Word: marxisms
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Sketching quickly, letting a line stand for a landscape, the author shows us Moscow in the month before last year's coup. Marxism's fragments still clog streets and government offices. The ruble is nearly worthless. Murderous Chechen bandits and corrupt former party officials war bloodily over control of the new capitalism, which turns out to be the old black market grown great. Ordinary people stand in lines for food, and when they have time, go to work...
...huge Palace Square in Leningrad for the first birthday of the October Revolution, or the steel-truss tribune designed by Lissitzky to carry Lenin forward like a high diver over the heads of a crowd -- without a feeling of exhilaration: this, not the bureaucratic and murderous reality of institutional Marxism, is what it was meant to be like, that now closed chapter in Russian history...
...avant- garde splinter groups and wild chiliastic claims, exquisitely attuned not only to Russian traditions of religious mysticism but also to Cubism, Futurism, Symbolism and other currents in Paris, Rome, Vienna. To imagine that the work of spiritually obsessed artists like Kandinsky or Malevich had any filial relationship to Marxism is to miss its meaning. Malevich, an egomaniacal genius who called himself "the president of space" and imagined that his art could translate all humankind onto a higher plane, was as far from dialectical materialism as a man could...
Only by asserting that Marxism was itself a millenarian religion can one argue a link between such artists and the ideology of the revolution. The motor of new Russian art was its belief that the world was on the brink of inconceivable change. Sever the strands of the past, leap into the future. "Only he is alive," Malevich pronounced, "who rejects his convictions of yesterday." Lissitzky's "prouns" -- a term he coined from the Russian words meaning project of the affirmation of the new -- resemble plans or aerial views of Utopian structures, an abstract New Jerusalem in paint. They...
...fact, is the fate of political and economic reform throughout the former Soviet bloc. At best, its countries probably will not and cannot become carbon copies of Western capitalist democracies. At worst, they are unlikely to revert to old-fashioned Marxism-Leninism in any form that would threaten a new cold war. But whether the hybrid political economies that do evolve represent a net gain for political and economic freedom or a descent into a kind of authoritarian chaos remains an unsettled question...