The soviet union once created is based on an idea and according to them the most logical and best idea in the world - a utopia. Utopias in Russia are looked down upon since they suppose that it exists somewhere else and is something in the future. In the soviet union, they are already living the utopia and are the heirs of all history. 28
He states that Lenin put the NEP into effect in order to appease the peasants and the farm workers. When it was put into action the period of War communism that preceded it came to be a bit of a utopia. it was viewed originally that all they had to do was to have the peasants take the grain away from the aristocrats and then the peasants would feed everyone and it would make it to the factories and then they would have communist production and distribution. This was not a realistic view of how it worked out and thus a utopia. 61
In order to postpone the war with the peasants and to make War communism work it had to be ammended and the program of NEP had to be added. 62
Description of 1922: NEP is in full swing, the height of soviet democracy and freedom. Mass executions without trial, investigations and tribunals are giving way to soviet diplomacy and procefure. In this period is also soviet legalized terror. 63
NEP was Lenin's pragmatism, not a utopia. If anything it might be the anti-utopia since it was done with calculated means. 64
Lenin worked hard and everything came through him, but it was an unweildy mess. In order to fix the bureacratic-ness he needed to create new bureaucratic processes and get rid of those that were't working. 71
Summing up 72 Socialism was already in place during NEP as the limited freedoms that the consumer and seller had were regimented by the gov and tolerated it only for a short period of time. 72
The intellectuals were some of the first to be called the enemies of the state and they felt that they did not have the freedom to work as they wanted in the new system. 73
Sinyavsky uses annecdotes and literature, primarily Blok, Dostoevsky and Mayakovsky, to discuss what he saw and belived about the Soviet Union. It is an excellent look from inside, but is neither a history textbook, nor a treatise on the Soviet Union. It is more of a cultural look at the history through the eyes of an author that rambles and digresses as he explains. Insightful.
Master and Margarita 105 a product of Stalin's problems, but not confined to them. Woland plays with and tolerates the Master in the same way that Stalin tolerated Bulgakov. Had S known about M and M Bulgakov surely would have been shot. The black ball is an allegory of the concentration of villains that congregate with Stalin. 105-108
Heart of a dog as the new man. 147-151
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