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.”

 .                   .                           .                         .                                .

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.