Like all apocalyptic-millenarian utopias , Soviet Communism in its nearly eighty-year history elaborated different versions of its ideal city. Each of them was an expression of the various degrees of development reached by its technical apparatus, the fruit of the political platform of its ruling elites and the elaboration of an intel¬lectual class that had chosen to link its cultural development to the fate of the October Revolution. Bolshevism at the end of the civil war (1917-1922) was a ‘radical hierocracy […] based on faith, with a system of voluntary adhe¬sion based on personal conversion. In other words […] a sect’ that ‘conquered Babylon’ with a radical program – the elimina¬tion of private property, of patriarchy, of family, of organized reli¬gion – and found itself at the historical juncture of being able to imagine how (and where) to build its own heavenly Jerusalem. But the construction of a New Jerusalem always presupposes the Apocalypse, the overturning of the ‘axis mundi’, the ritual destruction of Babylon…
Above the Earth. Cosmist Influence on Vkhutemas
Luca Lanini
2023-01-01
Abstract
Like all apocalyptic-millenarian utopias , Soviet Communism in its nearly eighty-year history elaborated different versions of its ideal city. Each of them was an expression of the various degrees of development reached by its technical apparatus, the fruit of the political platform of its ruling elites and the elaboration of an intel¬lectual class that had chosen to link its cultural development to the fate of the October Revolution. Bolshevism at the end of the civil war (1917-1922) was a ‘radical hierocracy […] based on faith, with a system of voluntary adhe¬sion based on personal conversion. In other words […] a sect’ that ‘conquered Babylon’ with a radical program – the elimina¬tion of private property, of patriarchy, of family, of organized reli¬gion – and found itself at the historical juncture of being able to imagine how (and where) to build its own heavenly Jerusalem. But the construction of a New Jerusalem always presupposes the Apocalypse, the overturning of the ‘axis mundi’, the ritual destruction of Babylon…I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
