А. Страхаў. Разьняволеная жанчына — будуй сацыялізм! 1926. Прыватны архіў A. Strakhov. Emancipated woman is a base of socialism! 1926. The private archives 12
arthur klinau The Great Kolkhoznitsa’s Rise and Fall The Great Kolkhoznitsa in the Pantheon of Gods – the Demiurges of the Happiness Country The Pantheon of the Soviet Gods had two chambers. All the previous Christian, Jewish, Muslim and other Gods were toppled in the first years of the workers’-peasants' government. Their own Olympus of the Gods-Demiurges was erected instead, made of creators, the architects of the New World and personified Gods-Heroes. Each of these chambers had its own hierarchy. On the top of the Gods-Demiurges’ pyramid there was the Great Communist – the main creator of the future happiness of the country. One step below, there was the Great Worker and the Great Kolkhoznitsa, or Peasant Woman. Then came the Great Miner, Steelworker, Builder, the Great Scientist, Cotton Grower, Soldier, Athlete, Writer, Machine Operators, and so on further down the list. At the foot of the pyramid, a bit smaller in size, but still Great – stood the Pioneer and the Oktyabrenok. The hierarchy of the Gods-Heroes started with the Great Lenin – the first personified God of the Soviet Union. But in the 1930s-early 1950s another God-Hero – the Great Stalin, usurped his place, still in his lifetime. God’s death got the facts straight: if you are not the Demiurge, you cannot become God during your lifetime. Die if you want to get to the Pantheon of the Heroes. Stalin was toppled from the group of the Great, his place was again taken by the Great Lenin, while the position of one step below was assigned to the two Great German prophets – Marx and Engels. And it was there where they invariably remained until the total and final fall of the Soviet Gods. The order of those who took lower positions below did not matter significantly. The configuration of the hierarchies changed, depending on the political situation and the era. The Great Felix, the Great Kirov, the Great Sverdlov, the Great Kamo, the Great Rosa Luxemburg. New heroes went to Valhalla and crowded out the old Gods – the Great Gorky, the Great… Someone came to the Pantheon just from the big screen – the Great Chapaev. And, of course, the most significant and massive replenishment occurred after the Second World War. Hundreds and hundreds of both real and imaginary heroes ascended to Olympus and scattered around the country in thousands of monuments and pictures, their names were given to streets, houses of culture, libraries, factories and steamers. No significant replenishment took place later, besides the God-Heroes of space explorers. The Great Yuri Gagarin flew to the very tops of Olympus, surpassing many Great classics of Marxism-Leninism. Accompanied by «stormy, prolonged applause» of the Soviet people and the cries of «Hurrah!», the Great Cosmonaut triumphantly marched to the House of the God-Demiurges. The party leaders’ travelling to Valhalla during the Brezhnev’s Era of Stagnation caused neither much enthusiasm among the old Asgard residents nor sacred awe among the earth's flock. The faith in the bright future was slowly perishing, and thus it was becoming more and more difficult to turn into the God. The people were accompanying even Brezhnev – the Great hero of the Malaya Zemlya, the Great Conqueror of the Virgin Land, the owner of all imaginable medals and awards – not to Valhalla, the home of heroes, but to the cemetery near the Kremlin wall. The era of the Soviet paganism was going to an end, giving its place back to the Orthodox paganism. The Orthodox Paganism and the Soviet Power Viking-kunung (Prince) Valdemar who baptized Rus' was a pagan who embraced Christianity because of the political necessity to marry Anne, the Byzantine emperors Basil and Constantine’s sister. Before that he had managed to put into life a pagan counter-reformation against Christianity which then was already becoming widely accepted in Kiev (as we know, the first ruler to embrace Christianity in Russia was Princess Olga, the mother of Svyatopolk who was Valdemar’s father), to kill his brother Yaropolk (Svyatopolk’s legitimate son, whereas Valdemar was a bastard) and to erect a pagan temple in honor of the six major Gods at the site of the already existing church. As any pagan believer is supposed to do, he baptized Rus not in the Christian way, but by force: by blood, «by fire and sword». One can endlessly argue how successful the Christian project in Russia was and how deep its roots penetrated into the depths of the Russian space, but the whole course of its thousand year history embraces exclusively a history of struggle between Christianity and paganism. When Catholicism came to the Western lands, the Christian project was more successful. Whereas in those regions where Orthodoxy was dominating then, the hidden struggle did not stop for a moment, sometimes taking forms of open terror. The most famous example is the Old Believers’ persecution which occurred after the reforms of Patriarch Nikon. In fact, it separated those who had adopted the basic values of Christianity from those for whom they were only a decoration, thus such people saw no difference in how to make the sign of the cross and which fingers use in doing it, how to walk and bow. It would be naive to assume that being mainly illiterate people would be able to understand the meaning of the new version of the sacred texts. But, of course, it was not the philological problem which made the Old Believers commit the acts of self-immolation. The split grew much deeper touching numerous other levels, and divided people into those who in the name of the Christian faith were willing to commit themselves to flames and the pagans for whom Orthodoxy was just a façade, a formality, an externally imposed foreign ritual. And due to this, it made no difference for them what this or that person would be doing. If the next day, due to the political necessity, someone would order to use five fingers when making the sign of the cross, people 13 would adopt it.
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