The “two souls” of bolshevism – Interview with Ákos Szilágyi

Szilagyi expounds that bolshevism had two, equally rationally com-mited „souls", two determining trends-one realistic and another one, the romantic. (The two types are personified by Lenin and Trotski.) But neither had anything to do with Stalin: with him and his "irrational realism" a representative of the lumpen strata appeared in power. Szilagyi points to the relationship between the Trotski line and the avantguarde Russian art of the 1920s and the logic of destroying the two together by Stalin.