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). ↩

The quantification of power: some thoughts on, and tools for, measuring democracy

(More substantive content soon! This is mostly of interest to political scientists, R users, and people concerned with the measurement of democracy).

Democracy is the government of numbers. No other form of government has historically been as concerned with the quantification of power. Indeed, the idea that power depends on the exact numerical strength of one’s supporters, rather than their qualities, would have seemed absurd for most of human history. And I would guess no other form of government has evoked so much mathematical effort. (Even the recent election here in NZ produced extraordinarily sophisticated Bayesian models to predict the outcome).

And yet because the concept of democracy uneasily mingles what is, what can be, and what ought to be, people often object to the attempt to quantify its degree (or even its existence) in particular places and times. (My students often do!). Democracy does not seem like the kind of thing that would be easily and uncontroversially measurable. On the contrary, because any attempt to measure democracy reflects certain normative standards, it cannot but be controversial, especially since most of its conceptualizations for such purposes tend to reduce it to competitive elections with a wide suffrage, which for a variety of reasons seems like an unacceptably narrow view of the ideal to many people.

This is most obvious when we’re talking about cases like Venezuela, where to take a position on the question – to say “Venezuela is a democracy” or “Venezuela is not a democracy” – is to take sides in a rancorous political dispute. But even to say something relatively uncontroversial, like “the United States is a consolidated democracy”, is fraught with normative implications, since clearly “actually existing democracies” (representative governments with non-Potemkin opposition parties and nearly universal suffrage) are highly imperfect, and to give them top scores in some scale seems to imply that they are better than they truly are. In any case, although most people around the world accept democracy as the only legitimate form of government, they disagree enormously about whether or not a given place is or is not actually democratic, and the degree to which particular practices and institutions “matter” for democracy.

Democracy measurement, then, is a somewhat dubious enterprise. The essential contestability of the concept (is democracy about equality, or about self-government, or about freedom? In what proportions?), as well as good-faith differences of opinion about the sorts of preconditions that are essential for its functioning and the kinds of institutions that actualize its values, make it difficult to take seriously any single measurement of “democraticness.” And these disagreements are not really resolvable by appeal to the dictionary; they go back to the earliest discussions of democracy as a distinct phenomenon in history.[1]

Yet I still think the attempt to summarize in some disciplined way particular judgments about “democraticness” over time and in space is useful. A democracy measure seems to me to be a numerical crystalization of a political history: a history at a (literal) glance that can be put to use to say more interesting things about the world. One need not agree with any particular conceptualization of democracy, or take any given measure as a normative standard of what democracy should be, to appreciate the possibility of historical comparison across time and space. And because the concept of democracy is inescapably contested, I think the more the merrier: let a hundred measures of democracy bloom, let a thousand schools of thought contend!

I am thus pleased to announce three different R packages (or rather, two and one update) for accessing and manipulating all the democracy datasets I know about:

1. A package to access the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset, version 7.1 (the latest update). The V-Dem dataset is the gold standard of democracy measurement today. It provides indexes targeting multiple conceptualizations of democracy, and an extremely wide variety of indicators that you can use to satisfy basically every measurement need that you might have; if you don’t like their particular conceptualizations of democracy, you can basically build your own. Each country is coded by at least five people, all of whom live there, and subject to rigorous aggregation and validation procedures. Plus, it is annually updated, and covers the entire period 1900-2016, so it’s pretty comprehensive. If you do any serious empirical research that requires you to use measures of democracy, you should seriously consider using V-Dem as your first choice of measure. This package allows you to access the entire V-Dem dataset (more than 3,000 variables, including external ones) directly from R, and to extract combinations of columns easily according to particular criteria (e.g., section of the codebook where they appear, label, etc.). Check it out at https://xmarquez.github.io/vdem, and install it using devtools::install_github("xmarquez/vdem").
2. A package to download or access most other democracy datasets used in scholarly work from R, including Polity IV, Freedom House, Geddes, Wright, and Frantz’s Autocratic Regimes dataset, the World Governance Indicators’ “Voice and Accountability” index, the PACL/ACLP/DD dataset, and many others, including some which are now of merely historical interest. (There are 32 of them in the package). The package automates the process of putting these datasets in standard country-year format, assigning appropriate country codes, and the like, and makes it easy to access some less well-known democracy datasets. (Mostly I created it because I’ve spent hundreds of hours tediously repeating these operations!). Check it out at https://xmarquez.github.io/democracyData, and install it using devtools::install_github("xmarquez/democracyData").
3. Finally, I’ve also updated my package to replicate and extend the Unified Democracy scores. (I first described this package on this blog). This produces a latent variable index from multiple democracy measures, based on methods discussed by Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton in 2010; the most recent update of the package extendes these scores up to 2016 and incorporates revisions and updates of a variety of datasets, including Polity IV, Freedom House, and V-Dem It also includes improvements to the functions used to calculate UDS-style models. Check it out at https://xmarquez.github.io/QuickUDS, and install it using devtools::install_github("xmarquez/QuickUDS").

Feedback, contributors, and pull requests for any of these packages welcome; I hope to be able to submit at least 2 of these packages to CRAN in the near future, so if you use them and encounter any problems let me know. (The V-Dem package is too large for CRAN and will probably never be there).

In what follows, a short discussion of the characteristics of these measures, probably of most interest to people who already use them.

Some general characteristics of democracy measures

The numerical measurement of democracy is about fifty years old. The earliest comprehensive measures of democracy – the Polity project, Freedom House’s Freedom in the World index (first known as the Gastil index), Kenneth Bollen's and Tatu Vanhanen's measures of democracy – go back to the late 1960s and early 1970s. (Vanhanen, who’s been at this business longer than most, identifies some earlier attempts to measure democracy numerically, some going back to the early 1950s, but these were pretty small and unsystematic). There are now 32 different accesible datasets containing some measure of democracy, most developed in the first decade of this century (at least AFAIK):


Most of these measures tend to be highly but not perfectly correlated, reflecting differences in conceptualization as well as varying judgments about the political situation of specific countries and periods:

Yet the high overall level of correlation among these measures masks substantial variation over time:

There is a lot more agreement among measures of democracy after the 1920s than before, simply because it is harder to make judgments of democracy for the more distant past (how much should class-stratified male suffrage count? etc.), though go back far enough and it’s reasonably easy (since there are no democracies past a certain point). In any case, only 13 of the 32 datasets measuring democracy code countries during the 19th century, and only 8 of these make any effort to be comprehensive (mostly because they follow the Polity IV panel, or modify the polity IV scores in some way).

These correlations among measures also mask substantial variation in space:

In other words, while on average the pairwise correlation between different measures of democracy within individual country histories is quite high (0.7), for a substantial minority of countries correlations can be much lower, or even negative. These numbers are better if we only look at the degree of agreement among measures from large, well-resourced projects, to be sure, but they are still by no means reassuring if we are looking for consensus:


Most democracy measurement projects are actually variants of these large-scale efforts; a large number of them take Polity, PACL/ACLP, or Freedom House as starting points to develop their own measures. If we take their correlations as measures of similarity, we can cluster the indexes hierarchically to show these quasi-genealogical family resemblances:


At the top, we have the “Polity cluster” – measures of democracy that mostly just modify Polity, including the Participation-Enhanced Polity Scores (PEPS), the PITF indicators (based on subcomponents of Polity), and the Polity scores themselves. These are highly related with some calculated indexes, including the Unified Democracy Scores and my extension, Freedom House, and Coppedge, Alvarez, and Maldonado’s “contestation dimension” (from a principal components analysis of a number of democracy measures), that attempt to weigh multiple factors in the construction of a measure of democracy, but mostly end up giving weight to the contestability of power and civil liberties.

In the middle we have a cluster that attempts to weigh participation and contestation more equally (LIED, the V-Dem Additive Polyarchy Index, Vanhanen’s Index of Democratization, etc.) and then a cluster of measures that derive from PACL’s attempts to develop a dichotomous measure of democracy (including Boix, Miller and Rosato’s extension as well as Geddes, Wright, and Frantz’s dataset of Autocratic regimes, as well as several other academic datasets). Then there is another cluster of measures that give more weight to formal inclusion (e.g. Doorenspleet, and Bernhard, Nordstrom, and Reenock, both of which make democracy depend on the existence of universal suffrage), a cluster of V-Dem indexes (which weigh multiple factors to come up with a number, including formal inclusiveness), and finally at the bottom we find measures that simply gauge the degree of participation (Vanhanen’s index of participation and the “inclusion dimension” calculated by Coppedge, Alvarez, and Maldonado).

There is a lot more that one could show here, but this is probably enough for now; hope these tools are useful to others! All code for this post available in this repository.

[1] On the other hand, unlike other controversial numerical measures of social phenomena, like university rankings or GDP per capita, governments and other organizations do not spend much time trying to “game” measures of democracy, because few people other than a small number of political scientists care, and little money is at stake. This is probably a good thing, on balance.

Propaganda as Literature: A Distant Reading of the Korean Central News Agency's Headlines

A rather long post on reading the Korean Central News Agency's headlines I am not putting directly on this blog because it contains interactive graphs that I cannot figure out how to embed, but look nice on GitHub. North Korean politics plus lots of data art, including baroque Sankey flow diagrams!

See it here.

Big Lies at the Monkey Cage

No, not that post. Just me talking about the uses of lies in politics, which may interest some readers here.

Posts at the Monkey Cage are highly constrained in terms of length and style, so I may as well use this blog for some additional notes and clarifications.

Mythical Lies. One point that perhaps could be stressed with respect to the political uses of myth would be that their acceptance always depends on the persuasiveness of alternative narratives. Moreover, it seems to me that the acceptance of myths usually hinges on taking particular narratives “seriously but not literally,” as was sometimes said of Trump supporters (and could, of course, be said of many other people).

For example, the appeal of the Soviet socialist myth in the 1930s did not hinge on its general accuracy or the degree to which practice lived up to its internal standards, but on its articulation of values that seemed plainly superior to the ones on offer by the major alternative narratives (liberal capitalist or fascist). Not everyone may have felt “dizzy with success” in the 1930s, but little that was credible could be said for capitalism at the time (a lack of credibility reinforced by the impossibility of travel and centralized control of information, of course, but not only by that). Here’s Stephen Kotkin in his magisterial Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization:

The antagonism between socialism and capitalism, made that much more pronounced by the Great Depression, was central not only to the definition of what socialism turned out to be, but also to the mind-set of the 1930s that accompanied socialism’s construction and appreciation. This antagonism helps explain why no matter how substantial the differences between rhetoric and practice or intentions and outcome sometimes became, people could still maintain a fundamental faith in the fact of socialism’s existence in the USSR and in that system’s inherent superiority. This remained true, moreover, despite the Soviet regime’s manifest despotism and frequent resort to coercion and intimidation. Simply put, a rejection of Soviet socialism appeared to imply a return to capitalism, with its many deficiencies and all-encompassing crisis— a turn of events that was then unthinkable. (Magnetic Mountain, pp. 153-54).

On one reading of Soviet history, the valence of the capitalist and socialist myths eventually reversed (perhaps by the late 1970s? Or later?): capitalism came to seem fundamentally superior to many Soviet citizens, despite its problems (which, incidentally, were constantly pointed out by Soviet propaganda), while Soviet socialism came to appear unworkable and stagnant (despite the material advantages that many Soviet citizens enjoyed, including great employment stability). But this reversal in valence had less to do with specific facts (popular Soviet views of capitalism in the early 90s could be remarkably misinformed) than with an overall loss of trust in the values Soviet myths articulated, reinforced by decades of failed prophecy about the coming abundance. (Perhaps best conceptualized as a cumulative reputational cost of lying?).

Strategic Lies. One thing I did not emphasize in the piece is that people may of course be predisposed to believe lies that accord with their deep-seated identities. Everyone has their own favorite examples of this, though I am reluctant to speak of “belief” in some of the more extreme cases. (See, e.g., this post about the differential predispositions of voters to identify the bigger crowd in two pictures of the inauguration; perhaps it’s better to speak here of people giving the finger to the interviewers, reasserting their partisan identities). But by the same token, these lies do not work for groups whose identities predispose them to reject the message or the messenger (e.g., Democrats, in the question about inauguration pictures).

So “identity-compatible lies” (anyone have a better term?) should be understood as ways to mobilize people, not necessarily (or only) to deceive them, which put them in the same functional category as “loyalty lies” below. From a tactical standpoint, the question then is about the marginal persuasive effect of such lies: does telling a big lie that will be embraced by supporters and rejected by non-supporters increase or reduce the chances that an uncommitted person will believe you?

I’m not sure there’s an obvious answer to this question that is valid for most situations. In any case, it seems to me that, over time, the marginal persuasive effect should decrease, and even become negative (as seems to be happening in Venezuela, where in any case most people who are not Chavistas can and do simply “exit” government propaganda by changing the channel or turning off the TV, and the remaining Chavistas become increasingly subject to cognitive dissonance (how come after all the “successes” proclaimed by the government in the economic war, the other side is still winning?).

Loyalty Lies. The idea that baldfaced lies can help cement the loyalty of the members of a ruling group when trust is scarce seems to be becoming commonplace; both Tyler Cowen and Matthew Yglesias provide good analyses of how this may work within the context of the Trump administration. (Cowen is also interesting on what I would call “lies as vagueness” and their function in maintaining flexibility within coalitions, which I didn’t mention, but which are obviously related to this and this).

But I wanted to plug in specifically a really nice paper by Schedler and Hoffmann (linked, but not mentioned, in my Monkey Cage piece) that stresses the need to “dramatize” unity in authoritarian environments in order to deter challengers during times of crisis. Their key example is the Cuban transition of power from Fidel to Raul Castro (2006-2011) – a situation which saw the need for supposedly “liberal” members of the Cuban regime to show convincingly that they were in fact “on the same page” as everyone else in the elite. And the same need to dramatize unity in a crisis seems to me to be driving the apparent lunacy of some of the statements by Venezuelan officials (check out Hugo Perez Hernaiz’s Venezuelan Conspiracy Theories Monitor for a sampling).

I suspect that the need to dramatize loyalty within a coalition (by “staying on the same page” and thus saying only the latest lie du jour) may conflict with the imperatives of strategic lying (saying things that are credible to the larger groups). Here the tradeoff is about the relative value of support outside vs. support within the ruling group; the less you depend on the former, the less it matters whether elite statements are believed "outside."

Endnotes

Not much happened on this blog this year, except for two announcements (for my new book and a software package for extending the Unified Democracy Scores); I didn’t even have the usual solstice link post. (Lots of things going on in my offline job; there should be more activity here next year). But there was still a lot of good writing this year worth sharing. In no particular order:

• I’ve continued to really enjoy Ribbonfarm. Some especially interesting or memorable pieces: Adam Elkus' The Strategy of Subversive Conflict; Sarah Perry’s The Origin of Authenticity in the Breakdown of the Illusion of the Real, The Art of the Conspiracy Theory, and Dares, Costly Signals, and Psychopaths; and Venkatesh Rao’s massive 14,000 word piece King Ruinous and the City of Darkness - combining personal memoir, Bihari politics in the age of Lalu Prasad Yadav, the Tata business empire, and many other things in a surprisingly interesting stew.
• Nick Szabo writes occasionally at Unenumerated. His piece on Artifacts of wealth: patterns in the evolution of collectibles and money was very thought-provoking, but just about everything there is worth reading.
• If you’re a political science or IR person, Paul Musgrave has been blogging regularly, mostly but not exclusively interesting book reviews. His twitter account is also very much worth following.
• Nintil is another good blog I discovered this year. I especially enjoyed the Soviet Union series, a good example of the very useful “someone reads the literature so I don’t have to” form of blogging.
• If you’re interested in Chinese politics and economics, Andrew Batson has been really good this year. I especially enjoyed his post What is Socialist about “Socialism with Chinese characteristics”?, but there were many other good ones.
• More China: I’ve really enjoyed following Everyday Life in Mao’s China. Beyond the pictures of “everyday life” during a sometimes difficult period, there’s also a lot of rare art, much of it not obviously political.
• Maciej Ceglowski has some really great talks here. I found the the one on Superintelligence arguments and the one on Lev Sergeyevich Termen, especially interesting. His travel writing is also compulsively readable.
• Inga Clendinnen passed away this year. (Another casualty of 2016). I loved her work on the Aztecs; David Auerbach writes a wonderful essay about her book on the encounter between the Maya and the Spanish, Ambivalent Conquests.
• Zenpundit is hosting a Thucydides Roundatable. I especially liked T. Greer’s Why I read Thucydides and History is Written by the Losers, but there’s lots of good stuff there.
• On Trump and the politics of Trump, some pieces I found useful throughout the year: Timothy Burke’s Trumpism and Expertise; David Auerbach’s Donald Trump: Moosbrugger for President; Adam Aelkus’ Trump: The Explanation of No Explanation; Gabriel Rossman’s Traitors; and Jacob Levy’s Authoritarianism and Post-Truth Politics.
• Venezuela is collapsing, economically and socially. Nick Casey at the New York Times and Hannah Dreier at the Associated Press are doing fantastic reporting; for political argument and analysis, see Caracas Chronicles.
• Among the non-fiction books I read this year, Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, Charles Kurzmann’s The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran, and Robert Crassweller’s Perón and the Enigmas of Argentina have stayed with me. (I may write about Kotkin’s book soon). Also worth mentioning: Achen and Bartels’ Democracy for Realists and Mary Beard’s SPQR.

Happy new year everyone!

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. ↩

Artisanal Democracy Data: A Quick and Easy Way of Extending the Unified Democracy Scores

(Apologies for the lack of posting - I've been finishing some big projects. This is of interest primarily to people who care about quantitative measures of democracy in the 19th century, or for some unknown reason enjoy creating latent variable indexes of democracy. Contains a very small amount of code, and references to more.)

If you have followed the graph-heavy posts in this blog, you may have noticed that I really like the Unified Democracy Scores developed by Daniel Pemstein, Stephen Meserve, and James Melton. The basic idea behind this particular measure of democracy, as they explain in their 2010 article, is as follows. Social scientists have developed a wealth of measures of democracy (some large-scale projects like the Polity dataset or the Freedom in the World index, some small “boutique” efforts by political scientists for a particular research project). Though these measures are typically highly correlated (usually in the 0.8-0.9 range), they still differ significantly for some countries and years. These differences are both conceptual (researchers disagree about the essential characteristics of democracy) and empirical (researchers disagree about whether a given country-year is democratic according to a particular definition).

PMM argue that we can assume that these measures are all getting at a latent trait that is only imperfectly observed and conceptualized by the compilers of all the datasets purporting to measure democracy, and that we can estimate this trait using techniques from item response theory that were originally developed to evaluate the performance of multiple graders in academic settings. They then proceeded to do just that, producing a dataset that not only contains latent variable estimates of democracy for 9850 country-years (200 unique countries), but also estimates of the measurement error associated with these scores (derived from the patterns of disagreement between different democracy measures).

This, to be honest, is one of the main attractions of the UDS for me: I get nervous when I see a measure of democracy that does not have a confidence interval around it, given the empirical and conceptual difficulties involved in producing numerical estimates of a woolly concept like “democracy.” Nevertheless, the UDS had some limitations: for one thing, they only went back to 1946, even though many existing measures of democracy contain information for earlier periods, and PMM never made use of all the publicly available measures of democracy in their construction of the scores, which meant that the standard errors around them were relatively large. (The original UDS used 10 different democracy measures for its construction; the current release uses 12, but I count more than 25).

Moreover, the UDS haven’t been updated since 2014 (and then only to 2012), and PMM seem to have moved on from the project. Pemstein, for example, is now involved with measurement at the V-Dem institute, whose “Varieties of Democracy” dataset promises to be the gold standard for democracy measurement, so I’m guessing the UDS will not receive many more updates, if any. (If you are engaged in serious empirical research on democracy, you should probably be using the V-dem dataset anyway. Seriously, it’s amazing - I may write a post about it later this year). And though in principle one could use PMM's procedure to update these scores, and they even made available an (undocumented) replication package in 2013, I was never able to make their software work properly, and their Bayesian algorithms for estimating the latent trait seemed anyway too computationally intensive for my time and budget.

I think this situation is a pity. For my own purposes – which have to do mostly with the history of political regimes for my current project – I’d like a summary measure of democracy that aggregates both empirical and conceptual uncertainty in a principled way for a very large number of countries, just like I believe the UDS did. But I also would like a measure that goes back as far as possible in time, and is easily updated when new information arises (e.g., there are new releases of Freedom House or Polity). The new V-dem indexes are great on some of these counts (they come with confidence intervals) but not on others (they only cover 2014-1900, they are missing some countries, and the full dataset is a bit unwieldy – too many choices distract me). Other datasets – the trusty Polity dataset, the new and excellent LIED index – do go back to the 19th century, but they provide no estimates of measurement error, and they make specific choices about conceptualization that I do not always agree with.

But why wait for others to create my preferred measure when I can do it myself? So I went ahead and figured out how to first replicate the Unified Democracy scores without using a computationally intensive Bayesian algorithm, and then extended them both forwards to 2015 and backwards to the 19th century (in some cases to the 18th century), using information from 28 different measures of democracy (some of them rather obscure, some just new, like the LIED index or the latest version of the Freedom House data). And I created an R package to let you do the same, should you wish to fiddle with the details of the scores or create your own version of the UDS using different source measures. (Democratizing democracy indexes since 2016!).

The gory details are all in this paper, which explains how to replicate and extend the scores, and contains plenty of diagnostic pictures of the result; but if you only want to see the code to produce the extended UDS scores check out the package vignette here. If you are an R user, you can easily install the package and its documentation by typing (assuming you have devtools installed, and that I’ve done everything correctly on my side):

devtools::install_github(repo = "xmarquez/QuickUDS")

The package includes both my “extended” UD scores (fully documented and covering 24111 country-years going all the way to the 18th century in some cases, for 224 sovereign countries and some non-sovereign territories) and a replication dataset which includes 61 different measures of democracy from 29 different measurement efforts covering a total of 24149 country-years (also fully documented). (Even if you are not interested in the UDS, original or extended, you may be interested in that dataset of democracy scores). For those poor benighted souls who use Stata or (God fobid) some awful thing like SPSS (kidding!), you can access a CSV version of the package datasets and a PDF version of their documentation here.

To be sure, for most research projects you probably don’t need this extended Unified Democracy measure. After all, most useful variables in your typical democracy regression are unmeasured or unavailable before the 1950s for most countries, and if your work only requires going back to the 1900s, you are better off with the new V-dem data, rather than this artisanal version of the UDS. But the extended UDS is nice for some things, I think.

First, quantitative history (what I wanted the extended UDS for). For example, consider the problem of measuring democracy in the USA over the entirety of the last two centuries. Existing democracy measures disagree about when the USA first became fully democratic, primarily because they disagree about how much to weigh formal restrictions on women’s suffrage and the formal and informal disenfranchisement of African Americans in their conceptualization. Some measures give the USA the highest possible score early in the 19th century, others after the civil war, others only after 1920, with the introduction of women’s suffrage, and yet others (e.g. LIED) not until 1965, after the Civil Rights Movement. With the extended UDS these differences do not matter very much: as consensus among the different datasets increases, so does the measured US level of democracy:


In the figure above, I use a transformed version of the extended UDS scores whose midpoint is the “consensus” estimate of the cutoff between democracy and non-democracy among minimalist, dichotomous measures in the latent variable scale. (For details, see my paper; the grey areas represent 95% confidence intervals). This version can be interpreted as a probability scale: “1” means the country-year is almost certainly a democracy, “0” means it is almost certainly not a democracy, and “0.5” that it could be either. (Or we could arbitrarily decide that 0-0.33 means the country is likely an autocracy of whatever kind, 0.33-0.66 that it is likely some kind of hybrid regime, and 0.66-1 that is pretty much a democracy, at least by current scholarly standards).

In any case, the extended UDS shows an increase in the USA’s level of democracy in the 1820s (the “Age of Jackson”), the 1870s (after the civil war), the 1920s after female enfranchisement, and a gradual increase in the 1960s after the Civil Rights movement, though the magnitude of each increase (and of the standard error of the resulting score) depends on exactly which measures are used to construct the index. (The spike in the 2000s is an artifact of measurement, having more to do with the fact that lots of datasets end around that time than with any genuine but temporary increase in the USA’s democracy score). Some of these changes would be visible in other datasets, but no other measure would show them all; if you use Polity, for example, you would see a perfect score for the USA since 1871.

Just because what use is this blog if I cannot have a huge vertical visualization, here are ALL THE DEMOCRACY SCORES, alphabetically by country:

(Grey shaded areas represent 95% confidence intervals; blue shaded areas are periods where the country is either deemed to be a member of the system of states in the Gleditsch and Ward list of state system membership since 1816, i.e., independent, or is a microstate in Gleditsch’s tentative list).


A couple of things to note. First, scores are calculated for some countries for periods when they are not generally considered to be independent; this is because some of the underlying data used to produce them (e.g., the V-Dem dataset) produce measures of democracy for existing states when they were under imperial governance (see, e.g., the graphs for India or South Korea).

Second, confidence intervals vary quite a bit, primarily due to the number of measures of democracy available for particular country-years and the degree of their agreement. For some country-years they are so large (because too few datasets bother to produce a measure for a period, or the ones that do disagree radically) that the extended UD score is meaningless, but for most country-years (as I explain in my paper) the standard error of the scores is actually much smaller than the standard error of the “official” UDS, making the measure more useful for empirical research.

Finally, maybe this is just me, but in general the scores tend to capture my intuitions about movements in democracy levels well (which is unsurprising, since they are based on all existing scholarly measures of democracy); see the graphs for Chile or Venezuela, for example. And using these scores we can get a better sense of the magnitude of the historical shifts towards democracy in the last two centuries.

For example, according to the extended UDS (and ignoring measurement uncertainty, just because this is a blog), a good 50% of the world’s population today lives in countries that can be considered basically democratic, but only around 10% live in countries with the highest scores (0.8 and above):

And Huntington’s three waves of democratization are clearly visible in the data (again ignoring measurement uncertainty):


But suppose you are not into quantitative history. There are still a couple of use cases where long-run, quantitative data about democracy with estimates of measurement error is likely to be useful. Consider, for example, the question of the democratic peace, or of the relationship between economic development and democracy – two questions that benefit from very long-run measures of democracy, especially measures that can be easily updated, like this one.

I may write more about this later, but here is an example about a couple of minor things this extended democracy measure might tell us about the basic stylized fact of the “democratic peace.” Using the revised list of interstate wars by Gleditsch, we can create a scatterplot of the mean extended UD score of each side in an interstate war, and calculate the 2-d density distribution of these scores while accounting for their measurement error:

The x- coordinate of each point is the mean extended UD score (in the 0-1 probability scale where 0.5 is the average cutoff between democracy and non-democracy among the most minimalistic measures) of side A in a war listed by Gleditsch; the y-coordinate is the mean extended UD score of side B; each blue square is the 95% “confidence rectangle” around these measures; the shaded blobs are the 2-d probability densities, accounting for measurement error in the scores.

As we can see, the basic stylized fact of a dyadic democratic peace is plausible enough, at least for countries which have a high probability of being democratic. In particular, countries whose mean extended UD democracy score is over 0.8 (in the transformed 0-1 scale) have not fought one another, even after accounting for measurement error. (Though they have fought plenty of wars with other countries, as the plot indicates). But note that the dyadic democratic peace only holds perfectly if we set the cutoff for “being a democracy” quite high (0.8 is in the top 10% of country-years in this large sample; few countries have ever been that democratic); as we go down to the 0.5 cutoff, exceptions accumulate (I’ve labeled some of them).

Anyway, I could go on; if you are interested in this “artisanal” democracy dataset (or in creating your own version of these scores), take a look at the paper, and use the package – and let me know if it works!

(Update 3/25/2016 - some small edits for clarity).

(Update 3/28 - fixed code error).

(Update 3/30 - re-released the code, and updated the graphs, to fix one small mistake with the replication data for the bnr variable).

(Code for this post is available here. Some of it depends on a package I’ve created but not shared yet, so you may not be able to replicate it all.)

Endnotes

Happy solstice, everyone!

It’s been a good year here at Abandoned Footnotes HQ. On the more academic side of things, three papers derived from ideas first discussed in this blog a long time ago are now in print (ungated copies here, here, and here, if anybody is interested enough). I may get around to saying more about them sometime next year. Plus, progress on other projects, and 11 posts on this blog!

The most viewed post was “The Saudi Monarchy as a Family Firm,” which won a 3QuarksDaily prize; the runner up was “Propaganda as Signaling.” The graph-heavy posts (modernist art masquerading as social science?) were also widely shared. Thanks to everyone who read, commented on and shared them!

As is the tradition here, here are a few things for your reading pleasure:

• Two blogs I discovered this year and have really enjoyed: Pseudoerasmus by the eponymous pseudonymous author (mostly economic history, growth, and development) and The Scholar’s Stage by T. Greer (East Asian history, strategy, politics). I especially enjoyed Pseudoerasmus’ Where do pro-social institutions come from? and T. Greer on Hobbes and Ibn Khaldoun.
• For your political science and IR needs, Chaos and Governance seems to have restarted occasional blogging. I’ve also learned quite a bit from Tom Pepinsky this year. Alas, however, Jay Ulfelder has decided to stop blogging…
• Ribbonfarm has been greatly reinvigorated this year, especially with the posts on ritual by Sarah Perry, and the posts on physics by Brian Skinner. I especially enjoyed A Children’s Picture-book Introduction to Quantum Field Theory, Samuel Beckett’s Guide to Particles and Antiparticles, An Ecology of Beauty and Strong Drink and Ritual and the Consciousness Monoculture.
• A few books that I wish I had had more time to talk about this year: Andrew G. Walder’s China under Mao and Alison Pargetter’s Qaddafi’s Libya. And so much more to say about Nina Tumarkin’s Lenin Lives! Perhaps next year…
• Some other neat or fun or simply good pieces I’ve saved this year: Andrew Batson’s Marxist Numerology, or Why Seven Workers are Different than Eight; BLDGBLOG’s Occult Infrastructure and the “Funerary Teleportation Grid” of Greater London ; Justin E. H. Smith’s The Stateless Europeans; XKCD’s Randall Munroe’s Proton Earth, Electron Moon (reminds me of this old classic, How to Destroy the Earth); on Liberland, a micronation that seems like a performance art piece; Perry Anderson’s Incommensurate Russia. 

Happy summer solstice / winter solstice / christmas / festivus / yule / Newtonmass / Toxcatl or any other ritual you may celebrate to all!

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.

---

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. ↩

Free Market Cults

(Warning: not about Steve Jobs, or about modern economics).

I have a post at the Monkey Cage on Putin’s recent prowess at the hockey rink and the sometimes dubious sports and artistic achievements of political leaders that may interest regular readers of this blog. (I am not responsible for the search engine-optimized headline, though I am responsible for all errors). In order to write it, I took the opportunity to read a neat collection of essays edited by Helena Goscilo, Putin as Celebrity and Cultural Icon, which includes an updated version of an earlier paper by Julie Cassiday and Emily Johnson on what they call “Putiniana”: the weird and wonderful world of Putin-themed products.

These range from the sorts of things that would not be out of place in any normal electoral campaign (e.g., Putin-themed party balloons) to the weird and wonderful: chocolate portraits of Putin, stuffed bunnies that sing a pop song proclaiming love for Putin, a 2010 lingerie calendar where Moscow State University students express their love for Putin, and “dental flossers in packets with the President’s portrait emblazoned on the front.” There are DVDs that fictionalize Putin’s love life, and even a small subgenre of fanfiction novels (some apparently quite popular) that cast Putin as a hero, such as Aleksandr Ol’bik’s President, which begins as follows:

It’s the hot summer of 2001 […] Events develop swiftly and completely unexpectedly. The President decides to head out for Chechnia with a spetsnaz squad to destroy the rebels’ lair […] He does this and is the only one left alive. (Putin as Celebrity and Cultural Icon, Kindle loc. 1169-1171).

And then there are “objets d’art” :

Picture from an exhibition organised by Putin’s People’s Front pic.twitter.com/qu2bZ5LCYJ

— Leonid Ragozin (@leonidragozin) October 13, 2015

One key point to note about this sort of stuff (and about similar products elsewhere, like Chavez paraphernalia – I’m sure readers can come up with fun examples from all sorts of places, including American electoral campaigns) is that it is produced and sold in a reasonably free market. (Some of it is, of course, given away, but much is actually sold for profit). The weirdest Putiniana is not produced at the behest of the Kremlin, and though it is sometimes disavowed by it, it has not attempted to suppress it. Moreover, while some of the most over-the-top stuff is clearly satirical in intent (such as the “Superputin” webcomic; in English here), some of it is bought or consumed by people who support Putin and approve of his supermacho image. (Though I remain baffled about who could possibly want to buy some of the more expensive objects, like a $700 limited edition chocolate Putin (measuring 12” by 19”) produced in 2003).

That people will buy the paraphernalia of leader cults is not a matter of course, even when they are constantly barraged by propaganda and pressured by authorities to do so. For example, from Alexey Tikhomirov’s wonderful piece on the “symbols of power” in the GDR before 1961, we learn that early attempts to sell Soviet leader paraphernalia in East Germany were almost a complete failure:

The establishment of a planned socialist economy, with the organized production of party cult objects, heightened the intensity with which public space was saturated with the symbols of power. The party put in orders for such items and created a centralized system to sell them. A catalogue of objects with political symbolism was published in 1949. It offered consumers an assortment of busts, reliefs, posters, portraits, postcards, and badges with images of the “leaders of the workers’ movement.” As a rule, these objects were churned out on East German soil, using Soviet models, and then distributed, with monitoring from above, to mass organizations, party organs, the army, schools, and universities. Attempts to organize retail sales of personality cult objects were not successful. Consumer demand for these things was virtually nil. Thus the owner of a small store in Leipzig that sold pictures of various types admitted that almost no one was interested in portraits of Stalin, Lenin, Marx, and Pieck. The employees of the Soviet military administration, however, were some of the most enthusiastic buyers of “pictures that were artistically kitschy.” (p. 60; emphasis added).

The desire (or the need) to buy such objects in particular contexts will of course vary with how much people feel the need to signal identification with a leader, to conform to social pressure, and the like. Yet (at least in Russia or Venezuela today) the market for such objects is indifferent to the meaning people give them; whether people bought, for example, the 2004 stuffed bunnies that sang “someone like Putin” to show how much they cared for Putin, or because they thought they were funny, or because they were hipsters wanting to show their ironic detachment from dominant values, or because they wanted to show their friends how ridiculous they were, matters not at all to whether or not they are sold. And, as Cassiday and Johnson note, most Russians – not just people who are dissatisfied with Putin – do not take Putiniana entirely seriously; to the extent that there is something like a personality cult here (perhaps because the market is large and robust, and supports a wide variety of such products?) it is not because the meaning people attribute to these objects and stories is clear and unambiguous. In fact, it seems to me that trying to “read” the meaning of a leader cult from the fact that, say, dental floss emblazoned with a picture of Putin is produced seems to me to be a fool’s errand; under reasonably free market conditions, there is no single meaning that is even intended, much less perceived, in the many manifestations of a leader’s image, nor any way to tell directly how people think of the leader, even if they approve of him (as seems reasonably clear in the case of Putin).