ABSTRACT
Even before the collapse of communism, the term “utopia”—once the horizon of Hope, the end of the long journey, and the content of emancipation—had become associated with tyranny. Although not at all the same or even similar economic or political systems, fascist and communist regimes shared an important commonality: armed with a totalistic ideology, they aimed at nothing less than a revolution in every aspect of social life as much as they sought to utterly transform the meaning of politics and the polity. And, a distinguishing characteristic of the Bolshevik revolution was the intention of many of its leaders to obliterate, by force if necessary, the private sphere which, according to the dictatorships, was a potential if not an actual site of resistance to their rule. Hence, the “cultural revolution” that accompanied the political and economic upheaval in Russia, while not an artifice of the new state power, gradually became an aspect of its will to total domination. In the 1920s, the cultural revolution signified a new beginning; by the 1930s, it became an excuse for the surveillance and selective jailing and execution of intellectuals and political dissenters.
