Soviet Union was a Platonic Kingdom of Philosophers
This post is 100% based on a wonderful book by Boris Groys called The Communist Postscript.
What differs a "philosopher" from a "sophist"?
A sophist conceals the paradoxical nature of language, constructing aesthetically pleasing passages and speeches, then selling them to the interested party — ultimately treating language as a commodity. The sophist is a hired manager of language, shaping it to fit only certain narratives.
Philosophers are so efficient at breaking through sophistry exactly thanks to their ability to wield paradoxical statements as rhetorical weapons against one-sided and seemingly logical (as “being non-contradictory”) statements. A philosopher is someone who lives and exists within paradoxes — the most famous of which was declared by Socrates: “I know that I know nothing.” A philosopher is someone who can acknowledge that two opposite viewpoints can be true at the same time. By acknowledging that such paradoxes exist, a philosopher demonstrates the totality of language. The totality of its language is what differs philosophy from science or politics. One can view the history of Western philosophy as a quest for more and more paradoxes.
Communism as practical Platonism
You probably know about the ideal state that Plato (via Socrates) envisioned in his famous dialogue. An expression of public and individual virtues, his Republic would’ve been ruled by philosophers. As we’ve previously established, a philosopher is someone who navigates society and language as a total system and thus can rule with the utmost justice — justice being the ultimate virtue.
What is the foundation of Soviet communism as a philosophy? It is — as officially stated by the Party — dialectical materialism. What is the main principle of dialectical materialism that every student from Tallinn to Tbilisi had to know? It is the law of the struggle of unity and opposites.
The main and only source of legitimacy for the Soviet Union was that it represented Marxist-Leninist philosophy and thus engaged with dialectical materialism as its basis.
This is not abstract theory. This principle was a driving force behind every political decision of the Party, prompting massive struggles for power and purges. For example, after the revolution of 1905, there was a question of legal representation in the Russian Duma (Parliament at the time). The Party was split between those who wanted to continue guerrilla warfare and those who wished for more legitimate political pursuits. What did Lenin — the leader of the Party at the time — decide? To do exactly both. To those who practice “normal” logic, this would be nonsensical — to engage in fighting your own party. But to him, it was an extension of the law of the struggle of unity and opposites.
Further down the road, after winning the Civil War and establishing the Soviet Union, every major political “schism” was resolved by combining two opposite viewpoints into an official Party line. The critique of opposition (either “Leftist” in Trotsky or “Rightist” in Bukharin) was that they were too one-dimensional in their thinking — that they did not properly use Marxist-Leninist theory. It took decades of painstaking work to combine countless contrary visions and opinions into a single total Party philosophy.
Even more, every Soviet — and, following Soviet sphere of influence expansion, every communist — leader saw himself first and foremost as a philosopher, as someone who contributed to Marxism-Leninism either in theoretical works (as Stalin did with his linguistic inquiries) or via praxis. The interesting thing about praxis is that both success and failure would be satisfactory — as they are seen as mere experiments.
This philosophical totality becomes even clearer when contrasted with its contemporary rival, fascism. What differentiated the two totalitarian systems was how these ideologies approached discourse. If we come back to the philosopher/sophist comparison, we can see that communism operated with total logic, defining reality with its own rules — the enemy of communism is the bourgeoisie, and it is communism that defines the meaning of “the bourgeoisie” — while fascism was more of a sophist, clearly stating its enemies and constructing its language accordingly.
Groys makes an even more provocative step and declares that the Soviet state was — contrary to Plato — a nation where it was a duty of every citizen to philosophize (that is, to think totally), not just a secluded ruling class. This totality resulted in a quite bizarre idea. The Party not only knew that Soviet citizens were subject to anti-Soviet thinking — it was a logical, dialectical given. Soviet citizens were not to think just pro-Soviet or anti-Soviet, but they were to combine them in a total discourse. The dissident movement (see “The Moscow Helsinki Group”) here can be thought of as a commodification of discourse. It became the first “marketplace of ideas” — the samizdat industry was the largest shadow area of the Soviet economy — focusing on a certain, logically coherent (that is, again, not self-contradictory) doxa. Paradoxically, it was critiqued by the officials not because of its anti-Soviet narratives (it was obvious to them that every Soviet citizen was aware of them already), but because of its lack of dialectical thinking.
Thus, the decision to end the Soviet experiment at the beginning of the 1990s is a logical — in a dialectical materialist sense — final step toward philosophical totality. Here Groys again makes a series of counterintuitive and provocative arguments (that’s kind of the whole book). He writes that the transition to capitalism that we saw with China or Russia/Soviet Union happened as a kind of dialectical synthesis. The communist project was a thesis, while the capitalist context of it was the antithesis. Thus, the resolution of this dialectic resulted in a bizarre superficial construction of capitalism. Groys argues that revolutionaries always try to be in the avant-garde of history — always trying to accelerate it. Perestroika (propped up with very Stalinist notions of acceleration) became a new frontier of history: dialectics can never be resolved — there has to be constant movement and struggle. And so another great experiment was conducted — to carve up socialist property and to create a class of oligarch-owners. The Soviet Union failed — although here we can stumble upon another example of dialectical thinking, because the Soviet constitutions since Stalin granted republics the right to secession — China didn’t.