Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Vol. 6, No.

1, 97126, June 2005

Marxism-Leninism as a Political Religion

KLAUS-GEORG RIEGEL
University of Trier, Germany
riegel@uni-trier.de 1469-0764 Original Taylor 2005 0 1 6 Department Klaus-GeorgRiegel 00000Summer & Article Francis (print)/1743-9647 of SociologyUniversittsring 2005 Group Ltd Political (online)Religions 1554296TrierGermany Totalitarian 10.1080/14690760500099788 FTMP109961.sgm and Francis Movements Ltd and

ABSTRACT This article describes Lenins utopian design of a revolutionary community of virtuosi as a typical political religion of an intelligentsia longing for an inner-worldly salvation, a socialist paradise without exploitation and alienation, to be implanted in the Russian backward society at the outskirts of the industrialised and modernised Western Europe. The coup dtat of October 1917 accomplished the institutionalisation of a political religion combining a political and sacral monopoly of power and belief. Consequently, the Leninist policy of social extermination of political opponents, ideological rivals and stigmatised social classes became a sacral obligation to be fulfilled by the new ideological orthodoxy. The beginning iconography of a Leninist sacral tradition praised Lenin as a messianic and numinous leader, a process of iconographic work in progress which culminated after Lenins death in the sacral Lenin cult. The Lenin mausoleum served as the monumental centrepiece of sacral rites and practices to be enacted by the Stalinist orthodoxy. Stalins invention of a sacral tradition of Marxism-Leninism qualified him as the only true disciple of Lenin. Therefore, Stalin claimed the monopoly of the infallible interpretation of the holy scriptures, summarised in his own dogmatic performances. In this sense, Stalins Leninism became itself a religion dtat (B. Souvarine).

It is one of the paradoxes of the Western modernisation process that the political religions of Fascism, National Socialism and Marxism-Leninism institutionalised the political centres as arenas for the pursuit of utopias of inner-worldly salvation. Quite in contrast to the pre-modern theocracies, the modern political religions discovered the kingdom of politics as the central arena for the realisation of their millennial dreams, ideologies and totalitarian aspirations. Furthermore, the pre-modern structural interdependence of politics and religion in Western societies was re-established after the modernisation processes in these societies had initiated the structural differentiation of political power centres, and religious confessional cultures. As a result of the European religious wars of the seventeenth century, the modern state had neutralised the religious demands and power aspirations of Catholic and Protestant churches by claiming an absolute monopoly of power, and binding decisions on secular, public domains without interfering into the fields of religious beliefs and commitments. Religious confessions became a matter of private, individual conscience and decision. As far as the Christian religions1 are concerned, they concentrated upon the interpretation of
Correspondence Address: Klaus-Georg Riegel, Universitt Trier, Dept. of Sociology, Universittsring 15, 54296, Trier, Germany. Email: riegel@uni-trier.de.
ISSN 1469-0764 Print/1743-9647 Online/05/010097-30 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd DOI: 10.1080/14690760500099788

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the ultimate experiences of human life, death and transcendental powers. In this way, they emancipated themselves from legitimising state authorities and interfering in matters of scientific disputes examined by scientific communities. Therefore, religions in modern society are specialised in dealing with the contingencies of human life.2 The salvationist regimes of modern political religions reversed that structural differentiation of politics and religion by mobilising the civil duties as well as the religious consciences of their citizens for their own cause. Thus the modern political religions of Fascism, National Socialism and Marxism-Leninism introduced a totally new structural and cultural figuration within the context of Western modernisation processes. First of all, the institutionalisation of these political religions resulted in a reversal of formerly differentiated, functionally autonomous and institutionalised spheres of action and thought. Especially with respect to Italy and Germany, modernised, industrialised and culturally differentiated societies experienced a breakdown of modernisation.3 In the context of a less differentiated institutional framework, the sacralisation of politics initiated again a re-sacralisation of political centres formerly serving as secular arenas for the pursuit of power, prestige and distribution of goods and services. The re-sacralisation of political centres takes place when, as Emilio Gentile has impressively demonstrated in the case of the Italian Fascism,4 a political movement confers a sacred status on an earthly entity (the nation, the country, the state, humanity, society, race, proletariat, history, liberty, or revolution) and renders it an absolute principle of collective existence, considers it the main source of values for individual and mass behaviour, and exalts it as the supreme ethical precept of public life. It thus becomes an object for veneration and dedication, even to the point of self-sacrifice.5 In this sense, political religions6 propagate (1) doctrines of inner-worldly salvation. They constitute autonomous spheres of ethical behaviour without being obligated toward transcendental sources of salvation. The leaders and ideologists of the movements invent an independent tradition of sacralisation of their utopian vision of reconstructing society and culture. Even though this invention of sacral tradition borrows selectively myths, rituals, ideologies and cosmologies from the cultural repertoire of Christian religions, political religions claim their own mandate to salvation and aspire for self-perfection and self-deification. The modern political religions emphasise (2) a total reconstruction of society according to their utopian visions. In their view, modern societies served as a laboratory for gigantic experiments of revolutionary transformations7 of their respective structures and cultures. Their belief in (3) the primacy of politics leads them to conquer and use the central political institutions as means for the revolutionary reconstruction of the society. The political system becomes the central and sacralised arena for the self-salvation and self-sacrifice of revolutionaries striving to implement the utopian designs which have to be realised in the present and on earth. The inner-worldly political arena becomes the heavenly city for self-salvation from the sufferings and evils of human societies. The leaders and their respective followers of that inner-worldly political kingdom define themselves as (4) a moral lite, as a community of self-elected saints, who are entitled to transform totally the structure of society and to command the people in the name of

Marxism-Leninism as a Political Religion 99 salvation, to the establishment of a new and better social and cultural order. The moral avant-garde of these salvationist movements promulgate doctrines of faith which are extremely intolerant of other commitments. Political religions represent (5) exclusive commitments to their holy cause. Alternative commitments were treated as heretical challenges to their own monopoly of salvationist vision. They are seen as objektive Gegner8 (objective enemies) who were persecuted and terrorised, deported to concentration camps and annihilated in mass-murder campaigns. This claim to the exclusive mandate of salvation and of historical truth is closely related to an expansive and universal drive in a (6) world mission. The political religions evolve a universal and trans-national vision of their salvationist commitments. The absolute truth transcending the borders of primordial collectivities has to be offered to everyone by an army of true believers whose whole duty consists in universal proselytising and establishing mission centres to spread the holy gospel. The Russian Revolutionary Tradition and Socialist Salvation The Russian case of a political religion propagating the inner-worldly utopian doctrine of a classless society without alienation and exploitation, does not fit exactly into the paradigm of a breakdown of modernisation. First of all, the political religion of Marxism-Leninism was institutionalised in Russia and China but not in Western Europe, which served until this moment as a frame of reference for modernising societies. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 succeeded in the outskirts of capitalism and stirred up the hopes and dreams for a messianic coming of a salvationist, socialist world revolution. Thus the predominantly agrarian societies of Russia and China situated at the periphery of modernised Western societies, emerged as the centres of socialist salvation. The Russian socialist movement led by Leninist Bolshevism was considered a negative frame of reference by Italian Fascism and German National Socialism, which were urged to reactive activism and defence against the threatening challenge of a Bolshevik-Russian leadership on the battlefield of rivalling political religions. The advantages of the agrarian backwardness of Russia9 were demonstrated by the seizure of salvationist power within the context of rivalling and conquering political religions on the Western battlefield. Russian socialism could compensate for this backwardness by accepting a Western socialism easily coalescing with the system of agrarian value orientations with its emphasis on the worth of the ploughmans labor and its rejection as sinful of activities which were not directly connected with tilling the soil.10 In this way, the disadvantages of Russias backwardness were transformed in a triumphant salvationist advantage of having reached a combination of the communist paradise, of the obscina connected with a great spurt of industrialisation at the same time. For example, Trotskys ideological concept of a permanent revolution on a world scale, initiated by the fires of the Russian revolution of 1917, reflected these hidden yearnings for representing not only an original version of Russian socialism, but also for claiming a supremacy on the field of rivalling political religious utopias. In his prophetic messages, the disadvantages of Russian backwardness should be compensated by the strategic advantage of mobilising Russian proletarian masses exhibiting a revolutionary enthusiasm11 not yet known in history. Second, the Russian socialist movement evolved within a context of modernisation characterised by Caesaropapism, the complete subordination of priestly to

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secular power.12 The Tsarist hierocracy a close affiliation of autocratic monarchy and Orthodox Christianity represented a fusion of secular and sacral power typical of the modern political religions to come. Even though the Russian socialist movement was internally divided in different factions, social circles and parties, their members fought unanimously against a Tsarist hierocratic domination, considered by them to be symptomatic of Russian backwardness in lagging behind the modernised and industrialised societies of Western Europe. Thus the Russian socialists acted as a modernising movement against a reactionary force of feudal absolutism. Ironically after some time in power, the Stalinist hierocratic autocracy itself began to rediscover the rich Tsarist iconography of power as a useful means to legitimise their minority status when confronted with a society familiar having an elective affinity with secular and sacral powers. Third, at the same time, the Russian revolutionary socialist movement was also since its beginning a part of the Western European political messianism,13 whose socialist sacral tradition has provided an important contribution to the socialist messianism deeply influencing the Russian socialist movement in the second half of the nineteenth century. The French Revolution played the decisive historical role for engendering the prophets of totalitarian democracy,14 whose political messianism was incorporated by the Bolsheviks in their own salvanionist heritage. The religion of Revolution embraced an enormous variety of interests, hopes, tendencies and expectations from nationalism to communism, from evangelical poverty to industrial technocracy. They were all aware that they were an international confraternity.15 Furthermore, crucial decisions concerning the directions of development, major themes of self-reflection, guiding ideologies and founding myths of the Russian socialist movement were formulated and decided within the confines of the socialist labour movements of Western Europe. For example, in 1881 Vera Zasulic asked Karl Marx, the prophet, founder and manager of the sacral tradition of the communist movement, if all countries of the world had to pass all phases of the capitalist production; indeed, as Zasulic claimed, it was a question of life and death.16 In the case of Russia, Marx answered, the Russian socialists could jump directly to the communist phase, but only under the condition that the Russian obscina, a supposedly agrarian paradise, served as starting point for initiating the longed-for revolutions in Western Europe.17 This close incorporation of Russian socialism into the sacral tradition and policy of the headquarters of socialist-communist parties in Western Europe applied to Leninist Bolshevism too. Lenin and his companions undertook a long journey through almost all West European centres of socialist agitation, were initiated into the learned code of interpreting the dogmas and canons of the sacral tradition, and internalised the behaviour and language of professional politicians in exile. For example, the decisive schism of 1902 between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks took place in London and the central Marxist think tank at that time, the Liberation of Labour (188083), was working in Geneva, where Lenin met the leading Russian Marxists like Plekanov, Akselrod and Sasulic for the first time. Lenins complicated affiliation with German socialism, whose organisational discipline and power he admired, deserves special consideration.18 The first issue of Lenins Iskra appeared on 11 December 1900 in Leipzig, after which it was published in Munich, and later in London and Geneva. A clandestine distribution system of the Iskra to Russia was directed by Lenin and managed by his wife Krupskaia, living as exile residents in Munich, Geneva, Zrich and London.

Marxism-Leninism as a Political Religion 101 Fourth, the long years of political exile in Western Europe had familiarised Lenin with the sacral tradition of Western socialism, and Marxism did not prevent him from searching for an organisational weapon19 adapted to the specific Russian conditions and suited to overthrowing the mighty Tsarist powers of secret police, bureaucracy, army and legitimising Orthodox state-church. Borrowing selectively from the class struggle experiences of Western socialist movements and from the Russian revolutionary underground tradition, Lenin invented his salvationist conception of a professional revolutionary, an ascetic of revolutionary work and self-sacrifice.20 Lenins revolutionary catechism, What is to be done? Burning Questions of Our Movement (1902), reminded his readers of Chernyshevskys novel, What is to be done? or Tales of the New People (1863),21 which cultivated the new ascetic, self-sacrificing hero, Rakhmetov, believing in science and a rational socialist order. Indeed, Lenin continued the long Russian tradition of underground revolutionary asceticism.22 Pestels Decembrist Revolutionary Welfare Association,23 the revolutionary Catechism of Necaev,24 The Programme for Revolutionary Actions of Tkachev,25 and Isutins guidelines for his Organization26 were attempts to organise and discipline the messianic belief of the revolutionary intelligentsia. These organisational patterns of disciplining and introducing a brotherly and collective control of each other,27 as Bakunin admonished his companion Necaev,28 represented typically religious communities of virtuosi,29 small groups of intellectuals longing for salvation for themselves and their respective societies. The Russian Jacobins30 cultivated an intellectually and morally developed minority that was to seize power and, thereafter, retain control of the state during the long period of transitions to the earthly utopia. That Russian intellectual minority should not be confused with intellectuals only producing and debating ideas, utopian designs or provocative criticism. The Russian intelligentsia formed an order pursuing its own cause, a secular priesthood disseminating a certain attitude to life like a gospel.31 The Leninist Revolutionary Community of Virtuosi Lenins revolutionary minority, organised as a conspiracy of disciplined and obedient men and women ready to destroy primordial commitments and reconstruct new loyalties and beliefs, demonstrates very clearly the transfer of sacral, transcendental powers to an inner-worldly asceticism of revolutionary action and belief. The revolutionary, inner-worldly and secular vocation (Gesinnungsethik) is no longer driven by the search for the other-worldly certitudo salutis. However, it follows the secular calling of the revolutionary commitments; that is, to realise the utopias of moral self-perfection and the total reconstruction of societies and cultures. Like the Puritan virtuoso, the Leninist professional revolutionary is a soldier whose battles are fought in the self before they are fought in society it is the acting out of a new identity, painfully won.32 The party of professional revolutionaries required the unreserved devotion of the virtuoso cadre to the revolutionary, salvationist principles and articles of faith of the movement. In order to get the organisation of revolutionaries we must have people who will devote themselves exclusively to Social-Democratic activities, and that such people must train themselves patiently and steadfastly to be professional revolutionaries.33 Lenins organisational imperatives of the strictest secrecy, the strictest selection of members, and the training of professional revolutionaries34 can be found in all types of total institutions,35 which are operating with the strategy

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of Benthams panopticon.36 More especially, Lenins proposition of a complete, comradely, mutual confidence among revolutionaries37 stimulated the vigilant eyes of informal social control to discover the secrets of the hidden actions, thoughts and sins of comrades-in-arms. In Lenins conception, a permanent struggle for the best theory, strategy and tactics within the party secures the necessary lines of demarcation with heretical seductions, and purifies the community from the contagious poison of rightist or leftist manoeuvres. Party struggles lend a party strength and vitality; the greatest proof of a partys weakness is its diffuseness and the blurring of clear demarcations; a party becomes stronger by purging itself.38 The permanent search and fight against real or invented internal enemies resulted in both the endless self-purification campaigns confirming the exclusiveness of the party and in the strengthening of internal cohesion. The whole self-purification machinery worked as a selection procedure to train true believers in systematic obedience, to expel heretics, to search out dissenters and to fight against renegades. The Leninist body of discipline, the party of professional revolutionaries, uses the advantages of continuous training, correcting, monitoring, supervising and stigmatising to form a salvationist organisation of military agents, reliable, experienced, and hardened workers.39 Our worst sin with regard to organisation consists in the fact, exclaims Lenin, that by our primitiveness we have lowered the prestige of revolutionaries in Russia.40 He gives his disciples a detailed register of cardinal sins guilty of lowering the prestige of revolutionary work. A person who is flabby and shaky on questions of theory, who has a narrow outlook, who pleads the spontaneity of the masses as an excuse for his own sluggishness, who resembles a trade-union secretary more than a spokesman of the people, who is unable to conceive of a broad and bold plan that would command the respect even of opponents, and who is inexperienced and clumsy in his own professional art the art of combating the political police such a man is not a revolutionary, but a wretched amateur.41 All comrades-in-arms, Lenin warns, should have a lively sense of their responsibility, knowing as they do from experience that an organisation of real revolutionaries will stop at nothing to rid itself of an unworthy member.42 The disciplinary power of the party43 makes professional revolutionaries. Such leaders can acquire training solely by systematically evaluating all the everyday aspects of our political life, all attempts at protest and struggle on the part of the various classes and on various grounds.44 The total subordination of body and mind of military agents under the revolutionary goal aspired to, requires even a militant preparedness,45 a permanent self-control and endurance, for the desired salvationist actions and programmes. Critics of Lenins party conception had pointed out the hidden religious dimensions in this catechism for professional revolutionaries very early on. F. Gerlich saw very clearly that the Leninist proletarian was in fact a salvationist intellectual.46 R. Flp-Miller observed the intense self-deification of the party as a chiliastic movement dreaming of a paradise on earth.47 F. Stepun criticised Bolshevisms imitation of the Orthodox Church.48 N. Berdiajew drew a comparison between the myth of the Third Rome and the missionary activities of the

Marxism-Leninism as a Political Religion 103 Third International.49 Already in 1909, within the context of the Vecchi debate, S. Frank had called the zealous revolutionary socialist intelligentsia revolutionary monks who formed a revolutionary order.50 The ascetic requirements, which Lenin demanded that his revolutionaries fulfil, were reflected by self-descriptions of leading comrades-in arms. Stalin spoke of the Communist Party as a kind of sword-bearing knightly order.51 While G.E. Zinoviev glorified the professional revolutionaries as dedicating themselves only to the Revolution and their interests,52 N. Bukharin praised the exclusive commitment of party cadres to the revolutionary goals. The Leninist party appeared to him a revolutionary order which pursued permanent self-purification53 in order to obtain a moral unanimity. Dzerzhinsky, the First Chekist, believed in the redemptive power of terrorist actions by the Cheka, requiring sacrifices in order to shorten up the road to salvation for others.54 Later on, Dzerzhinsky added, we are willing to heal them but at the moment we are fighting for the power.55 Lenin himself emphatically testified to his belief in the party. We believe in the party, we see in her the reason, the honour and the conscience of our epoch the only guarantee for the liberation movement of the working class.56 Apparently, Lenins utopian design of a revolutionary community of virtuosi represented: 1. a political religion typical of an intelligentsia. It was a militant collective pursuing party unity, unquestioning obedience and iron discipline, instructions directed to the self-conquest of virtuosi in order to serve as disciplined soldiers in a professional organisation of military agents.57 That militant collective seemed to offer a convincing answer to the classical Christian paradox of theodicy, namely to the tormenting problem of how the extraordinary power of such a god may be reconciled with the imperfection of the world that he has created and rules over.58 It substituted other-worldly God by becoming itself the centre for a this-worldly solution to Christian theocracies. By this way of self-deification, the sacralised political body of the Leninist organisation generated historical truth, the salvation needed to solve the mysteries of history and society. Applied to that this-worldly sacral political source of historical truth and omnipotence, the Leninists could approvingly quote Durkheims dictum: Si la religion a engendr tout ce quil y a dessentiel dans la socit, cest que lide de la socit est lme de la religion.59 Consequently, the Leninist idea of a militant collective is the sacral soul of its inner-worldly political religion. In this sense, the Leninist intellectuals, as a social group of virtuosi, offered an answer to the theodicy problem by claiming an exclusive mandate to public interpretation60 of the symbolic universe of the sacral tradition of socialism. Their claimed monopoly position within the competitive ideological world of rivalling socialists groups, factions and parties provided them with the moral superiority to belong to the moral avant-garde of progressive forces in history and society, and therefore to be entitled with the exclusive mandate to totally transform the structure and culture of society in the name of an emancipated mankind, and a new and better socio-cultural order. The Leninist organisational weapon provided the social and cultural frame of reference for that salvationist mandate and endowed the Leninist intellectual with the pervasive meaning, and thus to find unity with himself, with his fellow men, and with the cosmos.61 The quest for salvation through heroic self-perfection was institutionalised in this closed Leninist world of a militant

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K.-G. Riegel collective, legitimising revolutionary thought and action, through virtuosi pursuing their mission of redemption of society and humanity. Lenins party of professional military agents served as a charismatic representation for an inner-worldly salvation, longed-for by intellectuals aspiring to erect a socialist paradise without exploitation and alienation in a backward society at the outskirts of an industrialised and modernised Western Europe. It was significant and meaningful for some members of the Russian intelligentsia62 to join the revolutionary community of virtuosi in order to liberate the labouring and suffering proletarian and agrarian masses from the yoke of an autocracy hindering the modernisation of a latecomer to Western modernisation. The charismatic glorification of the party as a saviour, messiah, a salvation army for a backward society in overwhelming social and cultural misery, gives the intelligentsia a mission to fulfil for their inner needs, a firm conviction to march on the progressive sides of historical development, and an undivided commitment to the holy cause of the party. The fusion of the conflicting demands of individual heroism and organizational impersonalism found expression in the form of an organizational hero the Bolshevik Party.63 On the long journey toward its salvationist mission, Lenins party experienced the bitter lessons of a painful search for historical truth, revealing the correct answers to the question of life and death;64 namely, the sacral legitimation of the Leninist option to solve the parousia problem of revolutionary salvation65 in a predominantly agrarian society experiencing the first waves of industrialisation a historical opportunity not forecasted in the sacral scriptures of classical Marxism directed at highly industrialised and modernised Western societies. The legitimacy of the October Revolution of 1917 was at stake. Not surprisingly, the Leninist political religion produced a huge array of catechisms, theoretical writings, pamphlets, books, forgeries and fictitious traditions in order to legitimise the coup dtat of 1917 as a historically justified revolution, not violating the phases of historical development, one prophesied by Marx himself. Therefore, it seems justified to consider the Leninist political religion as a true book religion giving its adherents ample opportunities to study the sacral teachings, to interpret dogmas and canons, and to propagate the unfailing truths of the sacral tradition and their legitimised interpretation by the new censoring orthodoxies of the party. The Leninist virtuoso had to be an expert familiar with the sacral language and binding scriptures66 of the imagined community of Leninist disciples. After the successful seizure of power in 1917, the Leninist inner-worldly community itself has become an original sacral substance.67 It was no longer a quarrelling faction within the broad frame of reference of Western socialism, but the revolutionary avant-garde of a trans-national movement proselytising and establishing mission centres to spread the holy gospel of world revolutionary obligations and expectations. Leninism became a world mission. The world missionary activities organised and directed by the organs of the Third International opened up new horizons for salvationist hopes and actions, transcending the narrow Western European conceptions of class struggles and proletarian dictatorships to come. After the first Communist International (1919), Lenin dictated to the

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Marxism-Leninism as a Political Religion 105 Second Congress of the Communist International (1920) 21 conditions68 to be accepted by communist parties wanting membership. His conception of a centralised party with disciplined cadres, working conspiratorially, formed the organisational and ideological model of a new world church, equipped with the hierocratic monopoly to excommunicate deviant church members. For example, in September 1920, the Congress of Baku took place. Delegates of communist parties and sympathetic fellow travellers, mainly from the Near East, discussed the practical adaptation of Leninist theses to the colonial question in their home countries. The chiliastic aspiration to establish agrarian soviets and thereby overstep the capitalist phases of development and arrive immediately at a socialist heaven intoxicated the delegates and stirred up among them a revolutionary tat deffervescence.69 The popular masses of the East are not so well educated as the working masses of the West, but the heart of the man of the East, awakened by the thunder of revolutionary events in Russia, is filled with self-sacrificing zeal and burns with a bright fire of hatred for the oppressors, a sacred fire of struggle. The entire East is saturated with bacteria of revolution. Millions of suffering masses of the East are gripped by the spirit of protest and are straining to go into the battle.70 The last desperate battle between Good and Evil, proletariat and capital, could only end with the lasting triumph of the proletariat, carrier of salvation. The salvation of the East lies in the victory of the proletariat, and so our only road is that contact with Soviet Russia. Under its leadership and instruction, along with it, we must go forward against the common enemy world capital.71 In this holy war between the proletariat, messiah of the East, and world capital, devil of the West, the young Soviet power appeared as world missionary church, as ecclesia militans et triumphans, bringing the torch of enlightenment and salvation into the darkness of oppressed peoples of the East. The coup dtat of October 1917 very clearly demonstrated the primacy of politics for realising the utopian designs and salvationist hopes long cultivated by the Leninist militant collective of revolutionary virtuosi. Thus, the seizure of power did not mean solely a change from the Tsarist autocracy to a proletarian dictatorship usurped by the Leninist minority after having declared the other rival socialist Russian parties supporting or tolerating the Provisional Government during the February Revolution as a short-lived bourgeois transition period. Lenins decision to seize power, highly controversial even within the Central Committee and supported only by a thin voting margin, accomplished the institutionalisation of a political religion combining a political and sacral monopoly of power and belief. Consequently, the use of revolutionary terror against real or imagined enemies of the Leninist regime became a sacral obligation to be fulfilled by the new ideological orthodoxy. The ideological sacralisation of revolutionary terror,72 the use of unrestricted violence directed against political opponents, ideological rivals, stigmatised social classes (wealthier peasants, the kulaks, petty bourgeois people, aristocrats, priests, bishops and believers of the Orthodox Church, speculators, burglars, hooligans, enemy agents, the whole administrative and army personnel of the old Tsarist autocracy, the financial and merchant class and so

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K.-G. Riegel on) aiming at their oppression, social extermination, deportation and detention in concentration camps. Lenin conceived of the class war as one wholly between the socialist and salvationist forces on the one hand, and the exploiting classes of capitalist society doomed to extinction on the other. Consequently, uprisings of those evil, corrupted and stigmatised classes like the kulaks had to be mercilessly suppressed. The interests of the entire revolution require this, because now the last decisive battle with the kulaks is under way everywhere. One must give an example. 1. Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers. 2. Publish their names. 3. Take from them all the grain. 4. Designate hostages as per yesterdays telegram. Do it in such a way that for hundreds of versts around, the people will see, tremble, know, shout: they are strangling and will strangle to death the bloodsucker kulaks.73

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The Leninist policy of social extermination74 was very clearly expressed by Latsis, Chairman of the Eastern Front Cheka, in November 1918. We are not waging war against individual persons. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. During the investigation, do not look for evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against Soviet power. The first questions that you ought to put are: To what class does he belong? What is his origin? What is his education or profession? And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused. In this lies the significance and essence of the Red Terror.75 The most important instruments of the Leninist machinery of social extermination, Peoples Courts, Revolutionary Tribunals, the Cheka, forced labour camps and concentration camps, were already institutionalised at his lifetime.76 Even the arrangement of show trials followed instructions initiated by Lenin.77 The show trial against leading members of the Socialist Revolutionaries, Lenin admonished the Peoples Commissariat of Justice on 20 February 1922, should be arranged as an educative model trial arousing the public opinion against the Socialist Revolutionaries, strengthening the revolutionary consciousness, evoking their public guilt confessions, linking their deviant political opinions with capital crimes such as the attempted murder of Lenin78 and dramatising the dangerous situation of the socialist fatherland infiltrated and encircled by counter-revolutionary agents. Lenins policy of social extermination envisioned a new society purified of the deficiencies of the old order poisoned by class oppression and exploitation, human alienation and enslavement of the proletarian class. Interestingly, Lenin stigmatised his imagined political enemies by biological metaphors, putting them on a subhuman level, easily, mercilessly and without inner constraint to be crushed and annihilated. This rhetoric of stigmatisation was deeply rooted in an ideological paradigm of thinking and acting, a specific habitus, a socially constituted system of cognitive and motivating structures,79 to deal with enemies destined to be exterminated. The whole

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Marxism-Leninism as a Political Religion 107 Leninist ideological vocabulary abounds with invectives of this kind against a world of imagined enemies supposedly threatening a future socialist society. For example, Lenin characterised the kulaks as the most beastly, the coarsest, the most savage exploiters These bloodsuckers have waxed rich during the war on the peoples want These spiders have grown fat at the expense of peasants, impoverished by the war, of hungry workers. These leeches have drunk the blood of toilers, growing the richer the more the worker starved in the cities and factories. These vampires have gathered and continue to gather in their hands the lands of the landlords, enslaving, time and again, the poor peasants. Merciless war against these kulaks! Death to the kulaks. Hate and contempt to the parties defending them: the rightist Social Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks and todays left Social Revolutionaries!80 The future socialist society should be cleansed of the wealthy and the scoundrels, who represented only parasites, main enemies of socialism.81 A precondition for the achievement of socialism, Lenin continues, is the cleansing of the Russian earth from all harmful insects, fleas the scoundrels, bugs the wealthy etc.82 As disciplinary measures applied to the lazy wealthy, scoundrels and workers, Lenin recommended sending to prison, cleaning the toilets, or passing yellow passports in order to get supervised by the whole people as harmful elements until their correction, or shooting dead at least one out of ten lazy people.83 Lenins frank use of biological metaphors to stigmatise and dehumanise the enemies of the people as harmful insects, parasites, vermin and germs reveals his eschatological dream of creating a sanitised body of a future socialist society by means of revolutionary terror. The Leninist state apparatus of social control and terror was supposed to work as a systematically planned disinfection campaign84 for the sanitation of an infected, capitalist society. Typically, for the metaphorical world of inquisitorial endeavour,85 the Leninist political centre legitimised the unrestricted use of violence and terror by claiming to fulfil sacral obligation; in this instance, dictated by the historical laws of class struggle, to suppress and destroy ideological enemies, annihilate class formations of the old corrupted social order,86 so as to open the horizons on a new socialist society. The Leninist takeover provided his party with an effective symbolic monopoly over the sacral socialist tradition, stigmatising and liquidating competitive conceptualisations and interpretations within that socialist universe. The early iconography of a Leninist sacral tradition tried to present Lenin himself as a numinous hero87 in leading his believers to a utopian end of history. The sacralisation of Lenin as a numinous leader, messiah, and saviour who could liberate the labouring masses from misery, hunger, exploitation and civil war was a continuation of the former process of sacralisation of his party, distinguished as a charismatic, militant, heroic and salvationist collective of virtuosi. The Lenin cult, centring on the assumed charismatic capabilities of Lenin, considered him an icon represented, by a sacralised, charismatically qualified party organisation whose imperatives of obedience, discipline and heroic self-sacrifice were transposed in an unconditional veneration. Even though Lenin refused to actively cooperate with

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K.-G. Riegel this iconographic work in progress, he proposed in a decree on 14 August 1918 influenced by Campanellas City of the Sun88 to establish a revolutionary sacral tradition and ordered Lunatscharskii, the Commissar of Enlightenment, to prepare the creation of monuments to great revolutionaries on an extremely large scale, temporary monuments made out of gypsum.89 In order to politically appropriate the public urban space, Lenin envisioned cities in which monuments, inscriptions, emblems, street names and coats of arms would serve as constant reminders for the pupils of his gigantic new revolutionary school.90

Nevertheless, Lenin himself moved into the centre of devotion, veneration and charismatic glorification. For May Day 1918, the Bolshevik poet Bednyi praised him as vozhd, a military title appropriate to a leader of a party functioning as a military organisation.91 After the 30 August 1918 assassination attempt on Lenin by Fania Kaplan, the first but still exceptional religious associations tried to explain Lenins survival. Since September 1918, Lenins qualities of a saint, an apostle, a prophet, a martyr, a man with Christ-like qualities and a leader by the grace of God92 were venerated. Especially in the speeches of Trotsky and Zinoviev, the hagiographic traits of a Leninist sacral tradition were prefigured. Zinoviev, for example, described Lenins long years in emigration as the trial of an ascetic and [he] came to be the apostle of world communism Lenin became a leader of cosmic stature, a mover of worlds He is really the chosen one of millions. He is the leader by the Grace of God. He is the authentic figure of a leader such is born once in 500 years in the life of mankind.93 In February 1919 the first official bust of Lenin was unveiled, copies were placed in 29 cities between August 1919 and February 1920.94 Additionally, the political posters depicted Lenin preaching to workers and mobilising them against the enemy, showing new Bolshevik icons, symbols and images of Lenin and Marx. After the celebration of Lenins fiftieth birthday on 22 April 1920, the Lenin cult began to develop its own dynamic: the superhuman qualities of the vozhd, his simplicity and humaneness, the popular essence (narodnost) of the vozhd, and his power (moshch)95 were praised. Certain symbolic forms probably recalled religious icons. The extensive use of the colour red, the distorted perspective (Lenin is far larger than the sun, the globe, and the worker and peasant on either side) the composition (Lenin flanked by the worker and peasant, just as Christ was sometimes flanked by two apostles) and the circular frame that surrounds Lenin (Christ was often situated in an oval frame) must have been familiar to Russians accustomed to the conventions of religious icons.96 Furthermore, Lenins outstretched arm clearly points the way for his followers, but later renditions of the outstretched arm also suggested a benediction The image of Lenins raised arm may well have reminded viewers of Russian Orthodox icons, in which the raised hand or arm (in benediction) was a usual feature of

Marxism-Leninism as a Political Religion 109 images of Christ or the saints (the right hand conferred a blessing while the left hand held a book or scroll).97 After Lenins death, the cult of Lenin was organised by special party commissions. Artists and writers were engaged in producing new images, rituals, and symbols incorporating both Russian Orthodox and traditional folk rhetoric and practice. Henceforth, Lenin was often invoked as our dear father, and at the funeral some mourners carried Lenins portrait on tall sticks, like religious banners in a Russian Orthodox procession.98 The establishment of Lenin Corners was modelled after the Russian Orthodox home, the place where the icon was kept.99 The decision of the Politburo to build a mausoleum and to embalm Lenins corpse for veneration by a mass pilgrimage recalled Russian Orthodox dogmatic belief that saints bodies were incorruptible and did not decay after death.100 Embedded in this sacralised tradition, Lenins embalmed corpse and his sacral writings evoked the medieval myth of the Kings two bodies, a visible mortal and an immortal, invisible body politic that was immortal, infallible, and capable of absolute perfection.101 The propaganda slogan Lenin is dead ! Leninism lives! Leninism will triumph! evoked this myth of the Kings two bodies, his visible mortality as well as his invisible political immortality. Not surprisingly, the Lenin cult, already established during his own lifetime, consecrated him as a political and sacral icon for a militant collective of virtuosi, and laid the foundations for a political and sacral tradition which could be selectively used by the Stalinist hierocratic power. For example, in his mourning speech, within the context of the funeral rites for the dead Lenin, Stalin made the famous oath of swearing to comrade Lenin: Departing from us, comrade Lenin directed us to guard the unity of our party as the apple of our eye. We swear to you, comrade Lenin, that we will also fulfil this commandment with honor.102 The greatness of Lenin, Stalin exclaimed, consists in his capacity of having created the Soviet Union, thereby giving by his deeds the oppressed masses of the whole world that the hope for salvation is not lost, that the domination by landlords and capitalists does not hold very long, that the realm of work can be created through the endeavours of the working people itself, that the realm of work had to be created on earth and not on heaven. Thereby he had inflamed the hearts of workers and peasants of the whole world giving them the hope for liberation.103 On 28 January 1924, in a commemorative speech, Stalin compared Lenin with a mountain-eagle, called him a genius of revolution, praised his humility as well as his steadfastness on principles and his faith in the masses.104 Even though Stalin did not play a leading role105 in the establishment of the Leninist leadership cult before and after Lenins death, in his mourning speech Stalin clearly claimed to be the only reliable guardian of the Leninist legacy, leading the party and protecting it from evil heretical contaminations. Furthermore, the Central Committee praised a mystical union between Lenin and his believers. Lenin lives in the soul of every member of our party. Every member of our party is a particle of Lenin. Our entire communist family is a collective embodiment of Lenin. Lenin lives in the heart of every honest worker. Lenin lives in the heart of

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every poor peasant.106 Stalin could, within this sacral Leninist tradition,107 pursue his own advancement toward the status of immortality and infallibility. Stalin followed the strategy of cult building via the assertion of Lenins infallibility. By making the partys previous vozhd an iconographic figure beyond criticism, Stalins letter implicitly nominated the successor-vozhd for similar treatment.108 Stalinist Hierocratic Domination Stalin transformed the Leninist community of virtuosi into a church dispensing grace (Anstaltsgnade), which includes the righteous and the unrighteous and is especially concerned with subjecting the sinner to Divine law.109 The organisational necessities of wartime communism and the revolutionary transformations of industrialisation and collectivisation in the 1930s transformed the Leninist community of virtuosi to (1) a bureaucratised and hierarchically organised institution of grace, with institutionalised salvation and an office of charisma.110 This evolved into an administrative apparatus with obedient and disciplined cadres who substituted the pneumatic enthusiasm of the early virtuosi. The Stalinist church was also organised as (2) an office hierarchy that dispensed grace. The correct interpretation of the store of sacral scriptures, the supervision of canonical preaching, and the functioning of the missionary apparatus belonged to the duties of office holders. The vouchsafing of grace and absolution of sins are organised as a ritual which requires little personal ethical accomplishment.111 The structural change from the Leninist political religion of virtuosi to the Stalinist church institution was accompanied by (3) a selective reformulation of the Leninist legacy of sacral scriptures, and ritual worship of the numinous leader of the October Revolution. The hierocracy112 is forced to develop their own interpretations of the history and future of the revolutionary cause. The rise of a professional priesthood with salaries, promotions, professional duties, and a distinctive way of life,113 indicates that the ideological experts of propaganda and state security have noticed the heretical challenges. They are engaged with the task of rationalising dogma and rites [Kultus], [which were] recorded in holy scriptures, provided with commentaries, and turned into objects of systematic education, a distinct difference from mere training in technical skills.114 The sacral experts of Stalinist orthodoxy worked out and invented115 the new sacral tradition of Marxism-Leninism, with the intention of legitimising the new monocratic office holder of the church.116 The deification of Stalin left the party unable to control his actions and justified in advance everything connected with his name The cult of Stalin, following the logic of any cult, tended to transform the Communist Party into an ecclesiastical organization, producing a sharp distinction between ordinary people and leader-priests headed by their infallible pope.117 The most important tenet of faith in this invented sacral tradition of MarxismLeninism was that Stalin alone qualified as the only true disciple of Lenin; the consequence thus being his monopoly infallible interpretation of his holy scriptures. Stalins own dogmatic performances like his lectures at the Sverdlov University (1924), published as Leninism118 can be presented in this way as an authentic interpretation of Lenins sacral teachings. In that sense, Leninism

Marxism-Leninism as a Political Religion 111 became a religion dtat.119 Like most catechisms, the Stalinist version of Leninism was a very dogmatic, rigid and categorical booklet,120 Bible nouvelle dcoupe en versets comme sil sy trouvait autant de rponses dfinitives toutes les questions poses par lhistoire,121 trying to catechise the novices as well as the cadres, probing their ideological knowledge, testing the correct memorising of relevant ideological formulas, and selecting the aspiring and faithful party members out of the flock of sheep of illiterate and agnostic party candidates. Stalins Leninism, the ideological core of the newly founded Marxism-Leninism, formed une thologie complexe avec sa dogmatique, sa mystique et sa scolastique122, a new secular religion,123 a socialist religion with a god. And the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-holy god of the new religion was himself, Stalin.124 Using the Leninist icon of party organisation for legitimising his own claim to leadership, Stalin outlined his conception of the new party as the Party of Leninism.125 That party is the war staff of the proletarian army,126 armed with a revolutionary spirit unbounded devotion to the cause of the proletariat. But in order to be an effective vanguard, the Party must be armed with revolutionary theory, with a knowledge of the laws of movement, of the laws of revolution.127 Praising the party as the highest form of the class organisation of the proletariat,128 Stalin urged it to fulfil a cultural revolution by educating and converting the proletarian masses with the spirit of discipline and organisation; that the proletarian masses must be inoculated against the harmful influence of the petty bourgeoisie, must be prevented from acquiring petty-bourgeois habits and customs; that the organisational activities of the proletariat must be utilised in order to educate and transform the mentality of the petty bourgeoisie; that the proletarian masses must be taught to help themselves, to cultivate their own strength, so that, in the course of time, class may be abolished and the conditions be prepared for the inauguration of socialist production.129 In order to realise that utopian goal of socialist production, the party itself, Stalin claimed, had to be an expression of a unity of will incompatible with the existence of fractions. The required iron discipline should not be blind, but presupposes, the existence of conscious and voluntary submission; for only a conscious discipline can ever become a discipline of iron. By purging itself, Stalin recommended, the party can be steeled in the school of solidarity and discipline, and reach a unity of will. After having enumerated the dangerous seductions and challenges coming from the opportunist, reformist, all the socialists who have an imperialist and jingoist bias, all the socialists who are infected with patriotism and pacifism, Stalin made unmistakably clear that: The more drastic the purge, the more likelihood is there of a strong and influential Party arising.130 Sometime later, at the apex of his power and influence, Stalin issued his History of the All-Union Communist Party: Short Course (1938),131 approved by the Central Committee, and surely a party catechism and canonical text to be memorised by heart by the new, compliant party cadres. At the height of the great purges, Stalin himself went on to rewrite the history of the party.132 By rewriting the party history, he tried to occupy the historical memory of the party cadres, eliminating all rivals belonging to the early community of Leninist disciples, and claiming himself in companionship with Lenin as the revolutionary voszhd, a

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leader conquering history and society. Stalins crude forgery of party history was intended for the believing younger cadres for whom, mastering the Short Course would be obligatory; it was revolutionary theory with a knowledge of the laws of movement, of the laws of revolution.133 The Short Course, he hoped and decreed, must become the basis of the Soviet System of political education. By providing a unitary guidance, it would end the confusion in the telling of Party history and the abundance of diverse viewpoints on theory and history found in earlier texts.134 The Short Course was to initiate the Stalinist revolution of belief, providing the unity of will for party cadres attempting to modernise a late developing society in the mould of European industrialisation and modernisation. Dramatic management of the Moscow show trials (193638) was the last step in the formation and legitimisation of the new Stalinist monocratic rule. They brought Stalin a monopoly of the legitimate use of hierocratic coercion.135 The means for implementing such a monopoly of hierocratic coercion consisted mainly of (4) the establishment of internal security organs, and the leadership cadres who could act as representatives of the Stalinist centre. At the same time, this applies also to mission institutes136 that acted as instruments of power in dominating foreign communist parties, as well as ideological and cultural zones of influence forming a worldwide church with its headquarters in Moscow. The Stalinist Purge Machinery As already mentioned, the Stalinist cadres who replaced the Leninist virtuosi presented a different biographical identity. They stemmed predominantly from peasant origins, with low intellectual standards and no cosmopolitan outlook. The lower ladders of the now swelling administration, in the economic, political, and other spheres, were swamped by newcomers from the popular classes, badly prepared for their new positions, in fact, for the most part poorly educated, if not semiliterate Petit bourgeois mentality, to use the language of official disapproval, soon permeated officialdom and all too often combined greed with incompetence.137 Even the upper layers of the administrative apparatus, the powerful class of bosses (nachalstvo) endowed with power, privileges, and status, was a ruling layer created by the state, trained, indoctrinated, and paid by it.138 Not surprisingly, those party cadres had to pay the Stalinist hierocratic domination only pure obedience to the institution (Anstaltsgehorsam).139 This pure obedience presented itself as a formal humility of obedience140 (formale Gehorsamsdemut), which informally deviated from prescribed patterns of commands by formally keeping up appearances. For such cadres it was sufficient to function as disciplined and obedient machines, without any personal calls to revolutionary enthusiasm. The pneumatic ethic of virtuosi was transformed into pure obedience to the institution, which is regarded as inherently meritorious, and not concrete, substantive ethical obligation, nor even the qualification of superior moral capacity achieved through ones own methodical ethical actions.141 The institutional grace was dispensed with after the principle extra ecclesia nulla salus.142 Party membership could be

Marxism-Leninism as a Political Religion 113 obtained by regular admission procedures. Minimal knowledge of party catechism and some formulas for faith in salvation were sufficient for admission. A good proletarian background, the achievement of a party membership card, and the demonstration of obedience and discipline belonged to the minimal standard equipment of a normal party cadre.143 Under those historical conditions, the purge machinery of hierocratic domination was implemented only in the registration of party membership, and the verification of minimal requirements for ideological knowledge and personal conduct. Party cadres were purged due to passivity, breaches of Party discipline, including factional activities, bad behaviour accounts, and misappropriating funds, of taking bribes.144 Getty has vividly described that the purges uncovered an abyss of corruption, nepotism, minimal ideological knowledge, bureaucratic formalism and inefficiency, as well as mafiosi type practices within the party ranks.145 Thus the proverka was restricted to examining only the outer conformity and not the inner vocation of a cadre. The public confession of deviant acts before a purging commission, or the public of a party collective, can be considered a ritual obligation without a soul-searching transformation in the total personality of the respective party cadre. Confessing minor and/or mortal sins belonged to the routine practice of an experienced cadre. Furthermore, this confession seemed to be restricted to external acts without a questioning of ideological motives. Repentance was conceived of as an external retaliation relative to the severity of the deviant acts. Apparently, this practice of merely mechanically connecting external, sinful acts with corresponding punishments and retaliations leads only to outer conformity without a social control of painful feelings over sinful thoughts, as well as a conscience which includes total personality patterns. All of the purge and confession rituals were enacted by hierocratic domination as a means to control, admonishing and threatening a submissive administrative apparatus with, in the case of visible moral faults and shortcomings in the conduct of party affairs, external retaliations. Fulfilment of the tasks of industrialisation and collectivisation were the required capabilities from the party cadres for a regime of economy, the fulfilment of the industrial and financial plan, the punctual fulfilment of grain collections, proper preparations for the spring sowing, for harvesting and the distribution of the crop, and in general for firmness in regard to the accuracy and efficiency of work done by Party members subordinated to the leadership of this or that comrade.146 The central apparatus of the hierocratic domination had to invent the imagery of an almighty master who could periodically discover, expose and punish unworthy cadres in order to overcome their localism, and to purge their ideological and administrative shortcomings. The need for a central power to install at least an external, threatening potential to be internalised by the administrative party cadre, seems to be indicated in the closing speech of Stalin at the Thirteenth Party Congress: The basic idea in the purging is the fact that people of this kind feel that there is a master who may call them to account for their transgressions against the Party. I believe that sometimes, from time to time, the master

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Stalin demanded from his party cadres permanent revolutionary vigilance. The Shakhty-affair demonstrated the failing revolutionary vigilance of the party organisations and labour unions. It demonstrated that our technical experts are enormously backward, that some old engineers and technicians are working without being controlled and therefore sliding into industrial wrecking pressured by special offers from enemies from foreign countries.148 The revolutionary vigilance to be pursued by party cadres, admonished Stalin, had to fight and discover an invisible enemy operating everywhere in the country, using the mask of outer conformity of loyal party membership in order to secretly sabotage Soviet industrialisation projects. Every party member had to show his utmost revolutionary vigilance to detect these wreckers, to force them to publicly confess their industrial sabotage, and to punish them for their counter-revolutionary wrecking. This necessary individual revolutionary vigilance had to be complemented, Stalin urged, by a good organised control functioning like a searchlight helping to light up at every possible time to cast light upon the present state of the apparatus and to bring out into the open the bureaucrats and clerks.149 In his report Deficiencies of Party Work and Methods for Liquidation of the Trotskyites and other Two-faced People,150 Stalin formulated the ideological outlines for the chistki, which were directed against regional (oblast) party family circles as well central high level party cadres151 at the height of the Ezhovshchina (193738). Again, Stalin deplored, leading party comrades had been naive and blind, had been unable to see the true face of the enemies of the people and to discover the wolfs in sheeps clothing and to unmask them.152 The present Trotskyites, Stalin continued, represent no more a political platform but rather a gang of wreckers, diversionists, spies, assassins, without principles and ideals, a gang of sworn enemies of the working class, being employed in the security organs of foreign countries.153 Stalins requests for enhanced revolutionary vigilance was directed at every party cadre, since the Trotskyites masking themselves as true believers had infiltrated all ranks of the party by obtaining party memberships cards. The Trotskyites strength, Stalin advised the Central Committee plenum, consisted in getting party membership cards, thereby acquiring political trust and access to all of our institutions and organisations.154 Therefore, Stalin concluded, the Trotskyite wreckers, diversionists, spies and assassins were omnipresent at every party cell and even at every corner and in the midst of the socialist institutions and corporations. By 1937 during the Great Purge, the demonisation of ideological heterodoxy was complete. No more accurate analysis can be offered than that of the writer for the migr Menshevik press who stated that Trotsky is forced into the role of the tempting demon, a Satan who holds in his hands the reins of all conspiracies While Nikolai Vasilevich Krylenko believed that Trotsky will enter history as the monstrous blend in a single person of all the lowest and most ignoble crimes human imagination can bring to

Marxism-Leninism as a Political Religion 115 mind, Anastas Ivanovich Mikoian denied that oppositionists were human at all: Trotskii, Zinovev and Bukharin gave birth to a new type of man a monster disguised as a person. Everything dark, sinister, and criminal, the contemporary Soviet press observed, all the human scum, all the dregs of society gather at the sound of Trotskiis cry, ready for ignoble and sordid deeds.155 Not surprisingly, in this demonised context of hell and heaven, devil and god, vreditel (wrecker, saboteur), that originally referred to agricultural pests or vermin,156 became the standard ideological slogan to stigmatise and exterminate all the saboteurs, spies, diversionists, double-dealers, Trotskyites and so on; blamed for the widespread chaos that reigned within the planned economy, responsible for shortfalls of industrial production, agrarian crises, hunger and disease epidemics, mine disasters, trains and railway accidents, chronic shortcomings in proliferation of consumer goods.157 To associate the wrecker slogan with germs and disease caused by harmful, infection-spreading locusts158 was not only a scapegoat mechanism used for diverting popular resentment and discontent with the failed prophecies of socialist reconstruction to social outcasts. It was also a conscious ideological strategy to sanitise an epidemic and infectious social organism by introducing healing measures to be taken by permanently purging the sinful, infected, sick parts of the body politic. The staging of model show trials like the Shakhty Affair (1928), the Industrial Party Trial (1930), the Menshevik Trial (1931), the Metro-Vickers Trial (1933), the Moscow Show Trials (193538) with their wide propaganda effects transmitted by radio, print newsreel campaigns, mass attendances, demonstrations, agitation meetings at the industrial working places was supposed to be a moral drama showing the victory of the progressive, disciplined, vigilant party soldiers over the vermin, germs and wreckers, damaging and infecting socialist culture and society. The Stalinist pedagogy of publicised rituals of criticism and self-criticism (samokritika), enacted by the discovered and accused wreckers delivering the stereotyped formulas of confession, repentance and pleas for reintegration to the socialist order, intended to evoke the empathy necessary to induce spectators to reproduce this ritualized self-judgement in themselves.159 The public drama of confession and repentance of sins was to be re-enacted within the confines of the private courtroom, where the individual sinner simultaneously played the roles of police, judge and jury in order to re-forge himself after the moral requirements of the new Stalinist ethic. Reforging a New Soviet Man from the Stalinist eschatology had to be practised by the believing party cadres themselves. Within the invisible sphere of private soul-searching the party cadre, like every conscious proletarian, had to undertake the task of self-fashioning a new identity by detecting and correcting his sinful habits and thoughts, his heretic seductions and secret deviations from the prescribed social norms and expectations of the socialist moral and ethic. For example, the Soviet diaries of the 1930s offered a convenient opportunity for introspection and record-keeping to writers aspiring to a journey of self-renewal and salvation160 by repudiating the backward, old and dark habits, social norms and bourgeois attitudes, and by embarking the virtuous path of personal salvation through an ardent identification with the Stalinist revolutionary project. Like the defendant forced to bare his soul before the prosecutor in the courtroom of the model show trial, the diaries had to apply the same soul scrutinising

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methodology to himself. On his own initiative, and outside the parameters of official Bolshevik discourse, he kept purging his soul, exposing, and holding trial over the potential class enemy within himself.161 Not surprisingly, the young Potyomkin,162 a student at the Sverdlovsk Mining Institute, welcomed the year 1935 with the firm intent of fulfilling Stalinist high expectations. After having visited a Komsomol meeting, Potyomkin noted in his diary: I spoke out in the debates, voiced the enormous purport and meaning of the resolution and linked it with the goals of our work toward becoming worthy bearers of the calling of advanced, politically active and committed youth. Tirelessly working to raise my cultural-theoretical level, embodying absorbing in myself the ideal of a social activist and theoretician, a revolutionary, a party worker of the great school of Lenin. But I was dissatisfied with my speech. I didnt talk in freely developed instantaneously formulated thoughts, my thought couldnt come up with clear and emphatic enough words to keep pace with my headlong enthusiasm. Imprecision of thought made the precision of words lose its meaning. The words dragged the meaning along and formed sentences in the air. This is the speech without preparation that I was drawing attention to just now. A new years toast to the great successes in the cultural and scientific enrichment of culture, and science and the potentialities of life. To precision, intensity of work, to the culture of speech. To self-confidence, high spirits, and good cheer.163 This inspiring revolutionary enthusiasm, written down in the diary of that young Komsomol reflecting his inner feelings and aspirations, strongly reminds one of the prophetic exclamations voiced by Trotsky, the charismatic demagogue of the October Revolution. Through a permanent process of self-disciplining, Trotsky prophesied, the envisioned New Soviet Man could become incomparably stronger, wiser, more subtle. His body will become more harmonious, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more melodious. The forms of everyday life are changing into dynamic theatricality. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, Goethe, Marx. And beyond this ridge, other peaks will emerge.164 From the darkness of former, polluted, decadent, bourgeois phases of history appeared the proletariat embodied with the messianic mission to lead the enslaved proletarian masses into the lightning sun of a socialist paradise. The New Man could not be considered simply a worker Rather, the paragon of Communism was a proletarian-intelligent. Absorbing the intelligentsias messianic message, and acquiring the latters personality, the working class was polluted. Ceasing to be its pure self, it turned into the intelligentsia.165 The working-thinking New Man represented messianic attributes not yet seen in human history. Sharing the same utopian and messianic revolutionary enthusiasm as Trotsky, Grigory Piatakov, one of the prominent old Bolsheviks, accused of being a Trotskyist and condemned to death in a show trial 1937, could emphatically announce a new age in human history:

Marxism-Leninism as a Political Religion 117 The limitless extension of the possible is the feature which makes us men of miracles Our idea is to bring into life that which is considered impossible, not realizable and inadmissible We are people of special temper, without any equivalents in history precisely because we make the impossible possible.166 Inquisition by Confession The required self-criticism and criticism of the party cadres was used as medium to reach their inner conscience, and therefore to convert and convince them to show self-discipline and self-sacrificing work for the benefit of Communism.167 However, this exposed conscience could not claim the protection of a private guilt-biography. The routine rituals of criticism and selfcriticism were arranged as degradation ceremonies to expose, humiliate and, in many cases, to exclude the sinner accused of sins which were publicised by a censuring purge commission, or a monitoring and questioning public. In this instance, the respective rituals were organised as an institutionalised ritual of exclusion for those cadres who dared to confess criminal thoughts and acts. The confessional practise is transformed to a ritual of exclusion, an inquisition by confession.168 The inquisition by confession, the chistka, tried (1) to isolate the deviant sinner socially. (2) The enactment of public criticism and self-criticism aimed at his stigmatisation. The bearing of his soul to the disciplinary authorities of the party did not give him the certainty of absolution from his criminal identity, but rather bound him closer to the community. His obedience to the discipline of the community, and his unconditional surrender to its commandments, were demanded from him. The public confession of sins served as a sign of this submission and surrender. The training in systematic obedience was the centrepiece of the ritual of criticism and self-criticism.169 (3) The physical isolation and social stigmatisation of the deviant sinner had to serve as a means of moral instruction and terrorisation. The pedagogy of terror and moral instruction is applied to deter further contagion by heretical diseases. (4) The extraction of confession by physical and psychological means of torture was practised by trained personnel of the state security apparaty. In contrast to the Roman Catholic Church, the Stalinist inquisition disguised all traces of physical or psychic torture. The Catholic Inquisition170 worked within the legal frame of justice at that time, which believed in the effectiveness of torture as a legal means to getting the last testimony of guilt from the charged culprit. Torture as a legalised practice, the procedure to torture as prescribed and testified by legal persons, was thought of at that time as an improved legal procedure compared to the ordeal preferred earlier. However, the Stalinist inquisition worked, rather, with the arranged illusion of presenting public sinners who confessed invented sinful thoughts and criminal acts. Especially in the context of the Moscow show trials (193638),171 the accused heretics and criminal cadres of diversion and sabotage had to play a prearranged drama of the successful unmasking of hidden and dangerous spies, saboteurs and heretics. The accused cadres of diversion who were tortured before their appearance on the stage of the show trial had to play their roles as culprits, according to the directives of the screenplay writers Yezhov172 and Stalin. The touching display of light against dark, of Stalinist heroism against

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heretic cowardice, and of Leninist discipline and obedience against Bukharinist or Trotskyite treason and sabotage, was enacted for moral instruction, and for a good end of the heretics who welcomed their defeat as true soldiers of the party. These rituals of public confession, of criticism and self-criticism, are normally practised in minimal differentiated societies integrated by a solidarit mcanique.173 The confessional cultures of such groups do not legitimise the inner workings of private conscience, sin and individual responsibility. Social groups with a solidarit mcanique cultivate public rituals of confession in order to control dangerous, sinful forces that could threaten the purity of the collectivity.174 The individual misconduct is at the same time an affair of the whole collectivity. Therefore, the individual sinner is demanded to expiate his sins publicly in order to purify the contaminated conscience collective. The confession of sins is public and collective since the individual sinner has violated the collective norms and values of his reference group, and is therefore obliged to exercise acts of piacula to restore the endangered stability of his community. The sins confessed represent stereotypes of sinful motivations and offences. As soon as the stereotypes of sins, acts and thoughts have been spoken, or vomited, so to speak, before the public, the pollution of the community can be healed and the former purity of their sacral authority restored. The sinners, ideologically deviant party members, experienced during their detention in prison, and their interrogation by security experts and torture specialists, a process of self-purification, a precondition for a confession vomiting175 the internal harmful objects. In this sense, Vishinsky, the prosecutor in the Moscow Show Trials, quoted Zinoviev as having said at the trial of 1516 January 1935: I am telling you all I think, and thereby I am extracting from my body the last splinter of the crimes that are being unfolded.176 Another prominent defendant, Drobnis, reported of his conversion and rebirth after having vomited his inner dirt: Arrest and imprisonment were the purgatory which enabled me completely to sweep away, to rid myself of, all that filth. I did this with complete determination, with complete firmness and consistency I ask you to believe me that I have purged myself and washed rotten putrid Trotskyism from every recess of my mind, I have dealt with it ruthlessly.177 Notes
1. Cf. H. Lbbe, Religion nach der Aufklrung (Graz: Styria, 1990), pp.14478. 2. Lbbe calls that function Kontingenzbewltigung, ibid., pp.16078. 3. See S.N. Eisenstadt, Tradition, Change, and Modernity (New York: John Wiley, 1973), pp.4772. Eisenstadt declares this breakdown of modernity as pathologies of breakdowns of modernisation, or, as in the case of Nazism, as attempts at what might be called demodernisation but not as cases of lack of or of tardy modernisation, ibid., p.51. 4. E. Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 5. E. Gentile, The Sacralisation of Politics: Definitions, Interpretations and Reflections on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 1 (2000), pp.1855 (at 1819). 6. The term political religion was developed systematically by Eric Voegelin, Die politischen Religionen (1938; Mnchen: Fink, 1993). Voegelin used this term in order to describe German National Socialism and Russian Bolshevism. At the same time, R. Aron wrote on the religions sculires; cf. R. Aron, LEre des tyrannies (1939), in idem, Raymond Aron 19051983: Textes,

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tudes et tmoignages (Paris: Commentaire no 2829. Juillard, 1985), pp.32740. See also R. Aron, Lavenir des religions sculires (1944), ibid., pp.36983. Aron described Leninism as a gnostic sect almost in the same manner as Voegelin did. Le lninisme apparat donc la gnose dune religion du salut par lhistoire, dont se rclamait une Internationale peu cohrente sans la prendre au pied de la lettre, R. Aron, Remarques sur la gnose lniniste, in idem, Machiavel et les tyrannies modernes (Paris: Editions de Fallois, 1993), pp.388404. Maxim Gorky, Untimely Thoughts: Essays on Revolution, Culture and the Bolshevisks 19171918 (London: Garnston Press, 1970), p.89, astutely observed that experimental character on Lenins revolutionary strategy. Lenin works like a chemist in a laboratory, with the difference that the chemist uses dead matter, but his work produces a valuable result for life; Lenin, however, works with living material and he is leading the revolution to ruin. Sensible workers who follow Lenin should realize that a pitiless experiment is being performed on the Russian working class, an experiment which will destroy the best forces of the workers and will arrest normal development of the Russian revolution for a long time to come, 10 (23) November 1917. See Hannah Arendt, Elemente und Ursprnge totaler Herrschaft, Vol. III, Totale Herrschaft (1951; Mnchen: Pieper, 1973), pp.65461. See A. Gerschenkron, Economic Development in Russian Intellectual History of the Nineteenth Century, in idem, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1966), pp.15287. Interestingly, Lenin itself used the paradigm of the advantages of backwardness with respect to the German socialist movement and later on the Russian Bolsheviks. The second advantage is that, chronologically speaking, the Germans were about the last to come into the workers movement [] so the practical workers movement in Germany ought never forget the English and French movements, that it was able simply to utilise their dearly bought experience, and could now avoid their mistakes, which in their time were mostly unavoidable. Without the precedent of the English trade unions and French workers political struggles, without the gigantic impulse given especially by the Paris Commune, where would we be now?, in V.I. Lenin, What is to be Done: Burning Questions of Our Movement (1902; New York: International Publishers, 1969), pp.278. Gerschenkron (note 9), p.184. L. Trotzki, Unsere politischen Aufgaben (1904), in idem, Schriften zur revolutionren Organisation, ed. and trans. H. Mehringer (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1970), pp.7134, esp. p.96. Trotskys vision of revolutionary enthusiasm was supposed to be an alternative model to Lenins Fabrik-Disziplin, a Leninist notion Trotsky vehemently criticised in this pamphlet. See K.-G. Riegel, Sendungsprophetie und Charisma: Am Beispiel Leo Trotzkis, in W. Lipp (ed.), Kulturtypen, Kulturcharaktere (Berlin: Reimer, 1987), pp.22140. M. Weber, Economy and Society, ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich, 2 vols. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), vol.2, p.1161. See J.L. Talmon, Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase (London: Secker & Warburg, 1960). Cf. J.L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Mercury Books, 1966). Talmon (note 13), p.18. Vera Zasulic to Marx, 16 February 1881, in D. Rjazanov (ed.), Marx-Engels-Archiv: Zeitschrift des Marx-Engels- Instituts in Moskau, vol.1 (reprint Frankfurt am Main.: Neve Kritik, 1969), p.317. Karl Marx, Vorrede zur zweiten russischen Ausgabe des Kommunistischen Manifestes (1882), in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Die russische Kommune: Kritik eines Mythos, ed. M. Rubel (Mnchen: Hanser, 1972), pp.6971 (at 71). Cf. W. Geierhos, Vera Zasulic und die russische revolutionre Bewegung (Wien: Bhlau, 1977), pp.129272. See, for example, his correspondence with Kautsky dealing with the appropriation of funds, a theme very characteristic for Lenin and Stalin, who proved his early steelness by illegitimate appropriations (bank robberies). Cf. D. Geyer, Kautskys Russisches Dossier: Deutsche Sozialdemokraten als Treuhnder des russischen Parteivermgens 19101915 (Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 1981). For a detailed account of the various splits, discussions and factions within the ranks of the exiled Russian Social Democrats like Plekhanov, Akselrod, Martov and Lenin residing in London, Geneva and Munich, see D. Geyer, Lenin in der russischen Sozialdemokratie (Graz: Bhlau, 1962), esp. ch.V. Cf. P. Selznick, The Organisational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics (London: Free Press, 1952), esp. pp.4255. B. Mazlish, The Revolutionary Ascetic: Evolution of a Political Type (New York: Basic Books, 1976), esp. ch.8. See W.F. Woehrlin, Chernyshevskii: The Man and the Journalist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).

7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

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22. See J.H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1999), esp. ch.14. 23. See M. Raeff, The Decembrist Movement (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966). The statutes of Pestels association in G. Dudeck (ed.), Die Dekabristen: Dichtungen und Dokumente (Leipzig: Insel, 1975), pp.163210. 24. Necaevs Catechism in M. Bakunin, Gewalt fr den Krper, Verrat fr die Seele? (Berlin: Karin Kramer, 1980), pp.11723. See also P. Pomper, Sergei Nechaev (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1979). Necaev seems to be the Stawrogin in Dostoevskiis Demons. See I. Berlin, Russische Denker (Frankfurt am Main: Europische Verlagsanstalt, 1981), p.46. 25. Cf. D. Hardy, Petr Tkachev, the Critic as Jacobin (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977). 26. See F. Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1966), pp.33553. 27. Bakunin (note 24), p.80. 28. In Demons, Dostoevsky gave a lively portrait of some underground revolutionaries like Necaev, Bakunin or Tkachev, experiences won in the Petrashevsky circle where the followers of Speshnev discussed the advantages of instituting a central committee for the planned uprising. See Venturi (note 26), pp.889. 29. Weber, Economy and Society (note 12), vol.1, p.539, defines the virtuosi as heroic men of self-control and self-discipline pursuing their salvation. Thus, all these methodologies of sanctification developed a combined physical and psychic regimen and an equally methodical regulation of the manner and scope of all thought and action, thus producing in the individual the most completely alert, voluntary, and anti-instinctual control over his own physical and psychological processes, and insuring the systematic regulation of life in subordination to the religious end. The goals, the specific contents, and the actual results of the planned procedures were very variable. Apparently, Weber had the Western monasticism in mind as a paradigm of moral self-perfection within communities of virtuosi. See, for example, M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. T. Parsons (London: Unwin, 1984), p.117. For a first attempt to interpret the Leninist virtuosi within the Weberian sociology of religion, see Klaus-Georg Riegel, Konfessionsrituale im Marxismus-Leninismus (Graz: Styria, 1985). Interestingly, some time later O. Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), esp. pp.35122, uses the confessional culture of the Orthodox Church and their monasteries as a starting point for analysing within the context of Foucaults theoretical approach the Leninist and Stalinist cadres. Not very astonishingly, both approaches, the Weberian and the Foucaultian discourses, are portraying the Leninist monk revolutionaries (S. Frank) and the Stalinist cadres within the paradigm of public penance and private confession. 30. Lenin sees his movement in the tradition of the Jacobins of the French Revolution. See for example W.I. Lenin, Zwei Taktiken der Sozialdemokratie in der demokratischen Revolution (1905; Berlin: Dietz, 1946), pp.545. Cf. Astrid von Borcke, Die Ursprnge des Bolschewismus: Die jakobinische Tradition in Ruland und die Theorie der revolutionren Diktatur (Mnchen: Berchmanns, 1977); J. Keep, The Tyranny of Paris Over Petrograd, Soviet Studies 20 (1968), pp.2235. 31. Berlin (note 24), p.167. 32. M. Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Orgins of Radical Politics (New York: Atheneum, 1976), p.315. 33. Lenin (note 9), p.123. 34. Ibid., p.137. 35. E. Goffman, On the Characteristics of Total Institutions, in E. Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation on Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1961), pp.1124. 36. M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin, 1991), esp. pp.195228. 37. Lenin (note 9), p.137. 38. Ibid., p.5. Lenin put this ideological Leitmotiv on the title page of his catechism, quoting from a letter of Lassalle to Marx on 24 June 1852. 39. Ibid., p.116. 40. Ibid., p.123. 41. Ibid., p.1234. 42. Ibid., p.138. 43. In the words of Foucault (note 36), Discipline makes individuals; it is the specific technique of power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise. It is not a triumphant power, which because of its own excess can pride itself on its omnipotence; it is a modest, suspicious power, which functions as a calculated, but permanent economy, p. 170. 44. Lenin (note 9), pp.1578.

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45. Ibid., p.158. 46. F. Gehrlich, Der Kommunismus als Lehre vom Tausendjhrigen Reich (Mnchen: Bruckmann, 1920), pp.301. 47. R. Flp-Miller, Geist und Gesicht des Bolschewismus: Darstellung und Kritik des kulturellen Lebens in Sowjet-Russland (Wien: Amalthea, 1926), p.120. 48. F. Stepun, Das Antlitz Russlands und das Gesicht der Revolution (Berlin and Leipzig: Gotthelf, 1934), p.60. 49. N. Berdiajew, Wahrheit und Lge des Kommunismus (Luzern: Vita Nova, 1934), p.22. 50. S. Frank, Die Ethik des Nihilismus (1909), in K. Schlgel (ed.), Wegzeichen: Zur Krise der russischen Intelligenz (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 1990), p.312. 51. J. Stalin, ber die politische Strategie und Taktik der russischen Kommunisten, in Werke 5 (Berlin: Dietz, 1952), p.61. 52. G. Sinowjew, Vom Werdegang unserer Partei (Hamburg: Carl Haym, 1920), pp.1718. 53. N. Bucharin, Die eiserne Kohorte der Revolution, Russische Korrespondenz Jg.III; Vol.1112 (1922), p.730. 54. In an entry in his diary of 20 August 1919, A. Paquet reported that characterisation by Radek. See W. Baumgart (ed.), Von Brest-Litovsk zur Deutschen Novemberrevolution: Aus den Tagebchern, Briefen und Aufzeichnungen von Alfons Paquet, Wilhelm Groener und Albert Hopman Mrz bis November 1918 (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971), p.117. 55. Ibid., p.117. 56. V.I. Lenin, Politische Erpressung, in Werke 25 (Berlin: Dietz, 1971), p.266. 57. See the classical characterisation of the intellectual solution to the problem of theodicy in Weber (note 12). The salvation sought by the intellectual is always based on inner need, and hence it is at once more remote from life, more theoretical and more systematic than salvation from external distress, the quest for which is characteristic of nonprivileged strata. The intellectual seeks in various ways, the casuistry of which extends into infinity, to endow his life with pervasive meaning, and thus to find unity with himself, with his fellow men, and with the cosmos. It is the intellectual who conceives of the world as a problem of meaning. As intellectualism suppresses belief in magic, the worlds processes become disenchanted, lose their magical significance, and henceforth simply are and happen but no longer signify anything. As a consequence, there is a growing demand that the world and the total pattern of life be subject to an order that is significant and meaningful vol 1, p. 506. 58. Ibid., p.519. 59. E. Durkheim, Les formes lmentaires de la vie religieuse: Le systme totmique en Australie (Paris: P.U.F., 1979), p.599. 60. See K. Mannheim, Competition as a Cultural Phenomenon, in idem, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952), esp. pp.1968. Mannheim uses Heideggers term ffentliche Weltauslegung through intellectuals for his own theory of intellectual competition on the field of mind. 61. Weber (note 12), p.506. 62. Especially for those intellectual virtuosi oriented to a revolutionary action, criticising the useless and void discussions within the social circles frequented by amateurs, dilettanti and charlatans, as Lenin or Bakunin liked to designate their former comrades-in arms. See for example the derogatory description of the Petrashevsky circle by Bakunin in his letter to Herzen, 17 November 1860, in M. Bakunin, Sozialpolitischer Briefwechsel mit A. I. Herzen und Ogarjow (Stuttgart: J.G. Cottasche Buhhandlung, 1985), pp.248. Very early, Bakunin deplored that lack of religion, that inner void [] as sickness of the 18th century [] It is a terrible, tormenting sickness with the only escape of being conscious of the own endless void, M. Bakunin, Das Vorwort zu den Gymnasialreden Hegels (1838), in idem, Frhschriften, ed. R. Beer (Kln, 1973), p.62. Quite different the enthusiastic judgement of A. Herzen, Mein Leben: Memoiren und Reflexionen 18121847, vol.1 (1907; Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1962), esp. p.525, who sees that social circle as a unique opportunity for moral self-perfection among an intellectual collective whose members claim legitimately a mandate to salvation as they represent the pure and uncorrupted beliefs for a moral and human progress of society and act without vested interests as demiurges of a new and better future of mankind. Cf. M. Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1965), esp. pp.5768. See also K.-G. Riegel, Der revolutionre Orden der russischen Intelligenz aus der Sicht Fedor Stepuns, Zeitschrift fr Politik 3 (1998), pp.30025. 63. Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), p.3. 64. See Zasulic (note 16).

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65. For other-worldly oriented religions, Weber (note 12) writes, once the Second Coming (parousia) was delayed, there existed an eschatologist solution. Henceforth, emphasis had to be shifted to the afterlife: those alive at present would be not able to see salvation during lifetime, but would see it after death, when the dead would awaken. For this-worldly political religions the quest for salvation, one might add to this observation, produces certain consequences for practical behavior in this world In other words, a quest for salvation in any religious group has the strongest chance of exerting practical influences when there has arisen, out of religious motivations, a systematisation of practical conduct resulting from an orientation to certain integral values p. 528. 66. With respect to the sacral language and written scripts used by the trans-nationally minded experts of the religious community, see B. Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991), pp.1219. 67. E. Voegelin, The Political Religions (1938), in M. Henningsen (ed.), The Collected Works of E. Voegelin, vol.5, p.59. 68. J. Braunthal, Geschichte der Internationale (Berlin: Dietz, 1978), vol.2, pp.55761. See, for example, article 3 where a periodic cleansing of the respective party joining the Third International is required, p.560. 69. See E. Durkheim (note 59), p.547. 70. Congress of the Peoples of the East. Baku, September 1920, stenographic report, ed. and trans. B. Pearce (London: New Park Publications, 1977), p.100. 71. Ibid., p.112. See also excerpts of the speeches by Zinoviev and Radek, in X. J. Eudin and R.C. North (eds.), Soviet Russia and the East 19201927: A Documentary Survey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957), pp.16572. See further H.C. dEncauss and St.R. Schram, Marxism and Asia: An Introduction with Readings (Baltimore, MD: Allen Lane, 1969), pp.17086. 72. Another heritage of the Great Revolutions, especially the French Revolution. See S.N. Eisenstadt, Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and Revolution: The Jacobin Dimension of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p.50. 73. W.I. Lenin, Letter to V.V. Kuraev, Ye.B. Bosh, E.A. Minkin, 11 August 1918, quoted in R. Pipes (ed.), The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1996), p.50. 74. Isaac Steinberg, a Left Socialist Revolutionary and first commissar of justice, already characterised in February 1918 Lenins revolutionary terrorist justice in this way. See R. Pipes, Communism: A History of the Intellectual and Political Movement (London: Phoenix, 2001), pp.456. 75. Quoted in G. Leggett, The Cheka: Lenins Political Police (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p.114. 76. Ibid., pp.171203. 77. M. Jansen, A Show Trial Under Lenin: The Trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries, Moscow 1922 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), p.27. 78. Ibid., pp.279. 79. P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p.76. 80. W. I. Lenin, Genossen Arbeiter! Auf zum letzten, entscheidenden Kampf! (1918), in Werke 28 (Berlin: Dietz, 1970), pp.423. 81. W.I. Lenin, Wie soll man den Wettbewerb organisieren? (1917), in W.I. Lenin, ber den Parteiaufbau: Eine Sammlung ausgewhlter Aufstze und Reden (Berlin: Dietz, 1959), pp.493502 (at 498). 82. Ibid., p.501. 83. Ibid., p.5012. 84. Typically for the ideological outlook of Bolshevism, Lunacharskii stigmatised on the occasion of the show trial against the Socialist Revolutionary Party (1922) that party as a stinking abscess, like a germ spreading its putrid activity into the depths of every sore. Such a germ is the SR Party. Having survived a difficult crisis, the heavily wounded country should attend to asepsis, to the complete cauterisation by means of severe disinfection, of all of these saboteurs [vrediteli] of life. Quoted in J.A. Cassiday, The Enemy on Trial: Early Soviet Courts on Stage and Screen (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000), p.120. 85. In most cases the inquisitorial orthodoxy claims to function as a surgeon healing the sick and infected body by painful but necessary surgeries. The pastoral care of the surgeon supposedly necessitates the cutting off of sick parts of the body in order to save and heal the remaining healthy body. For example, L. Sala-Molins (ed.), Le dictionaire des inquisiteurs, Valence, 1494 (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1981), declares the heresy as un vritable cancer, quil faut [] cautriser ds le dbut, afin quil ne pourrisse tout le coeur et ne tue toute vie spirituelle. Il faut retrancher la chair pourrie, rejeter loin de la bergerie la brebis galeuse, de peur que toute la maison, toute la masse, tout le corps ne sinfecte, ne se corrompe, ne pourrisse, ne meure, p. 239. See also The Rule of Saint Benedict, trans. C. Gasquet (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1966), chap.XXVIII, where the abbot should act

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like a wise physician in order to correct any not amending brother. As a last means to be applied to the rule prescribes: If he be not healed by this means then let the abbot use the severing knife, according to that saying of the apostle, Put away the evil one from among you; and again, If the faithless one depart, let him depart, lest one diseased sheep should infect the whole flock, pp. 5960. 86. For example, Bukharin used the same dehumanising metaphors for characterising the bourgeois enemies of the people. See N. Bucharin, Das Programm der Kommunisten (Bolschewiki) (Wien: Literatur und Politik, 1918), p.22. Those bourgeois, useless fellows, spider-speculators, bloodsuckers, parasites, usurers, should be brought to the gallows and their trade annihilated, ibid., p.40. 87. O. Figes and B. Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), emphasise that the veneration of Lenin had begun already in the exile revolutionary underground where he enjoyed the status of supreme leader and teacher of party. Bolshevism was defined by a personal pledge of loyality to him [] Lenins violent attacks on his opponents and his generally authoritarian leadership style reinforced this culture of obedience, p. 100. Furthermore, Lenin did not possess the charisma of a brilliant demagogue. Lenins domination of the party had more to do with the political culture of the party than with his own charisma. Lenins oratory was rather grey. It lacked the brilliant eloquence, the pathos, the humour, the vivid metaphors, the colour or the drama of a speech by Trotsky or Zinoviev. Lenin, moreover, had the handicap of not being able to pronounce his rs. Yet his speeches had an iron logic, and Lenin had the knack of finding easy slogans, which he crammed into the heads of his listeners by endless repetition, ibid., p.101. 88. For more details on Lenins conception of a talking city taken from Campanellas City of the Sun, see R. Stites, The Origins of Soviet Ritual Style: Symbol and Festival in the Russian Revolution, in C. Arvidsson and L.E. Blomqvist (eds.), Symbols of Power: The Aesthetics of Political Legitimation in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksel, 1987), pp.2342 (at 336). 89. V.E. Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley, CA.: University of California Press, 1999), p.137, quoting from the memoirs of Lunatscharskii. 90. Ibid., p.137. Bonnell cites R. Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p.89. 91. Ibid., p.140. 92. Ibid., p.146. 93. N. Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), p.82. 94. Bonnell (note 89), p.141. 95. Ibid., p.142. 96. Ibid., p.146. 97. Ibid., p.144. 98. Ibid., p.148. 99. Ibid., p.148. 100.Ibid., p.149. 101.Ibid., 149. 102.J.W. Stalin, Zum Tode Lenins. Rede auf dem II. Sowjetkongre der UdSSR 26. Januar 1924, in Werke 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Druck-Verlags-Vertriebs-Kooperative, 1972), p.42. 103.Ibid., pp.423. 104.J.W. Stalin, ber Lenin, in Werke 6 (note 102), pp.47, 55, 47, 52, 54. 105.R.H. McNeal, Stalin: Man and Ruler (New York: New York University Press, 1988), p.89. 106.Tumarkin (note 93), p.148. Tumarkin concludes: The collective, in these terms, is more than simply an ideal: it is Lenin. Lenin lives in the hearts of all worthy people, but every member of the party is Lenin. This is a religious concept of communion, like being one with Christ, ibid., p.148. 107.All former disciples of the immortal Lenin selectively used that sacral Leninist tradition for their own power aspirations. For example, Zinoviev in a speech before the Fifth World Congress of the Communist International praised Lenin as a confessor who used to beat ideologically erring followers. Surely, it was a pleasure to get beaten by the master. But what to do without Lenin? Now the Executive has to collectively substitute comrade Lenin, G. Sinowjew, Die Weltpartei des Leninismus (Hamburg: Carl Hoym, 1924), p.126. Bukharin praised Lenin as a machine of genius saving up costly discussions for his disciples [] Unfortunately, we will presently have more debates than at his lifetime, N. Bucharin, Die Ergebnisse des XIV Parteitages der KpdSU (1926), in U. Wolter (ed.), Die Linke Opposition in der Sowjetunion, Texte von 1923 bis 1928 (Westberlin: Ollie & Wolter, 1976), vol.3, pp.452519 (at 519). Especially Trotsky eulogised Lenin as a genius comparable only to Karl Marx. In his autobiography tried Trotsky to demonstrate his

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close companionship with Lenin whose ideological heritage the epigones misused for erecting a dictatorship of the apparatus over the party, see L. Trotzki, Mein Leben: Versuch einer Autobiographie (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1930), The relationship to Lenin as a revolutionary leader was substituted by a relationship to a head over a hierarchy of priests. Against my protest, on the Red Square was a mausoleum erected unworthy and humiliating for a revolutionary. They changed also the official books on Lenin in similar mausoleums. His thoughts were cut through in quotations for wrong sermons, p. 498. 108.R.C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 19281941 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992), p.154. 109.Weber (note 12), vol.2, p.1204. 110.Ibid., vol.2, p.1204. 111.Ibid., vol.1, p.54. 112.Ibid., vol.2, p.1164. 113.Ibid., vol.2, p.1164. 114.Ibid., vol.2, p.1164. 115.E. Hobsbawm, Inventing Traditions, in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp.114. 116.The year 1934 marks the beginning of a decisive loss of power by the Politburo in accepting Stalin as an autocratic ruler. Cf. O.W. Chlewnuk, Das Politbro: Mechanismen der Macht in den dreiiger Jahren (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1998), esp. pp.190304. 117.R. Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p.617. 118.J. Stalin, Leninism (Moscow: International Publishers, 1928). 119.B. Souvarine, Staline: Aperu Historique du Bolchevisme (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1935), p.382. 120.Ibid., p.335. Furthermore, Souvarine continues, Stalin avait pouvoir den rendre la lecture obligatoire aux proslytes, soumis des purations priodiques et tenus de suivre des cours lmentaires de doctrine pour y apprendre par coeur des aphorismes intangibles. Plus de deux cent mille ouvriers, illettrs politiques en grand majorit, ayant t admis en bloc dans les rangs communistes pour en amliorer la composition sociale, la faveur du deuil populaire, les leons de Staline devaient servir a leur ducation , ibid., p.336. 121.Ibid., p.333. 122.Ibid., p.335. 123.D. Wolkogonow, Stalin: Triumph und Tragdie: Ein politisches Portrait (Dsseldorf: Classen, 1989), p.735. 124.Medvedev (note 117), p.319. 125.Stalin (note 118), p.162. 126.Ibid., p.163. 127.Ibid., p.162. 128.Ibid., p.168. 129.Ibid., p.170. 130.Ibid., pp.1714. 131.J. Stalin, History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course (Moscow: International Publishers, 1945). 132.For further details, see Tucker (note 108), pp.52650. 133.Stalin (note 118), p.162. 134.Tucker (note 108), p.537. 135.Weber (note 12), vol.1, p.54. Kotkin speaks in this context of a theocracy. See S. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilisation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), pp.2938. 136.Cf. K.-G. Riegel, Transplanting the Political Religion of Marxism-Leninism to China: The Case of the Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow (19251930), in K.H. Pohl (ed.), Chinese Thought in a Global Context (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1999), pp.32755; B. McLoughlin, Stalinistische Rituale von Kritik und Selbstkritik in der Internationalen Lenin-Schule, Moskau, 19261937, Jahrbuch fr Historische Kommunismusforschung 2003, pp.85112. 137.M. Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York: The New Press, 1994), p.267. 138.Ibid., p.267. For Lewin, not surprisingly, the parallel with church history became obvious especially with respect to the transformation of sects into churches. Such a parallel can throw a searching light on the transformation of the revolutionary Bolshevik party from a network of clandestine committees into a mighty bureaucracy, with a powerful hierarchy on one pole and a rightless laity on the other, with privileges at the top and obligatory catechesis handed from

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above for the use of the lower rungs, and finally with a laicized version of [] sin, apostates, and inquisition, ibid., p.305. 139.Weber (note 12), vol.1, p.563. 140.Ibid., p.563. 141.Ibid., p.563. 142.Ibid., p.560. 143.E. Yaroslavsky, Bolshevik Verification and Purging of the Party Ranks (Moscow and Leningrad: International Publishers 1933), p.38. 144.Ibid., p.31. 145.J.A. Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 19331938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 146.Yaroslavsky (note 143), p.53. 147.Ibid., p.35. 148.J. Stalin, ber die Aufgaben der Wirtschaftler (1931), in Werke 13 (Berlin: Dietz, 1955), p.33. 149.J. Stalin, Rechenschaftsbericht auf dem XVII. Parteitag ber die Arbeit des ZK der KPdSU (B), 26 Januar 1934, in Werke 13 (note 148), p.330. 150.J.W. Stalin, ber die Mngel der Parteiarbeit und die Manahmen zur Liquidierung der totzkistischen und sonstigen Doppelzngler: Referat und Schluwort auf dem Plenum des ZK der KPdSU (B) 3. und 5. Mrz 1937 (Stuttgart: Das Newe Wort, 1952). 151.See Chlewnjuk (note 116), pp.246304. 152.Stalin (note 150), p.4. 153.Ibid., p.12. 154.Ibid., p.14. 155.I. Halfin, The Demonisation of the Opposition: Stalinist Memory and the Communist Archive at Leningrad Communist University, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 2 (2001), pp.5960. 156.See Cassiday (note 84), p.120. 157.See J. Stalin, Die Ergebnisse des ersten Fnfjahrplans. Bericht am 7. Januar 1933, in Werke 13 (note 148), p.186. Stalin complains especially of theft and embezzlement on the kolkhoz farms, and even the inoculation of pest to the livestock or the diffusion of meningitis to the horses, ibid., p.186. 158.Cassiday (note 84), p.121. 159.Ibid., p.125. 160.J. Hellbeck, Self-Realisation in the Stalinist System: Two Soviet Diaries of the 1930s, in M. Hildermeier (ed.), Stalinismus vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg: Neue Wege der Forschung (Mnchen: R. Oldenbourg, 1998), p.279. 161.Ibid., p.283. 162.Diary of Lenonid Alekseyevich Potyomkin, in V. Garros, N. Korenevskaya and Th. Lahusen (eds.), Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s (New York: The New Press, 1995), pp.25190. 163.Ibid., p.257. The diary as a battleground for self-disciplining processes was astutely analysed by Ignacio de Loyola, one of the most important militant virtuoso in modern history. See his Ejercicios espirituales para vencer a si mismo y ordenar su vida sin determinarse por affecion alguna que desordenada sea, in S.I. de Loyola, Obras Completas (Madrid: Biblioteca de Aubores Christianos, 1963), pp.443628. 164.L. Trotzki, Literatur und Revolution (1924; Essen: Arbeiterpresse, 1994), p.252. 165.I. Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), pp.11718. 166.Ibid., pp.11516. 167.Yaroslavky (note 143), p.18. 168.Goffman, On the Characteristics of Total Institutions (note 35), p.46. 169.L.A. Coser, The Militant Collective: Jesuits and Leninists, in L.A. Coser, Greedy Institutions: Patterns of Undivided Commitment (New York: Free Press, 1974), correctly points out that for Ignatius real obedience involved internalized acceptance The fulfillment of commands must not be merely mechanical and external By incorporating the will of the Superior into his own psyche, the model Jesuit joyfully sacrifices his autonomous self and becomes, as it were, putty in the hands of his Superior, p. 123. 170.Cf. J.H. Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Regime (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). For a comparison between the Stalinist and the Spanish inquisition cf. K.-G. Riegel, Inquisitionssysteme von Glaubensgemeinschaften: Die Rolle von Schuldgestndnissen in der spanischen und der stalinistischen Inquisitionspraxis, Zeitschrift fr Soziologie 3 (1987), pp.17589.

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171.Cf. Riegel (note 29). 172.W. Hedeler, Jeshows Szenario, Mittelweg 36/7 (1998), pp.6177. 173.E. Durkheim, De la division du travail social (Paris: P.U.F., 1960), pp.3578. 174.See M. Hepworth and B.S. Turner, Confession: Studies in Deviance and Religion (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), p.71. 175.Hepworth and Turner (note 174) are referring to the study of Pettazzoni, La Confessione dei Peccati. After Pettazzoni the rituals of confession in pre-industrial communities are accompanied by rituals of purification. In Kikuyu, the word kotahikio (confessing) is derived from tahikia, which means vomit. The purification rituals of washing, spitting and fumigating are addressed to the pollution which is present in the words of the confession. Primitive confession is thus connected with the objective breaches of social norms which produce physical pollution, ibid., p.73. 176.Quoted in N. Leites and E. Bernaut, Ritual of Liquidation: The Case of the Moscow Trials (New York: Free Press, 1954), p.94. 177.Ibid., p.94. Leites and Bernaut call this process of self-purification by the defendant a rebirth on the eve of death [...] Having accomplished this, he felt he had proved that he was still perhaps even more than ever a Bolshevik. He was conscious of his moral strength, and found it easy to reject charges of cowardice, ibid., p.94.