Tomorrow Never Comes
Chapter 5:
The Return of the Radiant Future
Tomorrow Never Comes
The end of the Cold War wreaked havoc with cartography, erasing three existing countries from the map (East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the USSR) while adding 17 (and this is not even counting the disintegration of Yugoslavia). This geographical upheaval was accompanied by a redistribution of conceptual territory whose consequences would take years to play out. The former Soviet bloc lost more than nuclear weaponry and economic and political stability. In the division of spoils, the West got custody of the future.
Who, after all, was writing the epitaph for the Cold War era? I hesitate to invoke Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, both because of how wrong its predictions now seem and because the "end of history" has become such a post-Cold-War cliche, but Fukuyama is an illustrative symptom. Fukuyama was nothing if not timely. His book came out in 1992 (that is, just after the Soviet collapse), and was based on an essay published in The National Interest in 1989 (when Eastern European communist regimes were in a race to see who could self-destruct first). Fukuyama's triumphalism is difficult to bear, but what should be even more galling to both leftists and the disgruntled denizens of the postsocialist world is his appropriation of a Marxist framework to declare the permanent dominance of the capitalist liberal democratic paradigm. Fukuyama had the vision to realize that the spoils of the Cold War were not merely economic and ideological; the winners retained the right to frame the future.
Granted, a defunct political system would appear to have no future by definition, but for Soviet discourse, the future was about more than simply continuity beyond the present day, or even the central planning five and seven years ahead, for which the USSR was so famous. One would expect a Marxist regime to be teleological, but the centrality of the future in Soviet culture goes far beyond the system's Marxist foundations. The future was more than a goal off in the temporal distance: it was the thing that gave the present its meaning. As X has argued, the Soviet Union, particularly but not exclusively in the Stalin era, sapped the present in favor of the future. Any and all suffering and sacrifice endured by the population "now" would be redeemed by what was yet to come.
The Soviet writer who seemed to understand this best was Andrei Platonov. His 1930 short novel The Foundation Pitpurported to be about the construction of a grand "Proletarian Home" that would house workers when it was finished, but many of the starving, exhausted members of construction brigade (along with one little orphan girl) fall ill and die during the course of the novel. More than simply left incomplete, the actual building never even begins; all that the men have accomplished is digging the foundation pit of the title, less a proletarian home than a makeshift mass grave.
Replacing the Soviet Union with the Russian Federation (and the other 14 successor states) involved not just the passage of calendar time, but the inversion of the temporal hierarchy. The Soviet devaluation of the present in favor of the future suggests another interpretation of Rabfak's now familiar complaint in "Our Nuthouse Is Voting for Putin": "Why is today yesterday and not tomorrow?" A better future that is somehow qualitatively different from the present and the past is virtually inconceivable. The post-Soviet era hobbled the national imagination, reducing the future to endless variations on the historically familiar.
With, perhaps, one exception: the end of the world.