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Communism: Utopia Or Reality, Part 2

Question: In its time, the Soviet Union was an attempt to build a communist society, a society of equal opportunity. Why didn’t humanity learn anything from this? Why did it turn into such a tragedy?

Answer: I would not say that what they wanted to build in the Soviet Union was communism. It was a dictatorship. The Russian empire was a feudal society in which the population was predominantly ignorant; the peasants were confined to their land.

However, in his writings, Marx indicated that prior to building communism, we must pass through particular social developments. After all, a communist society, first and foremost, is a society in which everyone has a consciousness in which everyone is connected as one family above their ego [1], and each one feels himself to be a part of the others. This requires a person to have a full understanding of his nature and the goal toward which we must reach.

The modern person is the antithesis of the future society. He is completely against connection with others. He wants to think and be concerned only about himself. He has himself and his family, and all the rest doesn’t matter to him at all, and suddenly they say to him, “You must understand and perceive that you are a single, whole unit with everyone!” That is, he needs to understand that according to the law of nature we must reach a state where we are one family and even more, because this family is still only a physical connection between people, whereas here it is talking about our inner connection [2], not on a physical level, but on a level of internal consolidation in which each one feels “we,” but not “I.”

We are like a single, complete whole. In other words, this requires an inner transformation of the person and his worldview, which is impossible to implement in a short period of time, neither by force nor through persuasion. It requires a long process of education [3]. We know that the right education for a child requires a minimum of 25 years from birth until going out to meet life. What kind of education is it possible to talk about in Russia, when communism was apparently inserted by violent methods, through revolution, through a civil struggle between different strata of the population? In the end, everything turned into terror, terrible power, and counter-revolution. There was no socialism or communism there.

Question: However, for the first revolutionaries, there were pure thoughts and high ideals.

Answer: Without a doubt, people were ready to sacrifice themselves. While I was still a student in Leningrad, I rented a room from an old woman, a revolutionary. She told me how she stood and shivered in the bitter cold, distributing cookies to soldiers who were going to the front, and, even though she herself was hungry, she didn’t have even a thought about taking a cookie for herself. People didn’t think about themselves, their ideal was the revolution that later began to devour its lovers, and this is a natural process. Ideals move our egoistic world forward, but after that an absolutely different pragmatic wave comes that begins to crush these ideals beneath it and works according to the usual egoistic laws.

To be continued.
[160035]
From KabTV’s “About Our Life” 5/11/15

Related Material:
Communism: Utopia Or Reality, Part 1 [4]
Integral Society: Is It A Utopia Or Reality? [5]
The Correct Realization Of The Concept Of Unity [6]