Originally Posted by
pbrower2a
Let's see... Yevtushenko? Shchedrin? Gagarin? Clearly Artists. I'd say that Russians born between 1928 and 1943, more or less, were Artists, much as was so in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and Japan.
They were the children of the time in which Josef Stalin enacted about the only admirable legislation... that that prohibited corporal punishment in schools. They were fortunate that they were not purged in Stalin's persecutions of real and imagined enemies. Gorbachev and Yeltsin were reformers -- not revolutionaries. Gorbachev tried to save the Soviet system by humanizing it. Glasnost and perestroika were intended to reform the system into a going concern... and we can only guess whether those who sought a continuation of the hard-line characteristics of the system proved Gorbachev's efforts futile. A democratic Soviet Union might have been nice to have around.
Shostakovich? Solzhenitsyn? Sakharov? Kalashnikov? Artem Mikoyan? Those seem clear-cut Civics in my book. They got cold feet about the System only after the Second World War, if at all. Think of all those images of veterans of the Great Patriotic War -- common people -- wearing medals from that war. Later generations didn't experience the war -- or get the medals.
Khrushchev... Zhukov... Malinovsky...Anastas Mikoyan? clear-cut examples of the sorts of Nomad leaders who lead the troops, do the diplomacy, and administer the home front. (Sure, most of Stalin's henchmen were of this generation. I'm going to accept that the Idealist/Reactive boundary in Russia as well as most of Europe was around 1877 so that I can fit Stalin into the model of a Reactive who shoves aside or "purges" out elder Idealists).
No Idealists? Sure. They were either puppets like Kalinin or... gone, like most of the early Bolsheviks that Stalin purged as potential rivals. That's how things were in Germany, Italy, and Japan, too... but not America, Great Britain, or Canada. That some generational constellation is the ideal for meeting a Crisis Era hardly indicates that that generational constellation will be in place.
Russian children (born in the 1840s and 1850s) at the time of the Crimean War through Alexander II's emancipation of the serfs were well off the scene around the time of the Russian Revolution.
I see Russia as having gone through a Crisis of unusual length and severity, beginning with the Bolshevik Coup and the subsequent (and extermination-filled) Russian Civil War between the Reds and the Whites, Stalin's forced collectivization (with enforcement of extreme ferocity) and Great Purge (another Revolution, in effect), and of course the Great Patriotic War -- conducted genocidally. Have you ever sampled the writings of Ilya Ehrenberg, who said things nearly as blood-curdling as anything Josef Goebbels or Julius Streicher ever said or penned? If you think the American deportation of Japanese-Americans and resident aliens harsh, what can you say of the wholesale uprooting of ethnic groups (Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans) seen as potentially treacherous?
In few places was life so cheaply forfeit -- often for illusory grounds -- than in Russia for about 30 years. Sure, there were comparative respites, as in the late 1920s and perhaps the very late 1930s... that means little. Those were eyes of the storm, so to speak, and clearly not eras in themselves.
The three-wave Crisis solved little, but at a huge cost. Was Russia in 1946 much improved from Russia in 1913? There was more literacy and some industrial development... but far less than had there been peace and greater respect for human dignity. Some things were obviously worse. Infamous as tsarist Russia was, it had an independent and well-respected judiciary. It had cultural and scientific freedom, and Russian achievements in science and culture in late tsarist times were quite good. Many of those people who might have otherwise created a very different Russia during that time were either dead or making their contributions to progress (including about half the Jewish population of the United States).
Its industry had been in boom. Russia was poor by the standards of western Europe... but no worse than Japan or India at the time, let alone China. A few reforms at the right time could have saved the system -- and the right time was the 3T of the previous Saeculum. It's easy to see how Nicholas II could have saved Russia from thirty years of disaster: he could have revoked the anti-Jewish measures that ensured that talented Jews disenchanted with the system either fled or turned to Bolshevism, he could have allowed the Duma -- which could have become a distinguished Parliament -- genuine authority; he could have allowed trade unions to operate openly. It would have been wise also to improve the road system in Russia even as a military measure for better logistics and maneuver in the event of war as well as for better distribution of civilian goods.
Could a Reactive/Nomad generation follow an Adaptive/Artist generation in a cycle if the Crisis ensures that the post-war children will be impoverished instead of indulged? It seems unlikely -- but so does a three-wave, thirty-year Crisis Era. Systems as totalitarian as the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China are capable of ensuring that youth never get the chance to challenge the political or cultural norms of society. Marxism-Leninism operates by different rules than those of any other ideological basis of governance, and those rules nearly preclude dissent. Marxism-Leninism ignores the generational cycle and the complexities of human nature at the risk of catastrophic failure.
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Let's all agree on this point, an answer to an obvious question: why do we even discuss this topic?
Because history is important, and it is no mere disjointed collection of events and biographical details. We are trying to make sense of history.
Whatever differences we may have on interpreting events in Russia, a big player in human history if not always for the best, we would all have to agree that thirty years of history so ferocious as those that Russians experienced between August 1914 and May 1945 would ensure that even a great military victory would leave a wrecked people in its wake. The weapons in place at the 3T/4T cusp are enough to bring about the extinction of humanity, and even 'reasonable' restraint might leave a ruined world for children unfortunate enough to be born into the wreckage of a world that failed to appreciate what it stood to lose. Destruction of two hundred years of industrial development and investment, five hundred years of scientific and intellectual progress, and perhaps the entire moral fabric of society won't require thirty years of political and military catastrophe; it might take only thirty minutes of folly -- and the catastrophe could be world-wide. There might not be a university or even a library to restart the intellectual life, no electric power, a credible government anywhere, or even the Swiss banking system to survive the unspeakable calamity. Books -- and not only the abandoned best-sellers and obsolete how-to books -- and computer, video, and music disks will be burned as fuel to stave off the cold. So long Shakespeare -- and so long Mozart.
Think of a world in which children live and die in radioactive ruins. Think of a world in which people are so cold and desperate that they send children back to the mines to retrieve coals and are so hungry that they latch their children to plows to eke some grain from polluted fields. Think of that scenario lasting for a few centuries in a new Dark Age. That's not the worst scenario possible. Another has little characterization because there will be nobody surviving with the capacity to judge a great failure.
Humanity would have to re-learn what Galileo, Newton, Descartes, Locke, Jefferson, Darwin, Mendel, Mendeleyev, Freud, Einstein, and others learned with considerable difficulty and that we all take for granted today -- with even more difficulty. Children of a world so badly wrecked would not become the pampered youth who grow up to write great poetry or novels of unusual insight, and they would not become founders of new religions. They would be more like the children of the dull Dark Age that followed the collapse of Classical civilization in the 5th century of the Christian Era.
The past is the key to the future. Maybe it takes humanity eighty years to re-discover a fad or folly once rejected only to find out why it was rejected.
Blah, blah, blah...
(but seriously, I do).