Meaning as Power

Artists could find icons of the Revolution in the past. Razin could become a Bolshevik, Christ a socialist. Borrowing and revamping old symbols were essential for establishing a new culture. The process has been given considerable and illuminating attention by historians of the French Revolution, who have gauged popular atti-

tudes by the changing face of political icons such as Marianne, the female embodiment of France, and Hercules, the popular battler.^[44] One aspect of the process has, I believe, been neglected: symbols are an instrument as well as a reflector of struggle. At any moment a symbol has a number of potential meanings; and which meaning a symbol gets is often a matter of political struggle. Symbols do not simply acquire meaning; meaning is given. It is not enough to assert that a political power expresses and defines itself with the historical figures it honors.^[45] More emphasis should be put on how history is honored; power expresses itself not in how it defines itself by history but in how it redefines history according to itself. Memory is active and selective; it emphasizes what serves its purposes, rejects what does not. A sign and prerogative of political power is the cooptation of history; and an essential exercise in power is to establish oneself as a focus or center, a set of standards and symbols around which history must be arranged.

Early in 1918 the Bolsheviks, insecure in their power, attempted to create and disseminate their own version of the past with a government-sponsored "competition to produce designs of monuments intended to signalize the great days of the Russian Socialist Revolution."^[46] Since only six months had passed since those "great days," such an attitude was hardly appropriate, and the plan might have been dismissed outright had it not originated at the top: Lenin had suggested it to Lunacharsky, who in his own words was "stunned and dazzled by the proposition. It was extraordinarily to my liking, and we set to its realization immediately."^[47] Included were three undertakings: the removal of monuments raised to the tsars and their "servants"; the renaming of streets and squares; the creation of monuments to the forerunners and heroes of socialism. These three tasks suggested a strategy for creating a new culture. Tearing down the monuments of the old regime would remove its symbols from the Soviet city. Still, all of the national past could not be forgotten or jettisoned. Before a new culture could be created, the remaining elements of the old had to be redefined. In 1918 the monument plan was, for the most part, an effort to grapple with the past: new names were given to old symbols; monuments and symbols that could not be renamed were placed in a new context.

Quick progress was made on the first undertaking: work begun under the Provisional Government on the removal of tsarist emblems from public buildings was continued, and a monument to General Mikhail Skobelev was pulled down as part of the May Day festivities in Moscow. That autumn, monuments to Alexander II and Alexander III

were also removed.^[48] The constructive side of the project was not so quickly commenced. By August 1918 a long list of monuments had been drawn up,^[49] and a most interesting list it was; not only were socialists such as Robert Owen, Jérôme Blanqui,^[50] Marx, and Engels included, but historical "revolutionaries" such as Brutus, Razin, and another Cossack rebel, Ivan Bolotnikov, were honored. Most intriguing was the list of "cultural figures," an eclectic group: writers of socialist sympathies such as Verhaeren found themselves side by side with the likes of Fedor Tiutchev and Rimsky-Korsakov—unlikely champions of socialism.^[51] The monument plan reached its apogee on the November 7 holiday with the unveiling of monuments in the center and outlying districts of Moscow and Petrograd. A representative of the party—in some cases Lenin himself—gave a speech at each unveiling, which then developed into a political rally.^[52] As the original list presaged, the choice of subjects was eclectic: Marx, Engels, and Robespierre were honored, but so were such nonsocialist cultural figures as the poets Aleksei Koltsov and Ivan Nikitin.^[53] Even Dostoevsky was honored, which might have surprised him had he lived to see the Revolution.

Symbols acquire meaning not only through their given properties but through their context. The very fact that a monument had been erected by the revolutionary regime and the subject commemorated suggested a new interpretation: the subject belonged to revolutionary history. For a Brutus or Razin this interpretation was feasible, but when the Bolsheviks claimed the Russian heritage (by honoring Tiutchev, for instance), it was not. To ensure that the desired aspect of each subject was memorialized, the unveiling speech set the tone, and an inscription, chosen from the subject's more progressive statements, was chiseled onto the pedestal. The Chernyshevsky monument, for instance, was graced with the quote: "Create the future, strive for it, work for it, and carry as much of it as you can into the present." The proper interpretation was thus engraved in stone for each viewer.

The monuments, born of symbolic confusion, were often ungainly, and popular understanding resisted the sponsors' interpretations.^[54] Some, like the monuments to Robespierre and Volodarsky, were blown up by vandals. Marx himself seems to have suffered most, and that at the hands of his own admirers. One Moscow Marx was, for some reason, gilded; a Moscow statue of Marx and Engels was nicknamed both "Cyril and Methodius" and "the bearded bathers"; a Petrograd Marx, placed before Smolny Institute, was described as "a horrible statue, . . . thick and heavy, standing on a stout pedestal and holding an enormous

top hat like the muzzle of an eighteen-inch gun behind him"; there was even a plan for a "Karl Marx, standing on four elephants."^[55] His plight drew embarrassing attention:

Karl Marx has fled the town of Penza.

Actually, it wasn't Marx but his recently erected monument.

Contradictory rumors about the causes of his mysterious disappearance are circulating about the city.

Some say that his horse was seized during the recent mobilization, and Marx refused to continue on foot.

Others . . . claim he went looking for a more appropriate site than Penza. He's decided to tour the cities of the Russian Republic, knowing that every city would be flattered to have such a monument but not every city could afford such a luxury. Marx—the monument—will arrive in some city, stand on the square for several days, and then leave for the next city.^[56]

The Lenin plan confronted the old dilemma of how a revolution should celebrate itself by straddling the fence between the permanent and the revolutionary. The two involve contradictory senses of time: the permanent, a sense of eternity in which concrete moments disappear; the revolutionary, a momentary, dynamic present. Lenin seems to have sensed the conflict and suggested naming the plan "monumental propaganda," satisfying both eternal values and the demands of the moment. If this term was not sufficiently unclear, he added, "For the time being I'm not thinking about eternity or even duration."^[57] The weather sensed his ambivalence; most of the monuments, cast in gypsum, melted away in the first rain.

Lenin was not alone in his confusion; it represented utopian longings that were strongest when the struggle was fiercest. The idea had a precedent in the revolutionary tradition: Lenin himself mentioned Campanella and his plan to cover the walls of the City of the Sun with edifying frescoes.^[58] The plan would also have been familiar to the residents of Utopia, who "put up statues in the market-place of people who've distinguished themselves by outstanding services to the community, partly to commemorate their achievements, and partly to spur on future generations to greater efforts, by reminding them of the glory of their ancestors."^[59] A more tangible influence was the efforts of French artists like David (Oath of the Tennis Court ) to memorialize their revolution.^[60]

The oddities of the Lenin plan should not eclipse an important point: the Bolsheviks saw festivals as a source of legitimacy. They could rewrite the past to project their presence back onto it, to include themselves in Eliade's cosmic history. Monuments have great power to alter

the structure of time, a task dear to revolutionaries from Robespierre to Lenin. Revolutionaries, in fact, have often used their newfound power to legislate time. One of the Bolsheviks' first legislative acts, passed on January 23 (February 5), 1918, was to switch from the Julian calendar of the Russian Orthodox church to the Gregorian calendar used in the West. Celebrations of the Romanov dynasty were annulled, but as a concession to the religious feelings of the populace ecclesiastical holidays were retained. There were clear political consequences to the calendar changes—church rites no longer had legal authority^[61] —yet is also true that the calendar change was long overdue.

A May 12 decree published in Izvestiia introducing a new schedule of holidays was close to the radical legislation of revolutionary France. In the brief life of the French Revolution, profound changes were made in the measurement of space, as were equally profound, albeit temporary, changes in the measurement of time. The first and most controversial change was the conversion to metric measurement; its success is shown by the fact that nobody today remembers that it was first legalized by the Convention. Even fewer remember that this wise decision was followed by the legislation of time in an equally logical manner. The year was divided into twelve months of thirty days each, and the seven-day week of Christianity was replaced by a metric ten days. A new era was declared, its advent being the establishment of the Republic.^[62] Bolsheviks, fortunately, were less radical and more generous. The year 1917 remained 1917, and where French workers had exchanged one day off in seven for one in ten, the Russians gained a few holidays: January 1 (New Year's Day), January 22 (Bloody Sunday), March 12 (Overthrow of the Autocracy), March 18 (Paris Commune Day), May 1, and November 7 (the anniversary of the Bolshevik takeover in the new style).^[63]

The Bolsheviks also attempted to claim urban space as their own; streets and squares were renamed during the anniversary celebration. Most of the new names were appropriate in a city that had just overthrown the tsar: Palace Square was renamed Uritsky Square after the recently slain Chekist; Nevsky Prospect became the Prospect of October 25; Palace Bridge became Republican Bridge. Not only central points were changed: Big and Little Gentry Streets became the First and Second Streets of the Rural Poor; and Guardian Street became SelfGoverning Street.^[64] The plan could be bold and aggressive, as when the Iberian Chapel, one of Russia's most sacred shrines, had a plaque reading "Religion is the opium of the people" attached to it for the November 1918 celebration.^[65]

Although the Iberian Chapel plaque was a strong measure, it would

be an overstatement to say that the Bolsheviks, having seized political control, could manipulate symbols at will. Symbols do not always succumb to redefinition; nor can the redefiner assume that the new definition will be accepted. Pilgrims continued to stream into the Iberian Chapel until Stalin leveled it in the 1930s; and unpredictable symbols upset festivals from the very start.

Symbols sometimes gave notice that they were real things, not to be manipulated freely. Airplanes were considered an outstanding emblem of modern science, which Bolsheviks liked to think was on their side. Moscow artists, including Vladimir Tatlin and Kuznetsov, proposed decorating fifteen airplanes, which would perform aerial stunts over Khodynka Field.^[66] The intractability of the symbol, however, was discovered in Petrograd, where a plane hired to fly over the celebration crashed in the center of town, killing the pilot and embarrassing the government.^[67] Monuments were also unreliable. The dangers of appropriating national or folk heroes into the revolutionary pantheon were made plain at the monument to Taras Shevchenko (see Figure 8), the Ukrainian poet who "with his peasant instinct understood the idea of the Internationale long before its dissemination," when a delegation from the Ukrainian consulate offered a wreath in the name of Hetman Pavel Skoropadsky, head of the nationalist and anti-Bolshevik government.^[68]

Perhaps most dangerous in the symbolic game was the outright negation or desecration of an opposing symbol. The Kremlin, which had become the center of Bolshevik power, also had a long history as the symbolic center of the Russian autocracy and Orthodox Church. Iakov Sverdlov ordered the Kremlin commandant to decorate its walls with Soviet symbols and gave him an unlimited budget for the task. On the Troitsky Tower an icon, one of the more sacred of Orthodoxy, was covered by a large panel of a hero in red, flying over the earth.^[69] An overwhelmingly religious crowd was offended, and when the panel was blown down by the wind, revealing the icon, rumors of a divine portent spread through Red Square. In the end, the Latvian Riflemen were called in to quell a riot.^[70]