The Press and the Law by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Journalists’ fly-by-night trade, as long as it lasts, is to outdo one another in snooping, conjecturing, and snatching whatever they can. Every encounter I had with the media in my first days in the West filled me with bewilderment; I was taken aback. An ill-defined feeling of resistance to their cheap tricks arose within me: my book about the perishing of millions had just burst onto the scene, and they were snipping a some puny weeds. Of course it was ungrateful on my part: was not the Western media, whatever its short-comings, the force that had offered me a pedestal to the world, rescuing me from persecution? Then again, they did not do this on their own: I was the one who waged the battle. The KGB knew full well that if they threw me in chains even more of my writing would be printed, which would backfire on them. It was, however, due to its penchant for sensationalism that the Western saved me, and fueled by the same penchant it was now demanding I make statements.

 I wrestled with a writer’s protective instinct, which had realized, even before my mind had, the danger of becoming a blatherer. I had been carried to the West on such a sweeping wave  that I could now talk endlessly, repeating myself in every which way, straying from the gift of writing. Political passion, of course, is embedded deep within me, and yet it comes after literature, it ranks lower. And if in our unfortunate land so many resourceful and active people had not perished, with physicists and mathematicians having to take up sociology and poets having to take up political oratory, I would have remained within the bounds of literature.

And here I clashed with the Western media. In its frenzied rampages it watched and stalked and photographed my every move. I had not bowed before the formidable Soviet Dragon – was I now to bow and scrape before these journalists of the West? Were they to ensnare me with glory? I did not need it! I had not clung to Khrushchev’s orbit even for a week, nor would I cling to theirs. All these methods disgusted me. “You are worse than the KGB!” My words instantly resounded throughout the world. So from my first days in the West I did much to ruin my relationship to the press; a conflict that was to continue for many years to come.

The Italian journalists informed me that they would be delighted to come to Zurich, that it would be no trouble whatsoever. They rented a banquet hall for the occasion at a nearby hotel. We went there at the appointed day and were quite taken aback: there were more than thirty of them, so energetic and lively; so engaged, their eyes fiery, their words passionate. The speech I had prepared, however, was much too complicated. I was still trapped in the flight between two worlds, not having yet acquired points of reference or an understanding of intellectual expectations; but I was already being besieged by the triumphant Western materialism that was eclipsing all spirituality. Consequently, I had prepared a speech for the Italian journalists that was like trying to push water uphill, a speech that far overshot the mark. While I sought to soar upward, I neglected to layout the basic questions. The eyes of the poor journalists glazed over at these abstruse heights, and after the ceremony a young journalist came up to me and said almost tearfully: “There is nothing you have just said that I can transmit to my readers. Could you perhaps say something more clear?”

What was strange was that the speech I gave came up against a wall of deafness and a sea of silence, as if my words had been neither uttered nor heard. Four years later I was to gather these same thoughts under the same rubric in my commencement address at Harvard, where my words resounded throughout America and the entire world. In the Western world the place where something is spoken or printed has a very diverse effect: something that is printed or said in the most refined European countries, such as France or England, has difficulty reaching the United States, while everything said in America, for some reason, resonates throughout the whole world. It is what physicists call an anisotropic medium.

 I invariably compared the people here in the West to the people back at home, and felt sad and puzzled by the Western world. Was it that people in the West were worse than people back in Russia? Of course not. But when the only demands on human nature are legal ones, the bar is much lower than the bar of nobleness and honor (those concepts having in any case almost vanished now), and so many loopholes open up for unscrupulousness and cunning. What the law compels us to do is far too little for humaneness: a higher law should be placed in our hearts too. I simply could not get used to the cold wind of litigation in the West.

I wanted that autumn, in my fervor, to state publicly that the whole system of book publishing and book-selling in the West did not foster the development of a spiritual culture. In past centuries writers wrote for a small circle of connoisseurs who in turn guided artistic taste, and high literature was created. But today publishers have their eye on mass sales, which so often entails indiscriminate tastes; publishers make gifts to booksellers to please them; authors, in turn, depend upon the mercy of their publishing houses. It is sales that dictate the direction of literature. But great literature cannot appear in such circumstances; there is no point even in getting one’s hopes up; it will not happen, despite unlimited ‘freedoms.’ Freedom alone is not yet independence, is not yet excellence. But I refrained from speaking out. Surely not all publishers were like this. ( And I was later to see they indeed were not all of that kind. There were publishers who did keep a moral compass.)

The world is an immense place and there are many paths to take, yet one’s own path is singular, narrow, and harried. Time, which saturates everything, flows on majestically, yet one’s own time is so brief, so insufficient.

Silence and solitude: without them I cannot manage. It was a great task for me to turn away from my work and drag my soul into this fleeting and fast-flowing political battle, initially by forcing myself, and then at full speed. The most difficult thing is overcoming one’s inertia, changing direction; once one is in motion, heading in the direction one has chosen, much less effort is needed. So I spent the whole feast of the Trinity, four days, working on my two (first) speeches in the U.S. and both were beginning to crystalize; the first basically about the Soviet Union as a state, the second about Communism as such.

Then a Russian émigré from the Senate staff, Victor Rediay, a wiry and energetic man from Poltava with a darkish complexion, drove me to Washington by car. It was a drive of many hours and as we were talking he gave me a taste of the seething and bilious tangles and intrigues of Washington’s inner circles, which turned out to be more sinister and heartless than I had pictured. The country was not being run by responsive and humane men but by cynical politicians. Whom among them could I hope to convinced, to sway? And to what end?

I was not in the least nervous – not that I expected to be, judging by my previous speeches; yet I had never experienced anything like this before. I felt as if I were standing on international heights, my words resounding and lasting. Released from the task of having to remember what I had to say, I now found the necessary freedom for every utterance and movement. I caught my audience off guard with my ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite!, as if a Soviet agitator has somehow appeared in their midst, but it was the announcement of Soviet prison-camp inmates reaching out to American trade unions .  .  . I believe that in all their fifty-eight years no one had lashed the Bolsheviks as harshly as I did with the two speeches I gave in Washington and New York.

Though I  came to the United States a year after my initial invitation, with the attention on me no longer so heated, the timing was still good. It is true that many people were stunned by my harsh tone, and television stations did not carry my speech, even though up on the balcony the cameras were rolling without pause. An angry big-city newspaper called my speech foolish, but others compared the two speeches I gave with Churchill’s Fulton speech (about Stalin’s ‘Iron Curtain’),. And I must say without undue modesty, that I agreed then with that assessment. A few years had to pass, as they now have, for me to leaf through those speeches and for me to be surprised at my confidence back then. As a result often great changes within me, I would not give such speeches today: I no longer see America as a close, faithful, and staunch ally in our quest for liberation as I had felt in those days. Today (1978) I would not be able to say this to an American public. It was all about how the different peoples of the world can understand one another despite their different experiences, and how their experience can be transmitted verbally. When I had given my Nobel Prize speech, I had thought that this was possible, and still believed it when I spoke before the Senate, but already six months to a year later I had lost all hope. In my speech I roused my listeners to strive for the international consciousness of a great people (all the while knowing that today’s politicians were far from being up to the task, and that the American electoral system, with its manic fanfare and powerful financial intervention, blocks the rise any one great and independent.

England encountered all my insolent statements with invariable politeness, and did not even show any anger when I stated with irony that, current events being what they are, Uganda was rising to be of greater importance than Britain. The British accepted my words and listened – but would any good come of it? The incorrigible vice of the world, to which any concept of the hierarchy of ideas is alien, lies in that no one person’s voice, no one person’s strength, can be remembered or acted upon,  everything passes by, shimmering and flickering, into a new diversity. A kaleidoscope.

 A leading Canadian television commentator lectured me that I presumed to judge the experience of the world from the viewpoint of my own limited Soviet and prison-camp experience. Indeed, how true! Life and death, imprisonment and hunger, the cultivation of the soul despite captivity of the body: how very limited that is compared to the bright world of political parties, yesterday’s numbers on the stock exchange, amusements without end, and exotic foreign travel.

The case of Stern against me ( that I had wrongly accused them of collaborating with the KGB) was the first time ,but I was to notice it in the future too: in legal clashes there is a physical sensation of tension in the upper chest, the tensing of muscles one feels in hand-to-hand combat, in this case a pointless tensing of muscles, since this is a combat of souls. It is not a combat for which souls are suited: it is too low for them, and therefore a degrading encounter. (And then there is a long-term effect, an emptiness in the chest). Legal battles are a profanation of the soul, an ulceration. As the world has entered a legal era, gradually replacing man’s conscience with law, the spiritual level of the world has sunk. The legal world! Nothing but chicanery! The Western court system is drowned in a litigious quagmire, choked by the letter of the law, the thread of its spirit lost, this affording crooks and swindlers the advantage. Not to  mention that a court case can drag on for months, even years, which works in these peoples’ favor.

On January 1, 1977 I went back to work. I spent all my waking hours without distractions: nothing but the February Revolution. It now seem strange to recall; that it was not too long ago, two years ago, a year ago- that I had been trying to rally Eastern Europe into a liberation movement, to rouse Western Europe and America to defend themselves and America to defend  themselves. Now I wanted nothing to happen in my life, no external events, nothing to be entered into my personal calendar- a sign of a happy life. If I were to work like this for three or four years, I would have a result in hand. I wanted to work until the entire experience of my lived life would be exhausted and I felt the need to get up and go into order to renew my perspective.

What use to me had been those positions on which I had taken such a strong stand here in the West, with people seeming to listen to me? All this was without real benefit, and my soul had not embraced it. I came to see more and more that the political West, the West of the media, and, of course, the Western business world, were not our allies – or were too dangerous to have as allies in restoring Russia. Looking back it is amazing that the unanimous support that had sustained me in my battle against the Soviet Dragon – the support the Western press and Western society, and even from within the Soviet Union – that incredible and unjustified groundswell that lifted me, had been triggered by a mutual lack of understanding. I, in fact, suited the all-powerful opinion of the Western political and intellectual elite as little as I did the Soviet rulers, or indeed the Soviet pseudo-intellectuals.

All the deadlines of history keep being pushed back, too slow for me and my constant, impatient forging ahead. Here in the West I could have fallen deep into despair had I not my work. Mountains of work, for years to come. You have to perform your duty first – and only then make your demands of History.
  
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“Today I sometimes think back to how confident I was only five years ago about the undisputed superiority of samizdat publications as opposed to official Soviet literature: even the samizdat Khronika Tekushchikh Sobytii (Chronicle of Current Events) seemed to me more significant in what it achieved than the state-controlled Novy Mir. But here in the West, “in total freedom,” there are already half a dozen magazines in Russian that are free from any oppression, and one would think that there would be nothing keeping them from rising to a level of excellence: nobody is repressing them, so why are they not rising? But not a single one of these pretentious magazines can come close to the cultural and aesthetic level of Novy Mir in its day, despite its having been assailed and fettered by censorship. None of these magazines have achieved the calm, dignified, and deep discourse that Novy Mir managed despite its having been shackled with such rigid confines.  And much of the national and popular spirit of Russia managed to prevail in Novy Mir, something that one does not find in magazines of the Third Emigration that, at best, distance themselves categorically from the vital problems of Russia. In my final Soviet years, fueled by my fiery battle against the regime, I overestimated both the samizdat and the dissident movement: I tended to consider these the central current of social thought and action, but it turned out to be a significant rivulet that was in no way connected with the core of life in the country. With their connections to the West, the dissidents disseminated information from their own circles rather than anything having to do with the people as a whole. In those years, with our offensive against the Soviet powers – saying we had no enemies except the Communist regime – we all seemed to  be a part of a single stream with a homogeneous historical consciousness. But I overestimated my own proximity to this ‘democratic movement,’ part of the reason being a legacy of the pre-revolutionary ideology of ‘liberation’ from which in those days I had still not managed to free myself. Furthermore, these dissidents were brave, self-sacrificing individuals without self-serving or hidden agendas. It truly admired them, particularly, of course, the 1968 protest in Red Square against the occupation of Czechoslovakia.

But in truth we had sprung from different roots, expressed different aspirations, and had nothing in common but the time and place of action. The line of my struggle had started a good deal earlier than theirs, and my dogged battle against the Bolsheviks was to continue into the future, towards greater clashes, greater demands than their flimsy slogans such as “Respect your own constitution.’ (One has to admit, however, that even though some of these dissidents did not want to see Communism fall apart, they did a fine job under mining its authority.)

The Real Day by Yuri Slezkine

Few apocalyptic millenarians live to see the promised apocalypse, let alone the millennium. Isaiah, Jesus, Muhammad, Karl Marx, and most of their followers did not.

But some did. Indeed, most definitions of ‘revolution’ – at least ‘real’ or ‘great’ revolutions, such as the Puritan, French, Russian, Chinese and Iranian ones – refer to regime changes in which apocalyptic millenarians come to power and contribute substantially to the destruction of the old order. ‘Revolutions,’ in most contexts, are political and social transformations that affect the nature of the sacred and attempt to bridge the Axial gap separating the real from the ideal. As Edmund Burke wrote in 1791:

There have been many internal revolutions in the government of countries .  .  . The present revolution in France seems to me to be quite of another character and description: and to bear little resemblance or analogy to any of those which have been brought about in Europe, upon principles merely political. It is a revolution of doctrine and theoretic dogma. It has much greater resemblance to those changes which have been made on religious grounds in which the spirit of proselytism makes an essential part.

The last revolution of doctrine and theory which has happened in Europe is the Reformation . .  . The principle of the Reformation was such as, by its essence, could not be local or confined to the country in which it had its origin.

According to Crane Brinton, revolution is the assumption of power by the ‘delirious’ idealists who expect realization of ‘heavenly perfection’. According to Martin Malia, it is a political transformation ‘perceived as the passage from a corrupt old world to a virtuous new one.’ And according to S. N. Eisenstadt, it is ‘the combination of change of regime with the crystallization of new cosmologies.” Great revolutions (as opposed to Burke’s internal ones) are ‘very similar to the institutionalization of the Great Religions and of the great Axial Civilizations.” They are the best of times, they are the worst of times; everyone goes direct to heaven, everyone goes direct the other way.

Revolution, in other words, is a mirror image of Reformation – or perhaps Revolution and Reformation are reflections of the same thing in different mirrors. The first refers to political reform that affects the cosmology; the second refers to cosmological reform that affects politics. The view that revolutions aspire to the creation of an entirely new world while reformations attempt to return to the purity of the original source is difficult to hold onto: Thomas Muntzer and the Munster Anabaptists were trying to bring about the fulfillment of a prophesy that had not yet been fulfilled. They believed that the way to perfection lay through the restoration of the Jesus sect, but they had no doubt that what they were building was ‘’a new heaven and a new earth,’ not the old Garden of Eden. The new Jerusalem was to prelapsarian innocence what the kingdom of freedom was to ‘primitive communism.’ All reformations (as oppose to theological or ritual reforms) are revolutions insofar as they assume that ‘it is not enough to change some of these Laws, and so to reform them’. All revolutions are ‘revolutions of the saints’ insofar as they are serious about ‘insatiable utopias.’ As Thomas Case told the House of Commons in 1641:

 “Reformation must be Universal. All the wives, with such that are born of them. There must not be a wife or a child dispensed withal, in this public Reformation .  .  .Reform all places, all persons, all callings. Reform the Benches of Judgments, the inferior Magistrates .  . .Reform the Church, go into the Temple . . .overthrow the tables of these Money- changers, whip them that buy and sell .  . . Reform the Universities, . . .Reform the Cities, reform the Countries, reform inferior schools of learning, reform the Sabbath, reform the Ordinances, the worship of God, etc.

There was more to reform; there was nothing that did not need reforming. They had everything before them; they had nothing before them. They were all going direct to heaven, they were all going direct the other way. The key to salvation was firmness:

“You have more work to do than I can speak .  .  . Give leave only to present to you the Epitome and compendium of your great work, summed up by our Savior, Mathew 15:13. Every plant which my heavenly Father hath not planted, shall be rooted up. Behold here a double Universality of number and extent.

Every plant, be what it will, though it be never so like a flower, though it seems as beautiful as a Lilly, which Solomon in all his robes could not outshine. Every plant, whether it be a thing, or person, order or ornament, whether in Church, or in Commonwealth, where ever, what ever, if not planted of God, you must look to it, not to prune it only, or slip it, or cut it . . .but pulled up . . .not broken off, then it may grow, and sprout again, but pulled up by the very roots. If it be not a plant of God’s planting, what do’s it in the Garden: out with it, root and branch, every plant, and every whit of every plant.

And just as Jesus explained the meaning of the Parable of the Weeds (“the weeds are the sons of the evil one, ”who will be thrown “into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth’) so did Thomas Case, to the same effect. The Puritan Reformation ,like the one that Jesus launched, had little to do with forgiveness.

“I know men will cry out, Mercy, Mercy, but oh no mercy against poor souls; such mercy will be but foul murder . . .Shew no mercy therefore, to pull guilt and blood upon your own heads; now the guilt is theirs, if you let them go, you will translate their guilt upon your own souls. You remember what the prophet told Arab, I Kings 20:42 Because thou hast let go out of thy hand, a man whom I appointed to utter destruction, therefore thy life shall; go for his life, and thy people for his people.”

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All millenarians practice self-monitoring and mutual surveillance with the purpose of identifying and punishing heterodoxy. What makes them both more anxious and more hopeful than other besieged fortresses is that the current set of enemies is going to be the last one ‘ The Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to hold the unrighteous for punishment on the day of judgment.

 The fact that it happened before is the best guarantee that it will never- after the coming day of judgment – happen again. The unrighteous are like animals , “born only to be caught and destroyed” and ‘like animals they too will perish”- this time for good.

The Bolsheviks lived in such a besieged fortress. The Revolution and Civil War involved the use of ‘concentrated violence’ against easily classifiable enemies from the top of Bukharin’s list ( ‘parasitic strata,’ unproductive administrative aristocracy,’ bourgeois entrepreneurs as organizers and directors,’ ‘skilled bureaucrats’ and their properly uniformed and color-coded defenders. The purges of the 1920s confronted the revolutionaries’ great disappointment ( as Pete did in his Second Epistle, whose main subject was the apparent non-fulfillment of the prophesy). The third and final battle was the Stalin revolution against the remaining targets from Bukharin’s list, including ‘technical intelligentsia,’ ‘well-off peasantry,’ ‘middle and, in part, petty urban bourgeoisie,’ and ‘clergy, even the unskilled kind.’ The Seventeenth Party Congress of 1934  had then proclaimed victory, provisionally pardoned the doubters, and inaugurated the reign of the saints.

There were no open enemies left. One of the most important and least discussed consequences of the proclamation of victory in 1934 was the assumption that most Soviets were now ‘non-Party Communists.’ There was no act of collective baptism accompanied by the expulsion of nominal unbelievers, as in the case of the Munster Anabaptists or fully ‘reconquered Spain, but the outcome was the same: all subjects were by definition believers, and all the remaining corruption was a matter of heresy and apostasy, not enemy resistance. The Party’s main instrument of maintaining internal cohesion was no longer concentrated violence but the ‘transverse section of the soul’ ( as the administrative director of the State New Theater put it, apropos of The Other Side of the Heart). Bukharin called it ‘coercive discipline’: ‘the less voluntary inner discipline there is . . .the greater the coercion. Even the proletarian avant-garde, consolidated in the party of insurrection, must establish such coercive self-discipline in its own ranks; it is not strongly felt by many elements of this avant-garde because it coincides with internal motives, but it exists nonetheless.’ Since 1920, when he wrote this, Bukharin had experienced several occasions on which to feel it; now in the wake of the victory celebration that he had joined as part of the ‘supply train’, every Soviet citizens was ,theoretically, in  his position.

How effective were coercive discipline and self-discipline? On the one hand, family apartments were filling up with nephews and tablecloths; Don Quixotes were being replaced by Sancho Panzas; and Izrail Veitser was marrying Natalia Stats and buying himself a suit. On the other- and much more consequentially, according to Arosev’s diary- a combination of schooling, newspaper reading, and ‘work on the self’ was producing  such ‘non-Party Bolsheviks’ as Volodia Ivanov and Lyova Fedotov [self-sacrificing communist youth]. Socialism was a matter of time, and time was apparently elusive but ultimately predictable. As Peter wrote in that same epistle ‘do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.’

The same was true of history, which took its time while economic and social preconditions sorted themselves out and Volodia  Ivanov and Lyova Fedotov ‘worked on themselves.’ The enemy was still at the gate. And hen-and-rooster problems continued to get in the way, but, in the annus mirabilis of 1934, most signs seemed to indicate that the Bolsheviks were going to heed Peter’s warning and be steadfast and patient lest they be led away with the error of the wicked. And then, on December 1, the telephone rang.

There are two reasons why the assassination of a prominent but undistinguished Party official resulted in a vast moral panic that changed everything.[1.]

The first was domestic. The House of Government was as much a besieged fortress inside the Soviet Union as the Soviet Union was in the wider world. The assumption that most Soviets were now converts to communism implied that some open enemies were now hidden; that coercive discipline might require additional scrutiny; and that Fedor Kaverin’s production of The Other Side of the Heart  (which had suggested that friend and foe might be twin brothers) may have been correct, after all. At the same time, Party officials were as much under siege in their House of Government apartments as the House of Government was inside the Soviet Union. Hens and roosters were doing what hens and roosters do – at a pace that the builders of eternal houses could only dream of. The saints were reigning over a swamp.

The second reason was international. The Soviet Union had always been  a besieged fortress, but just as victory was being proclaimed at the Seventeenth Party Congress, an effective metaphor was becoming a geopolitical reality. In the east, Japan had occupied Manchuria and approached the Soviet border. In the west, the birthplace of Marxism and Russia’s traditional model and antipode had been taken over by a hostile apocalyptic sect. Fascism, long seen by the Bolsheviks as the ultimate expression of capitalist aggression, as a modern version of nativist ressentment of the Old Testament variety. The scorned chosen tribes of a degraded Europe were to rise up against Babylon and restore their wholeness, one a a time. Some were trying, with varying degrees of conviction, but only in Germany would the movement reach millenarian proportions, takeover the state, proclaim the third and final Reich, and set out to fulfill its own prophesy by preparing for one final battle.. What Edom and the ‘tall Sabeans’ had been to biblical Hebrews and what white people were to Enoch Mgijima’s and Ras Tafari’s Israelites, the international Jewry was to the German Fuhrer. As Hitler would say to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, “Should the international Jewry of finance succeed, both within and beyond Europe, in plunging mankind into yet another world war, then the result will not be a bolshevization of the earth and the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”

Like the Bolsheviks (but unlike most millenarians), Hitler was in a position to bring about what he has prophesized. Like the Bolsheviks (and many other millenarians), he led his people against an enemy whose power was largely esoteric. It was the same enemy- but whereas the Bolsheviks thought of it as a class, the Nazis thought of it as a tribe. Each considered the other a blind instrument in the service of Babylon. Both followed Marx, but Hitler did not know it (and the Bolsheviks did not know it about Hitler and did not usually read Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and “On the Jewish Question.” The final battle (Endkampf, or the poselednii i reshitel’nyi boui of the ‘Internationale’) would reveal who was the beast and who treaded the wine-press of divine wrath. The key victory was draining the swamp.

The search for Kirov’s assassins started at the top and aimed at the fallen angels . . . .and spread outwards, from the former leaders of the world revolution to vaguely defined social and ethnic categories consisting of anonymous, interchangeable individuals. After the February-March plenum of 1937, the people’s commissars were given one month to draw up detailed plans for the ‘liquidation of the consequences of the destructive work of saboteurs, spies and wreckers’ . . .there was no longer such a thing as a mistake, accident, or natural disaster. According to the campaign’s logic, any deviation from virtue– not only in human thought and deed, but in the world at large- was the result of deliberate sabotage by well-organized agents of evil.

Most orthodox Bolsheviks felt guilty by virtue of being Bolsheviks, everyone at some time or the other had had doubts about the Communist point of view and expressed them. Everyone had made slips and mistakes that could be regarded as crimes from the point of view of the system. They were all guilty of ‘gentry-estate self-satisfaction’, of allowing the swamp back into the House of Government, of being surrounded by beds, maids, carpets, nephews, and mothers-in-laws, they could see the blurring of the line between one’s own pocket and the state and a return of the bourgeois attitude to one’s material well-being. But  most of all, they were guilty of inner doubt and impure thoughts. The Bolshevik conception f sin was identical to Augustine’s (‘a thought, words and deed against the Eternal Law)’. When it came to crimes against the Party, which stood for eternal law, thoughts were not radically different from words, and words were not radically different from deeds. And when it came to the Party’s Inquisition, sins were not radically different from crimes.

 Witch hunts begin abruptly, as violent reactions to particular events, and die down gradually, for no apparent reason. Participants have difficulty remembering and explaining what has happened an try to avoid talking or thinking about it . . . Having woken up after the orgy, the last act of Stalin and the surviving members of the inner circle was  to get rid of those who administered it.


The Russian Orthodox, unlike the Russian Jews and Old Believers, had never known a Reformation or Counter-reformation and had never been taught how to deal with a Big Father who was always watching (and could never be bribed, flattered or evaded); how to think of salvation as a matter of ceaseless self-improvement (as opposed to happy accident, deathbed repentance, or the sudden descent of collective grace); or how to forestall censorship with self-censorship, police surveillance with mutual denunciation, and state repression with voluntary obedience.

Bolshevism, in other words, was Russia’s Reformation: an attempt to transform peasants into Soviets, and Soviets into self-monitoring, morally vigilant modern subjects. The means were familiar –confessions, denunciations, excommunications, and self-criticism sessions accompanied by regular tooth-brushing, ear-washing and hair-combing –but the results were not comparable. In  the House of Government and in certain well-drained parts of the Swamp, there were plenty of people who felt permanently guilty and worked tirelessly on themselves, but, by the time the children of the Revolution had become parents themselves, there was little doubt that most Russians still drew a rigid line between themselves and authority and still thought of discipline as something imposed from the outside. The Bolshevik Reformation was not a popular movement: it was a massive missionary campaign mounted by a sect that proved strong enough to conquer an empire but not resourceful enough to either convert the barbarians or reproduce itself at home. In the meantime, the founder’s children  had moved from the romance of those embarking on a new quest to the irony of those who had seen it all before. This is true of all human lifetimes (senile romanticism is almost as unappealing as infantile irony), but not all historical ages (some of which take centuries to complete). The Soviet Age did not last beyond one human lifetime.

[1.] Scapegoats are sacrificed everywhere, all the time: symbolically (in myths, films, tales, and temples) and in the flesh. Some societies succeed in limiting sacrificial offerings to special occasions; others have to improvise acts of atonement in response to unexpected catastrophes. Sects, or ‘faith-based groups radically opposed to a corrupt world,’ are besieged fortresses by definition. Millenarian sects, or sects living on the eve of the apocalypse, are in the grip of a permanent moral panic. The more intense the expectation, the more implacable the enemies; the more implacable the enemies, the greater the need for internal cohesion; the greater the need for internal cohesion, the more urgent the search for scapegoats.