The Mythical Context of October 1917

With the 2022 outbreak of open hostilities in the Russo-Ukrainian War, commentary on the conflict has emphasized its intimate relation to history, both as twenty-first century anachronism and twentieth-century specter. In a sense, it is a tautology to refer to any war as "historical" given Carl von Clausewitz's maxim that "war is a continuation of politics by other means"1 and in observation of history's enlistment to support politics of every sort. History is wielded by all parties to the conflict. Russia appears to wield it in an intensely mythical context of the sort that turns history into nature. History indeed is a stated battleground of Russia in its newest Foreign Policy Concept (FPC), signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin on March 31, 2023, which seeks to assert historical truth and counter those falsifications used to persecute Russia and minimize its historical accomplishments as synonymous with the Soviet Union. The FPC positions Russia as a uniquely "Eurasian" multicultural and multiethnic "country-civilization" with a singular historical mission to preserve undefined traditional moral and spiritual values, to counter colonialism and Western hegemony, and to induce the historically inevitable coming of a politically multipolar world.The FPC came a week after Chinese President Xi Jinping's high-profile visit to Russia designed to publicly affirm China's diplomatic and economic ties, as well as their unique partnership in bringing about that inevitable world order. While Putin made a toast quoting the I Ching to relay that the populations of Russia and China share a "common soul," and recalled their Cold War–era alliance only to contrast it with the superior nature of their current relationship,2 Xi more explicitly referenced the revolutionary origins of their relationship by reiterating that current global geopolitical change is the most significant seen in a century.The anticipated historical coming of multipolarity is a timid shadow of the future anticipated by the early Soviet Union and China, which sought nothing less than the total destruction of the old order (not its multiplicity), and the creation of not only a new world, but a new global subject in the emancipated proletarian. This is made more stark by Xi recalling the period of revolutionary furor surrounding the founding of the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party, and the relative stagnation and implied superfluidity of the remaining twentieth century.The twentieth century as a philosophical object explored by Alain Badiou is characterized by dissatisfaction with the status quo and unfulfilled promise among revolutionary forces, both left and right wing, which sought renewal through nihilistic violence he deems an enthusiasm for the "real," and which exists in contrast to the triumph of liberal mediocrity that characterizes the close of the twentieth century and possesses its own market-driven barbarisms. For Badiou, "The Century" is not reducible to a historical unit of time but is an ontological construct within which novel possibilities of thought are exhibited that see humanity as "raw material" to be shaped in order to bring about a promised future.3What traces remain of the century's schema in contemporary Chinese and Russian rhetoric is that of struggle, fought in every arena—not just military, but economy, science, and art. All of which were historic areas of cooperation between the USSR and China for a fleeting period lasting roughly from the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 to the Sino-Soviet split by 1961. It is the legacy of artistic cooperation that sets the stage for Shanshan Xia's documentary October: The Unrealized Century, to which I will now turn as it elucidates the nature of this contemporary relationship between China and Russia and contextualizes its current manifestation.Released in 2018, October follows the 2017 journey of the Chinese contemporary artist Cai Guo-Qiang in Moscow on the eve of the centenary celebration of the October Revolution that gave rise to the Soviet Union. The anticipated anniversary looms throughout the film's plot as Cai embarks on a tripartite quest to help coordinate the fireworks component of the celebrations at Red Square, organize his coinciding eponymously titled solo exhibition at the Pushkin State Museum, and find and pay tribute at the grave of Konstantin Maksimov, a Soviet-era painter who travelled to China at the height of Sino-Soviet relations in the 1950s and aided the PRC in developing their own program of oil painting. These stakes for Cai ultimately serve as a backdrop to elucidate a shared history between China and the Soviet Union, a shared history based on common ideals and hardships, but also on a common optimism for a bright future to which their cooperation briefly testified. This "unrealized century" that was promised but never arrived was glimpsed and embodied in figures like Maksimov who left China in 1957, the year Cai was born. This shared history is also articulated in a shared realist arts program through which Cai was initially trained, but that also instilled within him a clear utopian longing against which the realities presented in the film serve as a foil.The mood of the film is very much one of nostalgia, even sentimentality: traits generally considered anathema to the narrative of heroic overcoming that animated both the avant-garde art movements and the vanguardist revolutionaries of the twentieth century motivated with a common energy. It begins with grainy film footage of Moscow streets and revolutionary monuments that appear to have been recorded on Cai's own handheld 8mm camera. The montage evokes a kind of amateur family vacation film aesthetic as Cai can be heard quietly humming the "Internationale." This immediately exemplifies a shared international communist heritage possessed by both Russia and China, but also sets the tone for how much the situation has changed, both in their respective relationship to the ideal of international revolution and to each other. For much of its history, culturally, politically, and economically, Russia existed on the periphery of Europe and of the modernizing impulse that had been developed in the West. Suddenly, with the vanguardist October Revolution, Russia was instead placed at the forefront of a new political movement and a new model of modernization. It had experienced both aspects of the status of the peripheral: from marginal provincialism, whose affectations merely testified to the esteem of the emulated center, to suddenly becoming a site of rupture looked upon as a model of renewal by cultural intelligentsia of that center, its prior marginal status even lending credibility to its moral claims as revolutionary vanguard. These dynamics of contestation more or less played out for China in relation not only to Western modernity, but to the Soviet Union as well, and even internally as an ongoing process of negation and renewal that necessarily found its way into the arena of the fine arts.Christine Ho documents the politically and culturally charged debates within China around prescribed art forms, specifically around drawing within a realist formal sensibility of which Cai and his generation are a product and share as a common cultural experience. She describes how the Chinese state understood what was at stake in the 1950s and developed a comprehensive arts education that followed a Western academic model in privileging drawing as a foundational skill of the plastic arts. What was essential about this program of education was not only the visual literacy conferred, and the concomitant mental and social transformation it sought, but the fact that it established a common source of experience and was carried out according to the prescribed and defining modern notions of calculability, methodical behavior, and reflexivity—features that define modernity itself. As such, drawing within a socialist realist milieu standardized variation itself, and collapsed art and the artist into lived political reality in an effort to realize an aesthetic strategy that Ho quotes Boris Groys as describing as an "optimal equivalence of text and the real world, the effacement of author as creator."4 The social relevance of the original Russian realist painters such as Ilya Repin, whom Cai briefly mentions with praise, came from their depiction of the social political realities of their time, and it was this feature of "persuasive image-making" that the programmatic arts of revolutionary China sought to reproduce.5 A key component of this strategy was having artists travel into the countryside, suburbs, and worksites to spend anywhere from a week to a month as a political exercise of "going into life" in order to gain distance from the theoretical setting of the studio, and collapse the distance between the artist and their subject.6 This was in keeping with PRC founder Mao Zedong's antimodern modernism, which sought to erase social stratification, expressed in his directive to remove three social paradigmatic differences: between workers and peasants, between town and country, and between mental and manual labor.7 While the Soviet context reconciled the existence of art as an institution through socialist realist content, the Chinese context instead engaged with that avant-garde tendency that sought to preempt the reification of art by addressing the limits of its social reproduction. In a similar strategy to the incipient foray of Soviet constructivists, Chinese artists turned this drive for overcoming inward by collapsing their identity as artist intellectuals into lived political reality. Unlike the constructivists, however, they avoided the more ill-fated reification of art that exceeds its own limits.Cai is no stranger to these limits. While discussing his anticipated fireworks display in the film, he digresses into a discussion of the common "roles" and limits that the artist as subject position may occupy "whether in China, in Russia, or any country." Early in the film, Cai discusses the impact Maksimov had in China with the Russian Dean of the State University's Confucius Institute, saying he was a broad influence on the artists of his generation and had "the greatest impact on the Chinese people." The dean, however, is unfamiliar with him. Again and again, in spite of the reverence Cai holds for him, his inquiries about Maksimov are met with degrees of puzzlement by Russians, including Maksimov's surviving son who did not keep any of his paintings and plainly states they were not close. Although cordial, their lack of knowledge about Maksimov or interest in his work in contrast to Cai's enthusiasm is stark. When Cai meets Nikolay Solomin, someone who knew Maksimov personally, Cai's questions come across as probing for some assurance of Maksimov's esteem within Russia and in relation to his work in China, which this acquaintance makes no effort to humor. Although personally fond of Maksimov and of his art, Solomin lays bare the reality that he "didn't have the ability to influence Soviet art history" and that his relative obscurity within Russia is at least partially the result of his sojourn in China. Such testimony serves to imply multiple layers of obscurity for Chinese realist painting, having been largely founded by an artist marginal to later Soviet art that was itself marginal to the Western beaux arts, which, having been overcome, was now marginal to the Western avant-garde.Cai is of course an artist of not such marginal status, making his admiration for Maksimov all the more conspicuous. His cosmopolitan success is in no small part related to China's incorporation into globalized markets and political and cultural frameworks necessitated by what Wang Hui identifies as Chinese "New Enlightenment thinking" incorporated into the post-Mao socialist reforms. This is essentially a resolution of the contest between Mao's Marxism as an anti-capitalist, antimodern ideology of modernization and Marxism as an ideology of modernization stripped of Mao's inefficiencies and idealizations.8 New Enlightenment thinking, with its fetish for the Western intellectual tradition and market economy, once again places China on the periphery in order to further elicit a competitive spirit within it. China's much talked about rise has caused the already complicated relationship between it and Russia to evolve. Originally deferential to the Soviet Union for economic, military, political, and cultural support, then in competition over the vanguard of global communism, China and Russia's relationship appears in the film to hinge on an intertwined history of modernization and antagonism from the West. However, in the drive to integrate into the new global order following the rapid dissolution of the socialist bloc, China has been far more successful than Russia, all the while keeping some aspect of its (at least nominal) socialist credentials. Despite Putin's speech within the film celebrating Moscow's status as "one of the most modern megacities in the world," Cai's contemporary art exhibition within the Pushkin itself serves as an allegory of their relationship and relative levels of success in negotiating the periphery. The affected neoclassical features of the museum recall Russia's precommunist provincialism and eagerness to escape it following a Western European model—an anxiety that seems to have returned in the 1990s but is perhaps now looked upon as sour grapes.9Cai provides a diagnosis of the Russian people against B-roll close-up footage of statues including those of Vladmir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, saying they "need a way of thinking," lamenting that "nobody's giving them a way of thinking" and adding "they don't know what it is they're meant to adopt." This ambiguity of Russia's place in the world is underscored by Cai's discussion with the Chinese Deputy Culture Minister Ding Wei about his planned fireworks display. Wei questions if the presentation is "not too Red," based on an impression of Russian sensitivity or reticence when it comes to the topics of communism and socialism, and suggests Cai depoliticize and rearticulate the display as history so as not to give the impression that they are agitating for a revolution. If Wei's hesitation is valid, it begs the question of what sustains the continuing relationship between China and Russia.Such a question was indirectly raised by an audience member at the 2023 Valdai Forum following Putin's speech at the forum's plenary session. Citing the current threats from the West and the historical legacy of communism and the "children of 1917"—which includes the USSR, China, and Vietnam—in fighting fascism and imperialism, Putin was asked if it was time to "reevaluate" and celebrate Russia's relationship to 1917. Putin responded that while it would be "harmful" to totally disavow 1917, that a certain myopia is inherent to class politics in the face of purely "geopolitical" realities. Putin referenced the United States' at least partial success in turning China against the Soviet Union, which he contrasts with their current relationship, noting the West does not oppose China's rise on ideological grounds, but realpolitik. In effect, Russia is opposed to Western imperialism pragmatically because it has been its target, not because it stands for the internationalist principles of class struggle as was the official rhetoric of the Soviet Union and other "children of 1917."The "Internationale" leftist anthem serves as a motif in the film, appearing when Cai hums it in the intro, attempts to ephemerally reproduce its lyrics in his fireworks display, and sings it with an acquaintance at his exhibition opening, all three of which are titled October. This former anthem of the Soviet Union is a shibboleth of a shared experience for any who grew up in the socialist bloc and reflects a desire for the common "pursuit of…a beautiful, idyllic dream," as Cai puts it in relation to his exhibition, revealing it is not about the October Revolution or Russia and China per se, but about a broader human yearning for the possibility of life outside of capital capture. Earlier in the film, Cai describes how the very possibility of the October Revolution necessitated the existence of a people capable of creating a new world "by destroying the past." Indeed, the "Internationale" was written by a prominent member of the infamously iconoclastic Paris Commune, Eugène Pottier. The Paris Commune is commonly seen as the ur-modern socialist uprising, an uprising foundational to the development of leftist praxis, which featured the active and notorious participation of the realist painter par excellence Gustave Courbet, whose own pioneering aesthetic example would be foundational to realism and its descendants. The history of art taught to the Chinese students of socialist realism culminated in contemporary figures like Karl Ioganson.10 Iogonson, who had previously been an ardent constructivist, and before that, an enthusiastic participant in the Soviet Revolution, actively participated in the making of history and like Courbet, placed himself in proximity to revolution, not as theory but as praxis. Indicative of and common to the spirit of this time was the ever-present anxiety around the creation of a revolutionary subject suitable to their moment in history. This animating and modernizing spirit, which demanded an overcoming of self, extended beyond the inscribed revolutionary subject and into the arts, questioning either the artist's ability, or the formal mark's suitability (or fidelity) in being able to capture that historical moment.Ho describes how drawing was seen to materialize György Lukács's "intensive totality"; however, Lukács himself saw the need for a totalizing subject who would grasp that totality and elucidate it in a way that theory on its own would be unable to accomplish.11 A known antagonist to abstract or other "modern" art, Lukács was a prominent supporter of socialist realism and saw within it the potential to develop a universal humanitarian understanding. While that was not achieved, artists like Cai operate within the shadow of that ideal, refuse a premature historical synthesis, and maintain space for the unrealized century to emerge from its grave.