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
6102005
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

98

K.-G. Riegel

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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K.-G. Riegel

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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K.-G. Riegel

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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2.

3.

4.

5.

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

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

6.

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

7.

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

8.

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

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

9.

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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K.-G. Riegel

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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K.-G. Riegel
must without fail go through the ranks of the Party with a broom in his
hands.147

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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K.-G. Riegel

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,

Marxism-Leninism as a Political Religion 119

7.

8.
9.

10.
11.

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

18.

19.
20.
21.

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).

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K.-G. Riegel

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.

Marxism-Leninism as a Political Religion 121

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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K.-G. Riegel

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

Marxism-Leninism as a Political Religion 123

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

Marxism-Leninism as a Political Religion 125

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.