Chagall on the Russian Revolution:
The revolution troubled me because of the incredible dynamic vigour that penetrated you completely, exceeded your imagination, unfolded in your own inner world. And all this at the same time in which your inner, artistic world also seemed to you like a revolution.
A passage like this deserves to be treated as a genuine snapshot of something 'in its becoming'; whereas the temptation, I suspect, is to telescope all such statements through Stalinism, and to see here simply an example of 'false consciousness', delusion. This is not of course to approve of Soviet Communism. It is to insist that the revolution did open up authentically new possibilities - aesthetic and political at once - which one betrays by reflex references to Soviet Communism. It is precisely the latter that crushed such new possiblities.