Perestroika: from Dawn to Dusk (Article 2)

Part two of our study explores the ‘second’ and ‘third’ beings of Perestroika as a historical phenomenon. It identifies and examines different forms of its existence as history and as a way of historiorizing Soviet history. The author postulates that constituting its ‘selfhood’, ‘circle of selfhood’, ‘self-standing of selfhood’ Perestroika becomes history – its cohesive, complete, positive existence assumes a shape, stable forms of the reproduction of historical being (substance, subject, freedom) appear, and special modes of its existence (appearances, the seeming, intents) emerge. The paper considers such ways of Perestroika’s being, through which it exercises “compression” (Heidegger) of the existence of Soviet history and, displacing construction, socialism and itself through special procedures of idealization, autonomization, and transcending, turns it into Nothingness. The author concludes that as ‘being-towards-death’ of Soviet history, Perestroika constitutes its existence as its desinence, completion, completion of the end. These forms of Perestroika’s beingness fix not only the ways of restoring the identity of Soviet history existence, but also the ways of transforming its own being into Nothingness. The conclusion states that the collapse of the USSR was a consequence of the fact that, firstly, the Soviet power had stopped building socialism and, secondly, totalitarianism, as the ‘naked’ essence of Soviet history, demanded from the authorities such a form of organization of its subjectivity that would allow the resumption of the imperious construction of Soviet history - the construction of its “being-towards-death” (Heidegger).