Revolutionary performance: experience and modern production

The analysis of the works of E. Burke, A. de Tocqueville, B.N. Chicherin, A. Fouillee, and S. Moscovici on political philosophy, political psychology of masses provide an opportunity to look at revolutionary alternative as a kind of performance, the sense of which contradicts even the Jaures' interpretation of it as a "barbaric form of progress". The article shows a political revolution as a mass action that is drawn up as a play, whose task is to hide the reverse nature of upcoming changes. Revolution itself is not able to change the nature of institutions, relationships, society and personality. In this context the image of the future becomes an announcement of the revolutionary performance. Stage, actors, theatre performance change the mass from the audience into the play's participants. The problem is revealed through the example of Ukrainian events. A carnival according to Bakhtin transforms very quickly into a bloody revolutionary action according the lows of crowd psychology. The Maidan becomes an embodied triumph of revolution changes over parliamentarism, while maintaining the form of performance. The Ukrainian revolution has shown that the country connects its past with Russian dominance and its future with entrance into the European Union without the temporal self-definition. The revolution has complemented the spatial split of Ukraine into West and East by the mental split that occurred 420 years ago during the Union of Brest into Catholics (noblemen), Greek Catholics (common people of Western Ukraine) oriented to Poland, and Orthodox who were regarded as pariahs. The author analyzes the role of radicalism and patriotism in the revolutionary society where traditional political culture is completed by technological scripts of revolutionary protest.

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