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We’ll find our own basket and Pharaoh’s daughter to help us. Those who keep a childlike faith in the triumph of truths over lies, and in mutual aid, who live their lives entirely within the gift economy, will always receive a miracle at the exact moment they need it.
    Nadya
    PC-14, Mordovia
    1 A line from the popular Soviet children’s writer Sergei Mikhalkov: “Moms of all kinds are needed, and moms of all kinds are important.”
    2 Tolokonnikova here is quoting from Mikhail Lermontov’s 1832 poem “The Sail,” a classic many Russians can recite from memory. The poem ends: “[The sail,] rebellious, courts a storm, /As though in storms it might find peace!”
    3 In 2010, Erofeev and his colleague Yuri Samodurov were tried and convicted on the charge of “inciting religious hatred.” Members of the artists’ collective Voina (War) stormed into the courtroom during sentencing, with the intention of releasing several thousand live cockroaches. Among those involved in the action was Yekaterina Samutsevich, who would later be arrested for participating in Pussy Riot’s “Punk Prayer” alongside Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina.
    4 An antiquated name for the earliest Slavic polities in the area of contemporary Russia; roughly akin to calling England “Britannia.”

“Is our position utopian?”
Slavoj to Nadya, April 4, 2013
    Dear Nadya,
    I was so pleasantly surprised by the arrival of your letter—the long delay had raised a fear in me that the authorities will prevent our communication.
    I was deeply honored, flattered even, by my appearance in your dream. For me, appearing in a dream is forever associated with a precise date—the night of June 25, 1935, when Trotsky in exile dreamt that the dead Lenin was questioning him anxiously about his illness: “I answered that I already had many consultations and began to tell him about my trip to Berlin; but looking at Lenin I recalled that he was dead. I immediately tried to drive away this thought, so as to finish the conversation. When I had finished telling him about my therapeutic trip to Berlin in 1926, I wanted to add, ‘This wasafter your death’; but I checked myself and said, ‘After you fell ill …’ ”
    There is an obvious link with the Freudian dream in which a father who doesn’t know that he’s dead appears to the dreamer. So what does it mean that Lenin doesn’t know he’s dead? There are two radically opposed ways of reading Trotsky’s dream. According to the first, the terrifyingly ridiculous figure of the undead Lenin who doesn’t know that he’s dead stands for our own obstinate refusal to renounce our grandiose utopian projects and accept the limitations of our situation: there is no big Other, Lenin was mortal and made errors like everyone else, so it is time for us to let him die, put to rest this obscene ghost haunting our political imaginary, and approach our problems in a pragmatic, non-ideological way. But there is another sense in which Lenin is still alive: he is alive insofar as he embodies what Alain Badiou calls the “eternal Idea” of universal emancipation, the immortal striving for justice that no insult or catastrophe will manage to kill—Lenin lives wherever there are people who still fight for the same Idea.
    Is this not our predicament today? And by “our” I mean those who remain faithful to the radical emancipatory (in short, Communist) political vision. Are we to be dismissed as dangerous utopians harboring new catastrophes, or—to quote your wonderful concluding thought—will there always be a miracle at the right moment in the lives of those with a childlike faith in the triumph of truths over lies? We should not be ashamed to evoke here, as you do, the tradition of the “fools for Christ.” Is our position utopian? I am more and more convinced that today’s real utopians arethose pragmatic-rational experts who seem to believe that the present state of things can go on indefinitely, that we are not