Utopia and Revolution

(Mostly a disorganized discussion of Richard Stites’ superb Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution, by someone who is not a historian. Contains half-baked analogies to current events).

I’ve been on a Russian and Soviet History reading binge recently. (The fact that it’s the 100th anniversary of the October revolution is I think coincidental, but it probably helps increase the salience of the subject). Just a couple of months ago I picked up China Miéville’s October, his retelling of the story of the Russian Revolution, which I came across via Sheila Fitzpatrick’s review of several new books on the subject. I wanted to read a sympathetic perspective on the revolution (Miéville is a socialist), and I’ve often enjoyed Miéville’s novels, but I found this particular book flat and lifeless (though many reviews say otherwise, so take this with whatever amount of salt you prefer).

The problem is that despite Miéville’s sympathy for the revolution, the narrative feels like the story of any number of petty revolts rather than of one of the most significant events of the twentieth century. Reading it, one never gets a sense of why the revolution was so “revolutionary”, for lack of a better term. I expected more from a professional storyteller. I can think of several academic histories that are much more exciting and illuminating, even when they are less sympathetic to the aims of October; Figes’ A People’s Tragedy comes to mind. (For a more appreciative view of what Miéville was trying to do, see Henry Farrell’s review in Jacobin; I’m not persuaded that it works.)

Nevertheless, I guess I should thank Miéville’s book for pointing me towards an older work, Richard Stites’ 1989 book Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (free pdf via Monoskop). That book was fascinating – a genuinely immersive, extraordinary story of why the Russian revolution was much more than a series of protests and coups. Though Stites’ book is not about the political events of the time – it’s a study of Utopian experiments in Russia and the Soviet Union from the late 19th century to the early 1930s, not a recounting of the seizure of power of 1917 – it really gives you a feel for why people felt they were living through a most revolutionary time. And, despite the obvious and enormous differences in context between Russia in 1917 and today, I found many interesting analogies to current cultural trends, so the book seems worth discussing. (Warning: long).

I. Iconoclasm and allure of destruction

Like all important political terms, the term revolution is contested; we don’t always agree about what counts as a revolution, just as we don’t always agree on what counts as a democracy. And lots of events are conventionally called revolutions, many of which have little impact on world history. But the Russian Revolution, like the French or the American, has a good claim to represent a paradigmatic case of the phenomenon. One could attribute this to the fact that the revolution, like the American or the French, led to the birth of a new form of government – the Leninist one-party state with explicitly socialist commitments, a form which proved enduring (it still lives on in China, where the CPC sees itself as the rightful heir of October) and was attractive to many people for much of the second half of the twentieth century (see Seva Gunitsky’s excellent book Aftershocks for more on this point). But there is more to it than that.

Jack Goldstone once mentioned in a review article that great revolutions have a “fractal” quality, where “social order breaks down on multiple scales simultaneously,” from the family to the town to the city to the national government and across many social institutions. I’ve always found this idea quite useful for thinking about what distinguishes a simple revolt (where a normative breakdown is restricted to say, the national government institutions) from a big revolutionary upheaval. It certainly applied to the Russian revolution, where everything – family norms, clothing, architecture and arts, cities and town planning, public monuments, religion – seemed to be up for negotiation simultaneously.

This breakdown of normative order at every scale manifested itself in the first place in the iconoclastic destruction of the past. Iconoclasm – the destruction of symbols of the hated ancien regime – was of course not something unique to the Russian revolution. Every self-respecting revolutionary movement pulls down the statues of the defeated former rulers, changes the names of cities, and so on. (One also thinks here of movements to remove statues of offensive figures, or rename buildings, happening right now). But there was a longer and more radical tradition of iconoclasm in Russia; already in the 19th century, “nihilists” (that’s what they called themselves) had argued for “the destruction of everything” (Bakunin’s phrase) - “the temples, the shelters, the forms, and the Gods of the old order, so that not one stone would remain” (p. 69). And in 1917 this “pan-destructionism” (Stites’ word) really got going all over, fuelled by new ideas of “unparalelled negativism” (p. 69). Some of these were very funny:

In 1920, the “nothingists” (nichevoki) unveiled their manifesto of “revolutionary hoboism” whose main command was to write, read, speak, and print nothing. In the realm of thought, nihilist spokesmen of the Revolution turned their guns on philosophy, which was seen to be the quintessential expression of the bourgeoisie as religion was of the gentry. The most extreme of these currents, Enchmenism, negated mind, spirit, and psyche altogether. These were to wither away in the future “world commune” of languageless people run by a Revolutionary Scientific Soviet. (p. 69)

(One wonders how much of this was entirely serious, and how much just done for the fun of it).

To be sure, much iconoclastic behaviour had little to do with the theories of the revolutionary intelligentsia. For example, peasants throughout Russia burned down manors, broke statues, and “pulveriz[ed] musical instruments” (p. 62), not because they were actuated by a desire to build something entirely new, or in any way interested in avant-garde ideas about the need to destroy the old in order to build the new world, but simply as the rejection of “a way of life repugnantly and bewilderingly different from that of peasants” (p. 63).

Yet in the cities, and among intellectuals, destruction could be gleefully celebrated, though usually as the prelude to the building of the new. Here’s V. D. Alexandrovsky, a “teen-age proletarian poet”, in 1918:

Blow up,
Smash to pieces
The Old World!
In the heat of battle of the Universal Struggle
By the glow of flames
Show no mercy –
Strangle
The bony body of destiny! (p. 72)

This sort of thing lasted for a while; in 1927 Sergei Tretyakov could still write:

All for combat.
Force is best.
A bullet in the brain
Of Basil the Blest.
Smash all the icons
And the signs They have made.
Explode the Iverskaya
With a hand grenade. (p. 70)

Many young people seem to have been caught up in the exhilaration of the iconoclastic destruction of past culture (not just statues). The deliberate outrageousness of the Russian futurists, in particular, reminds me a bit of the desire of some people today to smash “political correctness” and the nostrums of what had been, until very recently, the “establishment” culture. Mayakovsky was the chief troll, an interesting, accomplished poet who spoke of his desire to point “‘Comrade Mauser’ at the orators of the world, [and to put] Raphael and Rastrelli against the wall” (p. 70), while his colleagues in the futurist movement were sort of the “alt-left” of the time, always a bit more outrageous than the more pragmatic Bolsheviks who actually had to worry about governing. But of course Russian revolutionaries weren’t the only people caught up in the fun of destroying the old (and Stites is good at recognizing that there was some fun in it); the impulse seems to have been pretty common among intellectuals of the early 20th century. Here’s the Italian Marinetti (another futurist poet, and later fascist, in 1909): “We want to demolish museums, libraries, [and for good measure] fight morality, feminism, and all the opportunist and utilitarian cowardice” (p. 70).

One of the things that struck me reading Stites was the degree to which iconoclasm was partly driven by a kind of “purity impulse”: the desire to cast out the “pollution” of the old, built on the backs of millions of exploited and unjustly treated anonymous people. This was especially evident in what was called “Makhaevism” (a current of thought identified with Jan Wacław Machajski, where the anti-intellectual impulse to destroy all existing culture was especially strong). For example, Machajski wrote that the masses should “rise up at the first opportunity and destroy and annihilate to the last iota the accursed accumulations of wealth which you have helped to create through the ages and which the masters have always seized entirely for themselves.” His point was not that the wealth and achievements of the past should be transferred to the proletariat, but that they should be destroyed; this was a purely leveling impulse, driven by the thought that the past was polluted by its complicity with injustice, and hence it was better to start from zero. As one of the followers of Machajski put it, “All history in fact … was ‘one endless, uninterrupted chain of violence and fraud’” (p. 74) and hence not worth preserving.

I don’t mean to give the impression that these sorts of feelings were widespread. Iconoclastic impulses also met anti-iconoclastic resistance; top Bolsheviks (and many other people) weren’t keen on destroying everything. Beyond destroying major symbols of czarism, they (Lunarcharsky in particular) preferred to preserve the treasures of the past - to open the Russian patrimony to the masses in those museums that the futurists wanted to destroy. But a pervasive distrust of past culture fed nevertheless into anti-intellectual attitudes that would play a recurrent role in the early decades of the Soviet regime, with its distrust of “bourgeois specialists”.

In any case, the new, avant-garde alternatives to the culture of the past weren’t always all that popular; despite the best efforts of the futurists and the Proletkult movement, much of the proletariat remained stubbornly attached to more traditional forms of culture and did not show much inclination to want to destroy it completely. For example, though there were a number of conductorless orchestras at the time (like the famous Persimfans, which was actually super cool – one of the more successful experiments of the time in egalitarian organization), they tended to play “Beethoven rather than Schoenberg” as Stites puts it; and though styles of dress changed, few people showed any inclination to follow the more eccentric ideas about appropriately revolutionary dress, like nudism.1 This of course does not mean nothing changed (Stites makes some very good points about, for example, the use of egalitarian language and the changing forms of address during the revolution), and at any rate some utopian ideas had enormous influence even if they were never very popular in their “undiluted” form.

II. A Science-fictional revolution

One of the more interesting things about the Russian revolution that I learned from this book is the extent to which it was a “science fiction” revolution. This was a revolution were a senior Bolshevik – Bogdanov – wrote a sci-fi novel called Red Star about a communist utopia on Mars (apparently a big influence on Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy), and where the “Anarcho-Biocosmists” proposed a plan to launch a social revolution “in interplanetary space but not upon Soviet territory”, apparently seriously (p. 55; this before people had even reached orbit!). And of course there were also the God-builders (I wrote a bit about them in my post on the Lenin cult here), whose attitude towards science and technology also had science-fictional echoes.


The original cover of “Red Star” “Biocosmist” ideas were among the more interesting ones. They were basically a version of transhumanism (in fact wikipedia says they influenced later transhumanists), and some of the people involved were surprisingly influential. Many of them took inspiration from Nikolai Fedorov, “a librarian and speculative theologian who never published a book”:

Fedorov (1829-1903) … combined certain features of Russian Orthodoxy and tsarist ideology with an extravagant belief in cosmic possibilities. The world of his vision, converted to Orthodoxy under the tsar in Moscow, spoke a single language (recovered from pre-Babel times by a congress of scientific linguists) and lived in rural communes, working in factories in winter and fields in summer. The social bond was faith and fraternity, not materialism or equality, since Fedorov opposed both socialism and capitalism. Each commune was situated around a cemetery with a model of the Moscow Kremlin at the center. The rule of communal life was Psychocracy: mind control, open diaries, public confession and penance, and the regulation of sexuality. Global security was provided by a Godloving Army and a Pacification Fleet.

Fedorov’s vague scientific-mystical Utopia was designed for a specific set of tasks which he called “the common mission” of mankind: victory over death, resurrection of all the dead, and the settlement of outer space. The syncretic quality of Fedorov’s dream generated a school of disciples in the Soviet period, loosely know as the Biocosmists, whose slogan was “Immortalism and Interplanetism.” Beyond their study and discussion circles, figures as diverse as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (the rocket scientist), Leonid Krasin (who designed Lenin’s mausoleum), and V. K. Vernadsky, the earth scientist, were said to have been in Fedorov’s orbit at one time or another. The most consistent of the Fedorovites was Valerian Muraviev, a man with an extraordinarily checkered career even for those times, a fanatical Bolshevik, and a devout Fedorov adept. He combined the ideas of his master with those of Frederick Taylor … The cult of Fedorov in the Russian Revolution, a seemingly impossible idea, illustrates precisely a vagrant mentality that some have chosen to call the “crankish” side of the Revolution but which was really a millenarianism and a utopianism fed by serious erudition of a special sort and by the unbounded Promethean belief in man’s ability to transform nature and reverse its laws (pp. 169-170).

You couldn’t make this up. (Incidentally, this clarifies for me some references in Hannu Rajaniemi’s excellent Jean Le Flambeur series of post-singularity novels about the “Great Common Task”). In any case, this sort of thing, funny as it sounds (I find it both horrifying and appealing in about equal parts), is a useful reminder that the impulse to conquer death through technology is not something that was just invented by Silicon Valley rationalists, but an idea with a more complicated history. There’s a line from Fedorov to Thiel and Musk!

Other “science-fictional” movements were a bit more down to earth. Stites notes the immense popularity of Taylorism and Fordism during the first decades of the revolution. The epigraph to chapter 7 is from Zamyatin’s famous dystopian novel We, where the main character comments that “this Taylor was undoubtedly the greatest genius of the ancients”. This is of course novelistic irony, but many people at the time seem to have taken the Taylorist message message as gospel. Consider Alexei Gastev, one of the main proponents of Taylorism in Russia at the time. Gastev was a poet of the machine, who in a 1919 work described in a celebratory vein what to Zamyatin was obviously a dystopian nightmare:

a mechanized, standardized world, in a literal sense, with production ruled by self-regulating and self-correcting machines, joined throughout the world in a machine city—that is, a single unbroken mechanized civilization stretching around the globe. All production people (not workers now) are reduced to a single level of skill—the middle range – and the machines are transformed into managers and decision makers, with production people adapting themselves to the rhythm of the machine. With this reduction and standardization of the work force and production space comes the uniformization of gestures, language, and thoughts—a human geography of symbols and movements copied from the machine, a single mode of speech, a standardized catalog of thoughts, and a unified collection of meals, of housing, and of sexual and spiritual life. Man is to become an anonymous production unit, an A, B, C, a 324, or a 075, “soulless and devoid of personality, emotion, and lyricism – no longer expressing himself through screams of pain or joyful laughter, but rather through a manometer or taxometer. Mass engineering will make man a social automation.” (p. 152)

Gastev went on to found the Central Institute of Labor, which he considered a “work of art” (management as artistic creation!), and where he tried out his theories about the training of workers:

The German Expressionist writer Ernst Toller, who visited [an institute office] in the 1920s, described a hundred identical gray benches, with a hundred men and women trainees in identical costumes obeying instructions conveyed by electronic beeps of machine. They approached the work benches in columns, performed tests in unison, graduated in difficulty. Their hammer-teacher was a machine to which their arm was strapped until they were able to work independently. A “cyclogram” photographed their work and recorded their progress by means of moving lights. There were no books, no theories, no meetings—only practical work, from simple to complex, in a course lasting three to six months. The purpose: to study “the human machine’ and to create new people by means of social engineering (p. 154; incidentally, Gastev more or less invented the term “social engineering”).

Graduates of the institute would go on to train workers elsewhere, combating laziness, apathy, low productivity and the like. (This was no joke – the institute even won major Soviet decorations in the 1920s). Apparently Gastev was warm and engaging, motivated by a vision of social equality (but a transhumanist one, where people would eventually meld with machines), and Stites seems to have a weakness for him. And there is a clear aesthetic dimension to Gasteevism: a “sparkling and kinetic vision of a vast continent unified by steel, electricity, and asphalt, of bright and throbbing machinery glinting in the sunlight as it labored to refashion a world, and of workers trained by industrial metronomes into something resembling a huge and elegant corps de ballet tending that machinery and deriving its graceful precision from it” (p. 155). Stites claims that from the perspective of the 30s, this was a “vision of hope”; he’s not entirely wrong.

III. Productivity Cults

In any case, the early 20s seem to have been fertile ground for management fads in the Soviet Union – as long as they promised productivity and sounded scientific. Given the historical period, this meant mostly Taylorism and Fordism (though non-hierarchical ideas also had a hearing in some places); but one imagines that if holacracy or whatever had been around then, there would have been people preaching its virtues. Yet the magical aura of Taylorism and Fordism was not restricted to intellectuals. Though many workers did in practice resent Taylorism and Fordism in their workplaces, Ford in particular seems to have been briefly an object of popular veneration, an emblem of promised wealth and abundance:

Workers were seen holding banners bearing Ford’s name in parades along with those of Soviet leaders. Peasants called their tractors fordzonishkas, and deep in a Volga province village, peasants harnessed a wedding cart to a Fordson decked out in red bunting. Some peasants were unable to pronounce the name Ford (calling him Khord instead), but they saw him as a magical persona, asking the journalist Maurice Hindus if he was richer than the tsars and was the most clever American. They longed to gaze upon him personally (pp. 148-149).

This is silly, but there were more interesting manifestations of this cult of Taylorism and Fordism. I was especially taken with the aptly named “League of Time,” whose “main concern was to ‘introduce scientific principles not only into man’s economic activity or production but into all organized activity or work’ – the army, the school, all of social life” (p. 156). Though nothing at this time was totally independent of the government, the league was in many respects like a civil society group for productivity enthusiasts:

At the grassroots appeared spontaneous cells or circles called “Time” or “Productivity.” Members (called elvisty after the initials L.V., Liga and “Vremya,” and sometimes Notisty), wore L.V. buttons and carried chronocards; some of them displayed oversized wristwatches as the emblem of their struggle – a poignant symbol in a land where less than a million watches and clocks were produced in 1928. (p. 157)

They apparently had some power, though, since members

eagerly ferreted out “tardy embezzlers of time,” including respected workers and officials, who were reprimanded and fined. A storm of criticism was unleashed against lateness and bad organization. Timeists poked their faces into every conceivable kind of enterprise and operation to uncover inefficiency and sloth as well as to reorganize and teach. Brigades marched into railroad stations to rearrange the furniture (at the Kazan Station in Moscow, for example, a passenger had to walk the entire length of the terminal three times in order to buy a ticket, check bags, and board train). At a Moscow factory, a time team reduced the period for distributing wages to 337 workers from thirty-nine hours to one hour and ten minutes. Speeches and articles pleaded with workers and managers to save time, conserve energy, and use space rationally. Worker’s clubs held court trials of machines, workbenches, and forges in order to prove that these were “innocent” in work stoppages and that poor work habits were guilty. Even in the country, cows were “tried” to determine who was responsible for low yields of milk. A virtual craze for efficiency erupted in the economy (p. 157)

Advertisement suggesting that ‘A Human Being Is Only Human with a Watch.’” Image number 26 in the book.
As you might expect, they were not much loved:

the Timeists were considered a nuisance by administrators. Komsomols who lived by League principles were often criticized by their comrades as “red-tapeists,” egoists, violators of the collective spirit, and super bureaucrats. Technical, managerial, and government people accused them of dilettantism, excessive and uninformed demands, and of being a menace to competent professionals. In any case, the League was not very successful in realizing Kerzhentsev’s dream: to teach all Soviet citizens “spontaneous self-discipline.” Instead it pitted a legion of enthusiasts and busybodies against uninterested citizens (p. 158).

And so they were suddenly dissolved in 1926. But I must admit that I found them endearing, despite the fact that I would almost certainly resent them in practice. There’s something appealing about living an organized, productive life, without wasting time in pointless meetings (the Timeists really hated pointless meetings. I sympathize, having sat through my share of them) or boring speeches. And there’s something sweetly naive (but not altogether wrong) in their embrace of “good time habits” as part of what makes a society productive, and their generally “civilized” methods for fostering such habits contrast favourably with the brutality of the Stalinist labor system in the 1930s (as Stites notes).

III. Communist religiosity

Almost everyone who knows anything about the Russian revolution knows that the Bolsheviks were atheists (complications introduced by God-builders aside), and that they persecuted religion (though the extent of this persecution varied greatly over time). What I did not know was the degree to which the early years of the revolution featured actual debate among believers and unbelievers, mostly organized by the League of the Militant Godless:

Since the population was low in literacy, preaching the Godless word directly seemed to hold out great promise for the enthusiasts of enlightening atheism. In 1923 big debates were held in every district of Petrograd. In Vladimir, 2,000 listeners heard a six hour debate between an atheist and a priest on the theme: “Is there a God?” Another in Pereyaslavl lasted two days and was attended by 3000. In both, according to Soviet sources, the priests were defeated and they deserted the cloth. The proletarians of Moscow, in spite of their hostility to religion, jammed the auditoriums to hear speakers like the Archbishop Vvedensky. But the Bolsheviks did not always win these debates. [Maurice] Hindus met a priest who had debated against the Godless, asking his opponent why man, if so powerful, had not invented sunshine, rain, or stars. The answer: nature created them. Question: who made nature? Nature, like a watch or a revolution, had to have a maker. Answer: Nature made itself. Result: public laughter and the victory of the priest. In 1924 “Russia teemed with talk of religion,” debates being for a while the chief outdoor diversion, according to Hindus, a native speaker who visited Russia many times. Atheist preachers hit the circuit like American parsons on the Bible Belt; like them, many were sons of rural folk, in their case armed with scientific miracles and blasphemy. A singularly unimaginative atheist sailor tried to keep the faithful out of church by buttonholeing them at the door and reading to them about isoceles triangles (p. 107).

(I could easily imagine a communist version of Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris at home in this environment). This anti-evangelical fervor was a bit of a fad, sustained partly by the desire of some to fit in with the new regime, and it would not last. But for a few years at least it seemed to be quite widespread:

The country was covered with a network of seminars, study groups, evening and correspondence courses, reference points and home-guides such as “Teach Yourself to Be Godless.” Godlessness was a mark of culture among adherents to the regime, and all higher educational institutions included atheist courses. There was even an All-Union Anti-religious University of the Air [I love that name!]. Since the majority of schoolteachers were still religious and since the teaching of atheism in school was not required in the 1920s (although the teaching of religion was forbidden of course), the burden of anti-religious propaganda fell very heavily upon the League [of the Militant Godless] and its supporters. And since the bulk of its themes were couched in rational, historical, and scientific terms, one must wonder at the effectiveness of the anti-religious propaganda network so acclaimed by its organizers and so defamed by its enemies. But one can hardly doubt the zeal and enthusiasm that went into this quasi-missionary crusade against the faith (p. 107).

“A. Apsit’s “To Our Deceived Brothers” of 1918. From what Stites says it seems the League was not particularly successful; most peasants, in particular, did not take to the godless gospel. But at least the League had a reasonably liberal approach to conversion. (Other revolutionary groups were much less tolerant). In any case, the degree to which various religious groups could organize at the time and preach their various visions of society was surprising to me. This freedom was fragile, and would disappear completely in the 1930s, but in the early 1920s many Christian groups (in particular so-called “sectarians”, groups considered heretic by the Orthodox church) could and did compete with the Communist party for the hearts and minds of the faithful:

Another movement of the 1920s became – at least for awhile and on a limited scale – a rival “religion of communism.” This was sectarian Christianity. The Sectarians were vibrant in their faith and in their conscious emulation of Bolshevik codes and rituals in order to compete with them, a practice that Bolshevik commentators found both engaging and annoying. Party officials observed that the sects were spiritually vital and attracted converts by their sobriety, mutuality, charity, and joyous song – a combination that Bolshevik Godbuilders dreamed of. The Baptists of Kursk Province attracted followers because of their model behavior, genuine brotherhood, relevance to life, and the unabashed prayers to Jesus in time of joy and woe. Perm Evangelists, copying the Bolshevik parallel feasts, launched a Day of Youth, a Festival of Sisters (for women’s equality), and religious texts set to revolutionary and church melodies. Novgorod Sectarians held concerts full of spontaneous singing and “love evenings” that fused the revolutionary concept of comradeship with Christian motifs of brotherhood in clean, sober and highly organized settings, avoiding both the wild drunkenness of village feasts and the banality of Bolshevik events.

Commentators were astonished at the frankly modern and syncretic methods of the Sectarians. Socialist imagery was freely adopted in slogans of justice, solidarity, and equality, in agitprop campaigns to enlist youth, and in organizational names such as Bapsomol (or Baptomol) and Christomol to rival the Komsomol. They held meetings and challenged other religions to friendly competitions. On May Day in Saratov Province, Baptists launched a Day of Classless Solidarity with Brothers in Christ and a two week campaign against biblical illiteracy. Almost every Bolshevik method of reaching the masses was imitated, including sheftsvo. Some Sectarians, grateful to the regime for having lifted the onerous persecution by the Orthodox Church, seemed to want some kind of merger between Bolshevik economic forms and a vibrant sectarian Christianity, infused with brotherhood, equality, and harmony (p. 121).

The influence went both ways; Bolsheviks also seem to have borrowed some ideas from these groups. Certainly they were quite aware of the power of ritual, and attempted to produce “counter-rituals”, from “Octobering” (instead of baptism) to “Red Weddings and “Red Funerals,” but with decidedly mixed outcomes. Most of these rituals were too boring, or too little rooted in meaningful traditions, to gain a footing even in the revolutionary environment of the 1920s, though some were popular for a time. And in any case, the success of the sectarians at “free conversion” may have had more to do with their exemplary behaviour than with any particular ritual forms:

The Sectarians were more successful than the Bolsheviks in arousing genuine emotion and commitment, and their conversion record was impressive. The Bolsheviks wondered why this was so and urged activists to emulate the methods of the sectarian groups. But the secret of the Sectarians’ success was not, of course, the forms of ritual and propaganda. It was their transparent faith and moral power. They preached no hatred against class enemies and opened their doors to people of all ethnic origins, sexes, classes, and nationalities. Their charity was unabashed and unlimited, and most of all uninhibited by ideological and political animosity (p. 121).

The similarities between Bolshevism and religion have long been noted, and certainly the search for ritual, the devotion of its adherents, and the vision of a total transformation of society make the parallels plausible. Stites nevertheless disagrees:

Because of certain outward features of Bolshevism – and other communist movements of our century – commentators have often called it a religion. In the 1920s, Fueloep-Miller remarked that Bolshevism taught science but was not a science, that it fought religion while being like one. In our time, Jacques Ellul has said, “the Russians have gone furthest in creating a ‘religion’ compatible with Technique.” These judgements are misleading. Maurice Hindus – writing in the 1920s – was more perceptive. Bolshevism, while containing many of the outward attributes of a faith, he observed, was actually a nonfaith because it was not forgiving, possessed no deity, exalted science and nature, and possessed a “revolutionary” system of ethics instead of a humane one. It lacked beauty, dignity, and spirit. Berdyaev in the 1930s emphasized its lack of inward drama and depth, its weakness in religious psychology, and its pedantry. Mao Zedong, a major communist of our time, put it very succinctly and honestly: “Marxism-Leninism has no beauty, nor has it any mystical value. It is only extremely useful” (p. 122).

I am less sure about the value of this particular judgment, though some of this is mere semantics. If you think doctrinal content or mystical experience, belief in a deity or a particular ethical orientation, are definitionally part of anything that can count as “religion”, then fine, Bolshevism (and Marxism-Leninism in general) is not one (Godbuilders excepted, perhaps). But if you think, as I do, that strong interaction rituals are more important than specific beliefs for religious practices, it’s harder to deny that many aspects of communist practice were religious, starting with the cults of many communist leaders, as Stites himself sometimes suggests. In any case, a purely aesthetic definition of religion (does it have beauty? Is it humane?) seems less than adequate to the actual variety of religious experience in the world.

IV. High and Low Modernisms

Stites argues that the Stalin era – starting sometime in the late 20s – was the end of the “utopian moment” in the Russian revolution. While Lenin had been ambivalent about most utopian experiments (and there are many more described in the book than I’ve mentioned even in this very long post – the book is super readable!), he was not openly hostile to most of them as long as they did not amount to genuine opposition, and in any case the relative pluralism of the NEP period had provided a certain amount of space for lots of crazy ideas. (This space was always precarious, and it had definite limits, but it existed). By contrast, once Stalin had consolidated his position in the late 1920s, he “began an emphatic repudiation of all Utopian currents and humanistic experiments” (p. 225).

In Stites’ telling, Stalin was unremittingly hostile to egalitarianism, visionary fantasy, or anything that smacked of utopia. Yet when we consider the perils of utopia, we usually think of the Stalin era as exhibit number one for the prosecution, with the human disasters of collectivization and forced industralization, the introduction of full central planning, and ultimately the endless search for enemies and saboteurs during the Great Terror. In the standard view, Stalinism is what happens when Utopian plans meet human reality.

There’s no real contradiction here, of course. Stalinism is the classic example of what James C. Scott called “High Modernism.” It belongs to the family of what Stites calls “administrative utopia”, with its emphasis on order and organization and its rejection of spontaneous and autonomous action; its horrific results came from the fact that it was coercively imposed on a generally unwilling population (especially in the countryside). To be sure, many people adapted the best they could, and some found fulfillment in participating in its grand projects (“make the USSR great”); one only has to read about the creation of Magnitogorsk, for example, described so amazingly in Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain to understand some of its appeal. And perhaps one can say that Stalinism was utopian less because of its plans (which were understood by many to be pragmatic steps towards socialism), but because of its hubris, its moral and epistemic self-certainty.

But if Stalinism was the classic example of high modernism, perhaps we can call the many utopian experiments that flourished (sometimes precariously, and often not for long) during the first decade of the Russian revolution examples of “low” modernism – modernism from below rather than above. Many of these would probably have had awful effects if scaled up and implemented coercively. (One only has to think of the many urban visions described by Stites, with their lack of privacy, communal kitchens, children raised in separate areas, and omnipresent piped music to recoil in horror). But many remained endearing and interesting as long as they did not attempt to impose themselves on the unwilling, and would not have been out of place in the “framework for utopia” of Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

These utopian experiments were also modernisms, founded on the rejection of past, even if a few also drew on older Russian practices (e.g., the egalitarian traditions of the artel). Many were dubious or crazy – from people talking about dressing in paper clothing to experiments with radical models of the family – but I was struck by the optimistic sense of experimentation that pervaded them, and do not feel like there’s much point in condemning people who came up with these ideas or bought into them as naive or deluded. (In any case many of these people would suffer greatly under Stalinism). These were genuine Millian “experiments in living,” and it seems to me a liberal society should very much make space for them.

Stites ends the book on an elegiac tone:

Utopianism is often naive, innocent, and childlike. But what virtue is more admired in the whole catalogue of human art and sensibility than childlike enthusiasm, innocence, and spontaneous love and acceptance? What is more lamented than our loss of youth, romance, openness to change, thirst for adventure, and the absence of refined callousness and cold sense of “reality?” These characteristics of the Utopian imagination appeal to every generation that discovers it; it is the recurring vision and hope for the “good place” even if it is “no place” – for the better world or even for the one world. The warming springtime of human hope does not give in to the wintry smiles of the cynic and the realist; it blossoms and it perishes in the sad autumnal winds. And then it is born again – for ever and ever (p. 253).

We know this story ends badly, and perhaps would have ended badly under any reasonably likely set of circumstances. The “low” version of modernism could also be destructive (it is, after all, founded on the rejection of the past), and in any case the difference between appealing low modernism and horrific high modernism is often simply a position of sufficient power. But I find myself drawn to a line that Sheila Fitzpatrick, in her book on Lunacharsky (The Commissariat of Enlightenment) attributes to Carlyle that encapsulates my feelings about these utopian movements:

As Thomas Carlyle (contemplating the sky-blue coat which Robespierre had made for the festival of the Supreme Being and wore on the day of his execution) wrote in his history of the French Revolution, “O Reader, can thy hard heart hold out against that?”

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1. Yes, this was a thing! In Moscow! Stites: “Believing that the only democratic and egalitarian apparel was the human skin itself, members [of the ‘Down with Shame’ group] demonstrated this belief by exhibiting their nakedness in public. Evenings of the Denuded Body were held in Moscow in 1922. Later there were marches and processions in Moscow and Kharkov and the occupation of trolley cars by the nudists who wore nothing but scarlet sashes bearing their device—to the amazement of onlookers and to the annoyance of the police who arrested them” (p. 135). ↩

New Book: Non-Democratic Politics

My new book, Non-Democratic Politics: Authoritarianism, Dictatorship, and Democratization has been out for a few weeks (Palgrave, Amazon). For the usual vaguely superstitious reasons, I did not want to make an announcement until I had a copy in my hands, but now I do. Just in time for the holidays!

I confess that I feel a bit ambivalent about the book’s publication. On the one hand, I’m of course glad the book is finally out in the wild; it’s been a long process, and it’s great to be able to touch and see the physical result of my work, and to know that at least some other people will read it. (Much better scholars of authoritarian politics than me also said some nice things about it in the back cover, which is extremely gratifying). Moreover, if you have followed this blog, you will find that some material in the book elaborates and supports many things I have said here more informally (on cults of personality, propaganda, robust action in the Franco regime, the history of political regimes, the Saudi monarchy, etc.); one reason I wrote the book was to be able to put together in a reasonably coherent way my thoughts on these subjects, and I felt encouraged enough by some of the reaction to my writing here to think that I had something to say. (Without this blog, this book probably would not exist; thank you readers!) And since I teach this material here at Vic, the result should be useful as a textbook. (If you teach classes on non-democratic politics do consider the book for use in your course!).

But I also feel that the book should be seen as “version 0.1” of what I really wanted to do. There was more that I wanted to write, and there are things I already want to add or revise (partly in response to current events, partly in response to learning new things), though I will only be able to do this if Palgrave decides there’s enough demand for a second edition. If I had more contractual leeway (and academic clout) I would put the whole thing in my Github repository and make it into an evolving work, adding or deleting material over time as I learn more, or correcting errors as they are brought to my attention, and releasing new versions every so often. But I don’t have that kind of leeway or clout yet (perhaps in the future – we’ll see); and traditional publication still offers some advantages (including dedicated peer review, from which I benefited a lot. Thank you, anonymous reviewers, whoever you are, for helping me improve this book).

In lieu of putting the entire work online, however, I have created a website where all the charts and data in the book are available, and where I can give free rein to my love of ggplot2 graphs and data art. The site (https://xmarquez.github.io/AuthoritarianismBook/) contains replication code for all the figures and tables in the book, natural-language explanations of the code, and full documentation for all the datasets, and is to boot available for download as a single R package. It also contains some extensions of the figures in the book, including huge vertical graphs of the kind that sometimes appear in this blog but could never fit in a normal book. My hope is that people can use this package (and the associated website) to easily do their own exploratory data analysis on the topic. I have tried to make it as user-friendly as possible for people with little experience using R; and I intend to update it regularly and add new features and corrections. Check it out![1]

The hardcover is unfortunately priced (I don’t recommend you buy it, unless you’re an academic library), and I think even the paperback should be cheaper, but I don’t make those decisions. Nevertheless, if you have enjoyed this blog in the past, and would like to see how many of the aspects of non-democratic politics I have discussed here fit together, or you simply wish to learn more about non-democratic politics, consider buying it!

Normal service on this blog will resume shortly.

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1. There will also be some further narrative material available at a different website, including extended discussions of a few cases, but I’m way behind on producing these narratives. ↩

The King's Two Bodies in Bolshevik Political Thought

I recently finished Nina Tumarkin’s fantastic book Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia, which is totally up my alley, as you may imagine. (Why hadn’t I heard of this book before? It’s so good!). One really interesting point that comes up in her book is the development, alongside the actual rituals of the cult, of what we might call a “theory of representation” to justify a phenomenon (Lenin worship) that was prima facie contrary to the tenets of Marxism (and even to Lenin’s own wishes). And it struck me that this spontaneously developed and unsystematic “political theology” (to use a more pretentious term) was strikingly similar to the medieval doctrine of “the King’s two bodies.”

The idea of the King’s two bodies is in principle quite simple: the King’s authority does not come from any of his actual personal qualities, but from his personification of the “body politic,” to which his natural body is joined. Kantorowicz (in a famous book) traces this view to its roots in the relationship between the incarnate body of Christ and the Church as a “body” of believers, though this is not particularly important for our purposes here. A passage from Plowden’s Reports gives the gist of the view as it was understood by the jurists and lawyers of the Tudor period:

For the King has in him two Bodies, viz., a Body natural, and a Body politic. His Body natural (if it be considered in itself) is a Body mortal, subject to all Infirmities that come by Nature or Accident, to the Imbecility of Infancy or old Age, and to the like Defects that happen to the natural Bodies of other People. But his Body politic is a Body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of Policy and Government, and constituted for the Direction of the People, and the Management of the public weal, and this Body is utterly void of Infancy, and old Age, and other natural Defects and Imbecilities, which the Body natural is subject to, and for this Cause, what the King does in his Body politic, cannot be invalidated or frustrated by any Disability in his natural Body (p. 7)

We might say that the king “represents” the state (makes it present) by personifying it physically; despite the fact that Louis XIV never actually said “L’Etat, c’est moi,” it is the sort of thing that would have made sense for him to say, as it summarizes this view quite well. And in personifying the state, the king’s “natural body” is in a sense “wiped clean,” gaining a kind of grace (“charisma”). To use Max Weber’s terminology, the “charismatic authority” of the king – his authority in virtue of the kind of person he is – thus becomes “routinized” , no longer dependent on his actual personal qualities but merely on his possession of an office. Yet it still remains a form of personal authority: loyalty and obedience is owed to the actual person of the king, not simply or solely to the abstract body of laws, the state, or the constitution, and the body of the king has a special majesty that must be honored.

Now, the early Bolsheviks would certainly have thought this was all nonsense. Yet the circumstances of the revolution, and in particular the obvious appeal of “charismatic” justifications for authority, seem to have forced them to try to accommodate such claims in ways that ended up being structurally quite similar.

The early Bolsheviks were rather “voluntaristic” by Marxist standards: they did not believe in merely sitting still and waiting for the dialectic of history to work its revolutionary magic. Yet most of them were wary of “heroes,” good Marxists that they were (unlike, say, the members of the Socialist Revolutionary party). Lenin’s What is to be Done exalted the role of the vanguard party of professional revolutionaries in the revolutionary process, not the role of any individual leader. And though his enormous energy, clear tactical judgment, and unshakable faith in the triumph of his vision, generated a form of charisma, as evidenced in a number of testimonies from both friends and enemies, he disliked flattery and did not seem to have consciously exploited his talent for “social hypnotism” to personalize state power.[1] Other charismatic Bolsheviks (Trotsky, for example) also preferred to exalt the party rather than themselves.

Yet soon after the October revolution it became clear that “charismatic” appeals were exceedingly useful in the struggle for the loyalty of the masses. Already in early 1918 the old Bolshevik M. S. Olminsky argued that though “[t]he cult of personality contradicts the whole spirit of Marxism, the spirit of scientific socialism,” Bolsheviks should not ignore their leaders, who personified the party and the working class (Tumarkin, p. 87). Individual Bolsheviks – primarily, but not exclusively, top leaders like Lenin – were both exemplars of the values that a good Communist should have (and thus to be emulated) and personifications of the proletariat (and thus to be honored). Lenin himself, for all his dislike of flattery, was quite conscious of the power of his image, and grudgingly accepted some of the manifestations of the cult growing around him. As Tumarkin puts it:

Lenin’s passive acceptance of publicity doubtless was partly inspired by his perception of the effectiveness of his image in legitimizing the new regime and in publicizing it. As Lunacharsky once observed, “I think that Lenin, who could not abide the personality cult, who rejected it in every possible way, in later years understood and forgave us” … [Lenin] was not ambivalent about playing the role of exemplar, as he did on May Day 1919 when he had worked in the Kremlin courtyard on the first subbotnik (p. 105) [2]

The cult of Lenin thus grew inexorably, even in the face of Lenin’s personal resistance, from the perception that the values and aspirations of the Bolshevik party were credibly embodied in his person. Charismatic claims to authority may have been suspect from a theoretical point of view, but they seem to have worked in practice. Yet in order to account for them the Bolsheviks were forced to insist that the veneration of Lenin and other leaders was acceptable because the leader always symbolized and represented, in a heightened degree, the party and the proletariat; to glorify Lenin was thus not to venerate the “hero” as such, but the proletariat itself, even though the “mortal” body of Lenin was connected to his “symbolic” body.

Possibly the most striking example of this thesis of “Lenin’s two bodies” appears in a piece written when Lenin was shot by SR member Fanya Kaplan in August 1918. At the time, Bolshevik journalist Lev Sosnovsky (who was to become the head of the Central Committee’s Agitprop department in 1920) wrote in Bednota, a newspaper “aimed at the broad mass of peasant readers” that:

Lenin cannot be killed … Because Lenin is the rising up of the oppressed. Lenin is the fight to the end, to final victory … So long as the proletariat lives – Lenin lives. Of course, we, his students and colleagues, were shaken by the terrible news of the attempt on the life of dear ‘Ilich’, as the communists lovingly call him … A thousand times [we] tried to convince him to take even the most basic security precaurions. But ‘Ilich’ always rejected these pleas. Daily, without any protection, he went to all sorts of gatherings, congresses, meetings (pp. 83-84)

Tumarkin comments that in Sosnovsky’s presentation, “Ilich is the mortal man and Lenin is the immortal leader and universal symbol … The mortal man exposed himself to danger, but Lenin cannot be killed.” Yet this piece is not an isolated case, explainable perhaps by Sosnovsky’s attempt to appeal to peasant readers. The futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, for example, well aware of the problematic nature of leader cults within Marxist thought, nevertheless justified the veneration of Lenin in terms similar to Sosnovsky’s, writing on the occasion of Lenin’s fiftieth birthday (1920):

I know –
It is not the hero
Who precipitates the flow of revolution.
The story of heroes –
is the nonsense of the intelligentsia!
But who can restrain himself
and not sing
of the glory of Ilich? …
Kindling the lands with fire
everywhere,
where people are imprisoned,
like a bomb
the name
explodes:
Lenin!
Lenin!
Lenin! …
I glorify
in Lenin
world faith
and glorify
my faith (p. 100)

Mayakovsky hits on the crucial point: to glorify Lenin is to glorify the values of his party because Lenin represents more than the mere mortal Ilich; he represents, as another writer put it in a piece published on the sixth anniversary of the revolution, “a program and a tactic … a philosophical world view … the ardent hatred of oppression … the rule of pure reason … a limitless enthusiasm for science and technology … the dynamic and the dialectic of the proletariat;” in sum, “Lenin is the one Communist Party of the Red Globe” (p. 132).

In these last couple of passages, Lenin is glorified primarily as a symbol – of the party, the revolution, and the proletariat. But the physical body still mattered; the embodiment of Lenin as Ilich was not irrelevant to his symbolic effectiveness. As Tumarkin notes, both in 1918 (when Lenin was shot) and in 1923 (when he died) the party press had presented Lenin as a sort of physical superman, surviving physical harm that would have killed a lesser man (p. 171); the natural body of the king, joined to his spiritual body, is no longer an ordinary body. And of course, the significance of Lenin’s natural body emerges most clearly in the fantastically strange decision (from a Marxist point of view) to embalm it and put it on public display after his death.

It is not clear, at least at the time Tumarkin was writing (1980s), how the ultimate decision to embalm was made; she suggests that Stalin was the driving force, since he had insisted that Lenin be buried “in the Russian manner” rather than cremated in the “modern” manner. (Cremation was apparently associated with executed prisoners in Russia, and Stalin seems to have been concerned about the bad symbolic connotations of doing this to Lenin). It certainly seems to have been controversial: Trotsky, Bukharin, and Kamenev all opposed it – Trotsky specifically objecting to turning Lenin into an Orthodox icon. So did Lenin’s secretary, Bonch-Bruevich, and Nadezhda Krupskaia (Lenin’s wife) protested publicly when the decision was revealed. The obvious similarities between the worship of the saints in Orthodox Christianity (whose bodies, if they are truly saintly, are not supposed to decay) and the proposal to mummify and exhibit Lenin’s body must have discomfited many “good Bolsheviks.”

But some of the people involved, like Leonid Krasin, had belonged to the “God-building” movement within Bolshevism, which we could call the transhumanist wing of the Bolsheviks. (Tumarkin tells some fabulous stories about them – both Gorky and Lunacharsky, the latter the first “Commissar of Enlightment” were also affiliated with this current of thought). They believed in the power of science (including Marxism, which they saw as the most important part of science) to eventually to overcome death itself, and saw themselves as consciously engaged in the creation of a new divinity. Krasin even “publicly preached his belief in the [physical] resurrection of the dead” through science, and speculated on the potential of cryonics to preserve the dead until the time “when one will be able to use the elements of a person’s life to recreate the physical person.” (Bolshevik EMs!). For them, the “immortalization of Lenin was a true deification of man.”

By showing that they could preserve Lenin’s body from corruption, they also seem to have hoped to create a proper sort of communist Saint, whose undecaying body was due to science rather than to God, and thus to help weaken an Orthodox Christianity widely believed by the population. As one of the people involved in the project (Boris Zbarsky) put it after the embalming:

The Russian Church had claimed that it was a miracle that its saints’ bodies endured and were incorruptible. But we have performed a feat unknown to modern science … We worked four months and we used certain chemicals known to science [though the chemicals remained secret - the lore of embalming was among the arcana imperii in the Soviet Union]. There is nothing miraculous about it (p. 196).

Nevertheless, proponents of embalming (the members of the aptly-named “Immortalization Commission”) still had to justify the decision to skeptical Bolsheviks in terms that clearly distinguished between the veneration of Orthodox Saints and the “new” veneration of Lenin. And the best they could come up with was generally some variation on the theme that the physical body of Lenin would provide genuine happiness to future generations. (I am reminded here of Mao’s mangoes). Here’s Avel Enukidze:

It is obvious that neither we nor our comrades wanted to make out of the remains of Vladimir Ilich any kind of “relic” (moshchi) by means of which we would have been able to popularize or preserve the memory of Vladimir Ilich. With his brilliant writings and revolutionary activities, which he left as a legacy to the entire world revolutionary movement, he immortalized himself enough.
[…]
We wanted to preserve the body of Vladimir Ilich, not in order simply to popularize his name, but we attached and [now] attach enormous importance to the preservation of the physical features of this wonderful leader, for the generation that is growing up, and for future generations, and also for the hundreds of thousands and maybe even millions of people who will be supremely happy to see the physical features of this person (p. 188).

I’m not arguing that the physical body of Lenin was actually useful as a mobilization device. There is little evidence that people came to the Lenin mausoleum for “spiritual” reasons, or that they experienced great “happiness” upon seeing Lenin – more likely, as Tumarkin argues, they came “out of a combined sense of political duty and fascination, or even morbid curiosity” (p. 197). But at the end of the day, leading Bolsheviks felt strongly that Lenin’s body needed to be preserved; to them the physical body of Lenin was inextricably tied to his symbolic and representative function. It became a “fetish” in the technical Marxist sense of the word.

It is tempting to dismiss these things as the result of sheer “flattery inflation.” But while flattery inflation was certainly going on (Tumarkin tells some very humorous anecdotes about that), the Bolsheviks still needed to come up with a theory of representation to justify the veneration of Lenin, whether mostly spontaneous (as in the aftermath of Lenin’s shooting in 1918) or more orchestrated (as in the aftermath of Lenin’s death in 1923). For all the bad faith required (since almost everyone agreed that ruler veneration was a feudal practice that had no place in a Marxist state), this theory remained remarkably consistent from Lenin to Stalin and even beyond Stalin, after Khrushchev denounced the “cult of personality” in the famous “Secret Speech” to the 20th Party Congress. Even Stalin, whose cult was, to put it somewhat uncharitably, basically a cynical ploy to concentrate power, felt the need to indicate that the veneration of “Stalin” was not the veneration of the mortal Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, but the glorification of the Soviet state. There’s a funny anecdote Jan Plamper retells in his book on the Stalin cult that shows how seriously Stalin took this idea:

Artyom Sergeev, Stalin’s adopted son, was also fond of telling a story. He recalled a fight between Stalin and his biological son Vasily. After he found out that Vasily had used his famous last name to escape punishment for one of his drunken debauches, Stalin screamed at him. ‘But I’m a Stalin too,’ retorted Vasily. ‘No, you’re not,’ said Stalin. `You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, not even me! (Plamper, The Stalin Cult, p. xiii)

Stalin could be venerated and respected because “Stalin” did not refer to the king’s mortal body, with all its failings, but to his representative function. To be sure, Stalin’s drive towards “totalization” – to paraphrase Mussolini, “all within Soviet power, nothing outside Soviet power, nothing against Soviet power” – meant that perhaps unlike Lenin, Stalin had to represent everything. As Tumarkin puts it, “Lenin was … like a Greek or Roman god who was master in only one field of activity” while “Stalin in the heyday of his personality cult wished to be recognized as superlative in everything - philosophy, linguistics, military strategy - like an omniscient deity” (p. 60). As the power of the state expanded, so did the domain of charismatic representation.

I suspect a similar theory of representation developed in China after Khrushchev’s denunciation of the cult of personality in Russia prompted some soul-searching about the cult of Mao within the Chinese Communist Party (as I noted here). In China, the distinction between the “correct” cult of truth (geren chongbai 个人 崇拜) and the “incorrect” veneration of mere persons (geren mixin 个人 迷信), however transparently driven by Mao’s desire to concentrate power, remained within the orbit of a (non-Marxist) theory of representation that derived the charismatic claim to authority from the credibility of the leader’s claim to symbolize the truth of the Chinese revolution. And yet, as in Russia, the actual physical body of the ruler mattered; the ruler was never purely an abstract symbol. Mao the superhuman swimmer, Mao’s mangoes, Mao’s physical appearance - they were all infused by Mao the truth of the revolution.

Perhaps I’m making too much of this. But it strikes me that the independent Communist reinvention of medieval theories of representation as a way to accommodate “charismatic” claims to authority (real or fake - it doesn’t matter), despite the obvious theoretical inconsistency between leader worship and classical Marxism, is indicative of a broader problematic of modern politics in a democratic age. Put bluntly, all mass politics is symbolic politics (whether in democratic or non-democratic contexts); and thus what we might call the “charismatic temptation” – the temptation to grant authority to a person who embodies these symbols, rather than to the law, or the constitution – remains ever present.

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1. The phrase “social hypnotism” is from a short description of Lenin by one B. Gorev, published in a 1922 Komsomol anthology of propaganda writings, quoted by Tumarkin (p. 130). ↩
2. The subbotnik was a Russian revolutionary way of celebrating May Day by offering “voluntary” labor. Lenin famously participated in the first subbotnik in the Kremlin by doing some heavy labor, which gained him the admiration of the workers present (and a lot of positive publicity). Incidentally, Tumarkin gives the date of the first subbotnik in which Lenin participated as May Day 1919; other sources give its date as May Day 1920. ↩

The Futility of Propaganda

When asked, “What do you know about Yugoslavia?” the peasant, painstaking and placid, answered, “It is a pseudosocialist country run by revisionist hyenas in the pay of American capitalism.”
Somewhat later, the interviewer asked: “If you could choose, where would you like to live?”
“Well, in Yugoslavia, for example”
“Why?”
“It seems that in pseudosocialist countries run by revisionist hyenas in the pay of American capitalism, oil and cotton cloth are not rationed.”

From an interview, sometime in the early 1960s, of a Chinese peasant who had fled to Hong Kong from the People’s Republic of China. Found in Simon Leys, Chinese Shadows, p. 52.

The Saudi Monarchy as a Family Firm

(I normally don’t write on current events, since I’m not a specialist in the politics of any country, but I had just finished Michael Herb’s excellent 1999 book All in the Family: Absolutism, Revolution, And Democracy in the Middle Eastern Monarchies when I heard the news that the Saudi King had died. Since I think Herb's thesis about the resilience of Arab monarchies in a world that is basically hostile to non-democratic norms makes a great deal of sense, I thought I’d add my 2 cents.)

Observers of politics have historically applied the term “monarchy” to a variety of superficially similar but sociologically quite distinct regimes: the Roman empire, the Carolingian kingdoms, the Romanov autocracy, the Kuwaiti emirate, the British monarchy. To the extent that there are interesting similarities accross these disparate cases, they have to do with the existence of recognized norms for selecting effective rulers only from a specific lineage (what the Polity coders call an “ascriptive” selection process, or more informally, selection by birthright). Ascriptive selection processes are typically connected both with certain understandings of the basis of authority (e.g., the king should rule because he is the Custodian of Mecca and Medina, not because he represents the people) and an exalted status for the effective ruler; the titles “King” or “Queen” and their various equivalents – Prince, Sultan, Emir, Emperor, Caesar, Shah, etc. – are first and foremost markers of status, elevating the person of the monarch above the common run of people and entitling them to visible honours not available to anyone else in society. The combination of an ascriptive norm of selection to offices with effective political power (rather than purely ceremonial positions) and a particular set of person-centered rituals and symbols defines monarchy, though it does not explain how monarchies survive.

Indeed, given the magnitude of the shift towards democratic norms of justification over the last two centuries, the survival of monarchies presents a bit of a puzzle. Though ascriptively-selected rulers were extremely common before the 19th century, nowadays the number of national states with effective monarchies is tiny; the Polity dataset identifies only 11 countries (Bahrain, Bhutan, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Oman, North Korea, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Swaziland, and the United Arab Emirates) where there is a norm of selecting members of a particular family for the top executive offices, and you might notice that one of them is not normally thought to be a monarchy but a totalitarian regime. (The data excludes countries with less than 500,000 population; including microstates might add Tonga, Brunei, Monaco, and Lesotho to the list, among others.) In six of these (Bhutan, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Swaziland, and the United Arab Emirates) powerful monarchs nevertheless share some power with other institutions, such as elected parliaments (in the Polity jargon, these regimes have “dual” executives, combining ascriptive and non-ascriptive selection processes). Moreover, once discredited, ascriptive selection processes have proven difficult to resurrect explicitly, even if we broaden our view to consider cases where ostensibly “republican” leaders have tried to ensure that control over the state passes to their sons or other family members after their death or retirement, as Mubarak tried to do in Egypt and Gaddafi tried to do in Libya. There are few “transitions to monarchy” in the 20th century, and the few I can find were quite short-lived. Though many highly personalistic regimes have shown a tendency to turn into family enterprises, they seem to have had mixed success beyond the second generation when recognized selection norms remain “republican” (consider, e.g., the failure of the Duvalier or Trujillo “dynasties” in Haiti and the Dominican republic); North Korea is exceptional in combining ostensibly republican justifications of rule with a successful ascriptive transfer of power to the third generation. We could look at these stylized facts and conclude that the remaining monarchies are mere traditional survivals, doomed to extinction once they run out of oil rents or superpower patronage (a view associated with Huntington, I believe). Or we could conclude instead that the remaining monarchies are precisely the most resilient examples of a once common political form; whatever the Saudi monarchy is doing, for example, it has served it well for over 70 years.

Herb argues that monarchies that have survived to the end of the 20th century (the book was published in 1999) are in fact distinctive in ways that make them very resilient. In particular, most of these are what he calls “dynastic” monarchies rather than “personal” monarchies. (Some people suggest that surviving monarchies in Jordan and Morocco do not fit neatly in either side of this dichotomy, but we’ll ignore these subtleties for the moment since the Saudi monarchy, at least, is the paradigmatic example of a dynastic monarchy). A dynastic monarchy can be compared to a family firm, with the family business being the corporate control of the state (and the enjoyment of its oil rents, in the Saudi case), the king as the family CEO, the senior male relatives as the key executives and company board, and most of the remaining family members as shareholders and lower-level employees. By contrast, in other monarchies the royal family does not play much role in governance or even in sharing the spoils of power; the king rules either in alliance with independent power holders (Barons in medieval Europe, powerful politicians in modern times) or as personal dictators who have managed to keep all potential challengers directly dependent on him through their individual political skills.

The Saudi monarchy fits the dynastic model quite well. Senior members of the family monopolize all important state positions, such as the defence, interior, and foreign ministries, and they play a role in determining the king’s successor. (Since 2007 there is even a formal institution, the “Allegiance Council,” staffed entirely by senior princes, that is supposed to select and confirm a new king and crown prince). Like a responsible company board, the senior princes have on occasion deposed rulers deemed to be irresponsible, and bypassed unsuitable candidates for the succession. For example, they briefly eased King Saud bin Abdulaziz from governance after he blundered with an ill-conceived plot to kill the immensely popular President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt in 1958, and then more permanently in 1964, when they formally deposed him in favor of King Faysal; and the family chose not to make Muhammad bin Abdulaziz king in 1964 1975, despite the fact that he was the most senior of the surviving sons of Ibn Saud, probably due to general agreement within the family that his temper and drinking habits made him a bad candidate, according to Herb.

Moreover, because the family is so large – Yamani quotes an estimate of 22,000 royals in 2009; polygamy plus time produces lots of male-line descendants (Ibn Saud had 43 sons by many wives, who in turn produced many sons of their own) – it can control not only the “ministries of sovereingty,” but place its members throughout the state apparatus, and in particular the armed forces, where they serve to deter coups. In fact, the extended royal family serves as a parallel information-gathering mechanism through the practice of “audiences” with royals, which it uses to both understand what the population is thinking in the absence of a free media and to provide particularized patronage; as Herb puts it,

The ruling families, and especially the Al Saud, use the size of the family to extend the majlis [audience] system to as many citizens as possible … Like American members of Congress the princes of the Al Saud act as intermediaries between citizens and the bureaucracy, earning personal credit for solving the problems that arise out of a bureaucracy that is, in the first instance, a creation of the Al Saud (p. 43).

The family, like many a successful political party (or mafia), has a very hierarchical culture (deference to older members is strictly enforced), effective private dispute-resolution mechanisms (including special jails for misbehaving princes, apparently), and fora where princes are expected to speak candidly and honestly about what they learn from their contacts with non-royals (princes who develop reputations as liars are not likely to go very far). And in return for lifetime submission and service, all royals receive an allowance and a state job, calibrated to their seniority and political importance, from the enormous oil revenues the Saudi state produces. (Firm figures are hard to find, for obvious reasons, but Herb cites estimates that suggest that at the height of the oil boom, in the 1970s, the al Sauds received at least 12% of all government revenue - an utterly fantastic sum).

One of the key things that makes family governance work in this context is, paradoxically, the indefiniteness of the succession rule. The succession norm in Saudi Arabia, for instance, only establishes that the kingship should pass to the most senior “able” male descendant of Ibn Saud, rather than simply to the eldest son or brother of the current king. One might think that this would exacerbate the GoT-style succession conflicts common in many monarchies. (According to Kotkin, almost half of all Romanovs in Russia from Peter the Great to Nicholas II died in family disputes over succession issues, and Herb notes that the Ottoman Sultans even formalized their right to kill their surviving brothers on acceding to power in a “Law of Fratricide” in the 16th century). But Herb argues that the very indefiniteness of the succession norm, combined with the emergence of the modern state with its many positions to fill, actually incentivizes family members to “bandwagon” against ambitious princes who threaten the corporate hold of the family. Though individual princes may prefer to rule unconstrained by the “company board” of their senior brothers and uncles, they will typically prefer that the state remain in family hands over one of their brothers ruling alone or with the support of outsiders. And those who are not contending for the rulership have little incentive to jeopardize their position by supporting candidates who take “extreme” measures in their quest for power, such as threatening intrafamily violence or directly appealing to outsiders by developing alternative patronage networks or offering genuinely liberal reforms. For example, when King Saud bin Abdulaziz did a tour of the realm in 1963 distributing money to tribal chiefs in an attempt to salvage his position and undermine his brother Faysal by securing the support of “outsiders,” uncommitted family members quickly switched to Faysal’s side; as Herb says, the only effect the trip had was “to enrich some bedouin shaykhs and to further alienate his brothers, who sought a decree from the ulema declaring Faysal the ruler and making Saud king in name only” (p. 97). (Shortly after, Saud threatened violence against Faysal, which sealed his fate; he was now deposed for good). Given that different contenders will normally tend to offer similar “bargains” to influential family members and that other family members do not need to pre-commit themselves to one side or another, there is little point for uncommitted princes to strongly support candidates that threaten to overturn the family monopoly on power, while the “losing” contenders can expect to be rewarded with money and influence even if they do not inherit the kingdom. By contrast, a rigid succession rule provides incentives for ambitious royals to use more extreme measures (e.g., poisoning your brothers, appealing to the people) that risk the family monopoly on power.

On this account, the Saudi family does not remain in power because of special family bonds, the certainty provided by a clear succession rule, or some Saudi cultural predisposition towards monarchy, much less because of some special symbolic capital of kingship among Arabs. And though oil helps, Herb rightly notes that the price of support is subject to inflationary pressures; more oil revenues mean potential contenders must pay more for support. King Idris of Libya was overthrown when oil revenues were flooding state coffers (take a look at the GDP per capita line in this picture), partly because he had no family members who had incentives to defend him. The effects of US support on the al Saud family are also quite ambiguous: on the one hand, they mean the family has access to intelligence and resources otherwise unavailable; on the other hand, they provoke a cultural backlash that challengers can and have mobilized. Instead, the family's endurance in power is due to the fact that there are few incentives for family members to mobilize outsider support in their disputes; attempting to do so merely makes family members bandwagon against you. Hence, despite many divisions, on crucial questions the family tends to remain united; and a ruling class that is unified on crucial questions – meaning, a ruling class that does not seek to bring in outsider support to settle its major disputes – is very, very, hard to overthrow. 

This is not to say that the Al Saud family does not reach out to other sectors of Saudi society, distributing resources to favored groups or mobilizing symbolic capital to secure the support of the ulema, for example; but these actions would be quite ineffective if incentives pushed ambitious princes to mobilize outsider support on their own, “escalating” fights by, for example, courting the army or the clerical establishment as individuals. Moreover, even the mobilizing power of the symbols of kingship is typically quite limited. Herb tells a funny story that apparently circulated in the Saudi court in the 30s about the loyalty of the Bedouin to their emir:

As soon as it became clear that the Emir was going to be defeated, his Bedouin followers would be the first to turn and loot his army, justifying this by saying they were his friends and that as he was going to be looted in any case, they had more right than his enemies to the spoils (p. 62).

The Bedouin in the story did not dispute the legitimacy of the emir; they simply reinterpreted it to suit their interests when circumstances changed. In other words, as I’ve argued here in much more detail, the recognition of a norm of authority is compatible with all kinds of behaviours, including turning around once it becomes clear there are stronger challengers; to speak of the “legitimacy” of the Saudi king has very little explanatory power when we seek to explain why the Saudi system has endured. Indeed, in some respects the Saudi system has more in common with systems of single party rule than with medieval European kingship. The Al Saud are an odd party, to be sure; only women can join voluntarily (by marrying into the family) but without gaining any formal power (though they may have influence through their sons). But, with its internal dispute resolution mechanisms, its intelligence networks, its “service” requirements, the family basically mimics the institutions of an effective (if small) party on the Leninist model. And thus the incentives that keep it in power are not dissimilar from the incentives that kept the PRI in Mexico or the Chinese Communist Party in power: they are basically reasons for insiders to stick together and not seek outsider support, and thus to prefer corporate control of the state to going alone.

[Edit 2/3/2015. I got a date wrong - Muhammad bin Abdulaziz was passed over for succession in 1975, when he should have been next in line after Faysal's death. Now fixed.]