Energy and Socialism: from Avant-guard to Stalin Culture

Lecture by Ilya Kalinin on 1 March 2017

 

European University Institute

 

Wed 01 Mar 2017 16.00 – 18.00

 

The question of energy and energy resources was recognized from the inception of the Soviet state as one of principal consequence in the construction of socialism. Let us recall Lenin’s famous slogan, putted forward at the VIIIth All-Russian Congress of Soviets in 1920: “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country”. We used to comprehend this slogan just as an example of Bolshevik rhetoric but I think we need to look at this formula more seriously and try to reveal some interconnections and correlation, some mutual translatability between Soviet power and electric one.

 

Then we faced here to the huge and heterogeneous range of historical and cultural phenomena from the State 10 Years Plan for the Electrification of Russia to Andrei Platonov’s utopian projects for the generation of energy from solar, lunar and astral light. Although Platonov was possibly the author most obsessed with the idea of new sources of energy and technologies that might utterly transform the social reality of socialist Russia, he was not alone in his preoccupation with these matters. A conception of socialism as granting access to unlimited sources of energy—energy as a force that could reconfigure the sociopolitical order—was an important subject of technological and artistic, political and political-economic reflections for early Soviet culture as a whole.

 

Quite possibly, the most interesting aspect of this discursively variegated process of inquiry and reflection lay in the diffusive interrelationships among its various organizing discursive formations. Raw technological ambition seized on the utopian insights of literature. New solutions in engineering, aspiring to revolutionize the social spaces of the country, were inspired by thought in political-economy. Political necessity imposed the demand for a leap forward in technology. Poetic language ran out ahead of this technological leap, offering visions of transformations that had not yet come to pass. In the following, I will be concerned with the rhetorical and – what is more important – conceptual intersections of these discourses and practices, as well as with various examples of the metaphorical and symbolic transformations of the concept of energy. Most importantly, I will be discussing electricity, that most progressive form of energy and the object of the obsessive interest of Soviet social and cultural figures, from engineers, to poets, from scientists, to representatives of the state. The transformation of energy from a physical phenomenon into a political force was reflected in a multi-tiered discourse that endowed natural resources with the grammar of political speech, and in particular with Marxist historical consciousness and even anthropomorphic features.

 

Location: Sala del Camino, Villa Salviati
Affiliation: Department of History and Civilization
Type: Lecture
Organiser: Prof. Alexander Etkind (European University Institute)
Speaker: Ilya Kalinin (University of Edinburgh)

 

http://www.eui.eu/events/detail.aspx?eventid=133322