The Icon and the Axe

One important feature of Revolutionary Prometheanism was its attractiveness to long-submerged minority groups of the Russian Empire. At a time when a groping and desperate Tsar was increasingly relying on repression and Russification, minority peoples looked increasingly to the new worlds being opened up in the cosmopolitan culture of the silver age. Jewish painters like Marc Chagall and Lazar Lissitzky played a key role in the experimental painting of the day; and the Lithuanian painter-musician-writer, Michael Chiurlionis, anticipated much of the most revolutionary art of the day and exerted a shadowy influence over much of the Russian avant-garde. Among the Revolutionaries the role of minority people was no less conspicuous; and it seems appropriate to conclude with two of the most visionary, brilliant, and universal-minded of all Russian Revolutionaries: the

Pole, Waclaw Machajski, and the Jew, Leon Trotsky. The silencing of their voices in the course of the twenties was a measure of the retreat of the new regime from the great expectations of the earlier period.

Machajski, who wrote under the pseudonym A. Vol'sky, believed even more passionately than Bogdanov in the need for a totally new type of culture. One must move beyond the culture not only of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie but also of the newest and most insidiously oppressive social class, the intellectuals. Beginning with his Evolution of Social Democracy in 1898, the illegally published first part of his magnum opus, The Intellectual Worker, Machajski warned that articulate intellectuals will inevitably find their way to the head of the revolutionary movement and become the controlling oligarchy within any future revolutionary regime. In order to protect the interests of the inarticulate manual workers he called for a world-wide "workers' conspiracy" dedicated to gaining enough economic improvement to permit the workers to raise their level of literacy and culture. Only in this manner could the advantage that the intellectual enjoyed over the worker be neutralized, and the working class assured that a genuine proletarian culture rather than a mythic culture of the intellectuals be built after the revolutionary attainment of power.

Machajski's position resembles the revolutionary syndicalism of Sorel, with its belief in "direct action" in the economic sphere and the development prior to any bid for power of an autonomous, anti-authoritarian working class culture. His form of social analysis is also reminiscent of Pareto's theory of the "circulation of elites," Michels' "iron law of oligarchy," and Burnham's subsequent theory of a purely "managerial revolution." But unlike all these figures Machajski remained an unreconstructed optimist, confident that the workers' conspiracy could save the Revolution and develop fully the Promethean possibilities of the proletariat. Machajski's ideas, which were particularly popular in Siberia, were anathemized by the Bolshevik leadership with particular venom long before his death in I926.64

Even more dramatic was the gradual fall from grace in thy 1920's of Leib Bronstein, known as Trotsky, the passionate and prophetic co-author of the Bolshevik coup. From his early days as a populist and a renegade Jew, Trotsky had seen in the coming revolution the possibilities for a total reshaping of human life. Change was to come about not so much through the staged, dialectical progressions that Marx had outlined as through an uninterrupted or "permanent" revolution, through a "growing over" (pererastanie) of the bourgeois into the proletarian revolution, of the Rusj sian Revolution into an international revolution, and of a social revolution into a cultural transformation of mankind.

Thus, although Trotsky professed dissatisfaction with the mysticism of the God-builders and Cosmists, he leaves no doubt in his abundant writings on cultural matters about his own "limitless creative faith in the future." In the last lines of his famous collection, Literature and Revolution, written in 1925, when his own authority was already on the wane, he expresses confidence in man's ability

to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biological type, or, if you please, a superman.

. . . Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.65