Old, Obscure, Great Books: Review No. 2

Here is a brief review of an old, out-of-print book by a scholar of long ago, just one of many, many great, old books I have acquired that do not deserve to be forgotten. I started these reviews because I am sure there are other bibliophiles out there who can enjoy learning from them as much as I have.

I believe that the inexpensive old books I have discovered in used book stores and library sales are, in both the subject matter itself and in how it is presented, superior to what scholars and intellectuals publish today. Old books offer a dirt cheap way to give oneself a great education. I have learned from old books so much important material that, if I read only newer books, I would hardly be aware of, if at all; material that is essential to a good education.

For instance, it was mainly not through my formal education, but through my self-education that I came to see how history is often distorted and misrepresented by people and groups who have certain social/cultural/political agendas, such as Christians responding to the new rise of atheism by claiming that atheism leads to totalitarianism and mass-slaughter as in Soviet Russia. Well, here is one book that thoroughly and comprehensively looks at Russia's path to communism - and it is a history that does not quite corroborate what the Christians like to assert about the matter.

Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism, by Avrahm Yarmolinsky; Collier Books, 1971; 349 pp.

The road to Lenin’s communist Russia of 1917 actually began in 1790 when Alexander Radischev’s book, A Journey from Petersburg to Moscow, was published. “While informed with the spirit of Western Enlightenment, the book [A Journey] is deeply rooted in the native soil. Never before had the seamy side of Russian life been so boldly exposed” including “that the gaudy façade of Catherine’s rule conceals a corrupt and cruelly oppressive regime” (13).

Radischev was an official in the Russian government. As a teenager he was sent to Germany to study and he eagerly absorbed the ideas of the Enlightenment‘s thinkers, especially the French philosophes. Radischev, though part of the nobility, was an egalitarian democrat who wanted the serfs emancipated and he saw industrialism as evil. He believed it was for the future generations to make his vision of Russia a reality.

It is not known why the official censor let the book slip by and be published but the consequences of his neglect were tremendous and far-reaching for his country. Radischev was sentenced to Siberia but the ideas of revolution were planted.

The explosive nature of Radischev’s book is evident by seeing the historical setting it was in, which was that of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. In Russia, Catherine II “opened schools, encouraged book publishing, sponsored a periodical press, though only as long as the satire in which it indulged remained innocuous. A peasant uprising at home and the turn events were taking in France helped put an end to her flirtation with liberalism. The regime which started out as enlightened despotism ended as despotism tout court. But she could not wholly undo, what was, in part, the work of her own hands“ (18-19). After the French king was executed Catherine wanted everything French “exterminated.”

Western liberal ideas were penetrating Russia, especially in its army after the war with Napoleon. Yarmolinsky tells how in 1820 that “the French ambassador wrote that he could not think without horror of what would happen to Europe if forty million Russians, still half savage and brutalized by slavery, conceived a desire for freedom and proceeded to shake off their chains. True, the dangerous notion hadn’t yet entered the heads of the lower orders, but it was already inflaming the well-born” (31).

Secret societies began forming, mostly of military officers. These societies were born of disapproval with sundry political and military matters and were the forerunners of the later communist/anarchist terrorist and revolutionary groups.

A group of insurgent army officers who planned to overthrow the czar in December, 1825 (the “Decembrists“) composed a tract called The Orthodox Catechism. The text is vaguely reminiscent of America’s Declaration of Independence but is heavily religious and collectivist. In it all Russia’s misfortunes are attributed to its government so the authors call for the formation of a republic because that is the form of government consistent with divine law. They assert that Jesus Christ must reign on earth as he does in Heaven; and the death of the czar is a sign from God for the Russians to free themselves from their slavery. The establishing of a new government is the army’s responsibility.

At the same time, among the Russian intellectuals two schools of thought about Russia’s direction developed, the Westernists and the Slavophiles.

The Westernists thought that Russia would progress similarly as the Western Europeans had. They strongly favored institutional reform as a means of progress. Vissarion Belinsky was the most prominent of them. He called the Orthodox Church a “toady to despotism” that was “foreign to Christ, who was the first to teach mankind the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity” (72).

The Slavophiles “were romantic doctrinaires who found in German philosophy sanction for their distrust of the intellect, their religiosity, their traditionalism. They believed that Russia possessed a culture distinct from and superior to that of the West” (69). They were populists in claiming that the Russian peasantry embodied the Orthodox faith and its sense of equality and brotherhood. Slavophiles held the lofty conviction that Russia could achieve no less than her own and the world’s salvation.

Alexander Herzen, who was prominent among the revolutionaries’ thinkers, was in the Westernist camp, envisaged a secular Armageddon in Europe that would bring in a new socialist society consisting of a centralized state, order (instead of freedom), and collectivism.

Nikolay Chernyshevsky was also one of the most important thinkers among the revolutionaries. He advocated enlightened self-interest, which meant identifying one’s happiness with the happiness of all. Man is the plaything of circumstances so his society is morally responsible for what he becomes. He also loathed laissez-faire and wanted to see the people living in phalansteries similar to those dreamt of by Fourier. After the publication in 1863 of Chernyshevsky’s fictional story, What’s to be Done?, about the heroically selfless “new men” of the future communism, his influence on radicals and revolutionaries - including on Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the next century - became tremendous.

Of the many terrorist groups in Road to Revolution, one was especially fanatical: “Half a dozen of the more audacious spirits discussed at length a plan for forming a terrorist band. They called it Hell. Each member of this secrecy-shrouded body was to be a dedicated and doomed man. He had to give up his friends, his family, his personal life, his very name” (137).

Dmitry Karakozov was a youth who was considered for the group and was fascinated by the possibility of daring action and self-immolation. “The cause of the common people was his ruling passion” (138). He tried to assassinate the czar but his pistol shot missed. This episode ended in much delicious irony.

That the czar’s life was saved was taken as proof of divine favor falling on him and the Russian people believed Karakozov was an angry serf-owner seeking revenge. Even a joint resolution in the U.S. Congress congratulating the czar for surviving the assassination attempt condemned his would-be assassin as an “enemy of emancipation.” Karakozov’s comrades were arrested and while in jail he vainly wrote to the czar pleading for his life to be spared. “On 3 September, two days after the verdict had been pronounced, Karakozov was hanged by one of the peasant’s for whom he wished to lay down his life” (141).

Like many of the early groups of Russian terrorists and revolutionaries, the Karakozov episode shows how they were often amateurishly inept to the point of hilarity. Often they were more dangerous to themselves than to their intended targets, and their many attempts to “rouse the masses” to revolt simply fell flat.

Yarmolinsky’s history of Russian radicalism ends in the 1890’s with the emergence of the major Marxist political parties.

Of nearly all the Russian revolutionaries, from the intellectuals down to the terrorists, three characteristics of them are salient.

First is how they saw their revolution in religious terms.

A few brief but very interesting examples from the book are representative of the communist revolutionaries' religious mentalities. In the early 1830’s when they were university students, Alexander Herzen and Nikolay Ogarev were seduced by the ideas of French socialist thinkers Saint-Simon and Fourier (whose socialist ideas were inspired by and meant to replace Christianity). They swore on the Bible “to dedicate their lives to the people and the cause of liberty ‘upon the basis of socialism‘” by forming a secret society (67). There was Vera Figner with her “ideal of the prophets and martyrs of the socialist evangel” (180). Michael Bakunin’s followers held “a dream of freedom and equality on earth which was a substitute for a lost faith in heaven” (184). In the 1870’s were one group of revolutionary propagandists who pored over the New Testament and “dreamed of a new faith that would at once steel the intellectuals with fresh courage and enlist the religious sentiment of the masses on the side of revolution.” They believed “a revolutionary was most effective when he suffered for the cause“(187). Yarmolinsky quotes one terrorist after an assassination: “Let my blood, too, be the seed of Socialism, just as the blood of the early martyrs was the seed of the Christian Church” (257).

Secondly, just like contemporary terrorists they were fanatical nihilists who reveled in death, destruction, and martyrdom. For instance one revolutionary pamphlet stated, “We must devote ourselves wholly to destruction, constant, ceaseless, relentless, until there is nothing left of existing institutions.” And here is another especially evil quote from the terrorists’ literature: “We prize thought only in so far as it can serve the great cause of radical and ubiquitous destruction” (152). Then there is Sergey Nechayev’s infamous, The Catechism of the Revolutionary, which describes the revolutionary as a “doomed man” who has, literally, only one interest: revolution, so he can “destroy this vile order.” Some of this rhetoric, also like statements of terrorists since then, is undoubtedly hyperbolic bravado and propaganda - but it expresses some amount of profoundly held conviction, nonetheless.

Thirdly, they were second-handers, some of them abjectly so. Nechayev was a basket-case of second-handedness.

In order to be seen as a hero by his comrades he faked his imprisonment, faked his escape from his faked imprisonment, and even faked being killed by the police. “His ascetic habits - he lived on bread and milk, and slept on bare boards, at least while staying at the homes of his followers - could not but make an impression. Those he did not fascinate he ruled by fear…He arrogated to himself the right to destroy those who did not see eye to eye with him” (157).

One cell member was disobedient to Nechayev and doubted the existence of a mysterious, secret “Central Committee” Nechayev claimed he attended and would then give them orders from (he was, indeed, its only member). Nechayev and three other cell members murdered him. “For years the cry to kill the people’s enemies had repeatedly been raised by the handful of would-be liberators. The only victim turned out to be one of their own small number who had aroused the leader’s hostility” (159).

Nechayev was eventually arrested and was to be sentenced to Siberia, but his pseudo-heroics only made things worse for himself. During his sentencing he shouted, “Down with the Czar!” and “Long live the free Russian people!” and similar insults to the authorities. “As a result, the Emperor changed the court sentence to solitary incarceration for life in the Fortress of Peter and Paul” (165).

Road to Revolution is a very interesting, informative, and readable book on the Russian revolutionaries before Lenin, from their intellectual theories and religious inspirations to their bloody actions. For anyone wanting to learn about this subject, Yarmolinsky’s book is required reading. More important, considering how often Christians attempt to tie atheism, rationality, and secularism to the totalitarian bloodbath of communism, Yarmolinsky’s book is an effective (although unintended by him) debunking of that assertion. Russian communism and its horrors were, to a very large extent, clearly consequences of irrationalism and secularizing the Christian religion.

Old, Obscure, Great Books: Review No. 1

Communism Was Not Secularism

Secularism's future will likely consist of a long intellectual and cultural battle until it wins the day at last. One major intellectual battle waiting to be fought is for the real secularists to repair the bad reputation their cause has. We are told how the 20th century was one of secularism that inevitably led to totalitarianism, warfare, gulags, genocide, and pogroms. Much of the bad reputation derives therefrom. Blaming secularism for those horrors is misplacing the blame, though. Anti-secularists fail to see under the surface of allegedly “secular” totalitarianism. Beneath that surface is religion. From this review of "Comrades" by Robert Service:
"But Hitchens makes the excellent point that Stalin was able to, indeed set out to, exploit the massive reservoir of credulity created by centuries of tsarist rule and sullen acquiescence to the Russian Orthodox Church, when he says: "Communist absolutists did not so much negate religion, in societies that they well understood were saturated with faith and superstition, as seek to replace it."

British historian Robert Service, in Comrades: a world history of communism, goes further. For Service, communism is a religion, a "secular credo" complete with millenarian overtones (apocalypse followed by paradise), an emphasis on scriptural exegesis (each communist party "was a synod of hair-splitting political discussion") and a theory of historical inevitability that looks suspiciously like a doctrine of predestination. Marx and Engels, Service suggests, enthusiastically encouraged devotion, with the consequence that they were "treated as prophets whose every word had to be treasured".

They were "infallible progenitors of an omniscient world view" and "remained unconsciously influenced by religious ideas about the perfect future society and the salvation of humanity".

To suggest that communism is religious in character is not an original point but it is a hugely important one, for it gives the lie to the view that communism, for all its attendant evils and failures, was essentially a rational experiment that the human race was bound to make - that it grew out of the Enlightenment, as opposed to fascism and Nazism, both of which were deeply irrational."

Hitchens is correct as far as he goes about the Russians' credulity; credulity that is found in any backwards, predominantly religious country. Under the tsars and Orthodox Church, Moscow was asserted to be the "Third Rome" and "Holy Russia's" destiny was nothing less than redeeming mankind. That was the self-image of a country where most people lived under the harsh, impoverished, quasi-communistic system of serfdom until well into the nineteenth century.

Meanwhile, Western Europe progressed quickly with its Renaissance, scientific revolution, and Enlightenment, none of which substantially penetrated Russia - Russian intellectuals were against Western thought.

Looking back at the big-picture, it is therefore bizarre that Karl Marx believed Russia would be among the last nations to become communist - there must be fully industrialized capitalism before there is communism, he believed. (Later on Russian communists got Marx to make an official doctrinal exception for their country.)

Communism took its deepest roots where religion was especially strong: countries like Russia (as well as other eastern European countries).

Some communist countries, especially Russia, went headlong toward massive-scale modernizing and industrializing; modernizing and industrializing they did not learn first-hand how to create but rather begged, copied, and stole from those who did learn them first-hand. These were countries that were historically dominated by religious and tribal beliefs of mysticism, millenariaism, self-sacrifice, collectivism, conformity, and authoritarianism. They were impoverished, backwards, and stagnant. They did not grow themselves into an intellectual and cultural period of reason and science, such as western Europe's scientific revolution and Enlightenment, which led to rational, scientific, independent-minds; increasing knowledge of man and the world; progress; and liberty. In comparison, and not so incidentally, those countries that originated and/or were most influenced by the secularism of scientific revolution and Enlightenment (e.g., Great Britian, France, Holland, America) were much less vulnerable to the influence and spread of communism.

The Russian people were living for centuries under religious-induced collectivism, mysticism, ignorance, authoritarianism, and millenarian expectations, and suddenly had their religion taken away and replaced with Marxist-Leninist communism. What was not taken away, however, were those ideas and mindsets that were integral to their religion. Only those ideas' contents and contexts were changed from religious to secular. No more was Holy Russia going to redeem mankind and messianically usher in the millennium of a reign of heaven on earth. Instead, the proletariat was the messianic force that would overthrow the existing order and usher in a workers' paradise. And more: with that substitution these people obtained possession of the products of reason and science without being rational and scientific. They kept their collective, messianic mission of transforming the world, a religious, pre-modern mission they can undertake armed with modern weapons produced by modern industry. That backwards people with a strong tradition of religious superstition would go about executing their "mission" by grabbing absolute power and committing wholesale bloodshed should not be surprising. As 20th century communism's history demonstrated, the Marxist methodology of "dialectical materialist" thinking and its alleged ability to create a "scientific" socialism were as delusional and as destructive as relying on religious mystical revelation or theology as a method for creating a society.

How is secularism to blame for the horrors of communism, and religion is not only off the hook, but touted as the antidote?

That is why secular offshoots of religion should be opposed and distinguished from real secularism. Understanding what is good for human life on this earth and what that requires necessarily means using reason as the means to that end; resorting to mysticism as a method of knowing precludes any characterization of that endeavor as "secular." It becomes religious. Likewise does introducing into secularism's inquiry a concept, or ideas that cannot be derived from rationally understanding the world, like the idea of, say, "messianism." It comes from religion. That idea, however, even if given secular content or context remains a religious idea.

Robert Service's analysis of Marxism is dead-on. Marxist communism was the offspring of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. Communism was not essentially secularism. Communism was essentially secularized religion.

Atheism and secularism were part of Marxist communism as a means of applying to society and government what otherwise were religious ideas. Religious ideas divorced from their supernaturalism cannot be made to work in this world any more than if they retained their supernaturalism. That is the lesson to be learned from the bloody "experiment" of communism.

Secularism will make significant headway when it distinguishes itself from and successfully opposes secularized religious ideas. The religious have used their own secularized offshoots, like communism, to justify denouncing secularism as a failure. We should not be tolerating this.

HT to Daily Atheist for the above review.