 Zinov'ev, Grigorii cited in Dvenadtsatyi s“ezd RKP(b) 17-25 Aprelia 1923 goda:Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1968), 37–38 Google Scholar.

11 Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv istoriko-politicheskikh dokumentov (TsGA IPD),f. 6, op. l . d . 224,1.66.

12 Partiinyi arkhiv Novosibirskoi oblasti (PANO), f. 2, op. 1, d. 17, 1. 233.

13 TsGA IPD, f. 197, op. 1, d. 116,1. 75.

14 TsGA IPD, f. 197, op. 1, d. 120,1. 4.

15 TsGA IPD, f. 197, op. l , d . 117,11.33-35.

16 Partiinyi arkhiv Tomskoi oblasti, f. 17, op. 1, d. 1065,11. 33-37.

17 Ibid., 11. 8-13, 26-29, 60-62.