Maja and Reuben Fowkes: We are interested in the way that 1968 was experienced across the world, and that while the revolt of 1968 was an international phenomenon, it took on different forms depending on local conditions. How would you characterize the experience of 1968 in Russia and Eastern Europe?

Viktor Misiano: The dialectic of the international and the local in the phenomenon of ’68: that is a good way of posing the question. In fact the year 1968 is just as significant for the Eastern part of Europe as it is for the Western part. Moreover, these events had approximately the same meaning on both sides of the ‘iron curtain’. 1968 was a surge towards liberation, towards emancipation from the social structures which fettered people’s lives. This indicates that the world still retained its unity at that epoch, despite all the political and ideological divisions that existed. This refutes the assertions of the ideologists of the Cold War that the processes that originated in our part of Europe were absolutely autonomous, that we were not involved in the modernizing and civilizing transformations of the second half of the twentieth century, and that we only ‘returned to history’ after the end of communism.

Even so, there were real differences, and one can explain them in the following way, albeit highly schematically. However multifarious the currents of leftist thought in the West, there they always represented a form of opposition, while in the countries of the Eastern bloc the left ideology was in power. For that reason, Soviet Marxism, including versions that got round the restrictions of the authorities, invariably bore a fundamentalist and concretely pragmatic character; it was an example of, if not directly conservative, most definitely constructive and creative thought. Indeed, it was conscious of its responsibility for the construction of a society in line with its ideas. The thinkers of the Western left, seeing their task as the deconstruction of the foundations of capitalism, drew their energies from critical utopias. Their thought was explosive, provocative, anarchistic in character. They appealed to the imagination and endeavoured to bring to mind otherwise undreamed of aspects of existence.

In the historical context, 1968 was for Russia and Eastern Europe first and foremost the culmination of the process of de-Stalinization and the reform of socialism, of the hope that it could be brought into line with the ideals of democracy. These ideals mobilized people, particularly the young, for social movements which were liberationist in spirit, but favouring a critical dialogue rather than a confrontation of diametrically opposed systems. For the East, therefore, 1968 means first of all the Prague Spring and the Dubček reforms, which met with so much sympathy from public opinion in the USSR. For this reason, the official criticism made of the events of 1968 in the West by the newspaper Pravda was not completely out of line with the attitude taken up by Soviet society, even its most advanced strata. Many features of the student uprisings of 1968 seemed to be adolescent and infantile, they were considered to be an ‘outbreak of irrationalism’, they antagonized people with their extraordinary performativism and aestheticism.
And in reality 1968 in the West did take on a carnivalesque character; it called for total performance, new experience, new sensitivities, and individual freedom. In this way, as later became clear, it revealed the possibility of new consumer markets. It was the harbinger of a new spiral of consumerism. But in the East consumer instincts remained frustrated, and in the years after 1968 this was what increasingly divided the Eastern frame of mind from that in the West. In the West the critical impulse continued to exist, particularly as regards the critique of consumerism, while in the East it stayed alive in the form of the values of liberal individualism, not those of socialist collectivism. Hence the Western critique of consumer society could not be understood in the East, as also in general the function of criticism in Western society remained incomprehensible. This is why at the end of the 1980s, at the international conference held in Dubrovnik, the first conference to bring together Western and Eastern European intellectuals, it was possible for Merab Mamardashvili, the most internationalist of all Soviet philosophers, and a polyglot familiar with Western ideas, to say: ‘Western society is simply normal human society’, a remark which scandalized his Western colleagues.

It was necessary for capitalism to return, for the pain of the period of transition and ‘shock therapy’ to be felt, for the views held in East and West on the liberating meaning of the experience of 1968 to start coming closer to each other …

MRF:In your view, how was art affected by the social and cultural transformations associated with 1968? Do you see conceptualism and the Sots-Art movement as close in spirit to 1968?

VM: On both sides of the ‘iron curtain’ the year 1968 can be understood as a protest against society of the modern type. And despite the fact that both in the West and in the East the protest movements in their most radical form went down to defeat, society indubitably changed. Both in Russia and in the West society started to lose its monolithic unity after the 1960s, it started to be differentiated into a multiplicity of mutually interwoven strata, subcultures, social milieux and niches. One way of comprehending the niche-type structures of postmodern society was the activity of ‘Collective Actions’ (Kollektivnye Deistviia) a group of conceptual artists in Moscow. At that time the critical analysis of modern society by Michel Foucault, that typical philosopher of 1968, can be recognised in the work of Ilya Kabakov. Indeed, in essence all of Kabakov’s ‘total installations’ are variations on the ‘panoptikon’ described by Foucault, that metaphor of a repressive disciplinary socium of the modern type.

The point is symptomatic for the context that interests us, Sots-Art, which endeavoured to establish an ironic distance in relation to Soviet society, that is to say it began to aestheticize it. Of course, the irony of the sots-artists lay in the carnivalesque form of their critique of the communist world, which was combined with its joyful acceptance. Transforming Soviet ideology into a distanced object of contemplation, they found themselves fascinated by its uniqueness and distinctive perfection. It is not accidental that Boris Groys, the theoretician of Sots-Art, is today one of the most radical of communism’s rehabilitators. And, finally, it is also important that in aestheticising communism the Sots-Artists anticipated its end, indeed, in essence, they prepared it for public exhibition …

MRF:How do you see the Russian role in 1968, and could it be rehabilitated?

VM: I am not a historian. Nevertheless, I am not inclined to consider that the entry of Soviet military forces into Czechoslovakia in 1968 and and subsequent cutting short of democratic reforms in the USSR were historically predetermined, although it was perhaps difficult to imagine an alternative, bearing in mind the concrete distribution of forces in the Brezhnev leadership. Even so, there were still many liberalising ferments in the Soviet society of those years, which did not die away afterwards, but took on other forms and a different dynamic. I think that Soviet society of the 1970s and 1980s, that is, society after 1968, was already different from the way it was before.  In many respects this society had more freedom and stood on firmer moral ground than Putin’s society of ‘sovereign democracy’.

Nevertheless, 1968 and the repression provoked by it remained a colossal trauma in Soviet political history. It was not by chance that the idea of ‘socialism with a human face’ once again appeared on the scene with the end of the Brezhnev leadership and the appearance of Gorbachev. Here too I am not inclined to the view that the way Gorbachev’s reforms ended was historically predetermined. There were many other impulses within Russian society which could have turned the events in another, not neo-conservative but also not catastrophic, direction, Regrettably, however, it is impossible to avoid noticing one general rule: every time Russia is faced with alternatives, it always makes the worst choice…

MRF: Recently you wrote that ‘the times demand not dolce utopia but actual constructive practice, not meta-position but position, not interaction but action’. Do you see a return to the principles of 68 in contemporary art?

VM: Indeed, we do see a turn towards political engagement, towards a rejection of relativist notions, which is also a return to the Marxist and critical tradition, to strict moral normativism and so on. We see this both in contemporary art and in the humanities and social thought, or, more precisely, in the sharpest and most sensitive figures and tendencies in these fields. I do not, however, see here the openness towards the ideas of emancipation and liberation, carnivalism and individualism, which distinguished 68 (particularly in its Western version). Everyone has too strong a recollection of how all that finished. The present situation is the direct opposite of the 90s, with their optimistic faith in communication and migration, in boundless individual freedom and performative dialogism, which was in many ways a caricatural re-edition of 68. It is no accident that the political scene of those years was dominated by the ‘children of 68’ – Gorbachev, Clinton, Blair, Schröder and so on. And we can see before our eyes how that era ended – in the unprecedented moral corruption of the intellectual class, in consumerism and conformism. Precisely for that reason, the present situation has given rise to values of solidarity and spiritual endeavour, strict moral conceptions, and asceticism. Revolutions are made by people who are able to renounce everything …
The sacrificial and somewhat sectarian character of the contemporary moral and political revival is also linked with the fact that, unlike in the year 1968, contemporary critical thought does not rest on powerful social movements. Contemporary society, particularly in Eastern Europe and above all in Russia, is recuperating from the shocks of the period of transition, devoting itself to hollow hedonism and enjoying the initial delights of consumerism. For this reason, the present task of critical thought is not to come out onto the streets, but to gather together materials and ideas for a new social project. And in this context an immensely significant role, particularly in Eastern Europe, is played by a re-examination of the experience of critical thought and socialism in the twentieth century, and of the experience of 1968.

Translated from Russian by Ben Fowkes.

Viktor Misiano interviewed by Maja and Reuben Fowkes in early 2008.