Russo-Soviet Topoi

On Topochrone

Mikhail Epshtein

In attempting to apply the Bakhtinian concept of the chronotope to Soviet civilization, one discovers a curious pattern: chronos is consistently displaced and swallowed up by topos. Chronos tends toward zero, toward the suddenness of miracle, toward the instantaneousness of revolutionary or eschatological transformation; topos, correspondingly, tends toward infinity, striving to encompass an enormous land mass, and even the earth itself.

This is to a certain extent a long-standing Russian tradition. The very history of this nation, as V. O. Kluchevsky wrote, has been one of the continuous colonization of new lands, of the conquest of space on all four sides of the earth, and then--as Nikolai Fedorov insisted, referring to the exposure and meteorological capacity (or "skyness") of the Russian plain--in the direction of the cosmos. The very history of Russia is the otherness of its geography; historical periods are marked not by purely temporal changes, but rather by dislocations and expansions in space.

The periods of our history represent the successive stages traversed by our people during that people's occupation and development of such country as it acquired up to the time when natural growth plus assimilation of non-Russians brought it about that the Russian population not only overspread the whole plain, but passed beyond its boundaries. Also, the periods represent, in sequence, the series of halts or rests which . . . [interrupted] for a time the Russian population's movement over the plain . . .[i]

This spatial orientation also shapes the eschatological tendency in Russian consciousness, a strange mixture of geography and eschatology that leads toward the topoi of an otherworldly realm. That which resides outside of and above time is itself assimilated as a new region, as an "other" continent (supplementing Europe and Asia) that Russian eschatological consciousness wants to annex to the imperial domain--so that world history might gradually begin to provide glimpses of other, more lofty lands and provinces. Eschatology is the geography of new land and new sky, to which the nation, on the basis of its experience and previous territorial conquests, would have the right to migrate.

Because Russia had become accustomed to solving its historical problems geographically, it came to occupy an area in space so large that finding its place in time became somewhat difficult. In the course of the last three centuries, Russia heatedly strove to enter history, but merely in order to overcome it, instantaneously to outstrip the Western nations, which were proceeding steadily along their historical paths, and to end up on the "other side of history," in the realm of the frozen moment and boundless space. Among the nations conventionally categorized as historical and non-historical, Russia chose a special, "suprahistorical" path: even as it enters history, it is already preparing its exit.

Time in Russia is displaced by (physical and metaphysical) space--this is the Archimedean law of the immersion of a large geographical body in historical surroundings. The more vast Russia became, the more slowly historical time flowed within it; conversely, as it shrank in space, it accelerated in time. Burdened by its new space, Russia would lapse into historical prostration, as occurred following its two victorious European campaigns, in 1812 and 1945. Conversely, following unsuccessful wars--the Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War, World War I--Russia lost portions of its territory and immediately received a stimulus to historical acceleration: reforms and revolution. The failure of the Afghan war exposed the limits of Communism's spatial expansion, and, having nudged the empire on to internal changes, stimulated its disintegration. In relinquishing its republics and Eastern Europe, Russia, having discarded the unwieldy space of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc, became the most dynamic (and perhaps the most volatile) region of the world.

In this paper I offer some thoughts on the methods of organization of Soviet space. I wrote all of these sketches in 1982<->83 in Moscow, i.e. from within the space that they describe; they bear the stamp of "intralocality" [vnutrinakhodimost']. One of the peculiarities of Soviet space was its topological impermeability, the notion that it could be understood only "from the inside." It was assumed to be impenetrable to those located outside of it. I was able to fulfil this condition--existence within the described space—as the first time I was allowed to travel outside the USSR was in 1986. Perhaps the chief paradox of Russian-Soviet space, a paradox which will in one way or another be examined in all of the following texts, is the striking interrelationship between rarefaction [razrezheniia] and condensation [sgushcheniia]. Reigning over the entire area of the nation is a barely assimilated emptiness, while in the settled regions, density attains an improbable concentration, typified by that Bolshevik innovation: the concentration camp. Congestion, density, the overcrowding of communal apartments and second-class train cars, jam-packed public transportation, people jostling each other in line, bags overflowing with groceries, objects piled up in warehouses, even the Communist idea of the maximum collectivization of property and of the way of life--all this can be seen as the nation's response to the disproportionate superiority and emptiness of the surrounding space.

Trans. Jeffrey Karlsen