Violence in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture

Sociologists and anthropologists seem to agree that, although violence and aggression are implanted in human nature and although there is no society without violence, the object of social sciences and humanities is the symbolical staging of violence through different languages, discourses, rituals and rhetorics. The configuration of these elements of culture defines the functions of violence, characterizing society in concrete historical circumstances. Thus, not actual violence, but what Robin Fox called 'the violent imagination' stands in the centre of research in the humanities:

The problem here is not violence. The problem here is the use to which violence is put [...] The problem is not our violent nature, or even the nature of violence, but our violent imagination, and our imaginative use of violence: an imaginative use that no longer bears any close relation to the evolved conditions of violence [...] The problem lies with the capacity of the human imagination to create an encompassing, consummatory systems with violence as their focus and purpose. (Fox 1982: 14–15)

Fox stresses that the violent imagination, or rather the symbolical and discursive formations that condition violence, the socio-psychological theory explaining violence as a reaction to frustration, is inapplicable or not always applicable:

Violence itself begets violence, and in perfectly unfrustrated people. The example of violence is easily imitated. We also know how easily violence can become endemic – can become a cult. This business of routinization can apply to almost any human emotion or activity. Under such circumstances one does not have to be in any way frustrated in order to be attracted by violent activity. (Fox 1982: 18–19)

Despite an abundance of western research about the history of discourses of violence and about the violent character of authoritative discourses in European culture, the study of the 'violent imagination' in Russian culture – even on a thematic, let alone rhetorical and discursive level – remains not a taboo subject, but is clearly marginalized and insufficiently advanced. It is possible to speak about violence in relation to the literature of the GULAG, but not in relation to the literature of the Great Patriotic War; in connection with Socialist Realism, but not with underground or émigré literature. Violence remains a characteristic of the discourses of the other, but never of one's own. There are exceptions: Alexander Zholkovskii's (1996) works about Anna Akhmatova, the writings of Elena Tolstaia (2002) and Mikhail Zolotonosov (2007) about Anton Chekhov, or the works of Boris Groys (1992) about the Russian avant-garde. But these are only isolated breakthroughs against the general background of a silent agreement that violence is registered only with respect to totalitarian discourses and, accordingly, has no relation either to orthodox tradition or to the nineteenth century classics, to the Silver Age or Soviet modernism, to the 1960's liberal generation or the underground movement, to postmodernism or the neo-avant-garde. New Drama here found itself almost entirely in this dead zone, whereas other phenomena (Kharms or Sorokin) belong to it only partly.

The matter is not so much this 'agreement', but the lack of intellectual self-reflection towards violence in discourse. The available literary criticism reacts only to a straight discursive justification of violence, accepting it or not, while remaining unable to work with articulated, yet implicit violence in discourse and with performances of violence. Moreover, without distinguishing the effects of violence, this lens not only smoothes them, but absorbs and even amplifies them.

An attempt at a typology

If we understand by violence the subject's deprivation of the freedom of choice, then it is obvious that the discourses of violence assume a variety of forms, from coarse physical violence to the didactics of Soviet culture, down to the justification of confinement in a concentration camp through the term 'reeducation'. The problem lies in the fact that in Soviet and post-Soviet culture there were at least three types of violence and three versions of corresponding discourses: the punitive discourse of the state violence, the modernizing/martyr discourse of the intelligentsia's violence, and the communal violence of the 'molecular civil war', to use Hans Magnus Enzensberger's phrase. The first two discourses of violence are so closely connected that they could be considered as two sides of the same discourse. The discourse of communicative violence both feeds into the first and second type of discourse, whilst at the same time confronting and being constrained by them. The discourse of communal violence is also complicated by the fact that its discursive components are reduced by the performative representation. However, it would be incorrect to say that these discursive elements are completely missing, in the same way as it would be wrong to believe that the performative element is entirely absent in the 'punitive' and 'modernizing' discourses of violence.

Totalitarian violence, or the state's discourse of punitive and 'prophylactic' violence, functioned as the major staging device for Soviet power: in conformity with Michel Foucault's description of executions in pre-modern culture (see Chapter 1 in Discipline and Punish, 1978), the Soviet state created a special 'theatre of terror', thus demonstrating absolute power over its subjects. At the same time, as modern historians have shown, violence of this type is represented in Soviet culture as a process of modernity, a 'scientific', or rather quasi-scientific, regulation of society by means of the liquidation or marginalization of entire categories of the population which are actually or potentially dangerous for the Soviet class and consequently do not fit in with the utopian model of the new society. Thus, Peter Holquist has underlined that 'purges' along the lines of sociologically defined categories were carried out in Russia even during the First World War, when a purposeful eviction of 'antinational elements' (Jews, ethnic Germans and Baltic people) from frontier +areas took place; at the same time the need to settle Germans in a concentration camp on the Volga was discussed. During the Soviet era this practice became widespread, typically accompanied by the 'medical' rhetoric of 'social prevention', 'hygiene' and 'cleansing', relying on statistics that determined the 'norms' of terror:

In significant ways, the Bolsheviks expanded upon state practices developed in the late Imperial period and massively implemented in the First World War. [...] The Soviet regime's application of state violence is better understood as a fundamental esthetic project to sculpt an idealized image of the politico-social body rather than a narrowly understood medico-prophylactic pursuit' (Holquist 2003: 155).

This logic, however, ceases to work during the Great Terror (1934–1939), when the majority of the arrested did not belong to 'suspicious' categories, but, on the contrary, were part of the new Soviet elite. With regard to this period, historians often use the metaphor of inquisitional terror, which served to strengthen a party-state that had adopted the role of the church. The constant production of new categories of potential enemies made the criteria for the definition of 'antinational elements' unstable and ambivalent. A characteristic feature of the terror of the 1930s is that the reasons for arrest were formulated after the event, based on the logic that 'once arrested, it means guilty'. The announcement of the confession as the 'queen of proofs' (Vyshinskii), the sanction to apply tortures in order to ensure the 'cooperation' of the arrested with the NKVD investigators and extract a 'confession' – the composition of the guilt of the terror victim – all these well-known facts reveal how state violence becomes a self-sufficient performance, created for its own goals and only pro forma requiring a 'legal' foundation.

In this sense, the terror of the 1930s can be seen as a paradoxical version of the Soviet sacred. In his famous essay 'Critique of Violence' (1921) Walter Benjamin describes two fundamental discourses of 'pure violence'. He calls one 'mythical': it is 'a pure manifestation of the gods. Not a means to their ends, scarcely a manifestation of their will, but first of all a manifestation of their existence' (Benjamin 1986: 294); and the other 'divine': 'Whereas mythical violence establishes the law, divine force annihilates it; where mythical violence posits limits, divine force destroys them limitlessly [...]; where mythical violence menaces, divine violence hits; where mythical violence is bloody, divine violence is lethal without being bloody' (Benjamin 1986: 297). Benjamin traces this rhetoric of violence to the Judaic tradition and illustrates his argument with a scene from the Old Testament (Numbers 16: 1–35) where, by God's will, the earth opened its mouth widely and swallowed Korah and his followers, who had rebelled against Moses, together with their children and wives. The following scene from Zamiatin's We (1921) seems much more expressive in its rendering of the execution of a dissident (a novel written at the same time as Benjamin's treatise):

An instant. The hand fell, loosing the current. A sharp blade of unbearable light. A shudder in the pipes of the Machine, a crackling that you could hardly hear. The spreadeagled body was covered by a light, sparkling little puff of smoke and then before our eyes it began to melt, and melt, and it dissolved so fast it was horrible. And then – nothing. A puddle of chemically pure water, which just a moment ago had been in a heart, red, beating up a storm.

This was all simple, we all knew about it. Dissociation of matter – check. Disengagement of the atoms of the human body – check. Still, every time it happened, it seemed like a miracle. It was a sign of the superhuman might of the Benefactor. (Zamyatin 1993: 48)

Jacques Derrida, developing Benjamin's definition of divine violence, adds that it 'annihilates [...] goods, life, law, the foundation of law, and so on, but it never attacks' (Derrida 2002: 288) and thus represents itself as a limiting embodiment of the transcendental signified: 'God is the name of this pure violence – and just in essence: there is no other, there is none prior to it and before that it has to justify itself. Authority, justice, power and violence all are one in him' (Derrida 2002: 293). In a postscript to his article Derrida notes in amazement:

The temptation to think the holocaust as an uninterpretable manifestation of divine violence insofar as this divine violence would be at the same time annihilating, expiatory and bloodless, says Benjamin, a divine violence that would destroy current law, here I recite Benjamin, 'through a bloodless process that strikes and causes to expiate' [...] When one thinks of the gas chambers and the cremation ovens, this allusion to an extermination that would be expiatory because bloodless must cause one to shudder. One is terrified at the idea that would make the holocaust an expiation and an undecipherable signature of the just and violent anger of God. (Derrida 2002: 298)

What Benjamin saw as 'pure' violence of a revolutionary storm was implemented in the furnaces of Auschwitz or on the icy fire of Kolyma. Albeit terrifying, but precisely as 'divine violence' any totalitarian violence encodes itself from within: it introduces a constant 'state of exception' and transforms the law into a mere formality, aiming to exercise 'supreme justice'. Thus, totalitarian violence functions as a modernist transgression, not only destroying former sanctuaries, but – by the act of destruction – creating a new sacred object:

Transgression carries the limit right to the limit of its being; transgression forces the limit to face its imminent disappearance, to find itself in what it excludes [...] to experience its positive truth in its downward fall [...] Transgression contains nothing negative, but affirms limited being – affirms the limitlessness into which it leaps as it opens this zone to existence for the first time. (Foucault 1998: 73–74)

What Foucault defined as limitlessness is, in effect, a version of the sacred created by modernity, including Soviet modernity.

This type of violence is preserved throughout the post-Stalin era. As the historian Oleg Kharkhordin demonstrates, in the Khrushchev period and in the Brezhnev era, state violence became more regulated and acquired a disciplinary character. However, the creation of the Burlaw Court ('court of comrades'), the expansion of the functions of the Voluntary People's Guard (DND, Dobrovol'naia narodnaia druzhina), the campaigns against dandies (stiliagi), parasites (tuneiadtsy) and any other manifestation of heterodoxy, as well as the general tightening of criminal punishment, led to an increased social pressure of the 'collective' and the formation of a structure that resembled the classical panopticon:

the Khrushchev era can be considered as a time when the system of mutual supervision and communal control finally took root: both systems were more thorough and reliable in the function than the openly repressive Stalinist system, which it replaced [...] Ninetysix million controllers closely watching each other: this was Khrushchev's disciplinary dream. Instead of the chaotic and often haphazard repressions of the Stalin era, he wanted to create an ordered and balanced working system of a constantly forestalled guard. In many ways he achieved this. (Kharkhordin 2003: 389, 391)

Thus, the Khrushchev regime tried to transform the 'perverted' panopticon of Stalinism into a more traditional type of disciplinary violence based on the internalization of the role of the guard. However, the fate of Khrushchev's Thaw, where the disintegration of the Soviet model effectively begins, testifies to the impossibility to reform punitive/preventive violence into disciplinary violence: these are not different forms of one and the same model, but altogether different models.

Soviet 'prophylactic' violence relied at different times on the 'modernizing' violence of the intelligentsia, and even on the communal violence of gangs, crowds and the masses as strong and influential factors: this process requires a detailed historical description, which falls, however, outside the boundaries of literary criticism and of this chapter in particular. Suffice it to say that the understanding of the nature of Soviet violence as a synthesis of the boundless authority of the state, the pathos of modernization and a 'senseless' (or rather ritual) communication by means of violence was first rendered by Varlam Shalamov in his Kolyma Tales (Kolymskie rasskazy, 1954–1973; published 1978).

Shalamov himself experienced the hellish Soviet panopticon from the inside, spending eighteen years in different GULAG institutions. However, the concentration camps in Shalamov's Kolyma Tales are anything but transparent, functional or rational. The disciplinary omnipotence of the authorities is here replaced by chain reactions of unrestrained violence:

Everybody would beat up the workers: the men on duty, the barbers, the foremen, the tutors, the guards, the escorts, the bosses, the supply managers, – everybody. The impunity of beatings and murders corrupts the souls – of those who did it, who saw it, or who knew it ... (Shalamov 2003: 449)

In Shalamov's texts, violence also does not require any legal (or any other) validation. It is not driven by the quest for justice, nor does it require any social rituals; it simply constitutes the fabric of camp existence. In this reality, violence is so normal that anything non-violent seems perverse. The perception of violence as a social norm is typical for professional criminals. In fact, in many of Shalamov's stories, it is not a representative of the authorities but a criminal (as opposed to a political prisoner) who is the main source of the everyday oppression of the inmates.

Shalamov argues that the purpose of the GULAG is to kill the prisoner's mind through labour and terror, and to thus transform the human being into a piece of unconscious matter that can be exchanged for pieces of wood, gold, radium, ore, etc.; this may be read as a subverted ethos of modernization. He mentions several times that the value of raw materials is proportional to the death toll in the respective camps. Prisoners perished much faster in gold and radium mines than in camps producing coal, timber or less valuable ores. However, even this equation would be too rational for the world of the Kolyma Tales. The rules of the GULAG directly negate the logic of the industrialized terror characteristic of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, as any logic for that matter:

Many people could not understand the main law of the camp, the purpose for which the camp had effectively been invented: it is impossible to refuse work in the camp; refusal is a monstrous crime, worse than sabotage. Even if you use your last force and crawl to your workplace [...] then you are saved. For today. From execution. Once there, you can avoid working, in fact you can't do any work anyway. Endure the torment of this day until the end. You do a little bit, but you don't refuse. They can't shoot you. (Shalamov 2003: 447)