-1-
CHAPTER 2: FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT
This chapter moves between two poles: particularism and universalism. The noticeable preoccupation with class of Party applicants points to the strong particularist dimension in Communism. Only proletarians could demand a place in the brotherhood of the elect; all others were obliged to speak in dulcet tones. At the same time, however, we have already seen that the Communist autobiography was used throughout the 1920s as a class-transcending vehicle; class was important, but it was not everything. In fact, at times universalism became a dominant concern in admissions: whenever a complete conversion to Communism was proven, class origins became subsidiary. Even children of the disenfranchised could enroll, provided they publicly renounced their "reactionary" parents and demonstrated their own commitment to the proletarian movement. “Our Party organization is open to each and every one (vsem i kazhdomu),” Evdokimov stated at the XII Party Congress.[1]Such inclusivism -- and this is the heart of the present chapter -- did not extend to conscious, mature individuals who deliberately made what the Bolsheviks considered to be unforgivable political choices. The ultimate criterion was not sociological but ethical; toward the end of this chapter we will see that it was not class affiliation but Will that determined who belonged to the brotherhood of the elect and who did not. It was here that Communist particularism really asserted itself -- the Party gates were locked shut before the wicked ones.
The discourse of class permeated all spheres of Communist life. This was true of the vocabulary of university Party cells, intermediary Party and academic bureaucratic bodies, sociologists, psychologists and, most importantly, students themselves. In the daily life of the brotherhood of the elect, class was a complex network of significations that had to be handled with extreme care. It took the form of a ritual of words and deeds that had to be performed faultlessly by the students who wished to join the Party. And conversely, when they pronounced on the Party applicant's social identity, the various microstructures of power operating both within and outside the university were in fact determining his or her suitability for membership. Although students could disagree with this or that aspect of the official admissions policy, they were obliged to appeal in the name of class.
Because they failed to appreciate the messianic significance of Bolshevik social categories, historians are often unable to problematize class identities and continue to rely uncritically on notions such as "proletariat," "peasantry" or "petite-bourgeoisie." The difficulty of determining who was a proletarian during the 1920s is well-know: "class origins" and "current occupation" were equally relevant. But these were not just taxonomic obstacles. Rather, the issue was the relation between class and consciousness as posited by Marxist eschatology. Class identity was an index of the student's readiness to fulfill his eschatological role: years of work in production could not make a student into a proletarian if his consciousness was not that of a member of a class-redeemer. Working class students who did not develop a proletarian consciousness -- the eschatological waste, in a manner of speaking -- were simply stripped of the title of "proletarian."
And yet there was a measure of flexibility within the Party cell's use of the discourse of class. Class taxonomies were strictly articulated but their application was not and could not be. Meaning was constituted through the specific, local practices that underpinned the official lexicon. The cell was on its own when it came to adjudicating and renegotiating the significance of class notions and adapting them to concrete students. In the production of meanings, the Party not only produced in the realm of theory but also practiced techniques of power that defined the boundaries of sense, delineated the implications of various identities the subjects took on and described the sanctions against the adoption of undesirable identities. From this perspective, class may be seen as an index of shifting power relations within the brotherhood of the elect.
Party admissions statistics, which have so much to say about class, will occupy us in this chapter. The significance of these data, however, is not self-evident. Since I do not believe that class is an objective entity that can be measured, I will not take admissions figures at face value. It is not that admissions figures were somehow fraudulent, or failed to capture the objective reality they supposedly aimed at; the more urgent problem in the present context is rather that a preoccupation with quantities leads to a neglect of the qualities admissions figures were supposed to represent. If we focus on the validity of the data, we leave unquestioned the paradigm that drove its collection in the first place, which means accepting the questions formulated by the Party discourse itself. Since I prefer to concentrate not on measuring the success of the proletarianization of the Party but on the logic which set the parameters of this policy in the first place, statistical tables are scrutinized below not as (quantitative) data but as (qualitative) texts. By dwelling on the indeterminacy of the Party's methods of class categorization methods I hope to demonstrate the constructed nature of the Communist class typology. Statistics, then, become less a presentation of reality than an active force in its shaping. My starting point is Ian Hacking's insight that "the bureaucracy of statistics imposes not just by creating administrative rulings but by determining classifications within which people must think of themselves and of the actions that are open to them."[2] Rather than simply casting their nets and drawing in the proletarians, what the Party statisticians were actually doing was turning individuals who belonged to specific prerevolutionary occupational, estate or ethnic categories into proletarians. By establishing the criteria for admissions, statistical tables taught students which classes were welcome into the brotherhood of the elect and which classes had no place there.
Statistical categories were only the starting point. Class identity began its shaping there and soon was elaborated through the increasingly subtle classification of moral and psychological characteristics. Schematically speaking, the practice by which a student became a subject of class took four basic forms, which interlocked in ways that we shall presently consider. They were: (1) The objectivizing of the subject by the classifying practices -- every student was expected to be assigned a niche in the class matrix. The methods of statistical categorization were crucial here, both the guidelines provided by the center regarding the indexing of class identities and the way these guidelines were interpreted in localities. (2) The objectivizing of the speaking subject in the process of interrogation -- the student had to justify the identity he chose for himself during the elaborate admission ceremonies, Party trials and purge and self-criticism campaigns. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, (3) Self-objectification -- by recognizing the properties that went along with the class identity ascribed to him, the student was able to turn himself into his own object, to be fashioned and disciplined.[3]
The principal instrument available to those who wished to initiate the process of self-objectification was the Communist autobiography. While we have already seen that class featured prominently in student narratives, we can now look into this aspect of Communist poetics more closely. While the demands of the genre ensured that autobiographies ended fairly uniformly, with a conversion to Communism, their beginnings could vary. The path to perfection was directly influenced by the social position the autobiographer ascribed to himself. Any point of departure was imperfect by necessity: indeed, all the student autobiographers considered below reported to have begun life as individualistic intellectuals, possessive peasants, anarchist petit-bourgeois or unconscious workers. Hardly aberrations, such poor beginnings were necessary to the Communist eschatological narrative since a progression toward the light made sense only if the Party applicant emerged from the darkness.
How the Communist autobiographer chose to start his story was a question of paramount importance: after all, individuals from different milieus fought against different illusions and temptations, and travelled their own, unique roads to consciousness. At the end of the autobiography, the applicant underwent a rebirth into a new identity. From a particularist, interest-driven class actor he turned into a universalist proletarian, a member of the only class that could transcend all classes. This new identity preserved its former class identity as a sublimated identity, reborn out of Communist knowledge. From the vantage point of the reformed, conscious self, the autobiographer proceeded to remember and represent himself to himself as he was during the earlier stages of his development. The rigidly formalized demands of the Communist autobiography assisted him in recollecting and reliving his past as a peasant or a bourgeois. Comprehending his class-driven yesterday, the autobiographer could move into the Communist tomorrow. Thus autobiography became the means of constituting of the universalist Self; the autobiography did not merely record the process of the applicant's spiritual transcendence of class barriers, but actually helped him to attain that aim.
In what follows I will employ the categories into which the 1920 "Uniform Party Card" divided the population -- "worker," "peasant," and "non-proletarian" ("employee" or "intelligentsia") -- treating them one at a time.[4] My goal is to examine in detail how the social position students reported at the outset of their autobiography (and in the personal data questionnaires that accompanied it) shaped their self-fashioning.
Workers and Party Enrollment
The Party was convinced that the working class was the only class fit to shoulder the enormous tasks of human emancipation. This faith was not based on the sheer number of workers -- in fact, they were relatively few, compared with the peasants. But according to the Communist eschatological reasoning, the fewer the workers were, the more magnificent was their messianic prowess. It was not the concrete and mundane interests of the native workers that the Party acted for, but the universal class-emancipator. "At various times various people have believed themselves to be messiahs called to save the world," wrote Gorky in 1919. "These days, History has bestowed this mission on the [. . .] Russian working class -- a model for the rest of the world."[5] The working class was the only class that "did not own the means of production, `enjoyed' all the marvels of exploitation [. . .] was organized and disciplined [. . .] and, above and beyond all that, was the only class that understood its own actions."[6]
Workers were said to possess remarkable epistemological acuity. Separation from the means of production turned them into the first unselfish class History had ever known. Because the bourgeois was guided by greed alone (in the context of class epistemology, the term "bourgeoisie" should be understood to include all property owners, including "artisans" and "peasants"), his perception of reality was distorted and nothing short of a switch to a proletarian perspective could lead to a messianic awakening. The Bolshevik leaders were convinced that the proletariat alone had an undistorted understanding of social reality: "Since they exploited no one, workers were the only class capable of discovering the interconnectedness of the various facets of social relations."[7] The proletarian was poised to transcend the limits of the individualist mind: "The large factory, where every article passes through hundreds of hands prior to its completion, destroys the spirit of individualism," argued one of the heads of the Bolshevik educational establishment, Martyn Liadov. "`We create!', `We produce!', says the worker. Life itself whispers in his ear that only by a collective effort can he improve his plight."[8] Based on that principle, his peer, Lunacharskii, deduced workers' theoretical sagacity: "Nothing but working class affiliation could prepare an individual to embrace Marxism."[9] Ethical considerations were no less important, and workers were held to be ethically superior to all other classes because they were propertyless and therefore acted disinterestedly. When Communists stated that the present deprivations suffered by the working class would be the source of its future glory, they were reprising the Christian promise that "in the final days the last shall be first and the humble shall be exalted."[10]
How close Russian workers had been to their ideal type? By the final stages of the Civil War, all conscious workers supposedly understood what history expected from them. In 1920, Zinoviev proclaimed his delight in the “new notes coming out of the throats of millions of non-Party workers – they finally admit that they stand beneath and not above the Party. [. . .] Many workers say to themselves today: I am shunning Party membership not because the Party is unworthy – actually I know that the best element is indeed in its ranks – but because I do not yet consider myself sufficiently mature. Once I get rid of my habit of dealing with petty commerce I will certainly seek Party membership.”[11]But NEP was a time of backsliding, even among workers. Party leaders believed that the native working class -- only recently the proud standard bearer in the first proletarian revolution on earth -- had been reduced in size, scattered and bureaucratized. Sounding the alarm bells at the XI Party Congress (March 1922), Lenin declared that, "More often than not, individuals who go to work in our factories are an accidental element!"[12]
When dispatched to the universities, even as a reward for shock labor, workers suffered a particularly steep deterioration in status; Party statisticians transferred them to the column of the "non-industrial workers," a category filled out by other students, couriers, guards and cleaners -- not exactly brilliant material from a Marxist perspective. The psychology of workers who left the production line for the university was suspect. It was feared that "seclusion in academic circles makes Communist students boil in their own juice" and "reek of rotten meat."[13] To be sure, there were other, somewhat more optimistic writers who believed that mental labor did not need to be constructed in opposition to manual labor: according to Preobrazhenskii, for example, "the recent proletarian turn to education resulted not from disillusionment and a cowardly urge to flee real life but from the need to continue the October Revolution by different means."[14] Be that as it may, Bolsheviks agreed that student-workers were "ill" and that only "participation in the everyday revolutionary activity at the factory can shake them up."[15] The publicist Ageev advocated the creation of a "living link between students and life outside the university: we have to attach student Communists to the factory Party cells and, reciprocally, to send disciplined workers to the academic Party cells."[16]
The Party had fewer misgivings regarding the health of the "workers' faculties" (rabfaki) -- special schools offering a secondary level education -- precisely because these new type of institutions were supposed to embody such a link. Integrated into the higher educational system as a "key tool for the proletarianization of the higher education" workers' faculties were described as "siege ladders attached to university windows, used by worker and peasant youth to make the ascent."[17] Determined not to dilute its ranks with workers who had lost their mettle, the Party concluded by 1921 that it should admit “only those comrades who will bring a genuinely healthy spirit into the Party, and let us bar the way to all others."[18]Fearing that the Party’s separation from the masses will increase Larin and the “workers’ opposition” warned that the decision of the XI Party Congress to close admissions to the Party “might turn us into a sect of mandarins.” Speaking in the name of the Central Committee majority, Zinoviev, however, dismissed such “abstact truisms” regarding the alleged necessity of close contacta with the masses. “Our present task is not to increse the size of our Party but to role up our sleeves and invest all our energy in improving our membership. We have to chase quality, not quantity.”[19]
As a result of such resolutions, even workers' faculty students experienced serious difficulties gaining admission to the Party. The NEP-era siege mentality prompted the Bolshevik leadership to maintain that although the Party had to be working class based, not all workers had to be in the Party. The XI Party Congress recommended that the shorter six-month probationary period be accorded only to those workers who had been employed in large-scale undertakings for a miminum of ten continuous years; the probationary period for other workers was extended and fixed at eighteen months.[20] When Neverovskii, for example, expressed a desire to become a member of Leningrad State University Party's cell in 1921, his application was put aside and he was advised to reapply at a later date, when he had "performed enough social work." Despite his classification as a "worker," the discussion of his case was postponed indefinitely once the XII Party Conference (August 1922) put a freeze on all Party admissions except for factory workers. His father a night watchman, and his mother, a shoemaker, Neverovskii was deemed not pure enough to enter the brotherhood of the elect.[21]Presenting the effects of the policy of limitations on Party growth in the years 1922-23 the Central Committee reported that “admissions involve now a much more careful screening requiring from the cell a more thorough familiarization with the new comer.”[22]