The Ukrainian government has ordered the removal from libraries and schools and then the destruction of more than 100 million copies of works written in Russian, including the classics of world literature: Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin and Gorky will no longer be accessible. The fact that they wrote or composed their works before the first Ukrainian nationalism even existed does not matter: they have been declared enemies by the Ukrainian state and NATO propagandists.
The premise was as appealing as it could be: retelling Bogdanov’s Red Star amid the 1917 revolution. The main character, Leonid, actually a surrogate for Bogdanov himself, would have had a daughter in the communist Mars. The young woman comes back to look for him in the midst of the world revolution. But no. We discover that the plot begins in 1927, in the midst of the Stalinist counterrevolution, shortly before the killing and purging of the generation that had carried out the revolution. And that the authors replace historical context with a jumble, a tangle even, of prejudices and distortions… A tngle that is anything but innocent.
What did a social democrat of Lenin’s generation mean by a proletarian who became a “professional revolutionary”. For answering we have to revisit the original “What Is to Be Done”… by Chernishevsky
