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Sole Correct Scientific World Outlook

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from “Monumental Propaganda” by Vladimir Voinovich

 

 

I feel sorry for those future generations who will not even be able to imagine that there was a time when the broad extensive lands of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (broad extensive lands, not expensive foreign brands) were all under the sway of a general system of sociopolitical views that were progressive in every respect and compulsory for every one of the three hundred million representatives of the peoples, nations, and tribes (some of them still pretty wild) who occupied those extensive lands, and which went by the name of the Sole Correct Scientific World Outlook.

 

The world outlook was uniquely correct, and it was promulgated by the only political party (there was no need for any others).  But while all the members of the Party accepted the Sole Correct Scientific outlook, they were divided among themselves into two hostile tendencies.  One tendency was Marxist-Leninist and the other was Stalinist.  The Marxist-Leninists were good Marxists, kind people.  They wanted to establish a good life on earth for good people and a bad life for bad people, but it had to be done in accordance with the World Outlook.  And therefore they killed bad people, but whenever they could, they left the good people alive.  The Stalinists, however, were essentially democrats – they killed everybody without distinction, and they regarded the World Outlook not as a dogma but as a guide to action.  Consequently, the Marxist-Leninists were regarded as humanists and devotees of the Sole Correct Scientific World Outlook (SCOSWO), while the Stalinists were devoted to Stalin and were prepared to follow him in any direction, wherever he might lead them.

 

[…] so our Admiral, being a man of immense learning and absolutely independent views, who always had his own original opinion on everything, regarded SCOSWO disrespectfully even in those times when very few people could even conceive of such a possibility.  Under his influence I also began to ponder and to doubt things that had seemed incontrovertible to me only recently.  I began to wonder why SCOSWO was regarded as exclusively true and scientific and why the cause of the people’s future happiness required so many of the people to be killed, hounded, ruined, starved and frozen.  And whether it might not have been better to invent some Uniquely Incorrect SCOSWO that would be a bit less hard on people.  To this very day, however, the devotees of SCOSWO claim that the theory was good but the practice was bad.  Lenin devised it correctly, but Stalin applied in wrongly.  But who, where, in what country, has ever applied it correctly? Khrushchev? Brezhnev? Mao Tse-tung? Kim Il-Sung? Ho Chi Minh? Pol Pot? Castro? Honecker? Who? Where? When?  What is so good about this theory if it can never be confirmed in practice anywhere under any conditions?

 

Nowadays, of course, the number of people selflessly devoted to SCOSWO has fallen a bit.  But in the times we are describing here the broad expanses of our homeland were home to quite large numbers of them, one of whom was Mark Semyonovich Shubkin, a faithful adherent of SCOSWO, a disciple first of Lenin-Stalin and then of Lenin alone.  But he held on to Lenin for a long time, with firm, total commitment.  Shubkin remained faithful to SCOSWO and to Lenin before and after his arrest, during his nocturnal interrogations, even during the years he spent engaged in public works.  Despite the cold and hunger, never, not once, not for a single moment (until certain time came) did he doubt.  Major and minor devils frequently tempted him, trying to sow doubt in his mind, but he endured like Jesus Christ, in whom he did not believe.

 

The investigator Tikhonravov beat Mark Semyonovich very painfully with a towel twisted into a heavy rope while abusing him in the vilest possible terms, blinded him with the table lamp, prevented him from sleeping and wouldn’t let him sit down, but when Mark Semyonovich, enduring all of this stoically, pointed to the portrait of Lenin hanging above the investigator’s head and rebuked him with quotations from the leader, Tikhonravov replied simply, “I couldn’t give a shit for your Lenin.”  To which Shubkin was unable to find sufficiently convincing counterarguments.  But he continued to display his previous fortitude.  And he left the camp unbroken, undefeated, with his views unchanged.  That is, in the words of the Admiral, he left it the same fool he was when he entered it.  A sealed and certified fool, the Admiral called him, meaning a fool with certificates with big seals on them.

 

I must confess there were times when the Admiral’s judgments seemed too harsh to me.  And din Shubkin’s case undeservedly harsh.  After all, if a man had been through the camps and not changed his convictions in spite of everything, surely that was worthy of respect?

 

“Sheer stupidity, no matter what,” the Admiral used to reply mercilessly, “and not even stupidity – absolute idiocy.”

 

The Admiral regarded Shubkin with mild contempt, although at first he himself had attempted to shatter his faith in SCOSWO and its supreme idol.  He used to tell Shubkin about the German money and the German railroad carriage (which also happened to have seals on it), about the priests and prostitutes executed on the personal orders of “the most humane man ever to walk the earth,” about his progressive paralysis as a result of syphilis, and many other things which at that time were known to only a few.  None of these stories produced even the slightest effect on Shubkin.  Especially since he knew many of them already.  But he explained the actions of his idol by objective circumstances, harsh necessity and the fact that revolutions are not made wearing kid gloves.  He advised the Admiral to undertake a close rereading of Lenin’s full collected works.  “And then,” he said, “it will become clear even to you that Lenin is a genius.  “If he’s a genius,” the Admiral used to argue, “Then why is this prison camp socialism of ours so badly constructed?”  Shubkin would object, “Lenin didn’t intend to build what exists now, but something better.”  “But a genius,” the Admiral used to say, “builds what he wants to build, not something else.”  “Lenin,” Shubkin would explain, “couldn’t not foresee the inertness of the peasant masses, which would not appreciate the advantages of socialism, and he could not foresee that petit-bourgeois element would work its way up to the leadership of the country, that the leadership would turn aside from the road he has chosen, reject the New Economic Policy and advance too fast into collectivization.”  “But a genius,” the Admiral would persist, “is only a genius if he does foresee things.  It doesn’t take a genius not to foresee things.  We can all do that.”  “Vladimir Ilich,” Shubkin would sigh, “was born a hundred years ahead of his time.” “Well there I agree with you,” the Admiral would say, nodding this head in confirmation, “but at your age you should know that premature children are often retarded.”

 

Shubkin withstood all the Admiral’s onslaughts and for a long time, throughout the sixties and halfway through the seventies, he remained faithful to SCOSWO, and moreover, in doing so he behaved almost entirely in accordance with the behest of Christ, who had told his apostles: Go forth and preach.  Shubkin preached to the old and the young, even to children of preschool age, hammering SCOSWO into children’s heads in a form accessible to them.


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