Left School Левая школа | |
|---|---|
| Leader | Natalia Magnat Olga Barash Inna Okup |
| Founded | December 1972 (1972-12)-January 1973 (1973-1) |
| Dissolved | January 1977 (1977-1) |
| Succeeded by | Neo-Communist Party of the Soviet Union |
| Headquarters | Moscow,Russian SFSR,USSR |
| Newspaper | Left School |
| Ideology | Marxism-Leninism Trotskyism Atheist existentialism New Left |
| Political position | Far-left |
| National affiliation | Neo-Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1974-1977) |
TheLeft School (Russian:Левая школа;Levaya shkola) – aclandestineradical left organization, founded inMoscow in December 1972 - January 1973. Left School is seen by modern researchers as one of the first organizations of theNew Left in theSoviet Union.[1]
The group was founded byNatalia Magnat,Olga Barash andInna Okup, and consisted almost completely of the students ofMoscow State Pedagogical University.[2][3]
Natalia Magnat was a recognizedtheorist of the group, while Olga Barash was in charge of organizational work. Left School did not have a formal leadership, but objectively, its three founders took the lead.[4][5] As the group grew, its members were planning to hold a congress or a conference in the second half of 1976. It had been expected that the congress would elect the group's leaders, discuss and adopt thecharter and theprogram, as well as, possibly, choose a new name (the name "Left School" was seen as temporary and chosen, mainly, for reasons of secrecy).[5][4]
The organization's members planned to publish an underground magazine to be calledLeft School, but this project had not been implemented.[4] In the summer of 1973 members of the Left School made an attempt to create subsidiary groups inUkraine, but it was unsuccessful.[4]
In September 1973 Left School established contact with another underground radical left organization called TheParty of New Communists (PNC) (Russian: Партия новых коммунистов (ПНК)), whoseideological principles and political goals were extremely close to those of the Left School. After long negotiations both groups had come to a merger agreement, which was formally executed in September 1974. The merged organization was called theNeo-Communist Party of the Soviet Union (NCPSU; Russian: Неокоммунистическая партия Советского Союза, НКПСС). Natalia Magnat and Olga Barash joined the group of NCPSU's informal leaders.[2]
At the same time Natalia Magnat had surrendered the role of the primary ideological theorist to a former member of PNCAlexander Tarasov. As of now she was mainly concentrating on questions ofesthetics.
In spite of the formal integration with PNC, viable joint activities were not established in the beginning. As a consequence, when Moscow group of PNC (including its leaders) was arrested by theKGB in January 1975, the unaffected former members of the Left School led by N. Magnat and O. Barash, managed to preserve NCPSU from complete breakdown through increased secrecy.[6] They successfully kept the organization alive deep underground up until 1977, when arrested NCPSU leaders were released to freedom and began to revive the party.[2][4] Thus, although formally ceased to exist in September 1974, in reality the Left School acted as an independent clandestine group right up to January 1977.
Theoretic foundations of the Left School combined elements of classicMarxism,Leninism,Trotskyism, and Frenchatheist existentialism (primarily,Jean-Paul Sartre,Albert Camus andAntoine de Saint-Exupéry).[3]
Thepolitical regime which existed in the Soviet Union was seen by the Left School asanti-socialist andpetty bourgeois (philistine andbureaucratic by nature).[5] A power grab byJoseph Stalin's faction within theAll-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks) and theSoviet government in the late 1920s and early 1930s was thought to be the reason this regime was established. Stalin's supporters expressed the interests ofcounter-revolutionary forces and its regime was seen by the Left School as socially futile, condemning the country to cultural and socialstagnation, holding back personal development of the Soviet citizens, imposing primitivism, depriving people of political initiative and the right to participate in public affairs, driving the mosttalented people toescapism (alcoholism, religion) and, ultimately, to emigration.[5]
Left School never questioned the socialist nature of the USSR's economy; consequently, the social order of the Soviet Union was defined as "perverse socialism". To rectify the situation it would be enough to perform apolitical revolution which would bring the political order in line with the economic order, thus eliminating "the perversion". Such revolution was viewed by the members of the Left School as a "socialist democratic revolution" by analogy withbourgeois-democratic revolutions. The organization's members believed that the sociocultural dead-end, brought upon the USSR by the ruling bourgeois bureaucracy, would inevitably result in economic crisis in the context ofscientific and technical revolution.[4] This would be due to antagonism between bourgeois bureaucracy and creativity that would lead to arevolutionary situation. It was Natalia Magnat'sprojection that this would happen by the end of the 20th century. For the revolution to be successful it would be crucial that a revolutionary party would be formed in the country, a party which could take the lead in the revolution. Left School saw itself as an "embryo" of such a party.
Intelligentsia and, in particular, students, were thought fit to become therevolutionary subject of the "socialist democratic revolution". But it was theworking class which was deemed to be the grassroots basis of the revolution, being a class, that suffered most from thealienation, a class that would be most afflicted by the future economic crisis.[4]