Late Stalinism Quotes

“Similar to how in Nazism 'Jewish Bolshevism' turned out to be the flip side of a 'Jewish plutocracy,' in late Stalinism Jews were subjected to defamation as both radical rightists (counter-revolutionaries) and radical leftists (modernists).”
― Evgeny Dobrenko, Late Stalinism: The Aesthetics of Politics

“Weak argument: talk loudly.' Winston Churchill's famous marginal note is a classic example of a meta-equation. More precisely, it is a reminder of the basic principle of total valency: both halves of any equation strive toward self-repetition. In this respect, an equation is the ideal image of any reflection. Mimesis is tautological, and tautology as a universal phenomenon has its equivalent not only in mathematics but also in art; if in mathematics it takes form in an equation, then its ideal genre equivalent lies the riddle (the equation is the rationalization of a riddle, and detective fiction is its dramatization). As it grows into 'higher' genres, the riddle preserves its principle: two equal sides with unknowns, in which the sides demonstrate that they are identical. A riddle is a game. The process of solving it essentially boils down to proving the obvious; one knows from the start that the meanings of the two functions given are equal. This transforms the whole process into a sort of intellectual ostensibility.”
― Evgeny Dobrenko, Late Stalinism: The Aesthetics of Politics

“The heyday of conspiracy theories had been the reaction to the French Revolution. Like a virus, they would come to life every time that society was led into a state of anxiety and fears. But in the Modern Era they turned into a true secular religion. The surge of these theories in the Modern Era reflected the need to explain the collapse of a seemingly unshakeable ancien régime. This collapse was so unexpected, the break with medieval civilization so inevitable, and the upheaval so profound and so fraught with far-reaching economic, social, and political consequences that it needed an explanation. But the level of a patriarchal society's political culture changed too little, and the earlier one remained the explanatory matrix. Hence Divine Providence did not disappear, but a new fetish came to replace God: humans will and reason. In this respect, conspiracy is a sort of replacement of Revelation for an ill-defined, immature patriarchal consciousness disintegrating under the pressure of the Enlightenment, already having lost the integrity of faith but not yet having gained a basis in reason. Conspiracy gives the masses who have been cast out of the traditional matrices of thought explanations of the world missing outside of religion. Hence it contains elements of both religion (a parallel reality fitted to a ready-made picture of the world, teleologism) and rationalism (total logicalization, the search for cause-and-effect links and the hidden reasons for a phenomena lying within the interests of agents, and fitting the world into a logically interconnected system). This drama that burst onto Europe after the French Revolution finally arrived in Russia, with a century's delay.”
― Evgeny Dobrenko, Late Stalinism: The Aesthetics of Politics

“In a letter dated October 10, 1934, to Kaminskii (then the commissar of health) - a letter that was a response to the commissar's birthday congratulations to Pavlov on the occasion of his eighty-fifth birthday - Pavlov wrote about his attitude toward the October Revolution, which was 'almost directly opposite' Kaminskii's, for whom the revolution 'imbues the motherland's wonderful movement forward with courage.' On the contrary, Pavlov saw 'its enormous truly negative aspects' in the 'long-standing terror and unchecked willfulness of power,' which transformed 'our nature, which was besides rather Asiatic, into a shameful-slavish one ... And can you do much good with slaves?' Pavlov answered his own question thus '[For] pyramids, yes; but not for common genuine human happiness.”
― Evgeny Dobrenko, Late Stalinism: The Aesthetics of Politics

“Assistant veterinarian Dorokhov dissolved cattle horns in nitric acid and offered this poison to cancer patients. Technician Anatolii Kachugin preached healing with heavy metal salts. Aleksandra Troitskaia, a veterinary doctor from Kaluga, gave her patients an extract from cancer cells as a vaccine. In the atmosphere of insanity that gripped the country, patients dragged themselves to these hoaxers in droves. Apparently to make this picture ultimately surrealistic, Soviet art depicted the creation of the most advanced medicines (those that were at the times being created in the United States) in the USSR, with American spies (headed by the ambassador) supposedly chasing after them.”
― Evgeny Dobrenko, Late Stalinism: The Aesthetics of Politics

“When words possessing a high degree of terroristic menace become desemanticized in a ritualized literary culture, they not only cease to mean what they had meant, but also lose common elements of meaning, which become unstable and easily replaceable; then all the speakers of this ideological language become extremely vulnerable; the drifting ideological meanings harbor mortal danger.”
― Evgeny Dobrenko, Late Stalinism: The Aesthetics of Politics