Source: Moravia, Albertio - Un mese in Urss - 2013
Translation: lamescholar - 2025-05-17
In 1956, Italian writer Alberto Moravia visited USSR and published articles about it in the newspaper Corriere della Sera. Later, in 1958, he published a book Un mese in Urss. Below is the fourth chapter Provincialismo e civiltà meccanica in Urss.
IV.
PROVINCIALISM AND MECHANICAL CIVILIZATION IN THE USSR
What are the distinctive features of industrial civilization? We believe they are three: industrial civilization is rich, meaning its machines produce in large, sometimes excessive, abundance a huge quantity of various goods of good quality; industrial civilization is functional, meaning it reflects in its external aspects the rationality, economy, utility, nakedness, essentiality that is unique to machines; and finally, industrial civilization is also a mechanical civilization, meaning it produces a society similar to itself, organized and articulated, just like a machine, in social, intellectual, and psychological relationships.
These three characteristics are primarily found in the United States and more or less in all industrialized nations worldwide, but not in the Soviet Union, which is nonetheless the second largest industrial power in the world. In other words, in Marxist terms, there exists in the USSR a discrepancy, or mismatch, between the structure created by the revolution and the superstructure; that is, between the high degree of industrial progress and the aspects of urban life.
First of all: the overall appearance of urban life in the Soviet Union (I’m talking about the big cities especially, it’s less surprising in small provincial towns) is not that of wealth, but of poverty. A sober, uniform, dignified, and unadorned poverty of the working class. This poverty, or rather, this modest simplicity, however, doesn’t contrast, as it sometimes does in the West, with the splendor of a production of luxurious consumer goods, made for a narrow class of rich people; I would say that in the USSR urban life has this appearance not so much because the people are truly poor (we know instead that everyone has savings, even the lowest categories), but because there is little to buy and that little is of modest quality. Let’s roughly consider the State Monopolies in Italy, which, all of a sudden, in addition to tobacco, began to produce other consumer goods, indeed all consumer goods, from clothing to furnishings, from perfumes to jewelry, from foodstuffs to tableware, and all with the familiar style and taste, that is, the style of cigarette boxes. I have spoken several times in public in the USSR, and when it came to audience interventions, one of the most frequent questions was: “Please criticize the USSR”; or: “What didn’t you like about the USSR.” I usually responded that the production of consumer goods didn’t seem so varied or of such good quality as it should have been and could have been. And a murmur of approval spread through the room.
From this production of goods, still insufficient in quality, variety, and quantity, stems, as I have said, the immense working-class suburban aspect of urban life in the USSR. I arrived in Moscow on May 2nd, with the entire city still covered in cobblestones and the streets crowded with a festive crowd. The large, dark buildings on Gorki Street were all a swirling of red banners alternating with gigantic portraits of the current members of the Government. But beneath this magnificent blaze of purple banners, the crowd, on the pavements, was uniformly dressed, mostly in dark colors, often without hats and without ties. This crowd, however, was not composed only of workers, as it might appear at first sight; it was the Soviet crowd, including, besides the workers, intellectuals, bureaucrats, peasants, students, shop assistants, and so on. Seeing this crowd (and then the impression was confirmed by visiting public places, private homes, and gatherings) one understood that the revolution, even before being socialist, had been egalitarian: all citizens of the USSR, since 1917, had been brought to the level of the worker: and today they cannot hope to improve their condition unless together with the worker.
The face of the Soviet Union is the austere, gray, solemn face of the working humanity. But do not think of the workers, let us say, of Detroit or Turin; here we are dealing with the Marxist worker, as he has been so often described by the manuals of socialism, the worker who rebelled against the capital of capitalism, only to adopt as gospel Marx’s Capital. And it’s here that one must make a constatation certainly not new, but indispensable, in my opinion, to understand the USSR: the assertion of so many communist leaders that the Soviet Union had achieved socialism but not yet communism — that is, it has carried out the collective industrial revolution but has not yet created a classless society — is not just a political argument, it’s a real fact. The Soviet worker, and with him the society of this country, is still class-conscious; in the sense that the style and original way of life of the working class have extended in this country to all categories and all groups without exception.
The symbol of this class assertion can be found in the figure of Lenin, as consecrated by official iconography: humble, unfashionable garments and a working cap. In this sense, the formula “dictatorship of the proletariat” acquires no propagandistic meaning, but rather indicates a concrete, physical, visible state of affairs; and explains, besides the overall aspect of urban life in the USSR, many other things: statism, coercive powers, propaganda, and in short, the totalitarianism that was dominant in the USSR only yesterday. The classless society, of course, should tomorrow erase even the memory of the current class face of the USSR. But this society cannot exist unless and until there is a production of varied consumer goods, of good quality, and in abundance. Only then will there be in the USSR the equivalent of what in the United States is called the middle class, i.e., a technologically advanced high-level society.
I posed the question to official figures, for example, the Deputy Minister of Culture: “Do you believe that the light industry will be developed? Or will you continue to favor heavy industry?” The answer was always the same: “We are aware of the shortcomings of light industry. But for now, our main focus goes to heavy industry.”
This response illuminates various phenomena and problems of the USSR: from the scarcity of housing, especially in the two major centers of Leningrad and Moscow (if the USSR were to devote itself fully to building houses, it should simultaneously greatly increase the production of consumer goods), to the gigantic colonization program of Siberia (three million people should emigrate there within the next five years); from the reclamation of the so-called fallow lands (Kazakhstan, almost as large as Europe, once a desolate expanse of steppes), to the difficulties of exchange between the countryside and the cities (a greater availability of consumer goods would attract a larger quantity of provisions from the kolkhozes to the cities). Naturally, however, one must not forget, when speaking of the austerity of urban life in the USSR, what I would call the communist mentality. It is certainly determined by the scarcity of consumer goods; but in turn it determines it by diverting the Soviet citizen from the development of individual tastes and channeling his ambitions towards social goals.
Secondly, the external appearance of urban life in the Soviet Union is not functional, meaning it is not what one might imagine knowing the country’s enormous industrial development. Take one example: airports. An airport in Europe and America is the place where industrial civilization becomes futurist, where one seems to glimpse, for a brief moment, the world as it might be tomorrow: long windows overlooking vast, abstract landing fields, metal, crystal, cleanliness, sparkle, nakedness. But airports in the USSR aren’t avant-garde; they’re frankly relics. The large ones evoke neoclassical salons of Tsarist landowners, while the small ones resemble bourgeois salons like those in which Chekhov’s dramas unfold.
I remember one morning, around six, that I had to wait more than an hour at a remote airport in Kazakhstan. I sat beside the suitcases and, with the sharp focus that sometimes comes with interrupted sleep, I observed everything. Hanging at the windows were velvet drapes (the whole of the USSR was paraded in this state velvet, glittering and dark, now red and now blue); beneath the drapes were fixed, pierced and embroidered curtains; and beneath these fixed curtains, at the windows, half-pleated shutters. Many tables were covered with heavy carpets with floral and bird designs; the armchairs had summer upholstery. On the tables, above the carpets, there were embroidered doilies and above the doilies vases of flowers wrapped in moss-green paper. On the floor, there were carpets of Bochara and Samarcanda of modern manufacture; on the walls, red damask and above the damask, hanging slanting like so many family portraits, were the paintings by Khrushchev, Voroshilov, Malenkov, Bulganin. Stalin was depicted in a vast painting, standing against a landscape reddened by the aurora; a statue of Stalin, made of white-painted plaster, raised its arm in a corner. In another corner was the famous and flattering group of Lenin listening deferentially to Stalin. Everywhere, plush toys, lampshades with fringe and tassels, fabrics, flowers, nineteenth-century extravagance.
I spoke about airports because the neoclassical or Luigi Filippo style airport is almost incredible; but the same argument could be made for hotels, restaurants, meeting places, and, in short, all public places. In conclusion, without going into too much detail, I will simply say that in the USSR, the same spectacle was everywhere: a working-class crowd or people dressed like workers living in public and private environments in variously nineteenth-century styles (ranging from grand neoclassical to Luigi Filippo and Art Nouveau to Piacentino style). The architectural and decorative style preferred by Stalin was, in fact, the one that in Italy distinguishes the buildings designed by architect Piacentini). This fact must be emphasized first of all because it provides an explanation of the very particular and, in its own way, original atmosphere constantly out of tune of urban life in the USSR, secondly because it indicates the lack of functionality of this life in terms of the industrial revolution, that is, as I have already said, the lack of correspondence between structure and superstructure.
Third, finally: in the Soviet Union, society, at least for now, has not been appreciably influenced by machinery — it has not acquired its practical, utilitarian, simplified, rationalized characteristics. As far as I’ve been able to observe and reconstruct through many varied meetings and experiences, and also taking into account the way the last dramatic political events occurred in the USSR (Khrushchev’s report on Stalin), I could say that society in the USSR is still nineteenth-century, and what happens there is much more like what happens in Dostoevsky’s novels or Chekhov’s short stories than in Hemingway’s or Italian neorealist narratives. The Soviet society, at first glance, appears a Puritan, psychological, ceremonial, complicated, highly nuanced and individually graded society, all under the collective uniformity, far from lacking what Freud calls complexes, dominated at the same time by an intense and patriotic sense of social belonging, whose rigid ideological strictness can be witnessed by the suicides of Mayakovsky and Fadeev (the former committed suicide at the beginning of Stalinism because conformists banned him; the latter at the end of Stalinism, because iconoclasts banned him). The mechanization that in social relations is called elsewhere psychoanalysis, Enlightenment, rationalism, taboo criticism, paganism, neopositivism, functionalism, has exerted no influence on Soviet society.
It’s essentially still a Victorian society; meaning a society that makes itself the most distant possible image from reality. This is the result of social and psychological censorship created by two revolutions and various terrible and victorious wars; and the least we can say is that this censorship is so powerful and so profound that the Soviet society still has a very long period of growth and development ahead of it. The Protestant society of North America, to take just one example, took almost three centuries to arrive at self-criticism. Naturally, Soviet society demands that the positive image it creates of itself be reflected in art. Thus we have the phenomenon, otherwise incomprehensible, of Socialist Realism — i.e., Stalinist conformity — in literature, figurative arts, theatre, and music.
It would now remain to draw the conclusion of this hasty raid. The conclusion is one and simple: the Soviet Union is a country of peasants, two-thirds of whom live in the countryside and one-third in the cities. The peasants in the countryside, gathered in kolkhozes and sovkhozes, work the land; the peasants in the cities are workers, bureaucrats, intellectuals, politicians, and military personnel. From this character, fundamentally peasant-derived, in my opinion, stems the non-functionality of the superstructure relative to the industrial structure, the austerity and puritanism of urban life, that certain “something” of rustic, familial, slow, and affectionate that is noticeable everywhere in the USSR, even where machinery dominates. It is, therefore, a new humanity, born primarily from the emancipation of the serfs in the second half of the nineteenth century, which, while retaining the mentality of the peasant, has nonetheless seized control of modern mechanical technology and literally built the largest industrial empire in the world today, after that of the United States, with the sweat of its brow.
To clarify this concept, several historical comparisons could be made. One could say that the revolution was a massive armed peasant uprising, armed with a supremely modern ideology and guided to victory by some political geniuses. The other historical parallel can be drawn with the Protestant Reformation. In contrast to the papal Rome, which was too refined and too pagan, Luther raised up the revolt of serious and simple people who could not understand the mixture of profanity and religion of the Roman Church; similarly, the Russian peasantry did not want or could follow its Tsarist leaders on the path of what later became known as European decadence.
The Revolution had revived the naive and sublime idea of indefinite scientific progress, where it had abandoned it in its entirety in the late nineteenth century (the fateful date being the crushing of the Paris Commune by the French bourgeoisie in 1870), and had left everything done after that period to fall or be rejected. The Tsarist society had gone very far: this is evidenced, at least, by the magnificent collections of French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists acquired by Russian patrons, now passed to the State; but the peasants stood their ground and clung fanatically to the true nineteenth century, to that of Marx, Darwin, scientific progress, and democracy. From this revolt against the rear of Europe until 1870 arose the partly right, but largely false idea that everything that had been done in Europe after that date was decadent, corrupt, bourgeois, in short. This idea also explains why Russia is still stuck in the nineteenth century today.
Hence the provincialism of life in the USSR and, ultimately, the impression one brings back is that Russia cannot be too long separated from Europe; that there are no two civilizations, one capitalist and one communist, but only one equal civilization in the world; that the center of creative world is still in Europe; and that, in the end, the divorce from Europe has cost Russia more than it has cost Europe.
However, this divorce has had some positive aspects. It is enough to mention what, in fact, forms the subject of these notes: the Industrial Revolution. It was carried out in Russia under conditions, all things considered, better than those in Western countries. Russia benefited from the painful and degrading experiences of the early stages of industrialization in the West (those experiences from which Marx’s Capital emerged) and was able to initiate its own industrial revolution with broader, more modern, and more humane methods. All the labor struggles that lasted almost a century in the West found expression in the worker condition in the USSR, which should not be compared to the current one in the West (although in some cases this comparison would return to its advantage), but to that of the beginning of the industrial revolution in England, France and Germany.
On the other hand, it is true that the mindset of the Soviet man is rather that of a peasant rather than that of a citizen of an industrial civilization. But this gentler, more complete, and healthier mindset may perhaps tomorrow, by grafting itself onto the industrial revolution carried out with modern ideas and methods, contribute to giving us (in conjunction with Anglo-Saxon and European experiences) the new man of the modern world, that citizen, in the end, of the mechanical civilization who will probably be neither communist nor American. In other terms, the classless society dreamed of by Marx is not a utopia but a reality in progress, not only in the USSR but also elsewhere. It is closely linked to modern phenomena such as mechanization and automation, and if it will not be better than the societies that preceded it in the world, it will, in compensation, be more suitable for these new conditions created by science.