The Metaphysics of the Thaw: From Totalitarianism to Communism

In the article, the author makes an attempt of metaphysical reconstruction of the Thaw as a natural one following the emergence and formation of the stage of self-determination of Soviet history - an attempt to explain its historical existence as the beginning of the development of Soviet history. The author concludes that at this time Soviet history resumes its history as the ability to be, makes it its own history and annihilates the produced selfhood. The paper proves that in the process of its historicization (self-identification), totalitarianism as the essence of Soviet history, being a special way of the coincidence of the self-activity of power and socialist construction, acquires its own being and becomes the foundation of its beingness. It exists and in various forms constitutes the integrity of its being-in-the-world, while revealing in it a scarcity, a lack of being and non-being. With the help of such existential structures as the initiative of the authorities and socialist construction, totalitarianism decompresses the existence of Soviet history as complete, continuous and positive. It relieves it of various kinds of concealments (covetousness, obscurations, and distortions). It represents “unclenched” being as simulacrum, semblance and intentions. It selects a choice, chooses and, finally, in an uncompromising struggle against dissent, chooses choice as a way of annihilating its self. The article examines in detail how, during the Thaw, through the disclosure, rediscovery of Soviet history and its newfound version, totalitarianism, including in the form of Stalinism, which has become from the “metaphysical coefficient” (Sartre) of its historicity, a mode of independent selfhood, elevates Soviet history to its extreme possibility being - to communism and “being to death”.