Terrible Beauty
On the gothic revolutionary poetics of Larisa Reisner.
When Cathy Porter asked me to join her for this online launch of her two books — the first a paperback edition of her Reisner biography, recently published by Haymarket Books, the second a translation of Reisner’s writing now on sale from Brill as part of the Historical Materialism book series — I was flattered of course. But I was also confused.
Flattered, because a more accomplished peer thought my words would well accompany her own. Confused, because I am by no means an expert on Larisa Reisner. I am not alone in this regard. Despite a dazzling life spent agitating and writing from the frontlines of the Russian Revolution and Civil War, Reisner is often missing from the short list of truly great socialist authors. That is part of the tragedy.
For my own part, I had rarely thought to engage with Reisner’s work until Porter and I became acquainted at Historical Materialism in London. Thus my surprise when she asked me to speak at her book launch. I am, however, grateful I said yes. Reading the galleys Porter sent me of her and Richard Chappell’s translations of Reisner’s work, I encountered a writer unafraid to raise a red flag at the abyss. To my mind, there are far too few of these writers on what we call the modern radical left. Too few writers willing to stare the realities of disaster capitalism square on and ask what we might salvage as a weapon, more contented with the same half-honest bromides and truisms. Too few writers acknowledging that the promise of socialism is in fact a gamble.
So that’s what I spoke about, alongside Porter and Sezgin Boynik of Rab-Rab Press. Paul Reynolds of HM chaired. It’s in the video above, and my remarks are in the lightly edited text below.
It is often forgotten that the Russian Revolution took place in the midst of apocalypse. Even the revolution’s defenders – stubborn though we may be – have a tendency to downplay this reality. Perhaps it is an attempt to refute the arguments of the establishment that the revolution was itself an apocalypse. It is understandable that we might want to overadjust, eliding the desperation and social decay. We diminish the degree to which events that surrounded the revolution made most of Russia, Europe, and the rest of the world, tremble at the prospect of oblivion.
It wasn’t just the profound inequality, the unrelenting poverty and horrendous working conditions. It wasn’t just that working people daily confronted starvation, disease, destitution, maiming, or early death. These were, well before 1917, commonplace. Rather, it was how industrialized war and empire seemed to accelerate these in the form of collapsing stability and wholesale slaughter.
Before the Second World War, the First World War was simply called “the Great War,” and it was a fitting appellation. This was, after all, not only the first war to involve virtually every known nation and territory on what was by then a thoroughly globalized and integrated planet. The Great War was the first “modern war.” Technological and industrial marvels were directed toward making mass murder more efficient than ever before. Telegraph and newspapers ensured that most people knew about the latest massacre within days, each report describing yet another town or field reduced to a stretch of mud, corpses, and barbed wire.
The end of the world, therefore, seemed quite possible, indeed more likely than most people could ever remember. Events in the weeks leading up to the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in Petrograd confirm as much. China Mieville, in his October: The Story of the Revolution, chronicles the breakdown of order, the chaos that gripped the cities as the provisional government’s authority deteriorated.
It is important to keep this in mind because otherwise we risk forgetting just how much was at stake to the revolutionary workers who took over their factories, the peasants who rose up in the country, the soldiers and sailors who turned their rifles on their commanding officers. Yes, these were people for whom history had left no choice, but they were also gripped by the idea that they could make the future into something so much better. In other words, the Russian Revolution forged one of the primary dialectics of the 20th century: the idea that utopia could be snatched from the jaws of apocalypse, Rosa Luxemburg’s “socialism or barbarism” made vividly real.
This dialectic infuses the poetics of Larisa Reisner’s writings. We know of course that Reisner was not just a writer, but a revolutionary activist and diplomat, someone who put the survival of the revolution first, and clearly put her writing toward that task too. But Reisner doesn’t merely recount events, crucial though that is to any revolutionary history, as borne out in John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World or Leon Trotsky’s own The History of the Russian Revolution.
No, what Reisner’s reports convey is a specific structure of feeling, the way in which revolutionary situations tightly wind together hope and despair, destruction and creativity, the beauty and heroism of self-sacrifice, and the devastating losses of battle.
This is easily dramatized in her work at the front of the Civil War, when a dozen-plus imperialist armies attempted to smother the revolution under the same tank treads and ordnances that had already mowed down millions. Reisner’s description of the Red Army’s defense of towns like Kazan and Svyazhsk, of a rural village reduced to what she called “a Goyaesque vision of hell,” the contrast between blown up railroad trains and the shores of the Caspian Sea, the magnificent architecture of Astrakhan towering over nearby steppes and swamps; these all paint us a picture of a massive and ancient region in dramatic flux, thrust from backwardness into a struggle between radically different and competing visions of the future.
Trotsky — an effusive public admirer of Reisner’s work — would no doubt find resonance in these scenes. It was his specific formulations of uneven and combined development, built on those of Marx and Alexander Parvus, that explained how Russia had become ripe for socialist revolution, not despite its temporal juxtaposition, but because of it. How modernity had thrust itself on an empire of illiterate and isolated peasants, jarring them into the conditions of cosmopolitanism and collective struggle; these are well-documented in Russia. They set the stage for history’s most anachronized and “left behind” to step into the vanguard of history.
Reisner’s writings highlight these dizzying contradictions and the fierce struggles that they produced. She noted them across Russia, Ukraine, and beyond. She hinted at these same potentials when she described Afghanistan, during her time as a diplomat there. She described workshops and mills carved into the sides of mountains, where iron looms drowned out the sound of nearby bazaars through stone walls hundreds of years old. Conditions were cruel and oppressive, more akin to indentured servitude.
Even here, though, we see Reisner observe hope in the cracks of uneven and combined development. Again, she uses the dark works of painter Francisco Goya to describe these conditions. Again, she sees them as yielding revolutionary-utopian possibility. For sure, these are the kinds of conditions that can just as easily pave the way for fascism, particularly pivoting from the examples of British colonialism, as Reisner argued in her essay “Fascists in Asia.” But this same, wildly contradictory reality also creates fractures and gaps through which mass movements for liberation can pass.
“Yet here in in Kabul’s old fortress,” Reisner wrote, “where workers are beaten with sticks, and the living corpses of children and old men cut the cloths of their shrouds with the scissors of Goya’s devils, the proletarian yeast is rising… If possessions could bring happiness or unhappiness, I wouldn’t envy the owners of the cloaks and blankets made from this cloth, steeped in healthy class hatred.”
It is, however, worth stressing that Reisner didn’t just identify these frictive histories in the underdeveloped nations. Her time in Germany, then the most advanced industrial power in Europe, found these same patterns. Here, in the Weimar Republican interregnum between the fall of Kaiser Wilhelm and the rise of Nazism, German society buckled under its own weight. The contrast between industrial strength and urbanization, cultural decadence, and abject deprivation is again illustrated as backdrop for revolutionary possibility.
“Berlin is starving,” she wrote in 1923. “Starvation haunts the buses, shutting its eyes on the spinning upper decks to the advertisements, desolation and motor horns reeling past like drunks.” In Hamburg, meanwhile, overcrowded dormitories and dreary town squares – miles from the factories and shipyards – serve as the setting for fierce debates between workers and union bureaucrats, communists and social democrats.
It’s not just that Reisner’s eye wasn’t merely keen for the contradictions of uneven and combined development as well as the more catastrophic, ruinous, Goya-esque characteristics of post-Great War capitalism. Rather, she rightly sees them as dialectically inextricable. Not altogether unlike Evan Calder Williams’ notion of combined and uneven apocalypse, theorized in his 2011 book of the same name. Just as capitalism’s spread will leap over and subsume in its path everything it has yet to devour, so will its collapse give way to tears in the fabric of daily life. That which was once paradise is now host to wreckage.
If this is true, then there is another heuristic stalking Reisner’s poetics: that of redemption. Not in the biblical sense, but in the sense of a kind of secular theology, akin to Walter Benjamin’s concept of history. This is redemption as making whole, a bringing together of the fragments left behind by the catastrophe of unilinear progress, history’s detritus suddenly seizing and reshaping what had once shaped them.
Walter Benjamin and Larisa Reisner never crossed paths. Benjamin did visit Soviet Russia in 1926, but it was several months after Reisner’s untimely death from typhoid fever at the age of 30. We do know that Benjamin had at least a passing familiarity with Reisner’s work; she was one of many topics related to Soviet culture introduced to him by his lover, the Latvian Bolshevik, actor, and avant-garde theatre director Asja Lacis. If Lacis is understood as the decisive influence in Benjamin’s conversion to Marxism, then those familiar with both his work and that of Reisner may be able to pick out where their preoccupations overlap, despite very different approaches to the principles of materialism and socialist revolution.
Both were acutely aware of the catastrophes that lay in front of them, even more aware than most other Marxists, it would seem. Both were also aware, however, that capitalism’s catastrophes made history incredibly contingent. Though events may bring us to the precipice of several specific outcomes, no one outcome is guaranteed. Whether the prospect of apocalypse, of mass collapse and extermination, comes in the form of barbed wire and mustard gas, or through an ecological balance popping at the seams, it is only by facing the reality of these catastrophes that we can hope to suss out the edges and contours of a socialist future. That future is, as always, a gamble, though a surprisingly resilient one.
“Once in a century people discover a new truth, which they defend to the last drop of their blood,” wrote Reisner. “And mixed with these beautiful words, terrible in their beauty, is the smell of sweat, the living breath of those sleeping next to each other on the floor. No nightmares, no sentimentality… Tomorrow someone will die, knowing in their last moments that death is only one of many possibilities, not the main one at all, and that [the city] still hasn’t been taken, and that the message scribbled in chalk on the dirty wall, ‘Workers of the World Unite,’ is still there.”