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RELIGION, SCIENCE, AND POLITICAL RELIGION IN THE SOVIET CONTEXT

Review products

FroesePaul, The Plot to Kill God: Findings from the Soviet Experiment in Secularization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008)
PollockEthan, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2011

MICHAEL DAVID-FOX
MICHAEL DAVID-FOX*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Maryland Email: [email protected]
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Extract

The intellectual movement to interpret fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism as “political religions” has generated lively debates and an intensive publication program for over a decade. The scholarly trend has been closely associated with a revival of the concept of totalitarianism, reconfigured to account for the popular appeal and violent fervor of twentieth-century mass movements of the extreme right and left. As theoreticians of political religion have been preoccupied with arguments about the definition of religion and the problems of comparison, two stumbling blocks have become increasingly apparent. First, historians of Soviet communism, who since the early 1990s have empirically and conceptually transformed the study of Stalinism and Soviet history, have either exhibited “utter neglect” of the political-religion concept or have shunned it due to the scientism and official atheism of the regime. As a result, comparisons in the political-religion mode have generally been carried out by scholars not expert in Soviet history. Second, and closely related to this, even sympathetic critics have found secular religion too blunt a tool and too generic a concept to probe the “novel, supranational, but historically specific . . . sense of mission” produced by radical interwar regimes. Soviet communism as a project, more than fascism, was deeply invested in viewing its own ideology as genuinely scientific.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , August 2011 , pp. 471 - 484
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

1 Gentile's, Emilio 1990 article “Totalitarianism and Political Religion,” Journal of Contemporary History 25/2–3 (1990), 229–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar, is often credited with sparking scholarly interest in developing the concept in the anglophone world; among his major works are idem, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, trans. Keith Botsford (Cambridge, MA, 1996). The journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions was launched in 2000 by Burleigh, Michael, who later published Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror (New York, 2007)Google Scholar. The most comprehensive compilation resulting from the scholarly embrace of political religions is the three-volume collected edited by Maier, Hans, Totalitarianism and Political Religions (vol. 2 co-edited with Schäfer, Michael), trans. Bruhn, Jodi (London and New York, 2004–7)Google Scholar. See also Griffin, Roger, ed., Fascism, Totalitarianism, and Political Religion (London, 2005)Google Scholar.

2 Ehret, Ulrike, “Understanding the Popular Appeal of Fascism, National Socialism and Soviet Communism: The Revival of Totalitarianism Theory and Political Religion,” History Compass 5/4 (2007), 1236–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quotation at 1252. An exception is the German sociologist Klaus Georg Riegel's interpretation by analogy of Leninism as a messianic “virtuoso religion” led by the vanguard party as “Messiah” and Stalinism as an inquisitorial “institutional church” (Riegel, “Marxism–Leninism as Political Religion,” in Maier and Schäfer, Totalitarianism and Political Religions, 61–112). However, there have been a range of serious investigations of the relationship between revolutionaries and religion, such as Manchester, Laurie, Holy Fathers, Secular Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia, and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia (DeKalb, IL, 2008)Google Scholar; Etkind, Aleksandr, Khlyst: Sekty, literatura i revoliutsiia (Moscow, 1998)Google Scholar; Brown, Avram, “The Bolshevik Rejection of the ‘Revolutionary Christ’ and Dem′ian Bednyi's The Flawless New Testament of the Evangelist Dem′ian,” Kritika 2/1 (Winter 2001), 5–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Roberts, David D., “‘Political Religion’ and the Totalitarian Departures of Inter-war Europe: On the Uses and Disadvantages of an Analytical Category,” Contemporary European History 18/4 (2009), 381–414CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quotation at 406; see also Ehret, 1248.

4 For my own discussion of the debates in Soviet history see David-Fox, Michael, “On the Primacy of Ideology: Soviet Revisionists and Holocaust Deniers (In Response to Martin Malia),” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5/1 (Winter 2004), 81–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 On this point see Kotkin, Stephen, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995)Google Scholar.

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8 Roberts, “Political Religion,” 390–92.

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12 To give one example, Froese equates the resilience of religion to the surprising persistence of “nineteenth-century” national and ethnic identities despite all the reeducation and propaganda efforts of the Communist Party (162). For two decades scholars have discussed how the Soviet system in fact promoted and even created national identities. One of the first major statements in what is now the dominant approach was Suny, Ronald Grigor, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, 1993)Google Scholar.

13 Here he draws effectively on Peris, Daniel, Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless (Ithaca, 1998)Google Scholar.

14 Hellbeck produced a series of influential articles starting in the 1990s; his book, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA, 2006), describes successive “Enlightenment” and “Romantic” registers of Soviet ideological self-fashioning that are not easily shoehorned into the notion of political religion.

15 Kenez, Peter, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–1929 (New York, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Joravsky, David, Soviet Marxism and Natural Science, 1917–1932 (New York, 1961)Google Scholar; David-Fox, Michael, Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918–1929 (Ithaca, 1997)Google Scholar.

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17 Shearer, David, “Elements Near and Alien: Passportization, Policing, and Identity in the Stalinist State, 1932–1952,” Journal of Modern History 76 (Dec. 2004), 835–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Policing Stalin's Socialism: Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924–1953 (New Haven, 2009), chap. 8; Brown, Kate, “Out of Solitary Confinement: The History of the Gulag,” Kritika 8/1 (2007), 67–103CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on internal zones see 80–88; Kondrat'eva, T. S. and Sokolov, A. K., eds., Rezhimnye liudi v SSSR (Moscow, 2008)Google Scholar.

18 Andrews, James T., Science for the Masses: The Bolshevik State, Public Science, and the Popular Imagination in Soviet Russia, 1917–1934 (College Station, TX, 2003)Google Scholar.

19 Roberts, “Political Religion,” 408.

20 Graham, Loren R., Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union (New York, 1972)Google Scholar, enlarged as Science, Philosophy, and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union (New York, 1987); see also Graham, What Have We Learned about Science and Technology from the Russian Experience? (Stanford, 1998).

21 As other historians have done with great success: see, for example, van Ree, Erik, “Heroes and Merchants: Stalin's Understanding of National Character,” Kritika 8/1 (Winter 2007), 41–65Google Scholar; Rieber, Alfred J., “Stalin, Man of the Borderlands,” American Historical Review 106/5 (2001), 1651–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 On all Stalin's editorial changes see Rossianov, Kirill O., “Editing Nature: Joseph Stalin and the ‘New’ Soviet Biology,” Isis 84/4 (Dec. 1993), 728–45Google Scholar.

23 Gorbunov, V. V., V. I. Lenin i Proletkul't (Moscow, 1974)Google Scholar.

24 Here see Krementsov, Nikolai, Stalinist Science (Princeton, 1997)Google Scholar.

25 On divisions between “technicists” and “revivalists,” see Priestland, David, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization: Ideas, Power, and Terror in Inter-war Russia (Oxford, 2007)Google Scholar.