Edith W. Clowes.pdf

Simulacrum as S(t)imulation? 339
ethnic studies, New Historicism, deconstruction. If one wants to speak of
"postmodernist" and relativist aspects of perestroika, then we must point
to the fundamental contradiction that Gorbachev introduced: a "free" mar-
ket economy involves a loosening of grassroots initiative and some allow-
ance for competition, something that the Soviet Communist Party (in dis-
tinction, seemingly, to the Chinese Party) showed itself as unwilling to
allow. Centralized planning, privilege, and the central chain of command
were all threatened by the possibility of grassroots enterprise, a more fluid
economy in which money had real value, and a hierarchy different from the
old command structure. All these considerations suggest that Soviet com-
munists were exhibiting not a postmodernist temper, but rather extreme
principle or "printsipial'nost'."
This argument for the postmodernity of Soviet Marxism stands in stark
contrast to Groys' contention that Stalinism fulfilled the ambitions of Rus-
sia's modernists (not to mention Russia's Godbuilders, Bogdanov, Luna-
charskii, and Gor'kii). According to Groys, Stalin was the "artist-ruler" or
leader-creator that modernists such as Malevich, Khlebnikov, Maiakovskii
wished to be-who seemed to have the power to take the material of
human nature and transfigure it, to make a complete break with the past
and construct a new society. Groys' claim that Stalinism represented the
"complete triumph of modernism" is certainly lopsided (Groys, 11). Less
problematically, as Tupitsyn shows, Stalinism unwittingly provided excel-
lent raw material for the kind of postmodernist parody brought later by the
conceptualists with their "after-cultural" sensibility of living after a great
event, in this case, the demise of "utopia."
Another area in which Epstein overextends the claim to a Russian post-
modernism is in his discussion of socialist realism. In "The Origins" he writes
that "socialist realism may be regarded as an essentially postmodernist trend
destined to balance all opposites and to create a new space for the interaction
of all possible stylistic devices" (Epstein, "The Origins," 18). By contrast,
Groys argues that socialist realism may have won the position that the avant-
garde coveted, but in its style and outlook it is neither modernist nor post-
modernist. It is some strange throwback to what Zamiatin called the outlived
realism of Gor'kii, eclectic and-a much more serious criticism-inwardly
self-contradictory, as Terts pointed out in "On Socialist Realism" (1959).
There is none of the self-conscious, semi-humorous postmodernist quota-
tion or parody of a variety of styles in order to expose the "totalizing" value
system inherent in it. In socialist realist writing, instead of the admission of
the artist's complicity with the system, there is the assumption of complicity
and, indeed, in practice, bald, open, shameless complicity itself. It is cer-
tainly possible to argue, as Tupitsyn does, that the socialist realist tradition
left rich raw material for a postmodern response. As Terts showed 35 years
ago, the inept contradictions and awful mixtures of sensibility inherent in it