Rivers Plasketes

The second installment of Anton Vidokle’s trilogy on Russian cosmism, The Communist Revolution Was Caused By The Sun, looks at the poetic dimension of the solar cosmology of Soviet biophysicist Alexander Chizhevsky. Shot in Kazakhstan, where Chizhevsky was imprisoned and later exiled, the film introduces Сhizhevsky’s research into the impact of solar emissions on human sociology, psychology, politics, and economics in the form of wars, revolutions, epidemics, and other upheavals. It aligns the life of post-Soviet rural residents and the futurological projects of Russian cosmism to emphasize that the goal of the early Soviet breakthroughs aimed at the conquest of outer space was not so much technical acceleration, but the common cause of humankind in their struggle against the limitations of earthly life.

Based on the ideas of Russian philosopher, Nikolai Fedorov, Anton Vidokle’s film was shot in Siberia, Crimea, and Kazakhstan. Fedorov, like others, believed that death was a mistake, “because the energy of cosmos is indestructible, because true religion is a cult of ancestors, because true social equality is immortality for all.” Fedorov was one of the Cosmo-Immortalists, a surge of thinkers that emerged in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They linked Western Enlightenment with Russian Orthodoxy and Eastern philosophical traditions, as well as Marxism, to create an idiosyncratically concrete metaphysics. For the Russian cosmists, cosmos did not mean outer space: rather, they wanted to create “cosmos” on earth. “To construct a new reality, free of hunger, disease, violence, death, need, inequality – like communism.”