Western Marxists tend to think Russian Marxists fucked up communism, believing Soviet Socialism contaminated the emancipatory potential of Marxism with totalitarianism and repression. Yet why did the Communist Revolution take place in a rather backward country, where three quarters of the population could not even read or write, and not in France which had near universal literacy? What was behind the strange energy that mobilized such a radical social experiment and enabled industrialization so rapid that this new state soon rivaled the most developed capitalist economies and put a rocket in space? In a 2011 interview Conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov pointed to Cosmism, a metaphysical philosophy influential among nineteenth-century Russian scientists, revolutionaries, intellectuals, poets, artists, and others, and popular with both the educated elite in the last years of the Russian Empire and Leninist revolutionaries. Soviet avantgarde artistic production was largely preoccupied with Cosmism, an approach almost entirely suppressed from the 1930s onward. Based on many religious and scientific concepts, namely the laws of conservation of energy and matter, Cosmism can be seen as a spiritual backdrop to the Soviet project sharing a vision of collective consciousness and dematerialization of life. In addition, Cosmism sought to construct a cosmos on earth where humankind could achieve immortality. Like energy, intelligence is indestructible, expressible mathematically, and, like software, can be transferred to human or non-human containers, be they mechanical, biological, or alien bodies. Vidokle presents notes for a new film on the energy that animated Soviet Socialism.
