Vladimir Vladimirovich Loves to Watch Children Dying
In this essay I discuss some misconceptions about the Soviet Union’s political coordinates and then speculate on some amusing parallels between Russian Futurist poets and Russia’s current passéist leader.
Most biographies of Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (1893–1930) claim that he had a strained relationship with the Soviet authorities. i But was it really so? And if yes, then why? After all, he was a well-paid propagandist, the author of the lines “We say Lenin, but mean the Party / We say the Party, but mean Lenin”, ii and the moving force behind the Left Front of the Arts (LEF, later REF — the Revolutionary Front of the Arts), iii glorified after his death as the Soviet poet number one.
To give a quick answer, it is partly true, not least because of his leftism, which conflicted with the Bolshevik state’s often underestimated drift to the right.
Was the USSR really left-wing?
This is something many Western leftists who have romanticized the Soviet Union fail to notice or admit, and it has three root causes:
1) Dualistic thinking in “left vs. right” terms. If you have discovered that your views fall under the “left-wing” category, you don’t have to be for everything “left” and against everything “right,” and the other way round. “Left” and “right” are generic and often inadequate (some may say obsolete) umbrella terms, each embracing very different political movements. Left-wing liberals don’t have to support communism, and right-wing libertarians don’t have to root for Neo-Nazis. As a side note, since dialectic is also a form of dualistic thinking, the history of the Soviet Union can be viewed in this light not as uniformly left, but as an interplay between left and right.
2) Ignoring the fact that in the same state left economy can co-exist with right cultural and social policies, and vice versa.
3) Taking for granted a regime’s (in this case the Soviet Union’s) self-description of its political orientation.
The Soviet experiment started under the left-wing slogans of progress, negation of the old order, and creation of a new, more equal and fair society. However, in the very first years the seeds had been sown for the right turn that happened under Stalin.
On the one hand, the Soviet economy remained left, largely socialized, but after the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP) it assumed the most perverted form imaginable that led to the famines in Ukraine and Kazakhstan as a result of collectivization and to the formation of new privileged classes as well as the rise of the Soviet and post-Soviet kleptocracy.
In his foreign policy, Stalin actively promoted communism and supported left-wing movements around the world, not least financially. However, his alliance with Hitler in 1939–1941 demonstrated that their regimes might have had more in common than their apparently opposite ideologies suggested. And a look at the social and cultural processes in the USSR under Stalin may shed more light on this matter.
The Soviet Union was hailed for its emancipation of women. And indeed, reforms towards this end were carried out in the first years after the October Revolution. Even in the 1930s women in the USSR seemed to be more emancipated than in the West, having been admitted to demanding, traditionally “male” jobs.
However, most of the women who worked in factories and on construction sites were former peasants who were used to hard work since their childhood and thus served as a good source of cheap labor for Stalin’s ambitious five-year plans and industrialization projects. There were hardly any high-ranking female functionaries. The few notable exceptions such as the diplomat Alexandra Kollontai and Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaya belonged to the original revolutionary clique. Female newcomers had little chance to reach the top tier of power. The country was ruled by men.
Following the October Revolution the Bolsheviks decriminalized homosexuality, although it only applied to the Russian SFSR and the Ukrainian SSR. But in 1933–34 sex between men became a crime again with the introduction of the infamous Article 121 to the criminal code. Propaganda started associating homosexuality with fascism.
Lenin was the first in the modern world to legalize abortion in 1920, another sign of progress. Stalin banned it again in the 1930s, using low birthrates as the main pretext.
The Soviet twenties were generally renowned for their libertine sexuality and experiments with the concept of family. In the 1930s traditional views on family were back in the party’s favor and sexuality started disappearing from public discourse. By the time of perestroika “There is no sex in the USSR” became a popular catchphrase. The Soviet Union of the thirties was a conservative, patriarchal state with Stalin as the new tsar.
Incidentally, this patriarchal turn was also reflected in language reforms, namely in the removal of “unnecessary” feminine forms for job titles, which were quite natural in languages such as Ukrainian but also weren’t strange to vernacular Russian. iv
As for freedom of speech, from the very beginning there was a significant level of censorship and repressions. One can even say that on the whole the situation was worse than in the Russian Empire. One could not publicly criticize Marxism–Leninism or promote monarchism, nationalism, capitalism, or liberal democracy. However, there was originally a certain space for free discussion as long as one didn’t cross the red lines. One could even advocate their own interpretation of the official ideology.
This limited freedom was enough to warrant the active development in the twenties of modernist and avant-garde literature, art, theater, cinema, sculpture, etc. This, however, came to an end with Stalin’s crackdown on both political opposition and intelligentsia. From now on, there was only one possible interpretation of Marxism–Leninism, the official one, and only one official cultural doctrine, socialist realism, which was basically the realism of the 19th century adapted to the “new realities.” Modernism and avant-garde were now viewed as “degenerate” bourgeois art, just like in Nazi Germany.
The short-lived cultural revival was also stimulated by the policy of korenizatsiia, or “nativization,” which supported the development of cultures in minority languages and was supposed to fight Russian chauvinism. By the mid-1930s, however, Russification and Russian chauvinism were back with renewed strength. The aforementioned famines in Ukraine and Kazakhstan in 1930–1933 also had all signs of ethnic cleansing. Other affected provinces, such as Kuban or the Volga region, while technically in Russia, also had a significant Ukrainian population. Mass deportations based on ethnicity are another example of chauvinist policies. And even for the Jews, who played a significant part in the early Soviet apparatus, the tides started to turn under Stalin, resulting in full-blown state-sanctioned antisemitism after the Holocaust, however absurd it may sound.
Lenin claimed to be an anti-imperialist, but his desire to impose Bolshevism on newly-declared republics formed on the ashes of the Russian Empire signaled his imperialist ambitions. Stalin took the cue from his predecessor and went full-on imperialistic in 1939, but what most people ignore is that his first expansion beyond the borders of the former empire took place in 1926, with the annexation of the Arctic regions. Granted, he followed the example of Canada from the previous year, but in the case of Franz Josef Land, for which Norway was also a claimant, the single-sided decision and the failure to negotiate were portents of things to come.
Thus, Lenin’s Red Terror and “dictatorship of the proletariat” sowed the seeds for Stalin’s purges, totalitarianism, and cult of personality, while Lenin’s expansionism set the stage for his successor’s uncompromising imperialism.
Mayakovsky in the service of the Empire
Now let’s turn back to Vladimir Mayakovsky. The future poet came across socialism and Marxism and became involved in political activity when he was barely a teenager, which led to his being expelled from an art school and gymnasium. v At the time of the October Revolution, his political views could have been described as libertarian socialism with an anarchist bent. During the civil war he, as everyone else, had to choose sides, and it was logical for him to side with the Red. Although he never joined the Bolshevik party, he also did not want to be a mere “fellow traveler.” He adapted to the new realities to the point of becoming a fervent agitator.
And yet Mayakovsky’s pre-revolutionary Futurism and experimentation weren’t gone altogether. He remained an avant-gardist, a truly left-wing poet. “Proletarian” authors attacked him for his anarchism, individualism, and bourgeois mentality. His works were deemed to be too incomprehensible for the working class. Lenin bashed Mayakovsky’s avant-gardism but complimented a poem that touched upon social issues.
The right-wing turn was not complete during his lifetime, but at the end of the twenties he definitely could sense where the things were going. He saw that the only way forward for him was to become more a propagandist than a poet. And it in all likelihood contributed to his suicide.
We don’t know what Mayakovsky’s fate would have looked like if he hadn’t died in 1930. But, seeing how even such more “politically suspect” Russian authors as Mikhail Bulgakov or Boris Pasternak survived the Stalinist purges, he probably would have been better off than the Ukrainian fellow Futurist poets Mykhail Semenko, Geo Shkurupii, Oleksa Vlyzko, and numerous others who were executed despite having been convinced communists. vi
Anyway, in 1935 Stalin “rehabilitated” Mayakovsky by publicly calling him “the best and most talented poet” of the Soviet epoch. Ironically, from now on he became an icon of the socialist realism, even though during his lifetime he was harshly criticized for not being enough of a realist. His pre-revolutionary Futurist works were downplayed, as were some inconvenient facts of his biography such as his libertine private life. Maxim Gorky, who in 1932 returned from his exile on Stalin’s invitation, in stark contrast to the fate of other unruly thinkers, became another such icon.
One reason is that Stalin simply needed icons for the Soviet Union’s new cultural pantheon, and there weren’t that many great loyal communist poets or prose writers, dead or alive. In the case of Mayakovsky, there might have also been another explanation for Stalin’s goodwill. Stalin, born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, was Georgian by origin. Although Mayakovsky’s mother was Ukrainian and his father, according to family legend, was descended from Zaporozhian (Ukrainian) Cossacks, likely those who, after Catherine II had liquidated their autonomy in southern Ukraine, the Zaporozhian Sich, settled in the Caucasus and got russified, Vladimir Vladimirovich was born in Georgia. Thanks to his childhood in this land, Georgian was the only language he spoke besides Russian (he was notoriously bad at language learning).
It was after Stalin’s statement that one of Moscow’s central squares was renamed after Mayakovsky. In 1992, it was renamed back to Triumfalnaya Square, although the metro station in the square is still called Mayakovskaya. Curiously, after the collapse of the Soviet Union the Russians did the same thing they’re now criticizing Ukraine for. Sure, decommunization in Russia was only partial and many towns and streets still bear Soviet names, but the whole central Moscow within the Garden Ring got back its historical street and square names. More than 150 streets and squares were renamed between 1990 and 1993. vii And no, Red Square is not an exception, but rather a mistranslation. The name existed long before 1917, and historically the word krasny in Slavic languages meant “beautiful,” even if today most Russians interpret it as “red.”
Mayakovsky Alley in Moscow, on the other hand, has retained its name as it’s located outside the Garden Ring. After 1935 Mayakovsky Streets started to pop up all around the USSR. But, interestingly, a few of them appeared even before that. As early as 1931 a street was named after the poet in the village of Nosrkoye near Yaroslavl, to the north-east of Moscow. It had to be renamed in 1957 because, after Yaroslavl had devoured its suburbs, there turned out to be three different Mayakovsky Streets within the new city limits, so only one was to remain.
Mayakovsky Street in Saint Petersburg, known as Nadezhdinskaya before 1936, has also survived the city’s renaming from Leningrad. Another curious fact is that in his poem “The Man” Mayakovsky predicted that after his death his name would be given to Zhukovsky Street, where his lover and muse Lili Brik lived, in about 15-minute walk from the poet’s lodgings.
In the opposite end of the former Nadezhdinskaya Street from where Mayakovsky once lived there is a maternity hospital built in the mid-19th century. Here on October 7, 1952, a certain Maria, the wife of Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin, gave birth to a son. An apocryphal story has it that the hospital’s location in Mayakovsky Street was key in the decision to name the boy after his father so that with the patronymic he would be called Vladimir Vladimirovich, like the great poet.
Nomen est omen?
I don’t know if Putin knows any Latin, but he must anyway prefer the Soviet equivalent of nomen est omen, “As you name the boat, so shall it float,” which comes from the animation series about Captain Wrongel who had named his boat Pobeda, “Victory,” in a hope to win a regatta, but then the first two letters fell off so that the name became Beda, “Trouble.”
Of course, Putin and Mayakovsky had very different life paths, temperaments, interests, ideas, and physical appearances — next to the Soviet poet number one with his six feet three the world’s terrorist number one would have looked like a midget. But there are also some amusing parallels.
Do you remember Putin’s laughably long COVID table? Well, Mayakovsky also had a phobia around infections. It developed when his father died of blood poisoning after having pricked himself with a needle. The future poet was then twelve. Later in life the phobia made him avoid shaking hands and grasping door handles with his bare hand.
Mayakovsky’s early Futurist poem “A Few Words About Myself” from 1913 starts with the words, “I love to watch children dying.” The poem is open for interpretation. Some critics think the “I” is a cruel and listless deity. Others think it’s the poet himself, but the “children” are just a figure of speech and there’s some deeper meaning behind it.
Putin, on the other hand, does not write poems about it, but he definitely loves to watch children dying. If it weren’t true, he wouldn’t start wars. At the time of writing it is known of more than 500 children who have died in Ukraine as a result of Russia’s attacks since February 24, 2022.
Putin is the president of Russia with dubious legitimacy, but he would definitely like to be more than that. How about the President of Planet Earth? And Mayakovsky was one, kind of.
In 1915, another Russian Futurist poet, Velimir Khlebnikov (1885–1922), founded the Society for Presidents of Planet Earth aka the Union of 317. It was supposed to include 317 members, each being a President of Planet Earth. These 317 Presidents together should have ruled the global State of Time — individual states were to be dismantled — thus guaranteeing harmony in the world.
Among the Presidents of Planet Earth, in addition to Khlebnikov himself, Mayakovsky, and other Russian Futurists, were included H. G. Wells, Rabindranath Tagore, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and Sergei Prokofiev, to name but a few. The Society did not die with Khlebnikov. It continues to this day, with new members being “initiated” by the existing ones.
But why 317? Khlebnikov considered it the most important number in history. Among its various esoteric meanings are 317-year cycles. In particular, he believed that major historical battles occur every 317 years.
Khlebnikov has inspired modern avant-garde artists such as Marko Peljhan and Anselm Kiefer. The latter, commenting in 2005, said the poet’s ideas were “complete nonsense,” that is, he sees purely aesthetic value in them. But let’s imagine Putin, with his passion for esotericism and numerology, believes in them.
317 years ago was the period of the rule of his hero, Peter I, the founder of the Russian Empire, which found its demise shortly after Khlebnikov had created his Society and which Putin dreams to restore. In 1709 Peter I won the decisive Battle of Poltava in Ukraine, having defeated the Swedish Empire. Putin must dream of a similar big victory over the West in Ukraine 317 years from then, in 2026.
Coincidentally, both Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky were 36 when they died. Khlebnikov died from illness, and Mayakovsky shot himself. Putin turns twice as much in 2024. Vladimir Vladimirovich, I want to believe…
Notes
i Wikipedia is just one example: “…his relationship with the Soviet state was always complex and often tumultuous… Even after death, his relationship with the Soviet state remained unsteady.”
ii The quote is from Mayakovsky’s famous poem “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.”
iii LEF was a group with (former) Futurists at its core, which was active in 1922–1928 and featured at various points such names as the film directors Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov and the future Nobel Prize in Literature awardee Boris Pasternak. REF was its shortly-lived reincarnation in 1929.
iv Many Russian speakers today casually use feminine endings -ikha, -sha, -nitsa, and the like for job titles, even though official grammar prescribes to only use masculine forms for most jobs.
v For biographical details, I draw upon Mayakovsky: A Biography by Bengt Jangfeldt (translated by Harry D. Watson). I can recommend it as an interesting read, but if you’re going to use it for something more serious, the facts need to be double-checked as I’ve noticed several mistakes.
vi For more about Ukrainian literary Futurism, I recommend Ukrainian Futurism, 1914–1930: A Historical and Critical Study by Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj. For a wider picture of the persecution of Ukrainian intelligentsia, look up the Executed Renaissance.