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The Biopolitics of Stalinism

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The Biopolitics of Stalinism THE BIOPOLITICS OF STALINISM 44868_Prozorov.indd868_Prozorov.indd i 119/08/159/08/15 55:20:20 PMPM 44868_Prozorov.indd868_Prozorov.indd iiii 119/08/159/08/15 55:20:20 PMPM THE BIOPOLITICS OF STALINISM Ideology and Life in Soviet Socialism Sergei Prozorov 44868_Prozorov.indd868_Prozorov.indd iiiiii 119/08/159/08/15 55:20:20 PMPM To Marina and Pauliina, in captivation © Sergei Prozorov, 2016 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 1052 6 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 1053 3 (paperback) ISBN 978 1 4744 1054 0 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 1055 7 (epub) The right of Sergei Prozorov to be identifi ed as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). 44868_Prozorov.indd868_Prozorov.indd iviv 119/08/159/08/15 55:20:20 PMPM CONTENTS Preface vii Introduction 1 1 Postcommunist talinism: The Resurrection of the Effective Manager 13 The First Destalinisation: Getting Rid of the Sovereign 13 The Second Destalinisation: The Betrayal of the Revolution 19 The Red Emperor: The Product of Destalinisation 21 The Architect of Whatever 25 Transcendental Stalinism 30 2 Stalinism in the Theory of Biopolitics: A Brief Genealogy of a Reticence 38 Biopolitics and Socialism: Reciprocal Blind Spots 38 Foucault and Soviet ‘Racism’ 40 Is There a Revolutionary Biopolitics? 46 Agamben: Stalinism and the Integrated Spectacle 50 Esposito: Biopolitics and the Eclipse of Democracy 56 Biopolitics and Ideology: Giving Form to Life 60 3 The Great Break: Making Socialism Real 71 The Inactuality of Socialism 71 The Second Revolution 78 The War on Nature 84 The Soviet Katechon 93 Death to the Dying 97 Fedorov’s Biopolitics of Resurrection 105 Bogdanov’s Biological Communism 111 Anti-Immunity: Accelerating the Apocalypse 118 v 44868_Prozorov.indd868_Prozorov.indd v 119/08/159/08/15 55:20:20 PMPM vi THE BIOPOLITICS OF STALINISM 4 High Stalinism: Retreat, Simulacrum, Terror 127 The Great Retreat: The Apocalypse Deferred 127 The Negative Synthesis of Real Socialism 136 The Great Simulacrum: Socialist Realism and Real Socialism 142 The Limits of Simulation 146 The Great Terror: Explicating the Senseless 150 The Unreforgeable: The New Logic of Enmity 159 Immanent Annihilation 165 5 Deathly Life: The Subject of Stalinism 171 A Brief History of the Stalinist Subject 171 The Diarist and the Dupe 176 The Terrorised Subject 181 Destructive Plasticity 185 The Barren Life of Sofi a Petrovna 191 The Living Dead 198 6 Shalamov, or the Negative Experience 202 The School of the Negative 202 The Return of History as Horror 207 Bitter Indifference 214 The Ethics of Survival 220 The Inhuman 227 Revival 231 Writing after the Gulag 235 Shalamov in the Age of Anticommunism 243 7 A Real Renewal of Life: Towards an Affi rmative Biopolitics 254 Living Socialism Otherwise 254 Diffuse Socialism 260 Socialist Lives in the Absence of Socialism 269 Immanence and Barbarism 273 A Captivated Life 281 Conclusion 289 Notes 296 Bibliography 313 Index 331 44868_Prozorov.indd868_Prozorov.indd vivi 119/08/159/08/15 55:20:20 PMPM PREFACE This book was born out of a persistent unease about the status of the idea of communism in the postcommunist world. Having grown up during the Perestroika period, in which the offi cial Soviet ideology that I was just beginning to be indoctrinated into quickly and almost majestically trans- formed itself into a laughing stock, I have found it diffi cult to dissociate the communist idea from its historical failure. It was impossible in 1991 to read Lenin, Trotsky or even Marx himself without relating them to the ruins of the Soviet order all around us. Yet, the usual explanations of this failure seemed to me to be at best problematic. Starting from the early 1990s, two types of such explanations have been offered. The fi rst, asso- ciated with the theorists of totalitarianism, put the blame for the horrors of the Gulag camps, the societal degradation and the eventual economic collapse of the USSR directly on the idea of communism. This utopian idea of radical equality allegedly led to a horrendous social experiment, in which countless lives were sacrifi ced to the ideal that is, depending on the version of this theory, impossible, impractical or undesirable. The idea of communism appears to take us straight to the Gulag. While such a defi nitive explanation was undoubtedly tempting amid the ruins of the Soviet order, it was ultimately unsatisfying. After all, most of the inmates of the Gulag were faithful communists, many of whom ended up there after carelessly voicing their view that the Soviet govern- ment had actually betrayed the communist idea. Moreover, observing the opulent and aloof lifestyle of the party nomenklatura in the late social- ist period led one to conclude that these inmates had been correct and that the connection of the aging and jaded ‘socialists’ of the day to the revolutionary aspirations of socialism was at best tenuous. Perhaps, then, it was not the idea itself that led straight to the Gulag, but, as various ‘revisionist’ accounts suggested, the faults in its realisation: the idea of communism was still correct, valid and valuable; it was just implemented badly. It is easy to see why this view was enthusiastically embraced both vii 44868_Prozorov.indd868_Prozorov.indd viivii 119/08/159/08/15 55:20:20 PMPM viii THE BIOPOLITICS OF STALINISM inside and outside the former USSR: it allowed one to admit the obvious disastrous failure of the Soviet project and still retain one’s communist commitments. However, such a stance also had its costs. What does it mean that the communist idea was ‘implemented badly’? What exactly was bad in the process of its implementation? Was it the implementers who were either not communist enough (being too petty-bourgeois or populist) or overzealously communist (in contrast to their more mild- mannered European counterparts)? Or was it the population, which the implementers sought to transform into communists, but who fell short of the ideal, disappointingly sticking to their old ways and thereby under- mining the project of realising the utopia? Perhaps it was the country itself, too vast and largely inhospitable, diffi cult to control in any man- ner other than the most cruelly autocratic one. And what does it mean that the implementation of communism in the USSR went wrong? Does it mean that communism was implemented only halfway or so, leaving the utopia incomplete? Or was the implementation process entirely per- verse, producing something wholly other than communism and thereby betraying the idea? Was the product of the Bolshevik Revolution a par- ticularly shoddy version of what was still recognisably socialism or was it something wholly other that was socialist in name only (fascism, Russian traditionalism, and so on)? It would be easy to continue with these questions, but the point is clear. Once the blame for the disaster of the Soviet experiment is trans- ferred from the idea of communism to the process of its implementation, there appear manifold possibilities of insulating the idea from contingent empirical faults in its realisation, all of which, however, have the same side effect. As a result of such insulation, we end up with a strictly tran- scendent status of communism as something that inevitably goes bad in every attempt to realise it anywhere on Earth. As Michel Foucault has sardonically put it à propos of the habit of the Western left to ‘put inverted commas round Soviet socialism in order to protect the good true socialism’: ‘Actually the only socialism which deserves these scorn- ful scare-quotes is the one which leads the dreamy life of ideality in our heads’ (Foucault 1980a: 136). Ironically, having sought to salvage the idea of communism from the dreary ruins of the Soviet Union, one ends up not that far from the argument of the theories of totalitarianism: if every attempt to realise the idea of communism ends up a disaster, there surely must be something wrong with the idea itself. Thus, twenty-fi ve years after the demise of Soviet socialism, we remain stuck in a frustrated oscillation between blaming the idea, blaming its fl awed implementation and, fi nally, blaming the idea for its fl awed imple- mentation. Getting out of this impasse around the postcommunist status 44868_Prozorov.indd868_Prozorov.indd viiiviii 119/08/159/08/15 55:20:20 PMPM Preface ix of the communist idea was the fi rst motive for writing this book. The sec- ond was more down-to-earth and had to do with the tendency towards the rehabilitation of Stalinism in Putin’s Russia, a rehabilitation that, at fi rst glance paradoxically, coincided with the decline of the Communist Party and the Left more generally. After a decade of efforts at destalinisation in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which quickly went beyond Stalin’s per- son to target the entire Bolshevik ideology, Stalinism came back in vogue in the late 2000s. Yet, this time it was largely stripped of all ideological attire. Instead, Stalin became valorised as, in the already infamous phrase from an offi cial history textbook, an ‘effective manager’ who success- fully got things done, e.g. built factories and canals, organised collective farms, won the war and, perhaps most importantly, transformed the poor and chaotic post-revolutionary Russia into a socialist superpower.
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