Retro Life – Life Under the Dome of Soviet History (The Second Article)

This article presents an attempt to analyze the universal mechanisms of totalitarian "flattening", "folding", and "self-refracting" of Soviet history. It also answers the questions of how totalitarianism from the beginning of the development of Soviet history became the basis, and then the form of its simulated and symbolic being, and what place terror occupied in these processes. It explains how it turned from "improvised means" (Heidegger) of self-justification of totalitarianism into total terror, and how in the conditions of the Thaw, Stagnation, Perestroika it acquired a symbolic form of its manifestation. The article examined in detail how life, with the help of the discourse of monumental, antique, critical history, confronts the epidemic of the "historical illness" of Soviet history; frees it from various kinds of concealment through autonomy, historicization, and transcending; and how, as a result of all these processes, it reveals in Soviet history its being-to-death (Heidegger). The author concludes that Soviet history overcame the lack of being, its insufficiency, and non-existence, constituted itself as a "complete", "positive", "own" being with the help of Stalinism, which was its "metaphysical coefficient" development (Sartre).