{Russians await the Apocalypse}[7th April 1991]

[Redbook9:41][19910407:1231b]{Russians await the Apocalypse}[7th April 1991]

19910407.1231 (Sun[day])

[continued]

‘…The revolutionary mentality in Russia at the beginning of the century,* a mentality essentially religious, nourished by a readiness to believe in an impending Apocalypse** that would mark the end of history*** and the advent of “a new heaven and a new earth”. The fervour with which this belief was held reflected noble aspirations: if everything in the past was tainted with injustice, everything must be built afresh. Such sentiments has a particular Russian pedigree. Utopianism, regarded as a practical good, was an extension of the radical maximalism of the nineteenth century**** that had gone hand in hand with a similarly extreme utilitarianism – the tendency to measure everything in relation to its goal, rejecting the aesthetic and# the individual as values. The result was a “real-life utopia” of the sort prefigured by Shigalyor, “the inventor of equality” in Dostoyevsky’s “The Devils”, whose theory had started from the idea of unlimited freedom,#* only to end with unlimited despotism,#** where all would be equals in slavery. But such sobering recognitions were slow to surface for the intelligentsia, because revolution offered a transcendental meaning to Life,#*** filling the vacuum left by the trauma of world war.’

#****

*64G~1904

**64C1920

***2048C?

****2048R~1792

#2048R~C1920

(ie mid-point between R~ & C)

#*G~-R~-C

#**C-S~-M~

#***

			C
			↑/
		R~
	/↑
Revolution	G~	g~	Revelation
	\↑

#**** – T[imes] L[iterary] S[upplement] 4589, 19910315:5, ‘Homo Sovieticus: Utopia & reality in Russian experience’, D. Fanger, Professor of Slavic and Comparative History at Harvard University.

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