The Soviet Union lasted one human lifetime. It was born in 1917 and died in 1991, at the age of seventy-four. The difficult Civil-War childhood was followed by precocious ‘construction-of-socialism’ adolescence, Great-Patriotic-War youth, ‘postwar-reconstruction’ maturity, Khrushchev-Thaw midlife crisis, and ‘period-of-stagnation’ dotage culminating in a series of colds, frenzied CPR attempts, and death ‘after a protracted illness’.
Such an obituary works as a metaphor and a draft of a biography. It seems to make sense because the Bolshevik ‘party of a new type’ was not an organization seeking power within a particular state but a faith-based group radically opposed to a corrupt world, devoted to ‘the abandoned and the persecuted’, composed of voluntary members who had undergone a personal conversion, and dedicated to the total and immediate destruction of the ‘old world’ of suffering and injustice. It was, by most definitions, an apocalyptic sect awaiting an all-consuming revolutionary Armageddon followed by the millennial reign of Communist brotherhood as the overcoming of the futility and contingency of human existence.
Most apocalyptic sects do not survive the failure of the doomsday prophecy. Most sects of any description do not survive the transformation of an exclusive community of fraternal converts into a complex society of hereditary members. Most sects, in other words, never become churches. The Bolsheviks built an enormous Potemkin temple but failed to transcend their sectarian origins and expired along with the last true believer.
This story has a nice shape to it but it doesn’t work as an outline of Soviet history. The ‘Old Bolsheviks’ who built the Soviet state did not live long enough to grow old. The last Bolshevik who died in the top job was not a true believer. The founders’ successors came in two mutually hostile cohorts. The tale of the Soviet state consists of three generations.
The original Bolsheviks were born in the 1880s and 90s and converted to socialist millenarianism as schoolchildren, seminarians, and college students. Their cause was the working class as universal redeemer; their parents were provincial clerks, clergymen, teachers, and doctors. The movement’s center lay at the empire’s periphery: between 1907 and 1917 the share of ethnic Russians among exiled revolutionaries (43.4 percent) was about equal to their share in the population; the proportion of Georgians and Armenians was twice as high; Poles, three times; Jews, four times; and Latvians, eight times (8.2 percent of exiles compared to 1.2 percent of population). The only condition for joining underground revolutionary circles was unconditional faith in the coming Armageddon and a readiness for self-discipline and self-sacrifice. The main activities were reading (socialist texts as well as ‘treasures of world literature’) and, as one gained in revolutionary consciousness, ‘propaganda and agitation’. As in most apocalyptic sects, the core members were young men who abandoned their families in order to form a band of brothers around a charismatic leader (Lenin’s nickname was the Old Man). Women made up a small proportion of the membership and played auxiliary roles as debate audiences, prison liaisons, model martyrs, ‘technical workers’, and writers’ muses. At the turn of the twentieth century, ‘student’ was a synonym for ‘revolutionary’, but, according to most revolutionaries, the real university was the prison. Unfree spaces were filled with free time, and most inmates spent days and months reading books and taking notes. The education of a revolutionary was completed in Siberian exile, which combined banishment to hell with a chance to create a sacred community of true believers. Present-day suffering was a guarantee of future happiness.
One such student revolutionary was Aleksandr Arosev, a prominent Kazan Bolshevik and the son of a merchant, who associated the victory of Bolshevism with the transformation of the world into a fraternal sect. Communism was the kingdom of universal friendship. His closest friend was his high-school classmate, a fellow sectarian and amateur violinist by the name of Scriabin.
The prophecy came true on Easter Monday, 1917, when Lenin rode into Petrograd on a train and declared that the time had come, the prophecy had been fulfilled, and the present generation would not pass away until all these things had happened.
Sects and revolutions are staffed by young people. When Babylon fell, Arosev and his friend Scriabin, who had recently changed his name to ‘Molotov’ (‘hammer’) were twenty-seven. The Old Man was forty-seven. Arosev became one of the leaders of the Bolshevik military insurrection in Moscow and a prominent proletarian writer. Molotov emerged as one of the leading Bolsheviks in the capital. They were almost as young as the world they were ushering in. ‘The great uprising of the human mass in the name of humanity,’ wrote Arosev, ‘began simply and without hesitation – exactly the way the old books describe the creation of the world.’
For the next three years, the top Bolsheviks moved around continuously from one front of Armageddon to another and one assignment to the next. Some were accompanied by their permanent female comrades, most had short-term liaisons with nurses, secretaries, cryptographers, and propaganda department typists. Time flew so fast it was always about to end. According to the era’s most popular song, ‘Our locomotive is rushing full speed ahead, next stop Communism.’
The ‘last and decisive battle’ was won but the new world failed to materialize. War Communism was followed by the New Economic Policy, introduced by Lenin as a temporary retreat, opposed by many Bolsheviks as a betrayal of the revolution, and followed by a period of melancholy analogous to ‘the Great Disappointment’ suffered by American millenarians when the world failed to come to an end on 22 October 1844. Thousands of believers, as one of them put it, ‘wept and wept, until the day dawned’.
The postponement of the Millennium coincided with the death of the Prophet. Trotsky could not attend Lenin’s funeral because of a mysterious nervous illness. A public prosecutor who could not stop weeping for several months was treated for ‘traumatic neurosis’. In 1927, 1,300 Bolshevik functionaries stayed at the Lenin Rest Home No. 1 outside Moscow. Six were found to be healthy; 65 percent of the rest were diagnosed with various forms of emotional distress (described as ‘neurasthenia’, ‘psycho-neurasthenia’, ‘psychosis’, and ‘nervous exhaustion’). The surviving Old Bolsheviks, now top government officials in their thirties and forties, moved into the Kremlin and several downtown-Moscow hotels that had been converted into dormitories known as Houses of Soviets and settled into a self-doubting communal domesticity – visiting each other’s rooms, smoking cheap tobacco, drinking strong tea, arguing about the timing of the second coming, and weeping. And weeping.
There were two ways of reviving the revolution. One was rejuvenation through love, which seemed to require intergenerational romance. The great Party theoretician, Nikolai Bukharin, married the daughter of one of his oldest friends (after taking her away from the son of another old friend). The head of the Party’s Jewish Section, Semen Dimanshtein, married his adopted daughter. The chairman of the Military Board of the Soviet Supreme Court, Valentin Trifonov, married the daughter of his own wife. One day, he moved out of the mother’s room and into the daughter’s. They all continued to share the same apartment. One of the offspring of the new union was the writer Yuri Trifonov, who would devote his work to the question of how the revolution had devoured its parents. He was born in 1925, the lowest point in the history of the Soviet Great Disappointment and the highest in number of births among Bolshevik officials.
Arosev married and had three daughters, but his wife soon left him for another Party official, who had left his wife and three children in order to be with her. Arosev was sent to Prague as Soviet ambassador to Czechoslovakia and soon married his eldest daughter’s dance teacher, a young German Jewish woman named Gertrude, whom he called Gera and whom his daughters loved to hate.
The other way to rescue the revolution was to fulfill its promise by having the workers inherit the world. The intellectuals who had instituted the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ were committed to the cause of their own obsolescence through class-based affirmative action. The key to overcoming the rot of the New Economic Policy was streamlined mass education and the preferential promotion of the ‘socially close’. There were, roughly speaking, two main groups of beneficiaries (known as vydvizhentsy, or ‘promotees’): the children of workers and peasants, who became prominent in industrial management and regional Party apparatus, and Jews from the old Pale of Settlement (the only members of the literate classes not compromised by service to the tsarist state), who came to dominate the cultural, intellectual, and professional elites. In the 1920s the Old Bolsheviks produced two sets of heirs: the ones they selected as young men with ‘healthy social roots’ and promoted to positions of ever greater responsibility with the goal of eventual supreme leadership, and the ones they conceived in guilty midlife passion in the Houses of Soviets. Both were products of the Great Disappointment.
And then the day dawned. In 1927, Stalin launched his ‘Revolution from Above’, also known as the ‘Era of the First Five-Year Plans’. Its purpose was to bring about the fulfillment of the original prophecy by adding an industrial ‘base’ to the already solid political ‘superstructure’. Industrialization was to be accompanied by its presumed consequences: the abolition of private property, the destruction of class enemies, and the definitive self-realization of the proletariat. The weeping ended. The Left Oppositionists repented, the Right Oppositionists surrendered, and the rejuvenated Old Bolsheviks set about building, purging, and collectivizing. Valentin Trifonov returned from diplomatic postings in China and Finland to become chairman of the Main Committee on Foreign Concessions; and Aleksandr Arosev began to draft a revolutionary epic, the last volume of which was devoted to ‘the economic building of socialism under [Stalin’s] direction and the falling off of the de facto alien elements’.
The Old Bolsheviks’ official successors, born in the first decade of the twentieth century and promoted through Soviet colleges’ ‘workers’ departments’, got married, joined the Party, and stopped being workers. Nikolai Podgornyi, born in 1904 to a metalworker of peasant origin in Karlivka, Ukraine, graduated from the Kiev Institute of Food Industry; Leonid Brezhnev, born in 1906 to a metalworker of peasant origin in Kamianske, Ukraine, graduated from the Kamianske Institute of Metallurgy; and Aleksei Kosygin, born in 1906 to a metalworker of peasant origin in St Petersburg, then the empire’s capital, graduated from the Leningrad Textile Institute. All became engineers, ‘Red Directors’, and, for the rest of their lives, ‘people of the First Five-Year Plan’.
By 1934, the Stalin Revolution had been largely completed. Life, according to Comrade Stalin, had become ‘merrier’; the age, according to thousands of posters, was one of ‘happy childhood’; the country, according to Isaac Babel, had been ‘gripped by a powerful feeling of pure, physical joy’.
The Old Bolsheviks settled down and moved into their new permanent homes (in old imperial buildings or in new houses built for the purpose). Most of the men were in their forties and early fifties (Trifonov turned forty-six, Arosev forty-four), most of their wives were in their thirties, most of their children were between five and twelve, and most of their maids (each family had one) were young girls from the famine-gripped farms their masters had recently collectivized.
Family life in Old Bolshevik homes tended toward the nineteenth-century Russian model as represented in ‘Golden Age’ Russian literature (which, unlike most of its West European counterparts, was aristocratic, not bourgeois): the remote, admired, feared, and usually absent father; the less remote, less admired, less feared, and frequently absent mother; the more or less pitied German governess; the more or less dreaded piano teacher; and the beloved peasant nanny, who did most of the child-rearing until it was time to start reading the books their fathers would select for them. Most of those books came from the same nineteenth-century canon – as did their children’s own lives, complete with Christmas midnight magic, now called New Year’s; swimming and berry-picking at country estates, now called dachas; regular trips to Black Sea palaces, now called rest homes; and an intense cult of love, friendship, book-reading, letter-writing, and diary-keeping. Every girl was Natasha Rostova from War and Peace, and every boy was Prince Andrei.
The children of the revolutionaries were happy dwellers in the land of happy childhood. They respected their seniors, loved their country, and looked forward to improving themselves for the sake of socialism and to building socialism as a means of self-improvement. They were children of the revolution because they were their fathers’ children, because they were born after the revolution, and because they were proud of their paternity and determined to carry on what was at once their father’s ‘profession’, their country’s mission, and History’s secret purpose. Born in the 1920s, they came of age along with socialist realism, and the heart of socialist realism, according to Bukharin’s speech at the First Writers’ Congress in 1934, was romanticism. ‘The soul’ of ‘most of the young people of that time’, wrote one of them many years later, was ‘romantic’ – romantic in the sense of being exalted, vibrant, hopeful, and vulnerable, and Romantic in the sense of seeking transcendence in the here and now. The fathers’ generation had been shaped by the expectation of the apocalypse; the children’s generation was ‘religious’ about the heavenly city they inhabited. The fathers’ friends and lovers were fellow sectarians who shared their faith; the children’s friends and lovers were unique individuals whom they loved for reasons they never tired of discussing but were never supposed to exhaust. The fathers’ ‘classical’ reading was tempered by Symbolism and disciplined by the study of Marx, Lenin, and economics. The children were bored by modernism, entirely innocent of economics, and only indirectly acquainted with Marxism-Leninism through speeches, quotations, and history-book summaries. No one ever read Das Kapital, everyone was in love with Pushkin.
After toasting the New Year of 1937, sixteen-year-old Lydia Libedinskaia and her friends from the elite Moscow Exemplary School went to the Pushkin Monument on Tverskoi Boulevard, in the center of Moscow. That night is one of the central episodes in her memoirs.
The snow kept falling, melting on our flushed faces and silvering our hair. Our hearts were overflowing with love for Pushkin, poetry, Moscow, and our country. We yearned for great deeds and vowed silently to accomplish them. My generation! The children of the 1920s, the men and women of a happy and tragic age! You grew up as equal participants in the building of the Soviet Union, you were proud of your fathers, who had carried out an unheard-of revolution, you dreamed of becoming their worthy successors . . .
The fathers, meanwhile, were torn between the powerful feeling of pure, physical joy and the equally powerful feelings of guilt and confusion. How was life in elite apartments, with maids in the kitchen, carpets on the floor, and children in Moscow Exemplary going to turn into socialism? What did socialism inside the home even mean? What might possibly follow happy childhood?
And then they heard a knock on the door. Sects are, by definition, besieged fortresses; the Bolsheviks had always thought of their state as a besieged fortress; in the mid-1930s the Soviet Union was, indeed, besieged from the East and the West; and individual Old Bolsheviks were under siege in their own apartments, cluttered with orange lampshades and poor relations. When the knock on the door came, they were all guilty of having abandoned their youthful vision of socialism.
Arosev, Gera and the children were on vacation when the knock came. To everyone’s surprise, they came for Gera. Arosev kept trying to reach Molotov, but whoever answered the phone would either hang up or breathe into the receiver without speaking. Arosev kept saying: ‘Viacha, I know it’s you, please say something, tell me what to do!’ Finally, after one of these calls, Molotov said: ‘See that the children are taken care of,’ and hung up. Arosev was shot in February 1938, two months after Gera.
Valentin Trifonov was arrested on 22 June 1937. His eleven-year-old son Yuri, who was reading The Count of Monte Cristo earlier that day, wrote in his diary: ‘I have no doubt that Dad will be released soon. Dad is the most honest person in the world. Today has been the worst day of my life.’
Most of the men were executed within weeks or months, although their children would not be informed for over two decades. Most of the women were sent to special camps for ‘family members of traitors to the motherland’, where they spent eight years (plus another ten or so in exile) before returning to their children’s new homes – old, sick, broken, unwanted, unloved, and utterly lost. Their youthful faith was gone – along with their husbands. They and their children had nothing to say to each other. Bolshevism, like most millenarian movements, proved a one-generation phenomenon.
But the Party and the state still had time left to live. The top offices left vacant by the Great Terror were taken over by those who were meant to lead the dictatorship of the proletariat but hadn’t until the mass arrests started – those former workers who were too young to have taken part in the revolution or Civil War but old enough to be promoted in the 1920s, admitted to colleges under class quotas during the Stalin Revolution, and hired as industrial managers in the mid-1930s. They identified with the Party that identified itself with them but were utterly uninterested in Marxist theory or ‘treasures of world literature’. They prided themselves on being modest, pragmatic, and uncharismatic. They inherited the jobs of their martyred Old Bolshevik sponsors without ever wishing or needing to acknowledge the fact. They kept talking about building socialism but seemed content to keep building factories. They were the children of the revolution in the sense of being its ultimate (in the sense of both ‘best’ and ‘last’) beneficiaries.
Within two years of the end of the Great Terror, Podgornyi advanced from deputy chief engineer to chief engineer to Deputy People’s Commissar (minister) of Food Industry of Ukraine to, by the time he turned thirty-six, Deputy People’s Commissar of Food Industry of the Soviet Union. At the same time Brezhnev moved – also through a series of quick steps over dead bodies – from college director to the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast propaganda secretary, and Kosygin, from factory director to People’s Commissar of Textile Industry of the Soviet Union. Most members of that cohort served as political officers or industrial managers during World War II, came into their own as leaders of postwar reconstruction, survived Khrushchev’s attempts to restore the spirit of their First Five-Year Plan youth (which they acknowledged as foundational but feared as a threat to their hard-earned respectability), and came to power in a coup d’état in 1964, Kosygin as Prime Minister (Chairman of the Council of Ministers) and Brezhnev as First (later ‘General’) Secretary. Both were fifty-eight years old. Podgornyi joined them a year later as President (Chairman of the Presidium of the Council of Ministers). For the next twenty years they presided over ‘really existing socialism’, or a revolutionary regime devoted to permanence.
The children of the actual revolutionaries were twenty years younger and worlds apart socially, culturally, and emotionally. Unlike the Brezhnev generation, which had taken after its Old Bolshevik sponsors in being publicly all-male, they consisted of boys and girls who would grow up to be distinct men and women. The Great Terror put an end to their happy childhood but not to their passionate identification with the country their fathers had built. Yuri Trifonov and his sister were raised by their Old Bolshevik grandmother; Arosev’s three daughters were raised by their mother. When the Great Patriotic War began, most boys chose to clear their fathers’ names by volunteering for the army. Many were killed – thus fulfilling their oath to Pushkin and following him into the temple of eternal youth. The rest graduated from prestigious colleges and rejoined the Soviet cultural and professional elite (known to both members and non-members as the ‘intelligentsia’). Yuri Trifonov became a celebrated writer and Stalin Prize winner; two of Arosev’s daughters became actresses (one of them, Olga, a movie and TV star), and one, a writer and translator from Czech. They followed the ascent of their proletarian older comrades in the newspapers and marveled at the miraculous rise of the new socialist factories; celebrated their happy childhood as part of a common proletarian victory, before and after their fathers’ inexplicable demise; and joined their fellow countrymen – workers, peasants, Party bosses, and urban intellectuals – during the war, in pursuit of ‘one victory, one for all, whatever the price’. The song with that refrain was written by the celebrated 1960s bard, Bulat Okudzhava, the son of Georgian and Armenian Old Bolsheviks born in 1924 in downtown Moscow. The generation of the 1930s ‘happy childhood’ had become the ‘war generation’.
But then the paths of the revolution’s two sets of heirs began to diverge. What came as a springtime of hope for the young war veterans from Old Bolshevik backgrounds appeared as ‘Khrushchev’s hare-brained schemes’ to the mature Party leaders. What was ‘loyalty to the ideals of Marxism–Leninism’ to the Brezhnev generation looked like a ‘Big Lie’ to the urban intelligentsia (the ‘war generation’ had become ‘the sixties generation’). What was known officially as ‘Party leadership’ seemed like usurpation to the more educated among the led. For Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb born in 1921, the moment of truth came in 1955, after a successful test of his ‘device’. According to Sakharov’s memoirs, the test was followed by a banquet at the residence of Marshal Nedelin, the commander of Soviet Strategic Missile Forces.
When we were all in place, the brandy was poured. The bodyguards stood along the wall. Nedelin nodded to me, inviting me to propose the first toast. Glass in hand, I rose, and said something like: ‘May all our devices explode as successfully as today’s, but always over test sites and never over cities.’ The table fell silent, as if I had said something indecent. Nedelin grinned a bit crookedly. Then he rose, glass in hand, and said: ‘Let me tell a parable. An old man wearing only a shirt was praying before an icon. “Guide me, harden me. Guide me, harden me.” His wife, who was lying on the stove, said: “Just pray to be hard, old man, I can guide it in myself.” Let’s drink to getting hard.’
My whole body tensed, and I think I turned pale – normally I blush . . . The point of the story (half lewd, half blasphemous, which added to its unpleasant effect) was clear enough. We, the inventors, scientists, engineers, and craftsmen, had created a terrible weapon, the most terrible weapon in human history; but its use would lie entirely outside our control . . . The ideas and emotions kindled at that moment . . . completely altered my thinking.
In the 1960s and 70s, Sakharov’s thinking came to be shared by a growing number of inventors, scientists, engineers, and craftsmen working on much less explosive devices. Like its imperial predecessor, the Soviet intelligentsia had been created to serve the state but ended up serving its own ‘consciousness’ (split, in various proportions, between ‘progress’ and the ‘people’). The more desperately the aging state clung to its founding prophecy and the more intransigent it became in its instrumental approach to the educated elite, the more passionate that elite became in its opposition to the state and its attachment to (true) progress and (with ever growing reservations) the people. The children of the Old Bolsheviks began to think of their fathers as tragic heroes and of their fathers’ proletarian disciples as impostors. In theory – and often enough in practice to produce a sense of acute annoyance – the Party claimed the right to make all decisions about everything – from the Bomb to the Beatles. What added injury to insult was the growing sense that the ruling generation was not only politically illegitimate but socially inferior. The Soviet Union had started out as a dictatorship of the proletariat run by intellectuals; what it had become, in the eyes of the children of those intellectuals, was the dictatorship of the former proletarians who remained culturally proletarian (inarticulate, anti-intellectual, Russo-Ukrainian, domino-playing) in a country that had long since moved on. The Party bosses quietly admitted defeat by raising their own children to be professionals, not party bosses. By the 1980s, the rapidly growing anti-regime ‘intelligentsia’ led by the children of the Old Bolsheviks and their high-status contemporaries were watching with amused contempt as their former older comrades were dying slow deaths on national television, one after another, day after day. Kosygin died in December 1980, Brezhnev in November 1982, Podgornyi in January 1983. After a few more deaths in high office, there was no one left.
In 1963, Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, born in 1926, had written about her generation: ‘They are the best of the best . . . They are our future Decembrists, they are going to teach us all how to live. They are going to say their word yet – I am sure of that.’ They did. When Gorbachev walked onto the stage and proclaimed a new policy of glasnost (‘speaking up’), they were assembled in a chorus line, poised to give voice to a new millennium.
‘Decembrists’ were early-nineteenth-century aristocratic rebels who, according to Lenin, gave birth to the Russian revolutionary movement. The title of Lenin’s newspaper, Iskra (‘The Spark’), referred to a line from a poem by the Decembrist Alexander Odoevsky: ‘From a spark, a fire will flare up.’ The Old Bolsheviks started a fire in the expectation that capitalism would produce its own gravediggers, the proletariat. But history did not cooperate, and they had to do most of the gravedigging themselves. Having buried capitalism and anointed their proletarian successors, they moved into family apartments and, in due order and not entirely unselfconsciously, produced their own gravediggers by raising their children not as Bolshevik true believers but as members of the intelligentsia and would-be aristocrats (‘the best’ by virtue of both moral superiority and inherited privilege).
The Brezhnev generation inherited the state but not the flame. The state withered, and so did they; no one in the post-Communist world remembers their youth, celebrates their rise or claims them as ancestors. The modest rulers proved the greatest losers. A formerly proletarian state run by a few former proletarians turned out to be a dead end.
The Alliluyeva generation was kicked out of the Houses of Soviets but kept the flame burning – until the time came to torch their fathers’ inheritance. They never outgrew their youthful enthusiasms and never stopped discovering new books, people, and causes. Most eventually became liberal Westernizers and/or Jewish nationalists (most Russian nationalists came from non-elite quarters and were not liberal Westernizers; most Jewish and other nationalists did not distinguish between tribalism and liberalism). Those who did not emigrate (to the US, Israel, or Germany) lived to see their children take over the ruins.
Their children – the grandchildren of the revolution – were conceived during the Khrushchev Thaw and raised amid ‘the Brezhnev stagnation’. They inherited their parents’ social status and latter-day anti-Sovietism but not their romantic exuberance. They drank heavily, smiled knowingly, flaunted their elitism, and turned their parents’ fitful liberalism into a dogged devotion to a free world of their imagination, from uncompromising libertarianism to a cargo cult centered on blue jeans and rock and roll (the true colors of late Communism, according to the anthropologist Alexei Yurchak, were King Crimson, Deep Purple, and Pink Floyd). They were shaped and deformed by irony. Every word was a hint, every look a wink, every act a parody. Their foundational text was Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow to the End of the Line, about the end of the line also being Moscow. The artistic style they generated was ‘Moscow conceptualism’, which made late socialism postmodern. (In 1975 one of my high-school friends – the son of a KGB agent – and two fellow performers built a nest and spent several hours sitting in it at an Achievements of the National Economy exhibit, hatching an egg, or perhaps the Spirit, they weren’t sure.) The economists among them made the point of learning the opposite of what they were taught and, when Boris Yeltsin appealed for help, took charge of building capitalism. The shock-therapist-in-chief, Yegor Gaidar, was born 19 March 1956, less than a month after Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’. His father was a Navy officer and head of Pravda’s military desk; his grandfather, a Civil War hero and a classic of Bolshevik children’s literature. His friends and followers from among the revolutionaries’ grandchildren formed the core of new Russia’s cultural elite. They admired the West, deplored ‘the people’, thought of their grandparents as victims of Stalinism, and raised their children as citizens of the world. Many – perhaps most – have now left Russia. My conceptualist friend lives in a psychiatric hospital and, according to a classmate of ours who visited him there several years ago, cannot stop laughing.
Artwork © Gustav Klutsis / Tate, The USSR is the Shockworkers’ Brigade of the World Proletariat, 1931 photomontage poster depicting the Politburo heading a column of workers
