The Politics of Dancing

The culture that emerged out of the Russian revolution now seems as distant as that of the ancient pharaohs. It is easy to forget that what was attempted was the creation of a whole new civilisation and a whole new mindset about the human condition. That this experiment ended in the grotesque phenomenon of Stalinism may or may not have been inevitable, as Victor Serge observed the revolution did carry the seeds of Stalinism, but there were other seeds as well and the strangulation of the hopes and aspirations of the revolutionary generation of the 1890’s is one of the great tragedies of the age. Given that this period in history now seems so distant it astonishes me to think that Nina’s diary was written merely twenty years before I was born. The world it describes is long gone the emotional struggles of adolescence that it describes are universal. The combination of intelligence and sensitivity represents a heady cocktail; cocktails are dangerous things at any time of life but in ...

The news this morning is filled with the death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. We are told that it was he who blew the gaff on the horrors of the Soviet System, the camps, the terror, the insanity of an ideology gone mad. Now I am an admirer of Solzhenitsyn’s courage, if not his reactionary politics, he was at the end of his life after all a very narrow Russian nationalist. Though given his life experience and what he suffered I am in truth no position to make a judgement. However the idea that he was the ‘first’ to expose the hideous lie that was Stalinism is itself untrue. There were others. Out of the writing that emerged from the moral abyss of Stalin’s Soviet Union several books stand out, Vasily Grossman’s ‘Life and Fate,’ Anotoli Rybakov’s ‘Children of the Arbat, ’ and an extraordinary insightful book ‘ The Case of Comrade Tulayev,’ by Victor Serge. Serge’s life story almost exactly parallels that of the European Left from 1900 to 1945. (Only perhaps Arthur Koestler shares a re...