Stalin’s Soviet Monastery

Figures

Figure 0.1: Iosif Djugashvili in His Seminary Uniform, 1894

Figure 2.1: El Lissitsky, “Strike the Whites with a Red Wedge,” 1919

Figure 3.1: The Orthodox Monastery in Tiflis, Georgia, undated

Figure 4.1: Aleksandr Ivanov, “The Appearance of Christ to the People,” 1836–56

Figure 4.2: Vladimir Serov, “Lenin Proclaims Soviet Power,” 1947

Figure 5.1: Ilya Repin, “Golgotha,” 1920

Figure 6.1: Screenshot from Sergey Eisenstein’s October, 1937

Preface

I remember distinctly the moment when the idea of this book occurred to me, although in a way that was still too vague to formulate, and would remain vague for many years.¹ It was in the fall of 1965, and I was a graduate student in Russian literature at Columbia University. In a class on Common Slavic, Professor George Shevelyov made a comment about Old Church Slavonic, the language used for early Orthodox texts. He said that since the existing monuments (as they are called in Russian), that is, texts, were primarily Biblical and patristic in nature, Common Slavic had a limited vocabulary. I knew that that was a profoundly important point, and it has taken me from then until now to state what was important about it. At the time I had no idea that Old Church Slavonic would eventually lead me to an analysis of Joseph Stalin’s use of power, but it did. I can briefly describe this process as follows.

I now understand that since Old Church Slavonic played a formative role in the development of Russian culture; it bequeathed its limited vocabulary to Russian culture as a whole. Russia has had, and still has, a limited discourse system. (The long-term effect of Marxism was to make an already limited discourse system even more limited.) This fact raises numerous questions, such as this one: “Has Russia had such a robust literary censorship because it has a limited discourse system, or does it have a limited discourse system because it has had a robust literary censorship?” Moreover, Old Church Slavonic was written and read in monasteries, ←xi | xii→and this statement about the cultural system of the monastery eventually led me to the larger consideration of the monastery as a key to the cultural system of Russia as a whole.

The absence of the Protestant Reformation in Russia involves more than religion and religious rituals. The Protestant Reformation was related to the rise and spread of such crucial interrelated social phenomena as the spread of literacy, the growth of individualism, and the rise of private enterprise.² The fact that these phenomena occurred much later and much more slowly in Russia than in the West is directly attributable to the close association of government power and religion, an association that Protestantism, and all that it implies, never had the critical mass to dissociate in Russia. Nevertheless, Russian leaders like Peter the Great and Vladimir Lenin often proclaimed and carried out policies that had secularizing effects similar to those associated with Protestantism. This internal contradiction explains a great deal about the difficulties of exercising political power in Russia.

Stalin’s Soviet Monastery

More specifically, understanding the crucial role of the monastery and monasticism in Russia life also explains a great deal about the career of the man whom the world knows as Joseph Stalin. He was born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili on December 18, 1878, in the Georgian village of Gori, and died in Moscow on March 5, 1953. (The name Stalin is derived from stal’, the Russian word for steel.) We can integrate this powerful man and his long career into the evolutionary flow ←xii | xiii→of Russian history by emphasizing the formative role of the period of four years and nine months that he spent in the 1890s studying to be a priest in the Orthodox Seminary in Tbilisi, in his native Georgia. I will argue in more detail later that when he achieved enormous power as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he acted as the sadistic elder of a monastery; in effect, he imposed the traditional vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience on the Soviet Union, which can be more accurately described as Stalin’s Soviet monastery. I thus define Soviet history as a form of revolutionary monasticism, a revolution carried out as a way of bringing monastic principles out beyond the wall of the monastery and incorporating them into the practice of Russian politics. The internal contradictions implied by the term revolutionary monasticism, which caused so much violence and suffering, are a particularly intense version of the long-standing contradiction inherent in the exercise of political power in Russia, a matter about which I will also have more to say. In general, Russia has responded to the demands of modernization created by the Protestant Reformation in various dysfunctional ways.

This interpretation of both Stalin and Stalinism does to traditional interpretations of Russian politics what Marx was said to have done to Hegel. It was a commonplace among the early Bolsheviks that Marx had stood Hegel on his head. ←xiii | xiv→Analogously, the argument of this book stands the traditional interpretation of Stalinism, and by implication, Russian politics as a whole, on its head. If the traditional interpretation of Soviet history says that the society was determined, in one way or another, by political ideology, then Stalin’s Soviet Monastery argues that political ideology was itself determined by society, which is the proper subject of historical investigation. It therefore examines what anthropologists call enculturation, the process by which children acquire the linguistic and other skills that enable them to function in the society as adults, as a key to Stalin’s use of power. The subject of the book is therefore the creation of Stalinism, the events and principles that led up to it, as well as Stalin’s personality and policies. Stalin took advantage of Lenin’s glaring weaknesses as a political thinker, so Stalinism derived from Leninism. Some details about the rise of Leninism are therefore essential for an understanding of Stalinism as a socio-cultural phenomenon, which was a culmination of age-old Russian traditions and folk beliefs that requires broad-ranging discussions that draw on a variety of sources.

At this point it may be helpful to contrast Stalin’s Soviet Monastery with Nikolay Berdyayev’s The Russian Idea, which was first published in Paris in 1946. As the title indicates, Berdyayev believed in the mid-twentieth century tendency known as the history of ideas. While his book vacillates between the abstractions of ideas and the specifics of personality, it has some historical value because it was the first synthesizing work on Russian culture to appear in the West. Although The Russian Idea does not acknowledge the Bolshevik revolution and its consequences, it does contain some suggestive formulations, such as this one: “Nihilism is a typically Russian phenomenon and it grew out of the spiritual soil of Orthodoxy. It contains the experience of a powerful element belonging to Orthodox asceticism.”³ In a key passage, Berdyaev announces, “The Russian idea is an eschatological idea of the Kingdom of God.”⁴ Indeed, asceticism and eschatology, the study of end things, played a key role in the development of the Soviet Union; as I will show, asceticism and eschatology appear with particular clarity in the cult of Lenin.

Stalin’s Soviet Monastery departs from traditional studies of Russian history and culture such as The Russian Idea in that it draws on innovative work in disciplines such as media theory, linguistics, and anthropology. As such, it is essentially an exercise in historical anthropology and is therefore necessarily an interdisciplinary study that emphasizes the role of art, myth, and ritual in Soviet society. Art in modern Russian society means above all literature, and therefore this book necessarily devotes a great amount of space to discussions of literature in relation to Russian society, and specifically to the exercise of power in Russian society. Literature in Russia usually means the nineteenth century classics, and I will show that the work of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, among others, tells us much more about ←xiv | xv→the inner workings of power in Russian society than people have generally realized. Much of Stalinism is implicit in the work of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, so reading the Russian classics as precursors of Soviet authoritarianism is a powerful way to achieve a major goal of Russian historical studies in general—the integration of the pre-1917 period with the post-1917 period.

Acknowledgements

It remains my pleasant duty to acknowledge the help I received from people who read various chapters in draft form and made useful comments. These people include my friends Carolyn Gibson, and Owen Owens; and my former students, now distinguished professors in their own right, Dr. Trish Starks of the University of Arkansas, and Dr. Karl Qualls of Dickinson College. And no words can ever convey my gratitude to my wife Donna, who read the whole manuscript and made some essential editorial suggestions. This book shows the beneficent results of her work on every page.

Introduction