The very long and extremely eventful life of V.G. Venzher will have to become, after all, the subject of a special scientific study. Vladimir Venzher was born in Sevastopol. He graduated from school in the Crimea and entered the Physics and Mathematics Department of Moscow University at the time of the Russian Revolution. He took an active part in it, fighting on the fronts of the civil war and repeatedly being an eyewitness to front-line rallies with speeches by Trotsky. Venzher miraculously survived among the dying soldiers of the typhoid baracks and lost his brother, a Wrangel officer who was shot during the Red Terror in the Crimea.

After demobilization in 1921, he spent fifteen years in party and economic work. He participated in the implementation of land and water reforms in Central Asia in the 1920s, for which he was awarded the Order of the Red, Banner of Labor of the Khorezm SSR. After graduating from the Institute of Red Professors in 1933, Venzher worked for a year as the head of the political department of the Krasavinsk MTS in the Lower Volga Territory, where, on the very first day of his assumption of office, he released local peasants from arrest, accused, as was then customary, of anti-Soviet sabotage. And then for another three years he led a grain state farm in the Uripinsky district of Stalingrad oblast. In 1939 Venzher was transferred to scientific work in Moscow at the Institute of Economics of the USSR, where he worked until the end of his life, defending his candidate’s and doctoral dissertations there, as well as publishing a number of monographs on the problems of the Soviet agrarian economy. Some of his works were translated and printed in Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria in the 1950s.Footnote 1

The fate of Despite all his services to the party and science, Venzher encountered political difficulties himself. He miraculously managed to avoid Stalinist repressions, he repeatedly faced controversy and political disgrace during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev era for his systemic proposals for granting broad cooperative and democratic rights to collective farms and expanding commodity-money relations in the Soviet Union. For his colleagues at the Institute of Economics of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Venzher was the personification of human conscience. In a conversation with the author of this article, Doctor of Economics, Professor, Institute of Economics, Russian Academy of Sciences (IE RAS), M.I. Voeikov once said that in response to his question to Venzher on how he managed not only to survive but also not to compromise his convictions, he replied: “Very simple. At all meetings, I tried to clearly formulate my personal opinion and demanded that it be entered in the minutes.”

Venzher was also an excellent teacher and speaker. He was recognized by remarkable economists, including T.I. Zaslavskaya, L.V. Nikiforov, T.E. Kuznetsova, A.M. Emelyanov, and R.K. Ivanova, as their teacher.Footnote 2 Venzher for decades and even at a fairly advanced age, having been on various academic and rural scientific missions, was able to evoke a lively response from various communities and audiences during his speeches. Often, after Venzher’s speeches at collective-farm meetings, the collective farmers told their superiors: “We want Venzher again, bring Venzher to us again so we can listen to him.”Footnote 3 In the 1950s, Venzher quite often gave his reports at Kropotkinskaya in the House of Scientists of the Academy of Sciences, and even Professor Chelintsev himself, the legendary patriarch of the Chayanov school, tried not to miss any of his speeches.Footnote 4

We can see the charm and power of Vezhner’s oratory and personality in this story told by one of his students. In the mid-1980s, Comrade V.G. Venzher came to Novosibirsk to see his pupil Tatyana Ivanovna (Zaslavskaya A.N.). He came not only to visit his student, but also to support her in those difficult years, when, on the one hand, there was unjustified obstruction and condemnation of scientists for the “fate of the Soviet village” continued, and on the other hand, there was a growing need to intensify research on the problems of the village and socioeconomic processes in society as a whole. This lean, fit, and energetic man, who was in his mid-90s at the time but looked much younger, found an opportunity to share his thoughts about perestroika, as well as the fate of the village and our society, with the community of Akademgorodok. The author of these lines was lucky to be at this meeting (I did not know anything about him and went only because senior colleagues at the institute said: “This is the same Venzher to whom Stalin wrote a letter.”)”Footnote 5

Venzher was not only a skilled orator, but an extremely talented and original master of a kind of epistolary analytical genre in science and politics. It was in his numerous letters, primarily to the leaders of the Soviet Union, that Venzher left a unique intellectual legacy dedicated to a deep rethinking of the Soviet experience, not limited to the agrarian sector.

Vezhner’s Letters to Soviet Leaders: from Stalin to Gorbachev

Venzher was particularly vividly imprinted in the history of the political life of the Soviet Union, largely due to Stalin’s response to a letter to comrades Venzher and Sanina.Footnote 6 At the same time, it is somehow forgotten that Venzher wrote countless letters to both Stalin and other leaders of the Soviet Union with various proposals for improving the strategy and tactics of Soviet socioeconomic development. Venzher’s recommendations concerned not only the agrarian sector but also the social and scientific policy in the Soviet Union.

Some scholars during Venzher’s lifetime and after his death, while recognizing the courage and civic position of the author of the letters, nevertheless expressed skepticism towards such, from their point of view, an old-fashioned and naive way of communication between the scientist and the authorities.Footnote 7

Indeed, the epistolary style of political communication goes back to ancient times. Nevertheless, at least in the history of the Russian political tradition, the epistolary genre of thinkers-politicians sometimes played a crucial role in the political life of the country. Suffice it to recall Grozny’s correspondence with Kurbsky, Pososhkov’s letters to Peter I, Lomonosov’s letters to the Empresses Elizabeth and Catherine II, and the Decembrist Lunin’s letters to the metropolitan secular society from the Baikal penal colony, in which he mentioned that he had only one tooth left and indeed he was against the government. One can, of course, recall the famous exchange of letters between Gogol and Belinsky, political letters from Herzen, sociopolitical letters from the village of N. Engelgart, and the correspondence between L. Tolstoy and P. Stolypin about the first Russian revolution. Finally, at the center of the main intrigue of Soviet history of the 20th century, we find Lenin’s letter of testament to the party about his possible successors. Of course, all these famous examples of epistolary political correspondence of the rulers of the thoughts and souls of Russia rest on the foundation of the folk tradition of letters to the authorities, so widespread in the history of this country, both tsarist and Soviet, which, perhaps, was best captured in the cry of Leskov’s lefty: “Tell the Tsar not to clean the guns with bricks,” a message that, according to Leskov’s legend, never reached the sovereign, and if it had arrived in time, then “the outcome in the war with the British would have been completely different.”Footnote 8

By the way, about the British. Relatively recently, the English sociologist T. Shanin, in his keynote article on the methodology of the research of social scientists, expressed a definitely ironic attitude towards the Russian habit of scientists writing letters to the authorities in an attempt to establish a productive dialog with their government, stating literally the following: “An important feature of Russian society is the internal need of scientists themselves, developed over centuries of bureaucratic rule and decades of state planning, to find a mandatory state address for their research …. Here it acts as the main goal of science: the desire to write and communicate with someone, somewhere, be it the government, the Secretariat of the Central Committee, or the office of the sovereign-emperor, their thoughts, developments, and dreams (so that they, at least, gather dust in the archives of the supreme power).”Footnote 9

In our opinion, Professor Shanin contradicted himself, because almost 40 years ago, in the book “The Late Marx and the Russian Way” published under his editorship, he himself devoted an entire article to a detailed and respectful analysis of the correspondence of the young Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich with the leader of the International, Karl Marx, noting how important this correspondence turned out to be for the evolution of political thoughts and actions in Russia and the world and could have been even more fateful if some of Marx’s answers to Vera Zasulich had not remained unseen in the archives for so long. Footnote 10

Thus, it turns out that the experiences of epistolary communication between intellectuals and authorities are by no means useless. Moreover, in our era of the Internet, with its public and political sites, the genre of political messages in power is getting a second wind. We have no doubt that if Venzher had lived to see the era of internet communications, he certainly would have sent his analytical messages about the prospects for the development of Russia and the world to the website of the Russian President.

Unfortunately, as far as we know, only a few of Venzher’s letters to the government have been published.Footnote 11 Of course, the most well-known of his letters are related to the correspondence between Vladimir Venzher and Alexandra Sanina with Joseph Stalin. There were also many less well-known letters that Vezhner wrote to other highly placed officials, who however, in contrast to Stalin, did not reply. For example, there are at least three letters from Venzher to M.S. Gorbachev. However, there is no information on whether they were answered.

It is worth dwelling on this last page of the epistolary chronicle of Venzher’s letter to Gorbachev during the period of perestroika. Two letters from Venzher to Gorbachev have already been published in the scientific press, both of which date back to 1989. One of the letters is devoted to an analysis of the processes of perestroika in the Soviet Union and proposals for the development of a strategy for Soviet socioeconomic development based on a deep reform of socialist agriculture. Another letter is devoted to substantiating the need to create a specialized agrarian institute within the system of the USSR Academy of Sciences. To this letter, V.G. Venzher received a response from the President of VASKhNIL A.A. Nikonov, who wrote his answer on behalf of Gorbachev. Venzher wrote more letters to Nikonov and Gorbachev.Footnote 12 We do not know whether they replied.

Let us turn to the analysis of Venzher’s long letter to Gorbachev on the strategy of agrarian reforms in the period of perestroika. This letter has four sections: 1. Preliminary remarks; 2. Grain problem; 3. The restoration of full cooperativeness in socialist agriculture is the key to success; 4. On the yield of grain crops.

In the first section, briefly analyzing Lenin’s policy during the NEP, based on “the stable peasant as the central figure of our rise.”Footnote 13  Venzher thus defines what perestroika is and what its decisive social task is: “Perestroika means a significant change in the aims of communal production. From the development of production for the sake of production to production primarily for the sake of man. Consequently, the transfer of the center to the solution of social problems. What is the most decisive, the most important, the most pressing, and the most essential task for us now?”

Rise of farming! Again, we need to start from this weak point of our economy.Footnote 14

The rise of agriculture according to Venzher should manifest itself primarily in the solution of the grain problem. Venzher emphasizes that, in general, people in the Soviet Union is not starving, but the diet of its citizens is often poor and unbalanced. According to Venzher’s calculations, in order to ensure a balanced or qualified grain ration in the Soviet Union, it was necessary to produce at least 1 ton of grain per capita (of which approximately 700 kg was for livestock and poultry feed and 300 kg for human nutrition).

Venzher believes that in the near future, with the positive development of Soviet agriculture, it would be possible to raise the grain yield to 30 centners per hectare. Thus, if the area of grain crops in the Soviet Union is increased to 120 million hectares, and the gross grain harvest is 360 million tons, then approximately 280 million tons will go to a balanced (or, as Venzher wrote, “qualified” nutrition of the Soviet population), and the remaining 80 million tons of grain can be exported.Footnote 15 In this case, according to Venzher, what could the significant foreign exchange earnings from the sale of bread go to? - Firstly, to create a convertible ruble, and, secondly, “This will allow us to lift the bans on the free movement of citizens of our country abroad.

From the specified currency fund we will be able to convert our rubles and provide anyone who wants to make temporary trips abroad for vacation or for other reasons in their free time.

The necessary regulation may well be ensured by the procedure for issuing foreign passports (in the interests of maintaining state secrets and in other cases). The greatest guarantee of our citizens returning is our high standard of living (especially in terms of the food supply) and the further development of socialist democracy.

Thus, it will be possible to immediately solve the two indicated social problems.Footnote 16

Thus, we see that the well-known rise in agriculture, according to Venzher, in the end, is not an end in itself, but a means to a truly worthy and free life of citizens of the Soviet Union among all countries and peoples of the Earth.

However, further, as always, the sober-minded Venzher, by the way, stipulates that it is good to say that the yield is 30 centners per hectare, but in Soviet reality the yield is less than 20 centners per hectare. Venzher sees the reasons for this in the fact that the interests of the farmer himself are ignored in the Soviet Union. For example, the state agricultural industry, as an idea of integrated agricultural production, is impressive, but without taking into account the political and economic significance of agriculture, this idea does not give the desired result.

Appealing to Lenin during the NEP, Venzher proposes to return to the direction of the consistent cooperation of Soviet agriculture. On this path, he proposes to transfer state agricultural enterprises, i.e., state farms to the status of cooperative enterprises, i.e., to collective farms. At the same time, he proposes providing agricultural enterprises with complete cooperative independence on an integral regional scale. Instead of state district agrarian-industrial associations (DAIAs), create collective farm-cooperative agrarian-industrial associations (CAIAs). According to Venzher: “This would be a single cooperative on the scale of the whole district, uniting into one whole (a) collective farms (including transformed state farms); (b) a district cooperative for the primary processing of agricultural products; (c) a district cooperative for repairing equipment and replacing it with new technical means under agreements with collective farms and with the relevant departments; (d) a district cooperative for the sale of collective farm and cooperative products; (e) a district trade cooperative (meaning the possibility of integration into one system of consumer cooperation); and (f) a district construction cooperative. In short, a single cooperative of the whole district based on complete self-government.”Footnote 17

It is through all-round cooperation that Venzher thinks of the full realization of the personal interests of citizens under socialism, while Venzher emphasizes: “Farming in the exercise of self-interest, has its own particular features and specifics.”Footnote 18 For the knowledge of this specificity Venzher believed that there was an agrarian science, as an interdisciplinary science in the center of which, however, the political and economic issues of agrarian knowledge are found. Venzher’s letters to Gorbachev and Nikonov also addressed the problem of creating a leading main institute of agrarian knowledge in the Soviet Union.

Venzher for decades defended the idea of creating an Agrarian Institute in the Soviet Union at the Academy of Sciences. He emphasized that at the dawn of Soviet power in the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s, there were even several agrarian research institutions that dealt specifically with issues of strategic Soviet and international agrarian development.Footnote 19 In the 1930s, one after another, they were closed, and agrarian knowledge was dispersed among branch agricultural specialties. In letters to Gorbachev and Nikonov, Venzher formulated proposals for the revival of the institute of complex agrarian research, which would study fundamental problems such as land, the decisive factor of production; ground rent; land condition; land reclamation and use of water resources; and culture of agriculture and its specialization.

In 1990, the Agrarian Institute was finally established; it was headed by Academician A.A. Nikonov. Undoubtedly, Venzher’s written proposals to Gorbachev-Nikonov contributed to the creation of this institution. However, the Agrarian Institute was not organized in the system of the USSR Academy of Sciences, as suggested by V.G. Venzher, but based on VASKhNIL, and therefore, voluntarily or not, the new research institution still had a sectoral research approach to the detriment of the fundamentally interdisciplinary scientific approach. In addition, the new institution, on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union, did not even try to rethink the strategy of socialist agrarian development.Footnote 20

Turning again and again to Venzher’s letters to the authorities, one is convinced not only of the timeliness and efficiency of many of his agrarian political and economic proposals but also of the author’s amazing intuition for a certain spirit of the times, calling for the search for humanistic directions of socioeconomic development not only in the agrarian sphere of the Soviet Union but the noosphere of planet Earth, which, however, to an even greater extent than the letters, is indicated in Venzher’s monographs.

Here we should, first of all, dwell on two books by Venzher, where many of his thoughts turned out to be expressed quite frankly and fully, due to the spirit of freedom in the search for scientific truth that broke through during the years of the publication of these books.

The first of the books, “The Collective Farm System at the Present Stage,” was published in 1966, albeit, at the end of the “thaw,” but still at the start of the Kosygin reform, when it seemed that Soviet and world socialism had the strength and ability for its radical renewal and fundamental improvement of socio-economic development.

The second book, How it Was, How it Could Be, How it Became, and How it Should Become was published 25 years later in the midst of perestroika in 1990 a time of hope and approaching despair of the latest attempts to reform Soviet socialism.

Mid-1960s: Peasantry and Cooperation in the Soviet Union and Abroad

Venzher’s book, The Collective Farm System at the Present Stage, as its title implies, is generally devoted to the development and improvement of collective farms in the economy of the Soviet Union, but the preface to this book is surprisingly deep and original, having a meaning far beyond the stated topic.

The preface to the book, and hence the whole book, opens with the following postulate of the author: “The solution of the peasant question is one of the most important sociological problems of our time.”Footnote 21

What kind of peasant question in a country where, at least, socialism had long been victorious, and hence with a long-established cooperative peasantry, can we talk about? How can we talk about the most important sociological problem of modernity in a country where the word sociology was rehabilitated quite recently and where real sociological research is just beginning?Footnote 22

It turns out that in his preface, Venzher poses questions about peasant cooperatives not so much on a Soviet but on a global scale. His preface is largely devoted to the problems of the world economy of international social relations. Venzher writes about the recently collapsed system of colonialism, on the ruins of which dozens of new independent countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America were formed. Apart from the capitalist and socialist countries, most of humanity lived in those countries. And the vast majority of the population of these countries were peasants. However, in the socialist and capitalist countries of the 1960s, the share of the rural, and hence the peasant population was also quite high. In general, in the 1960s, more than 50% of the population on Earth were peasants, and their percentage was overwhelming in postcolonial countries. Where would it move, how would this predominantly peasant world of mankind develop? This was the main sociological question of the time according to Venzher.

Further, Venzher says that the competition between the countries of socialism and capitalism, of course, takes place and will take place in the spaces of the young states of Asia, Africa, and Latin America that have recently gained political independence: countries with a predominantly peasant social structure. Whom and where would the peasantry of these countries follow, and who and what would offer inviting prospects for the development for the world peasantry?

Venzher emphasized that the peasantry of the former colonies faced the most difficult problems: in many respects the archaic yet feudal structures of everyday existence, low labor productivity, general poverty and illiteracy, agrarian overpopulation, and quite often a lack of capital for the sustainable development of the peasant economy. In general, as they said in the famous Soviet film Chapaev: where should the peasant go?

It is under such conditions that Venzher believed that the world peasantry should support the development of agricultural cooperation. Indeed, in its social class structure of the 1920s, the Soviet Union was reminiscent of many postcolonial countries of the 1960s. That is why Venzher believed that the Leninist policy of the NEP, with its support for the stability of the cooperative peasantry, was still of world-historical significance. At the same time, Venzher, of course, emphasized that the cooperative movement of the peasantry had and would have a huge variety of cultural, national, and socioeconomic characteristics, which had to be taken into account when pursuing a policy of transformation in the rural regions of the world.

From the vantage point of today, one has to wonder at the foresight of Venzher’s worldwide socio-philosophical and socio-political analysis. It is unlikely that Venzher was familiar with the pioneering works of the intellectual direction of sociology and economics of developing countries, which was just being formed in the West at that time: Development Studies. Indeed, in his preface, Venzher, in fact, simultaneously with the studies of R. Arona, E. Hobsbawm, B. Moore, E. Wolf, and T. Shanin, formulates the paradigm of the countries of the first, second, and third world, the paradoxes of the economies of the developed countries of the rich north and the developing countries of the poor south, and, most importantly, writes about the enormous economic and political potential of the peasantry, which he proposes to use on the paths of cooperative development.Footnote 23 Thus, in the situation of the 1960s, the the Soviet collective-farm system was by no means a backward and obsolete form of labor organization (as many orthodox Soviet dogmatists, opponents of Venzher, liked to write about it), but, on the contrary, a laboratory of the latest socioeconomic prospects of the world rural development.

In our opinion, the subsequent decades of international rural development generally confirmed that Venzher was correct about the importance of cooperation for the sustainable growth of the economies of peasant (and other) countries.

In the 1960s, many hopes were related to the success of the so-called green revolution, based on the application of modern agricultural technologies. However, the green revolution has developed and is still developing very unevenly. Its agrarian-technological innovations took root and yielded sustainable fruits, mainly in those developing countries where, of course, the successes of the cooperative peasant movement from Mexico to India were also manifested.Footnote 24 In contrast, as the experience of the past decades has shown, without a serious social impact of cooperation, all the technological efforts of the green revolution turned out to be in vain. This turned out to be true for the countries of the socialist camp. In the 1980s, the most impressive successes in rural development occurred in countries as diverse as Hungary and China.Footnote 25 However, their success was based on a common innovative desire to develop the market foundations of large-scale peasant cooperatives.

Once again we are convinced that there is no prophet in his own country, and the subsequent chapters of Venzher’s book, which substantiated the directions of the market-cooperative development of the Soviet collective farm peasantry, turned out to be misunderstood, criticized, and rejected in the subsequent agrarian transformations of the era of stagnation, which relied on the exceptional superiority of rural forms of the Soviet state-bureaucratic economy.

1990: the Last Monograph as a Political Testament

Venzher’s last monograph, published in the year of his death, is truly a socio-philosophical testament of this remarkable scientist.Footnote 26 In this book, Venzher briefly surveys the path of emergence and formation of the Soviet Union. He gives accurate and insightful descriptions of the personal characteristics of the Soviet leaders and the core of their policies; however, as a real populist-Marxist, he pays a lot of attention to the prospects for the implementation of the so-called living creativity of the masses. Venzher, in his thoughts and feelings, was in the midst of the social and economic transformations of perestroika, reflecting on the alternatives to their implementation, anticipating possible risks and difficulties standing in the way of the rejuvenation of Soviet society.

In the middle of this book is a very small chapter entitled, Briefly about the philosophy of the historical process of development of human society in modern conditions. This name seems to sound comical: how is it possible to briefly (by the way, much shorter than the “short course of the CPSU(b)”) talk about such global things, about the philosophy of the historical process of the development of human society … even if only in modern conditions?

Nevertheless, this is Venzher, once again he succinctly, accurately, finally, and unmistakably diagnoses the approaching times. Here is a typical excerpt from Venzher’s analysis:

“The current level of development of the productive forces has created a threat … to all of humanity as a whole.

Firstly, a military conflict, the use of thermonuclear weapons would mark the death of not only capitalism but of all mankind, and all living nature, and the entire living environment, and all geological belts and spheres, and to some extent the solar system itself.

Secondly, not necessarily only war, neglect of the living environment can also cause a world catastrophe. Contamination of the living environment can be so formidable that a chemical fog will cover the Sun and eternal winter will be established on Earth. And this is the also death for man and for all living things. Where are the productive forces and production relations? Before the change of the social structure as a result of a social explosion! In general, as the current history shows, war can no longer be a continuation of politics only by other means, by means of violence and the will of others being imposed, because the means of war have outgrown the goals of war.

Thirdly, the resources of the Earth are not inexhaustible and they can also be wasted and again jeopardize the existence of mankind—its depletion and extinction; thus, there is no economic justice to speak of.

Fourthly, the danger of the formation of a greenhouse climate on Earth is fraught with new challenges and threats.

Finally, fifthly, at present, significant changes in the state of societies cannot occur in isolation from the general process of development, not linked, but separately in each country, without contacts. Society can move forward only in a cumulative process within a single human home, which means in a certain connection with the outside world.Footnote 27

Is it not true that the author has recreated an impressive picture of the dangers of everyday existence that have opened up before all mankind? And at the same time, it is actually recognized here that the famous picture of orthodox Marxism, where in the center of the social and natural universe, according to the poet N. Oleynikov’s the “bourgeois beetle and worker beetle perish in the class struggle” becomes, to put it mildly, unconvincing.

Venzher emphasizes this: “Previously, everything seemed like this: there were exploiters and exploited. Two classes. Whoever had the power won. Now it is not so! The social structure has become much more complicated….”Footnote 28

Then Venzher skillfully sketches the multifaceted characteristics of the increasingly complex structures of modern social life:

“The social structure has become much more complicated… The area of production has its own structure and its own infrastructure. The area of continuation of the human race has its own structure and its own infrastructure. The area of culture, subdivided into many separate aspects, occupies a considerable fraction of the members of society in terms of numbers: there are sciences, and art, and health care, and sports, and tourism, and other links. Finally, the area of administration, law and order, and defense covers a significant part of the population.

Under these conditions, the political activity of society receives a very versatile development: a multi-party system, and a wide range of interests, requirements, and initiatives, and a large number of scientific, technical, humanitarian, and general cultural societies.”Footnote 29

Such a gigantic socio-cultural conglomerate cannot be managed in the old-fashioned class-administrative way. In modern society, the democratization of public life in all the variety of manifestations of human self-organization is becoming more in demand than ever.

Undoubtedly agreeing with the arguments about the need for new political thinking, so fashionable in the Soviet Union and the world at the end of the 1980s, Venzher raises the question not only of the insufficiency of the calls of the October Socialist Revolution to overthrow the world of exploitation but also of the insufficiency of the slogans of the French bourgeois revolution, putting forward his own slogans of a new humanistic world:

“Once the main slogan of democracy and civilization was the demand for freedom, equality, and fraternity. Now objectively the same requirements are becoming: peace, dialog, excluding the use of military force, the commonwealth of peoples based on their independent existence and ecology (protection, improvement, and preservation of the living environment). In the implementation of these three additional life-affirming requirements, the whole philosophy of history, the core of the international and domestic legal order, the security of human survival.”Footnote 30

At the same time, the political realist Venzher, who in the years of his revolutionary youth did a lot of party work in various regions of the Soviet socialist republics, was extremely worried about the dangerous growth of the regionalization of political conflicts at the end of the 20th century, which he observed being resolved through military violence and which brought old divisions of cultural and nationalist grievances back from the past:

“Those regional armed conflicts that take place in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and other places are all expressions of the old way of thinking, which still aims at forceful pressure instead of rational political dialog that does not exclude compromises.”Footnote 31

Despite feeling anxious about the fate of the Soviet country and the whole world in all the variety of socio-economic and cultural-ethnic conflicts of the late 20th century, nevertheless, by the nature of his inherent optimistic thinking, Venzher stated: “The social restructuring of the planet, arising from the new philosophy of history, is inevitable. And it does not require general violence at all.”Footnote 32

Agreeing with Venzher’s statement, we are forced to admit that throughout the world, including the territory of the post-Soviet space, pockets of political violence are still smoldering, and sometimes even blazing, as demonstrated by the recent tragic events in the East of Ukraine. It is here in Donbass, the area of the legendary Soviet internationalism, almost a hundred years after the bloody civil war, in which, as we know, Venzher participated, a new painful center of the post-Soviet regional military conflict has opened.

***

We should not idealize Venzher’s socio-political outlook. Until the end of his life, he remained devoted to the worldview and attitude of the revolutionary generation of “commissars in dusty helmets.” to which he himself belonged. This generation was characterized by an uncompromising rejection of exploitation, a belief in, of course, the universal correctness of the last Leninist decisions from the time of the NEP, and finally, the conviction that it is possible, in the end, to work out and offer the set of correct decisions that must lead Russia and the world to a bright humanistic future. However, in our time of dull postmodern relativism, we so often lack this fundamentally optimistic desire to seek and build a society of social justice.

The closing lines of Venzher’s last book, published in the year of his death on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union, remain his impressive political testament: “We are against the oppression of the weak by the strong. We are against the exploitation of man by man. We are for a socially just and equal position in society, regardless of nationality, religion, and other characteristics of each nation. This is my final word.”Footnote 33