The Russian Revolution as Utopian “Leap”: The Socialist “New Person”

Abstract

Ernst Bloch argued for seeing beyond reality that is “merely factual” toward the “not-yet-become,” the “ocean of possibility” beyond “our customary land of reality.” Walter Benjamin recast the old Marxist metaphor of revolution as a “leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom” as a “leap in the open air of history,” where humanity might grasp “splinters of messianic time.” These metaphors allow us to venture beyond the conventional dismissal of the Russian Revolution as “utopian” in the sense of fanciful wish at odds with “reality.” Without ignoring failures to overcome the darkness of lived reality, much less idealism that produces new brutalities, this chapter views the history of Russian socialism from the 1830s into the 1920s as a history of human refusal to bow before the supposed wisdom of accepting what is as the only reality. I focus on the question of the human person (chelovek, lichnost’), and especially the “New Person,” in Russian revolutionary thought through arguments about self, society, gender, love, freedom, morality, and social revolution by Vissarion Belinsky in the 1840s, Nikolai Chernyshevsky in his 1862 novel What Is to Be Done? Stories About New People, and Alexandra Kollontai from 1905 to 1923.