The Hidden Roots of Bolshevism and their Ramifications
www.nimrodderosario.com
The Hidden Roots of Bolshevism and their Ramifications
Bruno Cariou
note: this article was largely plagiarized from the above authors’ original work by the crowleyite/zorastrian disinfo agent Stephen Flowers in his book(let) “The Occult Roots of Bolshevism”. This is the more searching and thorough work translated from the original French via Deepl machine translator software.
Communism refers to a real or intended state of affairs: the pooling of goods and, as opposed to
individualism, the system of community life characterised by such pooling. It also refers to a doctrine:
the social doctrine that advocates the pooling of goods and the abolition of individual property; the
doctrine that advocates absolute equality; the doctrine that advocates an economic and social
organisation based on the system of collective ownership of the means of production and exchange
(socialism as a step towards full communism). In one sense
As a special term, it designates the social organisation conceived by Marx as the ultimate stage of social
evolution, activated by the struggle of the proletariat and intended to lead to a society without classes,
without private property, without the exploitation of man by man, in which goods are distributed to
everyone according to their needs: this is integral communism. As a political, economic and social
system, communism has been advocated in the Soviet Union since the putsch of 1917 and in a number
of other countries since then.
This doctrine did not emerge spontaneously in the nineteenth century. It has its roots in ancient
religions, in Judaism and Christianity in general, and in the Kabbalah in particular (1).
The racial factor
The most pitiless, if not the most convincing, analyses of the Russian national character have been
made by the Russians themselves, who are prone to morbid introspection and also to exaggeration, and
are often self-deceived. Thus Peter the Great declared: "You can treat other European peoples like
human beings, but my people are cattle". Tchadayev, who led the revolutionary movement under
Nicholas I and encouraged his fellow citizens to turn to Western Europe, described Russia as a
superfluous member of the body of humanity. It is therefore worth quoting one of the few Russian
psychologists who does not fall into the trap of self-satisfaction.
The Russian man knows neither law nor justice," writes Nikitenko. The Russian man," writes Nikitenko,
"knows neither law nor justice. His morality is the result of his good humour, which, neither formed nor
reinforced by conscious principles, sometimes impels him to act but is frequently submerged by other,
more primitive instincts. A Russian can become tiresome through stealing, drinking and cheating, but
despite all this, there is something about him that captivates and attracts you [...] It seems to me that
this indefinable something is the psychic current inherent in certain representatives of the Russian
people, the latent spiritual force that, as the mystics would say, transforms changeable moods into
fleeting memories of a prenatal state or fleeting presentiments of a marvellous future. For the superior
Russian type, whether educated or illiterate, is attracted, at least speculatively, to lofty ideals and is also
capable of aspiring to them for a time.
with a superb disregard for consequences, with no concern for the road he is following, but without
method or perseverance. The result is often a situation as tragic-comical as that of the genius who,
gazing up at the stars, stumbled and fell into a peat bog. The boundaries between the world of dreams
and the world of reality, the boundaries between the true and the false, the dividing line between the
sublime and the ridiculous, blur and disappear as the fanatical Russian follows a Halloween pumpkin
into the enchanted land of fantasy" (2). "There is no need to dwell on the absurd incongruities and
follies to which the vain efforts of visionaries to bring the ideals of the millennium down to earth and
clothe everyday reality in them lead them. One need only consider the horrors committed in Petrograd
and Odessa after the maximalist revolution or recall some of the other revolting spectacles that
followed that sinister explosion (3)."
The Russian man always resembles both a child and an imperfectly tamed beast. But if he lacks culture,
he has a wealth of experience and a stoic attitude that has been engraved in picturesque proverbs, the
essence of which is submission to Fate and pity for one's neighbour. His language is rich, colourful and
violent, but his thoughts lack continuity and his reasoning lacks logic. "His actions belie his words, he is
incapable of giving himself the means to achieve his ambitions, and his indifference makes up for his
lack of constancy. In their relations with their fellow human beings, Russians often run the gamut of
behaviour, from feminine gentleness to bestial ferocity. His laziness, apathy, ignorance and dishonesty
remind "German authors [...] of the Gauchos of Paraguay" (4).
The inability to grasp the exact relationship between words and things "is a Russian characteristic that is
not very different from the ability of primitive peoples to create myths, which the Anglo-Saxons describe
as falsehoods". This is undoubtedly a trait of the North Slavs. The Russian masses pay little heed to facts,
refuse to acknowledge their finality and maintain that they can be safely discarded or even changed.
Their imagination is powerful enough to melt them down and adjust them to their own needs.
velléités. They are hardly aware of time, space and causality, and often even ignore them in practice (5).
And so an entire generation of professional revolutionaries spent their time blowing hot air. Bakunin
fought all his life with empty phrases for a simple negation.
It is worth remembering that the character of the Great Russian just described is that of a people who
are the result of a mixture of races that are diverse and varied from the physiological point of view as
well as from the psychological and spiritual point of view. The contradictions that inhabit it and pull at it
simply reflect its racial heterogeneity. The greater the racial differences in an ethnic mixture, the more
they cause degeneration, the less the character of the ethnic mixture and of the individual is preserved.
stable, the less cohesive it is. The particular instability of the character of the Great Russian shows the
extent to which this people is the result of cross-fertilisation. "The history of Russia is full of struggles.
of races: brown versus blond; broad skulls versus long skulls. Germano-Scandinavians, Celts, Slavs and
Tartars collided and mixed in the North and South (6). "The Russians, far from being pure Slavs,
absorbed a variety of indigenous races, nomads [...], whom they found in the North.
territory between the Upper Volga and the Oka" (7).
And the descendants of these diverse and disparate elements inherited the main intellectual and moral as
well as physical traits of the inferior races, their lack of social cohesion, their
their tendency towards anarchy, their intellectual and physical restlessness, which manifests itself in
scathing criticism of all social and political structures and in an irresistible passion for wandering", a
mania for not staying put. In this and many other respects, he offers a striking contrast to the Teuton,
who has a pronounced taste for hierarchy, is attached to his place of birth and imbued with a sense of
moderation. It was during the Mongol occupation that the Russian people became masters of cunning,
deceit, machination, corruption and all the tactics that the weak use to defend themselves against the
strong" (8). "It was during this period that the Moscow princes became familiar with the Tartar state
and imbued themselves with its spirit of conquest and its contempt for the organic state. "Ivan III
infused these exotic ideas into the community he established. He beheaded all the Boyars who were
intolerable to him, considerably reduced the power of this class, encouraged
his subjects to kill each other and imposed on a rustic people an absolute monarch whose orders and
whims were obeyed by a corps of soldiers (opritchina) who shed the blood of those outlawed by the
tyrant" (9). "Even after the triumph of the Bolsheviki [...], the state's relations with the population
remained as they had been under the tsars, and Ivan's Opritchniki became Lenin's Red Guards.
"Peter the Great was undoubtedly a political genius, but the material he worked with, the mould he used,
was not his own.
shaped by his predecessors, the pressure of foreign wars and internal unrest and the life he led did not
allow him to dig deep enough into the political soil to lay the foundations of a new structure (10). He
was content to adapt the type of Asian state he had inherited from his predecessors to the new
conditions. He contented himself with adapting to the new conditions the type of Asian state he had
inherited from his predecessors. That was all he did. All he did was invite Western Europeans, and
Germans in particular, to form the backbone of the administration he intended to reform, in the same
way that, a few centuries earlier, Slavic tribes had sent an embassy to the
Varègues to invite them to put Russia in order and to govern it. "Since then the
Germans played a predominant role in the Russian administration, in the army and navy, at court, in
schools and universities, in science and literature, in journalism, in trade and industry, everywhere
except in the Church (11)". It's true that the Russians had it out for them: like the Russians, they didn't
hesitate to cheat the treasury when the opportunity arose, even if they did so with a sense of
moderation that the Russian bureaucrat lacked. However, they served their Russian sovereign loyally.
Alexander III was the first Russian autocrat to deviate from the line drawn by Peter the Great. He
loathed Teutons and, indeed, all foreigners. For Alexander III was a nationalist and believed that no
foreigner had the right to worship the trinity of Orthodoxy, Panslavism and autocracy, a trinity that
would one day allow the Russian people to rise to the pinnacle. He therefore stripped his German
subjects of most of the privileges they had enjoyed until then, and forcibly russified the country.
administration. The Russification of the administration had disastrous results, all the more disastrous
because it had been preceded by the promulgation of the act of emancipation of the serfs and the
democratisation of the army under Alexander II. "The inevitable happened: the autocracy [...] lost
power to a myriad of troubled and irresponsible individuals throughout the empire, and the structure of
the state became unstable (12)".
This act unleashed ethnic forces whose nuclei were formed by emancipated peasants, the
They were enthusiastic followers of the "intellectuals" and non-Russian nationalities, who were quick to
join in the agitation against the regime. "Russian progressives joined forces with Poles, Jews, Armenians
and Muslims. Only the German element continued to fight for Tsarism" (13).
How did the brave de Witte react to the increasingly tangible aggressiveness of the non-Russian
elements towards Tsarism? He advocated "a policy of generosity" towards them and appealed to "their
noblest instincts and their sense of collective interest".
The professional army was replaced by the conscript army on 1 January 1874. The democratic reform of
military service introduced the character traits of the peasant - the feeling
dissatisfaction, bickering, a taste for satire, a lack of obedience - in a word, anarchy - in the army and
navy. "And over time, the efficiency of the Russian soldier diminished significantly. His generals, too,
seem to have fallen short. [The old army of Nicholas I would have stood in the way of a popular
revolution. Under Nicholas II, the March explosion would have been stifled if the army had been
opposed to it. But the peasant army that was sent against the German invaders was not made of the
same wood as the warriors who had made Russia's name famous in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. They hated war, couldn't wait to get back to their fields and took advantage of the first
opportunity, when the death penalty was abolished, to throw their rifles into the bushes and return to
their families. And when their hungry brothers encouraged them to turn their guns on the authorities
and fight for the land that had long been promised to them, they listened...". (14).
Finally, the industrialisation of Russia under Alexander II also helped to ignite the fuse by uprooting the
Russian peasantry. Until then, "the Russian social system was more or less medieval. Land essentially
belonged to the great noble families and large landowners, on whom the rural populace, who lived off
the land, were entirely dependent. Alexander II "emancipated" this
In other words, it uprooted them from the land and reduced them to a mass of nomadic pariahs.
A large proportion of the land was made available to rural communes (the mirs), which were managed
collectively.
They were exploited and paid less than under the previous system. Under this regime, the peasant was
at least attached to a piece of land, that of his lord, so he knew he was working for someone and was
often proud of it. Now that he was "free", he was more or less transformed into a proletarian, a mere
automatic instrument of labour. Under Alexander II, this was the true result of the "noble and generous
liberal ideas" and, in fact, this sovereign's reforms were greeted with frenzied applause from the
European democratic press of the time.
"The situation worsened still further under Alexander III. It was this sovereign who undertook the
artificial and corrupting industrialisation of Russia. No attempt was made to benefit organically, within
the means available, from Russia's natural resources; on the contrary, these resources were made
available to foreign capital, which encouraged a mode of production designed to benefit only
omnipotent capital and to enrich a new class of profiteers, while increasingly galvanising proletarian
opposition. It must be admitted that the Tsarist regime had not expressly wanted to reach this point,
but had been driven to it [...] by political considerations. Most of the capital was provided by France,
with the aim of strengthening Russia, which had become its ally, in the event of a new war against
Germany and of the
revenge that it was impatiently awaiting. Because it depended solely on foreign funds, industry was
deprived of the natural foundation of the land, which feeds its people and provides them, without
intermediaries or speculation, with their means of existence. The result was that neither those who
Neither those who worked nor those who employed them had direct access to the means to live and to
provide for others. Relationships between people changed. The old relationships [...] were replaced by
new ones.
relations based solely on money, which ended up being reduced to a pure and simple opposition
between those with empty stomachs and those with full stomachs. Russian soil had reached such a
stage of materialistic degradation that it was ripe like few others for the subversive agitation of the
Marxist ideology of class war, because it was one of the few countries where the process had been so
rapid and the Russian peasant, like the Russian in general, knows no middle ground, no wise
compromises: he goes from one extreme to the other. Freed from a patriarchal system of strict, blind
obedience, he can become a perfect anarchist" (15).
A magnifying mirror of the Russian race of soul and spirit, Grigor Rasputin was born in Pokrovskoye, a
small Siberian village in the marshy region of Tobolsk province. The inhabitants, most of whom were the
sons and daughters of prisoners carrying a heavy heredity, had
One of them, Grigor's father, was a horse thief. Grigor had not yet entered adulthood when he earned
the nickname Rasputin, a name derived from the rasputnik ("debauched") word. He continued to lead a
life of debauchery until he was touched by grace at the age of thirty, following an encounter
with a father. Russian tradition has it that a saint (Simon) appears to a fisherman to order him to
renounce his vices and that the fisherman feels contrition. Rasputin did not fail in this tradition. "In
Russia, where spontaneous repentance is generally the final stage of crime and religious conversion the
final stage of the sinner, the villain who atones for his crimes can count on the charity of the people"
(16) as well as on the complacency of the judiciary. "The doors of many monasteries were open to him if
he had chosen to become a monk, but either because he was aware of his unworthiness, or because he
was virtually illiterate, or because he was unable to escape the Russian tendency towards vagrancy, He
chose the painful but varied life of a pilgrim, wandering from village to village, from holy place to holy
place, without purse or pouch, barefoot and bareheaded, living on alms and making offerings in the
trunks of churches. He visited Jerusalem, among other places. During the two years he spent preparing
his mission, he was assisted by monks, with whom he was accustomed, in the manner of depressed
Russians, to discuss religious problems [...] with enthusiasm, interest and childishness" (17).
"It is easy to smile incredulously at the religious conversion of a vulgar being like Rasputin, who
breathed an atmosphere of vice and betrayed a hereditary tendency to crime. In the light of his
subsequent conduct, one might be tempted to regard this apparent improvement as an act of pure
hypocrisy. But this simplistic interpretation of Rasputin's confused motives
would show a lack of understanding of the complexity and subtlety of the moral world in general and of
Russian psychology in particular. Nowhere are avowed motives, unavowed motives and trivial motives
more inextricably entangled than in the Russian consciousness, nowhere are the contradictory
consequences of action more difficult to assess. The elements of
personality, which only comes into play at rare critical moments when it comes to making the right
decision.
are precisely those which are completely unaffected by the turmoil of everyday life. This is why they are
not known to the stranger, the friend, the confidant, or even the main person concerned, until
circumstances set them in motion. The Russian character is a multi-stringed instrument and the notes it
plays every day, affected by the ordinary events of life, do not express any of the other passionate
sounds that a sudden and subtle stimulus is capable of evoking" (18). Peasants like Rasputin E. Dillon
tells us that he knew many of them in different parts of the Russian Empire, whose "deepest instincts
were those of his people".
"Morbid retrospection is a typical characteristic of many Russians and asceticism is the usual
consequence. [...] Russians dwell on the mental and material conditions of their existence and analyse
their relationship with the invisible world, of which their religion gives them a glimpse. It is not unusual
for these
meditations derange timorous spirits, distort their piety by driving them to a state of terror.
superstitious and criminal practices. But, despite these visions [...], the down-to-earth character of the
individual is always present, in a latent form" (19). Rasputin was no mere hypocrite.
For some time at least, he submitted to the discipline he advocated. "His pilgrimage and the
The penances he had voluntarily imposed on himself had earned him the title of Starets - a name not
given to monks or priests but only to lay people who have renounced the world and live only for God
and the salvation of their souls - and he sought to add to it the titles of thaumaturgist and prophet.
Whenever his neighbours asked him a question, he would gaze dreamily into the distance, remain silent
for several minutes and then reply slowly with sentences that had no head or tail, as if he were coming
out of a trance. The good thief was sometimes one with the cunning charlatan" (20).
He himself believed that a great mysticism slumbers in the soul of almost all Russians, which a death, a
disappointment, an illness or a sincere word of encouragement can awaken at any moment and whose
awakening can have serious consequences. This religious temperament explains the number, variety and
strange character of Russian sects.
Rasputin naturally leaned towards the Khlysty sect. Whether or not he was a member of this sect, "the
history of religion and psychology teach us that mysticism and sensuality are not the same thing".
never far apart. As concupiscence was the main source of his own downfall, it was only natural that he
should generalise his experience and teach that it was the only mortal sin against which the true
Christian must constantly fight. The Khlysty method he proposed suited his vicious tendencies and
reminds me of the answer a catechumen once made
intelligent to a Catholic priest who asked him what you had to do to receive the sacrament of penance:
"You must first commit a sin, Reverend". This was exactly the doctrine propagated by Rasputin, who
maintained that salvation can only be achieved through repentance and that, in order to repent
effectively, one must first sin. Like the Khlystys, whose sect resembled its own small congregations, he
taught that any act of contrition in common must be preceded by the performance of sin in common"
(21).
"While the stubborn peasants of Pokrovskoye greeted the stories about Rasputin's marvellous gifts of
prophecy, healing and second sight with the scepticism that was part of their upbringing, the women's
hearts were touched, their faith acquired and their zeal ignited. They spread the word about their new
prophet, whose reputation soon spread throughout the villages and towns.
(22). He quickly acquired saintly status among women. "For a very long time, Rasputin's sect, which never
openly broke with the Orthodox Church, consisted almost entirely of women.
exclusively of women, most of whom were young, radiant and attractive". (23) However, the rising star
owed his fortune and fame to an encounter he had during one of his many
travels with an Orthodox priest who introduced him to the women of Moscow's high society. The
Bishop of Saratov was one of the two people who gave him access to the imperial court.
To the many disparate elements of which we have seen that the Russian people was composed from
the early Middle Ages, we must add the Jews. The Slavs found them in the Crimea, where they seem to
have been settled since the third century BC and where they mixed in the seventh century with the
Khazars who had fled there after the destruction of their kingdom by Sviatoslav, Prince of Kiev. During
Russia's internal wars, at the end of which Kiev, so weakened that it kept changing masters, eventually
fell into the hands of the princes of Lithuania and the Poles, Jews were to be found on all sides. "The
famous Russian Jewish orientalist Harkavy has published important documents showing that there were
many Jews among the Cossacks when they began to organise themselves in the sixteenth century" (24).
"Russian Jews, the majority of them in any case, knew exactly what they wanted; they showed it by
their actions; they expressed it clearly. They demanded the abolition of all restrictive laws; they
demanded equal rights and they knew "(25) that they would sooner or later obtain their emancipation
once the autocratic and bureaucratic regime had been overthrown"; "they
knew perfectly well that a republic, or even a constitutional monarchy, could not fail to proclaim the
principle of the "rights of man and the citizen", i.e. the emancipation of all members of the nation
without distinction of race or religion" (26). They did everything they could to contribute to its
overthrow. They played an active part. The heroism shown by the Jews in this gigantic struggle," wrote
a journalist in La Revue in January 1906, "is reminiscent of their own history.
formidable resistance to the Roman Empire. They have shown once again that the spirit of sacrifice,
courage and ingenuity that characterised their fight against Titus has not disappeared from the Jewish
soul [...]". "Russia owes much of its freedom to the Jews. Without them, the Liberals would never have
been able to achieve victory" (27).
In the 1870s and 1880s, young Jews played a leading role among the Narodniki. "Jewish workers at the
end of the nineteenth century were sensitive to socialism because of their religious origins. The Jewish
workers' unions welcomed the socialist doctrine as a revelation, as a messianic vision that had been
nourished to some extent by eschatological traditions and universal ideas of redemption". Similarly, the
theologian and economist Sergei Bulgakov (1871-1944) "wrote in 1905 that 'atheistic socialism' had the
same 'earthly' ideals as Jewish messianism and was thus opposed to his 'Christian socialism'". In 1910,
he described socialism as "a transposition of Jewish chiliasm" (28). The Bund, or General Union of
Jewish Workers, was founded in 1897. It conducted active propaganda in Yiddish and published
numerous pamphlets and a number of newspapers. "The Bund fomented numerous strikes in Russia:
between 1897 and 1900 alone there were 812, in which more than 27,890 men took part. There were
two
proletariats, the manual and the intellectual and, naturally, many Jews belonged to the intellectual
proletariat.
"The Jewish intelligentsia assimilated with the Russian intelligentsia during the 1970s, just as the Jewish
proletariat would later make common cause with the Russian proletariat" (29). His chutzpah served as a
model for the "pioneers of the Russian Revolution. There was no political organisation in the empire
that was not under Jewish influence or leadership. The Social Democratic Party, the Socialist
Revolutionary Party and the Polish Socialist Party all had Jews among their leaders. Vyacheslav Plehve
(1846-1904), director of the tsarist police and then Minister of the Interior from 1902 until his death,
was well placed to know that the struggle for political emancipation in Russia and the Jewish question
were practically identical and that 80 per cent of the revolutionaries in Russia were Jews (30), many of
them women.
The fact that the Jews enjoyed certain favours during the reign of Alexander II did not prevent them
from taking part in the revolutionary movement. "I dare, however, to state most categorically that, even
if the Jews had enjoyed equal rights in Russia and had not been subject to exceptional laws, they would
nevertheless have provided innumerable recruits for the revolutionary forces. This
ethnic or religious group [...] could not fail to be an opponent of tsarism and autocracy
" (31). Proof of this can be found in the answer given by a Bund delegation in 1905 to the question put
to it by E. J. Dillon as to whether the Jews were prepared to accept the proposal of the liberal Witte to
establish a House of Representatives. J. Dillon as to whether the Jews were prepared to accept the
proposal of the liberal Witte to establish a House of Representatives: "No. The Jews will not support
Witte. The Jews will not support Witte. He is not our man. He is only a bureaucrat and no bureaucrat
can be a reformer [...] The Jews will owe their emancipation to force and they will see to it that this
force breaks their bonds and gives them all their rights."
It was for reasons other than political, religious and economic that the Jews of Russia threw themselves
into the arms of the Revolution. Their attitude was closely linked to the "Jewish revolutionary instinct".
"Throughout history the Jewish spirit has always been revolutionary and subversive [...] It is progressive
and evolutionary. Even in the first national settlement it bore the seeds [of internationalism] which
would blossom and bear fruit in the ages to come. So the Jew who wishes to turn back, who ignores the
laws of evolution and progress and the advance his own race has made over others
nations by throwing off the shackles of narrow nationalism in the great march of humanity towards its
true goal, which will be attained when all men are brothers, when there will no longer be any difference
between classes, tribes, nations and peoples, in a word the march towards the great and glorious ideal
of a "Brotherhood of Men" [...], well this Jew is unfaithful to the spirit of Judaism. The Jewish spirit has
always aspired to justice, truth and equality: these are the fundamental principles of Israel. They were
embodied in the cry that resounded in the words of the prophets and was taken up by the first apostles
of Christianity. It was a protest, a revolt against iniquity and inequality. The
The first Christians were therefore the good Jews - or the good Jews were the first Christians [...] (32).
The religious factor
Hasidism was the last great movement of thought within Judaism before its emancipation. It has its
roots in the Kabbalah (33). Hasidism was born in the 1760s, but the foundations of the movement can
be considered to have been laid by Rav Israel ben Eliezer (1700-1760), nicknamed Baal Shem Tov, or
Besht, whose life and teachings are known only through the writings of his disciples and followers.
The word hasid is generally translated as 'love' or 'kindness'. A hasid is therefore a person who
practices love or compassion. In the Book of Jeremiah, Yahweh himself is described as a hasid. In other
passages of the Bible, people who love Yahweh and are loved by Him are also called hasids. This love
translates into the fulfilment of the obligations Yahweh has imposed. The word hasid often appears in
conjunction with zaddik, a virtuous person. A virtuous person is particularly close to Yahweh. Hasid
therefore came to mean a person who has a special relationship with Yahweh. Under the Hasmoneans,
Jews hostile to
the Hellenisation of Israel were called hasidim. In rabbinic Judaism, the word was used to designate a
person who fulfilled their religious obligations in a particularly strict manner and
careful: a pious person. In Germany at the end of the twelfth century, a Jewish mystical and ascetic
group whose ethic was characterised by humility, extreme altruism, a cynical and stoic search for an
absence of passions, a rejection of the physical world and a desire to be "pious".
to attain purity of soul took the name of hassidei ashkenaz. At the end of the sixteenth century,
mystical "holy associations" flourished in the Land of Israel, whose members aimed to make their
hearts the dwelling place (shekinah) of Yahweh by focusing continually on the Torah.
Their penitential rites went much further than those required of the ordinary Jew.
The seventeenth century saw a revival of interest in the practices and ideals of the Ashkenazi hasidei in
the Ashkenazi communities of Poland and Germany, where Torah study, mysticism, prayer, mystical
contemplation and kabbalistic practices often took extreme forms (34).
Besht's Hasidism taught, on the contrary, that what Yahweh requires of man is not asceticism and
mortification, as the Lurianic kabbalah wanted, nor in-depth study of halakhic literature (35), as the
Polish talmudists wanted, but devotion and adherence, union with Him (devekut). The only way to unite
with Him is to serve God with joy and abandon oneself to Him with enthusiasm (hitlavahut). The
Hasidim were certainly not the first to consider devekut as a fundamental concept, but whereas the
Kabalists considered it to be an ideal that could only be attained by a few virtuous men, the Hasidim
were the first to consider and affirm that it was accessible to all Jews, while conceding that most men
can only achieve divine union through the intermediary of the tzaddik (the 'holy', the 'pious'), who is a
manifestation of God and a link between the Creator and Creation. As G. Scholem suggested,
This extension of the scope of devekut reflects the transformation of Hasidism into a popular movement
and its convergence with populism, the political and social movement that emerged in Russia in the
1860s with the aim of drawing the entire peasantry, the people, into the struggle against Tsarist rule.
Among the Jews of Eastern and Central Europe, "as early as the Gaonic period, the title ba' al shem, or
'master of the name', designated a master of the practical Kabbalah who was an expert in the art of
suggesting
amulets for various purposes, invoking angels or demons and exorcising evil spirits that had taken hold of
the human body. On the whole, such characters were, in the spirit of
clearly assimilated to white magic" (36). In this respect, the Besht was no different from the other baalei
shem.
The world of the Jews of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was saturated with demons,
spectres and evil spirits, who were believed to be able to exert a particularly harmful influence on the
most important events in human existence: birth, marriage and death.
Sexual impotence or infertility were interpreted as the effects of witchcraft. Magical objects and
practices were supposed to chase away demons and protect men from illnesses and accidents that
were attributed to their action. They were also supposed to have the power to protect them from
dangers and misfortunes of human origin. Finally, magical procedures and objects were used to predict
future events. Of course, magical practices were not unique to the Jews. They were common among all
the European peoples of the time, although they were mainly practised by the peasantry and the
common people. Among the Jews, on the other hand, the art of magic was widespread among the
educated and the bourgeoisie. The science of magic was preserved by scholars and rabbis, who ensured
that it was passed down from generation to generation and used it whenever necessary. The baalei
shem were the authority on the art of magic among the general public. Although magical practices were
common to all strata of Jewish society, the baalei shem were considered the most competent to pass
them on and put them into practice. Until the beginning of the eighteenth century, most of them
worked as rabbis, only acting as miracle workers on a part-time basis. They then began to
specialise in thaumaturgy, perhaps because their services were increasingly in demand. The books on
charms that they began to publish at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when they were
who had hitherto been content to give them their guarantee, constituted a second source of income for
them, which did not dry up the first. Indeed, the magical procedures they divulged in books of charms
were often so complex that their co-religionists continued to call on them to apply them. The vogue for
magic among the Jewish working classes can be explained by the revival of scholarly interest in
cabalistic literature, which had the dual effect of reinforcing the authority of demonology and
strengthening belief in magical powers.
What distinguished Besht from the other baalei shem of the time was the mastery with which he
combined the use of magical science with prophetic inspiration. He could foretell both illness and the
future and, like Elijah (2 Kings 5.26), he could see at a distance and was able to discover incarnations.
(Under the influence of the Kabbalah and, in particular, the Lurianic Kabbalah, belief in reincarnation
had continued to grow among the Jews, especially among their elites, during the seventeenth century).
He was visited by God, who spoke through his mouth when he was in a trance. At least, this is what his
disciples reported, who, like Besht himself, saw his powers as a sign of divine providence. What's more,
unlike the other baalei shem, Besht had not inherited any magic books from his grandfather and
therefore had no reputation or authority; he was not even known as a guide: he must therefore have
become baal shem through an inner spiritual process (37). "The Hasidic movement has its origins in the
revelation of the Besht, the revelation of his "true" nature (38), which his admirers and followers say
took place in the northern Carpathians. It was there, according to legend, that the Besht decided to
return to the world after spending years in complete solitude to discover the secret mystical path
unknown to the masses.
Russian culture had absorbed a great deal of Jewish influence long before the emergence of Hasidism.
Although the origins of this influence are lost in antiquity, Jewish biblical elements are still present.
Jewish religious attitudes, musical traditions and literary works left their mark on Russia in later years.
Jewish religious attitudes, musical traditions and literary works subsequently left their mark on Russia.
Russian Orthodoxy itself contained many elements remarkably similar to the
practice and doctrine. There was a strong mystical tendency in the Orthodox Church. Adherents of this
tendency believed that the true believer was the receptacle of the divine and that, consequently, one
could speak in a certain sense of the divinisation of man. They believed that union with God, the very
essence of religion, was only possible in joy and religious ecstasy.
The Russian mystical soul was imbued with a desire for the infinite and for oneness with God. The mystics
maintained that the goal of human existence was to merge and dissolve into the divine soul.
universal. They also maintained that love was the highest value and that it filled and embraced all
creatures, including demons.
"Another particularly striking parallel between Hasidism and Orthodoxy is that between the Tzaddik and
the Starets. They came to prominence at the same time. The starets were holy men, usually monks,
whose gifts as spiritual guides commanded the respect of all Russians in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. He was not linked to the Orthodox hierarchy. If the first starets was a Russian saint and mystic
from the fifteenth century by the name of Nil Sorski who preached
mental asceticism, the starets did not become important figures in Russian religious life until the
eighteenth century, when they extended their activities from the monasteries to the lay world. They
became doctors of souls and counsellors to the common people, who began to make pilgrimages to
their monasteries and look to them as spiritual leaders, confessors and divinely inspired saints. In the
first half of the nineteenth century, just as tzaddikism was reaching its zenith in Hasidism, many
renowned starets with status, functions and activities in many ways similar to those of the tzaddikim
were at work among the Russians. Devotees chose a staret and submitted entirely to his authority. The
believer became
completely dependent on his starets. He gave up his own will and entrusted himself totally to his starets,
who thus acquired great power and personal influence. His influence was not linked to his position or his
knowledge, but came from his personality alone. He had a positive and optimistic attitude to life. People
believed that he possessed divine omniscience and wisdom, and that he was a paragon of humility,
kindness and devotion (39)."
Since its foundation by the first metropolitan, Leontius, who was sent from Byzantium with a procession
of Greek bishops by Patriarch Nicholas Chrysoverghes (983-996), the Orthodox Church has been an
exotic product, imported and alien to Russian idiosyncrasies in terms of beliefs, rules and ceremonies. It
contrasts with the old Armenian Church, which, despite the Greek and Syriac origins of its doctrine and
rites, has always been much closer to the religious tendencies of the Russian people.
"The Orthodox Church has never been anything more than a museum of liturgical antiquities. Vladimir
Soloviev compared it to a casket containing an oriental pearl whose lustre has been dimmed by a thick
layer of Byzantine dust. Its function in the State was always limited to that of a police force responsible
for controlling [consciences]. The clergy, with the exception of a few anchorites and ascetics given to
self-flagellation, was a body of social parasites, poor, filthy, greedy and ignorant, whose existence
alternately aroused the pity and contempt of the uncultivated herd of which they were a part.
set themselves up as shepherds. From the beginning, the Russian Church was a repository of petrified
forms to which a magical virtue was attributed. No life-giving spirit ever animated this rigid organism,
because Byzantium could not give what it did not possess" (40).
Over time, the rites and liturgical books of the Russian Orthodox Church had become more or less the
same.
away from the Greek Orthodox Church. Between 1652 and 1677, reforms were undertaken under the
aegis of the Russian patriarch Nikon, with the aim of reorganising the structures and restoring the
doctrine and traditions of the Church.
rites of the Russian Orthodox Church. A large number of them refused this reform and remained faithful
to the old rites, thus plunging the Russian Orthodox Church into a schism. Called Raskolnik (schismatics)
by their opponents, a name they refused to accept, they took the name of "Old Believers".
They believed that the end of the world would take place in 1666, the year in which Sabbatai Levi had
fixed the redemption of humanity.
In 1666, the Old Believers were condemned as schismatics and excommunicated by the Council of
Moscow.
The split was not solely the result of doctrinal differences. "It is certain that the great schism into which
Raskol fell was largely due to the conflict between the parish clergy and the monastic agents of the
absolutist and centralising government in Moscow", as well as to the growing influence of the Tatars on
the Russian government.
The high clergy and the episcopate recruited only monks. Peter the Great attacked the monasteries,
raising the age of novitiate to thirty, reducing the number of monks by half, forcing most of them to work
with their hands, denying them paper and ink to prevent them from writing.
He described them as the Antichrist and subjected them to a thousand indignities; but he did not venture
to break with the rule that all bishops had to be monks. As for the parish priests, who were to be
married, they carried no weight. Tensions therefore ran high between the high clergy and the low clergy.
Even before the appearance of the Old Believers in the mid-seventeenth century, members of the lower
clergy often refused to obey the orders of their archpriests and tried to evade not only the payment of
legal fees but also the jurisdiction of the metropolitan. The lower
clergy aspired to independence. The cup was full when Nikon, not content with simplifying the liturgy
and liturgical books, began to levy taxes on every town and village. The Old Believers appealed to the
Tsar. The Tsar's government sided with the ecclesiastical authorities and punished them.
the opposition.
Until the beginning of the seventeenth century, all the Russian provinces enjoyed a degree of autonomy.
"In the seventeenth century, the explosion of violence and barbarism that took place in Muscovy
was accompanied by the arrival of tsars, tsarinas, tsarevichs, princes and petty princes from all over the
world.
Kazan, Astrakhan and Siberia, who offered their services to the Tsar's government and married into the
Russian nobility, thus setting themselves up as defenders of Russian territory and taking control of the
towns of Kasimov, Zvenigorod, Kashir, Serpoukhov, Khotan, louriev and numerous villages and hamlets
(41)." This is how the proverb was coined: "Live until Moscow gets its hands on you". It was at this time
that the proverb "Live until Moscow gets its hands on you" was coined. Andreev states that the
ancestors of most of the Russian nobles in the Moscow kingdom were Tatar emigrants or European
settlers." It was under pressure from the Tatars that in January 1649 the Zemski sobor (Congress of the
Russian Land) promulgated the Sobornoye Ulozheniye (Code of Tsar Alexis), which replaced the
communal councils of the Russian provinces with an autocratic bureaucracy. The Tatars gained access
to the highest administrative posts and were kept there by the Tatars themselves.
russified. Russia's national characteristics were completely forgotten, especially as the ruling caste,
being mainly composed of elements alien to the Russian genius, had no idea of the character and
aspirations of the people they governed.
The Old Believers were violently opposed both to the Tatarisation of Russia and to the monopoly, closely
linked to the centralising state, that the monks exercised over the Orthodox Church.
The most striking similarities between the Sabbatarians and the Old Believers were their belief in
apocalyptic prophecies, their fascination with cabalistic calculations, their state of ecstatic joy, and their
quasi-masochistic acceptance of suffering. Old Believers made common cause with Jews and other
minorities to survive the persecution they faced. Sectarians and Jews
influenced each other, and the Jews played a significant role in the religious effervescence that rose in
Russia at the end of the seventeenth century. The Russian sectarians were all convinced that man was
capable of establishing direct links with God outside the established Churches. They tried to achieve
this collectively through exercises such as hand-to-hand combat, the consumption of alcohol, flogging
and even castration. Sectarian movements found their greatest echo in the
declining agricultural regions in the south and west of Russia.
Jewish mysticism exerted a profound influence on the genesis of the Russian religious philosophical
tradition through Jacob Böhme (1575-1624), whose writings have close affinities with the Russian
tradition.
with cabalism. Indeed, like the cabalists, he conceived of God as a force both infinitely transcendent and
immanent, of man's intellectual aspirations, sexual desires and social instincts as expressions of
'nostalgia' for the lost unity of man and God, and, like the cabalists, of God himself as seeking Sophia,
'the eternal virgin of divine wisdom' and 'the principle of eternal femininity', Like the cabalists, he
considered that God himself was looking for Sophia, "the eternal virgin of divine wisdom" and the
"principle of eternal femininity", and equated the return to God with the realisation of androgyny. All
this made a great impression on Russian religious thinkers. They were equally moved by the writings of
Johann Arndt (1555-1621), a Lutheran theologian for whom "the Kabbalah constitutes a great effort to
rediscover the hidden mysteries according to the Holy Scriptures". ("Where magic ceases," he wrote,
"Kabbalah begins, and where Kabbalah ceases, true theology and the spirit of Kabbalah begin").
prophetic beginnings" (42) and who was "one of the masters and spiritual fathers of the authors
of the Rosicrucian manifesto of the seventeenth century" (43). All texts by Arndt, translated by
Todorskii,
were banned by a decree issued under pressure from the Synod. As the decree never really came into
force, they continued to circulate in turbulent sectarian circles, which were never really combated in
Russia either.
Moreover, "these religious movements did not openly combat Orthodoxy, but rather saw themselves as
the true guardians of its message, which they considered corrupt. Nevertheless, thanks to their activities,
a new religious vision began to take shape in Russia, carrying with it the many problems that the
Reformation had left as its legacy to the world.
Western philosophy. It was a religious vision based on progress and inner search, and was uninterested in
the ritualistic and dogmatic aspects of the institutional Church. Its elements
The ideological principles of the Protestant reformers were not dissimilar to their own: belief in the
imminent advent of the millennium and a spirituality strongly influenced by neo-Platonism and
mystical pantheism. The latter was expressed in the concept of creation as an emanation of Sophia, in
their desire to leave the earthly world and the earthly Church to live with the "people of God" in an
"inner Church", in imitation of Christ. The terrestrial Russian Church was neither willing to understand
nor to combat this phenomenon (44)."
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a time of religious ferment and mystical hysteria in
Russia. The schism of 1666-1667 gave rise to deep enmity between the two rival factions and
radicalised the Old Believers. Between 1672 and 1691, over 20,000 of them committed suicide in
immolating themselves. Dissenting sects multiplied. They had hundreds of thousands of members and
millions of supporters (in 1840, an imperial commission estimated their number at 9.3 million). They
had visions, performed miracles, prophesied and predicted the future.
The dissident parish clergy was divided into three categories: the old believers, the "rationalists" and
the mystics.
The "rationalists", whose two largest sects were the Molokans (the Milk Drinkers) and the Dukhobortsy
(the Spiritual Wrestlers, who had the particularity of sometimes walking around town naked in imitation
of Adam and Eve and organising orgies at the end of their religious gatherings),
rejected the authority of the Church and claimed the freedom to interpret Holy Scripture as they saw fit.
The old believers attached importance to ceremonies; the 'rationalists' rejected them and rejected
all external forms of worship, sacraments, icons, holy images and relics.
The mystics were represented by the Khlysty (Flagellants), of which the Skoptsy (Castrated) were a
branch; although the mystics appeared in the mid-seventeenth century, certain aspects of their teaching
reflected old Christian heresies. They believed in the possibility of direct communication between man
and God without the mediation of the established churches.
So much so that they gave themselves titles like "Prophet", "Tsar" or "Christ"; the leader of the
Flagellants wore the title of "Mother of God". They tried to establish a link with God collectively,
through exercises such as hand-to-hand combat, alcohol consumption, flogging and castration. The old
Russian belief that God lives in the soul of every man and that he
expresses itself through his mouth was reaffirmed among them with new vigour. The members of these
sects lived almost clandestinely and presented themselves to foreigners as orthodox Christians.
The main events of the years following the schism were the rebellion at the Solovetski monastery -
which was committed by the Old Believers following the Tsar's refusal to allow them to continue
practising the old rites - and the Streltsy revolt in Moscow, which in many ways resembled that of 1917
and led to the Old Believers being dispersed throughout Russia and even going into exile. It was at this
time that mass suicides were on the increase among the Raskolniks. Twenty thousand cases of selfimmolation
were recorded between 1666 and 1689. "Fight the Antichrist" was the cry with which the
Raskolnik gave themselves courage and declared that they would rather self-immolate than fall into the
hands of the government. Those who, in spite of everything, preferred to go on living led the movement
opposing Peter the Great's reforms, claiming that he was "an agent of Satan" and that he was "an agent
of Satan".
"The Old Believers, of course, embraced the Johannine teaching that a mysterious figure possessed the
power of Satan and would appear at the end of time to wage a supreme struggle against the Church of
Christ. In addition, the Old Believers, like Russians in general, gave credence to the Hussite idea that the
Pope had become the precursor of the Antichrist in the year 1000 and subscribed to the idea that the
Western Slavs had abjured Roman Catholicism in 1439 at the Council of Florence and that it was
therefore up to Moscow to rekindle the torch of Christianity: Moscow, not the Tsar, because it was
understood that all Tsars from 1666 onwards would be incarnations of the Antichrist. For the
Raskolniks, as for the Cathars, the government of kings and princes was a manifestation of the power of
Satan.
On the death in 1656 of Paul de Kolomna, the only ecclesiastic who had been able to maintain unity
in the movement, the Old Believers split into two movements, the Popovtsy - who welcomed the
defector priests ordained by the Orthodox Church - and the Bezpopovtsy - who took up the cause
of the Old Believers.
without priests. The Popovtsy founded a few settlements and monasteries in the Don region and, until
the second half of the nineteenth century, tried in vain to create their own episcopate. Some firmly
believed that there was a true Church somewhere and tried to discover it in order to join it. Others
were convinced that a genuine Christian community had survived in Jerusalem. Still others clung to the
legend that a church lay beneath an invisible city on the shores of Lake Svetloyar, which would only
become visible again at the end of the world. It is difficult to separate the birth of radical socialist ideas
in Russia from the "spiritual communism" practised by the various Russian sects. Popular myths had for
centuries nurtured a widespread belief in the possibility of an earthly communist paradise bound
together by brotherly love and where justice, truth and equality would prevail. In the early twentieth
century, these myths captured the popular imagination and were associated with hopes of revolution.
A small number of old believers were allowed to use their old liturgical books again on condition that
they returned to communion with the Orthodox Church. Paul I made concessions to the Popovtsy who
agreed to rejoin Orthodoxy. Persecution of them resumed under the reign of Nicholas I, who was
convinced that their communion was insincere. The Bezpopovtsy took refuge in Siberia, in the Novgorod
region In 1720, the Bezpopovtsy declared that the advent of the antichrist had invalidated the clergy
and divine sacrifice and that, in these circumstances, each Christian became his own priest. The
Philipovsty, one of their branches, refused to pay taxes and to have a civil status. The Straniki
(Wanderers), one of the two branches of the Philipovsty,
formed a community similar to the primitive Church. In general, the Popovsty, like the Cathars, rejected
the world as created by the principle of Evil. They pretended to respect the Tsar, the government and civil
laws because they had no other choice, but in reality they
believed that all authority, being based on ignorance, was inevitably invalid or unjust, and so they refused
to obey it.
At the end of the eighteenth century, some of the Old Believers, mainly those living in the cities, were
to some extent reconciled with civil society, while the most extreme branches, the Beguny
(Wanderers), remained intransigent. Most Raskolniks retained their convictions, as shown by the fact
that in the nineteenth century the largest and most active sects were those that considered prayers for
the Tsar and his family to be the worst form of blasphemy. Similarly, the peasants and poor who
attended the annual Popovtsy assembly in Moscow in 1864 refused to pray for the Tsar.
The internal structure of a number of communities of Old Believers can be described as communist.
In the works of the founder of the Straniki, the systematic division of the people into classes, the
sharing of land, forests and water, and the registration of deeds, were stigmatised as victories of the
Antichrist. On his death, one of his disciples established that no Straniki had the right to be a king.
Another proclaimed that the maxim of Evtimiy of Tarnovo, according to which "the words 'mine' and
'thine' are accursed and profane, for God has put all things in common", should be respected. Another
proclaimed that the maxim of Evtimiy of Tarnovo that "the words 'mine' and 'yours' are accursed and
profane, for God has put all things in common" applied to all property without exception. On this basis,
they demanded rigorous communism and a complete renunciation of property rights. Their
communitarian ideal led them to believe in the existence of Belovodye, a mythical city in Central Asia
whose inhabitants pooled their goods and paid no taxes to any government.
In the many villages they had converted, the Raskolniks dug underground galleries where they could
find refuge in case of danger. The following anecdote gives an idea of the strength of their organisation:
in 1867, steps were taken to arrest a Raskolnik who had been living in Moscow for a long time, but the
Old Believers got wind of this plan; their ecclesiastical council had even managed to obtain a copy of the
confidential circular describing it in great detail.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the Russian government estimated the number of Raskolniki at
around ten million.
The Doukhobortsy, the Molokanye and the Khlysthy preceded the old believers by several generations.
The main characteristic of these three sects was that their revolt was more moral than intellectual. They
preached a return to Christ and a break with the Church, which, although it pretended t o believe in the
Gospel, had set it aside since the so-called conversion of Constantine. They claimed that the true
Christian faith had gone underground in the fourth century and had only reappeared within their
congregations. The Doukhobortsy and Molokanye have features not unlike those of the Cathar or
Albigensian sects, and it is likely that they derive from the Bogomils and therefore, to a certain extent,
from primitive Christianity and, perhaps, from Gnosticism and the
Marcionism. Widely disseminated in Western Europe under the veneer of Catholicism, it resurfaced
during the upheavals of the Reformation; after a period of latency among the Slavs, it reappeared with
the Raskolnik movement and the reforms of Peter the Great. The Doukhobortsy suddenly appeared in
the middle of the eighteenth century. Their fundamental principle
was mutual love. They knew nothing of private property and held all their possessions in common. They
practised communism in its simplest form. They had no leaders. Everyone had equal rights. Although
opposed in principle to the monarchy and, indeed, to any other system of government, they pretended
to submit to the established authorities. However, they refused to bear arms or take an oath.
It was also a time when the Ukrainian mystic Gregory Skovoroda (1722-1794) was roaming Russia with
the Jewish Bible in his haversack, preaching ideas that bore striking formal similarities to Hasidic and
Kabbalistic doctrine. The concept of the divine spark, which lies at the heart of Kabbalistic and Hasidic
teaching on the relationship between God and the world, played an important role in Skorovoda's
thinking and, more generally, in the doctrine of the
Doukhobortsy, who believed that the body is a temporary prison for the spirit, which can only escape
through mortification. Similarly, in the Kabbalah, the Qlipa (evil) is a bark that must be removed in order
to see the divine light.
In 1865, the Molokanye, the main dissident branch of the Doukhobortsy, had a work published in
Russian entitled "The Confession of Faith of the Spiritual Christians called Molokanye", which retraced
the history of the sect and set out its doctrine, while emphasising the persecution of its members.
It is not uninteresting that it was published in Geneva. The Molokanye were always classified as a
dangerous sect by the Russian government. For them, society and Christ cannot be separated; they are
one; this unity rests entirely on the evangelical precepts of love and equality (II Cor., iii, 17): God is a
Spirit; where the Spirit is, there is freedom. It follows that the only
he moral foundation of the Christian life is complete freedom and independence from all human laws
and constraints. The authority of men is not binding on those who are inspired by the teachings of
Christ. As they did not recognise human laws, the Molokanye did not feel morally obliged to pay taxes
or, naturally, to do military service. In the 1830s, several false prophets arose in their ranks. One of
them, who had discovered that Alexandropol was the new Zion, convinced some of the sect's members
that it was possible to fly to heaven from a peak in the South Caucasus. Forward-thinking and
methodical, he made canvas wings and launched himself from the roofs of the houses in his village.
Semen Matveevich Uklein (1733-1809), the Molokanye leader, introduced a number of Jewish
customs into his sect, influenced by one of his lieutenants, Semen Dalmatov. The
followers of Uklein went so far as to give the Mosaic law primacy over Christian doctrine and to
assert that Moses took precedence over Jesus Christ. This was the main point of disagreement
between the Gnostics and the future Christian Church in the early days of Christianity.
Around 1820, Maxim Akinthiev, a well-to-do peasant who belonged to the Molokanye sect, founded a
dissident sect whose doctrine and social organisation differed only in detail from those of the
Molokanye. He called for a return to the communism of the primitive Church as described in the Book of
the
Acts of the Apostles and planned to establish a community society based on family and village
organisation. None of its members was to own anything apart from their children and their wives. All the
income of its members was pooled and deposited in a common treasury.
All the farming tools were jointly owned.
The project failed, as had all the Raskolniki's other attempts at communist egalitarian social organisation.
The Brotherhood of the Right Hand, or La Nouvelle de Sion, was founded around 1876 by an artillery
captain called Ilin who had been relegated to the Solovets monastery twenty years earlier. His followers
were mainly to be found in the Perm and Ural provinces. Its main source of inspiration is the
Apocalypse. Like the Doukhobortsy, this sect rejected all rites, the invocation of saints, relics and
ecclesiastical authority. It is, however, strongly tinged with Judaism, as it demands the observance of
the Sabbath, circumcision and forbids the consumption of pork. At the same time, Ilin called the Jews
the congregation of Satan and attacked the Jews of Paris in particular. He looked forward to the
establishment of a Judaism in accordance with the New Testament and believed that Jehovah would
soon appear and that, after separating the good from the bad, he would gather the latter in Judea, in a
kingdom that would last a thousand years, "where all would be equal, where there would be no social
class, no police, no judges, only saints and ordinary people".
The principles of the Khlysty have no more to do with the Christology of the great historical Churches
than those of the Doukhobortsy. Indeed, the hymns of the Khlysty are full of terms such as Jehovah
Sabaoth, God the Father, the Son of Christ of God, the Holy Spirit, the Mother of God, a title given to
Mary at the Council of Ephesus. Interestingly, the Khlysty considered their sect to be much older than
their god, Jehovah Sabaoth.
But the Khlystys breathe a different atmosphere from that of the Byzantine doctors of theology, who
reshaped the messianic ideal according to the categories of Greco- Semitic philosophy and suppressed
its pneumatic and prophetic aspects as far as possible. The origin of the Khlysty doctrine can be found in
some of the earliest phases of the Christian faith, in that form of Christianity known as Adoptianism, in
which the Holy Spirit descended from heaven in the form of a dove to take possession of the "man born
of men", Jesus of Nazareth, who received this honour because he had kept all the precepts of the Law
and the Prophets. Like Paul,
the Adoptianists believed that they had died and risen with their Master and that the Spirit dwelt in
them and spoke through their mouths. The Khlysty also shared with them the cult of virginity, which was
found in the "Middle Ages" in the chivalry and in Dante and, later, throughout Russia, where those who
practised it called themselves "Christs".
For both the Khlysty and the Doukhobortsy, a fundamental point of doctrine is that the Christ is
reincarnated in each individual and that after the death of one of their Christs, the soul of the Christ is
incarnated in another individual.
again in another human body. Among the Khlystys, a Christ was recognised by his suffering. And the
Khlystys could count on the Russian authorities to persecute them. The two main sacraments of the sect
were mortification, suffering that they imposed on themselves or that the Russian government was
always ready to inflict on them, and the reception of the Holy Spirit, which, as in the primitive Church,
manifested itself through trance, ecstasy, convulsions and contortions.
For two and a half centuries, the sect, which flourished in monasteries and convents, concealed its rites
under the veneer of devout adherence to the Orthodox Church.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, a member of the Khlysty felt that the sect's morals had become
lax and broke away to found the Skoptsy sect. Wherever they spread, they formed Korahlya, presided
over by Christs, prophets or prophetesses. Their rigorous asceticism and
The skill with which they pretended to adhere to Orthodoxy led the Russian clergy to think that they
were good Christians and allowed the police officials, whom they bribed all day long, to pretend that
they were Orthodox. They did not eat meat and, as with the Cathars, men did not approach or touch
women, if they were able, even those of the sect. They religiously renounced meat, claiming, like the
Cathars, that it was the fruit of copulation. But they ignored the orthodox rules of fasting and ate eggs,
fish and meat.
milk and cheese during Lent. In L'Empire des tsars et les Russes, Leroy-Beaulieu describes the main rite
of the Skoptsy as follows: "It is not usually on young children that the Skoptsy practise their
fundamental rite; it is most often on mature men, when the sacrifice is the hardest and the operation
the most dangerous. This bloody initiation sometimes has several stages: the mutilation may be
complete or incomplete; depending on the case, it is called by the sectarians the royal seal or the
second purity. Women do not always escape this horrible baptism. For them, the
mutilation is not compulsory; many, however, on admission to the "doves" receive the stigmata of the
sect and the royal seal, which is the sign of entry into the number of the pure.
In their case, the Skoptsy seem to attack the ability to nourish rather than the ability to beget. The
young girl's newly formed breast is amputated or disfigured, her breasts subjected to a sort of odious
tattoo. Sometimes both udders are completely removed. In some women, the fanatics' iron goes even
further, attacking more intimate organs, although these incisions, carried out by ignorant hands, most
often render the unfortunate women who undergo them incapable of becoming mothers. Trials have
highlighted these outrages against human nature. The surgical procedures used for these detestable
ceremonies have been discussed in court. Judges have seen old women in their eighties and young girls
of fifteen, seventeen and twenty, all variously deformed by the fanatical knife or scissors". He thus gives
an idea of the race of mind and soul of the individuals who belonged to the Skoptsy sect, because sexual
mutilation is a widespread practice among all peoples, with the exception of those of Indo-European
origin.
At the end of the nineteenth century, there were three main forces at work in Russian thought: an
esoteric tendency, including Freemasonry and Gnostic syncretism of an initiatory nature, and a
tendency towards a more spiritual approach.
Rosicrucians were the main representatives; a rationalist and atheist tendency: resulting from the
fermentation of the components of the philosophy of the Enlightenment and the Hegelian dialectic which
It was a religious and traditionalist trend, mystical and Slavophile, whose aspirations were in line with
those of the Old Believers and certain "rationalist" and mystical sects.
Like Shatov in The Demons, the Slavophiles were spokesmen for the Russian idea and the belief in a
providential mission for Russia; hostile to Voltairianism, scepticism and
the atheism that Enlightenment philosophy and Hegelian dialectics had propagated in eighteenthcentury
Russia, this tendency nonetheless also fed Marxism, as Marx clearly saw: "The first phase of
the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie is characterized by the
formation of sects. In short, they represent the infancy of the proletarian movement, just as astrology
and alchemy represent the infancy of science. For the foundation of the International to be possible, the
proletariat had to have gone beyond this phase (45)."
These different trends were all characterised by a desire to build a new society. In any case, "In the
17th century as in the 19th, both the people and the intelligentsia were searching for an ideal
kingdom founded on justice, in contrast to the visible kingdom of today, where injustice rules.
(46). "
At the end of the nineteenth century, Russian aristocratic circles were plagued by both Freemasonry and
mystical sectarianism (47).
The Freemason factor
From the reign of Ivan III (1440-1505), Grand Prince of Vladimir and Moscow from 1462 to 1505, "all
the rulers of Muscovy until Peter the Great seem to have had, or been accused of having, an interest
in magic, alchemy or astrology, or even all three" (48). In 1621, Arthur Dee, the eldest son of the
Elizabethan astrologer and occultist, accepted the post of physician to Michael I Romanov (1596-
1645), Tsar of Russia (1613 - 1645), on the advice of James I. His appointment was part of a
programme to recruit dozens of scientists and technicians. They were also expected to be experts in
alchemy and astrology. During the fourteen years he spent at the imperial court, he devoted himself
to alchemy and edited a collection of alchemical texts, Fasciculus Chemicus, which he published in
Paris in 1621.
not exactly to the taste of the tsar's chancellor. Nevertheless, he left Russia unharmed in 1635. Not all
the foreign scientists who came to Russia at the invitation of the Tsar were so lucky. A number of them
did not survive the wrath of employers disappointed by their talents or succumbed to the blows of a
populace convinced that they were magicians.
The Tsars' growing interest in the Kabbalah was coupled with a fear, mingled with fascination, of
indigenous magic. In 1598, Boris Godunov swore an oath to those in his service not to cast spells on
him. Several people were accused of having subjected him to a spell, either because he really believed it
or because it was a convenient way of getting rid of his political opponents. The same oath was
demanded of the Muscovite population in the seventeenth century by Vassili IV Chouiski (1552-1612),
tsar from 1606 to 1610. In pre-modern Russia, black magic rituals and protection against black magic
were the domain of men, while divination was reserved for women; those who practised the profession
of fortune-teller were often also midwives. With the exception of the reign of Aleksey Mikhailovich, Tsar
from 1646 to 1676, who, like James I, was both interested in the occult sciences and terrified of black
magic, there was no real witch-hunt in Russia, although denunciations, arrests, trials and executions of
witches did take place more or less sporadically.
In Russia, as elsewhere, the arts of magic and divination probably date back to the dawn of time, and
there are no written records of them. The first books of magic written in Russian that we have
originated in Byzantium. (49) The composition of a large number of these divinatory texts is
attributed to biblical characters. Christian" folk magic was based on prayers, spells, lists of good and bad
days, brechomancy and brontomancy, which are still very much alive today. At the end of the
nineteenth century, the nature and role of magic and divination were probably very similar in the
Russian countryside and in rural areas of other European countries.
Two works of Semitic magic, including the Hebrew version of Secretum secretorum, a treatise on
occult sciences on the art of governing, the original of which seems to have been written in Arabic,
penetrated the Russian Empire towards the end of the fifteenth century, at a time when Jewish
influences were beginning to be felt there via Poland - the fact that geomancy was banned by a law
promulgated under t h e reign of Catherine II demonstrates that the influences in question were not
exerted solely on the circles of the Jews.
intellectuals. It was also at the end of the fifteenth century that the Russian peasant strata
began to be exposed to magical texts from Western Europe, such as almanacs and manuals of popular
medicine, Russian translations of which were published regularly until the seventeenth century. The
seventeenth century also saw the publication of a number of treatises on the interpretation of dreams,
as books were increasingly used as amulets.
The fact remains that the gulf rapidly widened between the practices and ideas imported into Russia by
foreign scholars employed by the local aristocracy, which were more or less considered to be 'scientific'
and whose dissemination was limited to imperial circles, and, on the other hand, magic and the
popular medicine, which, more or less influenced by the divinatory art of the Byzantine textual
tradition, survived in the anthologies published by monks and old believers. However, as one could
never be too cautious, foreign scholars attached to the imperial court had to swear a written
declaration that they would not use magical procedures to harm the tsar and his family (50).
The study of magic in ancient foreign texts was fragmentary and sporadic until the reign of Peter I
(1672-1725), Tsar from 1682 until his death. Esotericism, as opposed to popular magic and superstition,
began to exert a significant influence on the Russian upper classes following the establishment of
Freemasonry in Russia.
"Captain John Phillips of the Grand Lodge of London was appointed Grand Master of Russian
Freemasonry in 1731. Ten years later, he was replaced in this position by a Scotsman, General James
Keith (1696 - 1758), who can be considered the true founder of Russian Masonry. Under his leadership,
the lodges, most of whose members had previously been English or German, saw the accession of many
Russians belonging to high society (51)." In the 1760s, "Empress Elisabeth's secret chancellery already
noted that a number of high officials were Masons, in particular the brothers Zechariah and Ivan
Chernyshev, R.L. Vorontsov, the brothers P.I. and I.I. Melissino, Prince M.M. Chtcherbatov and the two
Panines. Various prominent members of the Galitzine and Troubetskoï families in the guards and cadet
corps were also included, as well as
a few commoners (52) ...". Not being in the Empress' favour, Keith eventually entered the service of
Frederick II of Prussia, who appointed him Governor of Berlin and promoted him to the rank of Field
Marshal. After his departure from Russia, Russian Freemasonry soon found a new patron.
protector in the person of Ivan Ivanovitch Chouvalov (1727 - 1797), one of the empress's most trusted
confidants, to whom he never revealed his membership of the sect.
The enthusiasm that Keith's proselytism had aroused for Freemasonry in Russian aristocratic circles
redoubled during the 1760s, to such an extent that Peter III, Emperor of Russia from 5 January to 9 July
1762, is said to have donated a house to the À la constance lodge and to have held Masonic conferences
in his Oranienbaum castle. "Around 1775, the Grand Master of the Russian Masons was I.P. Yelagin,
director of the court theatres and shows and administrator of court property. He had under his
authority some fourteen lodges, some of which were German, English and bilingual (with Russian),
which belonged to the mitigated observance limited to three degrees: apprentice,
companion and master. But the desire to deepen the mystery and multiply the number of degrees took
hold in Russia as elsewhere. Baron Reichel, who entered Russian service in 1770, imported Zinnendor's
system from Brunswick and attracted many of Yelagin's lodges; in 1776, the two groups united under
the leadership of Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick.
"Even so, Reichel's system proved too pragmatic and insufficiently ritualised and esoteric to satisfy his
followers [...] These disappointed followers found an answer in the Order of the Temple, or the Order
of the Rosicrucians. Strictly hierarchical and comprising numerous grades, this order had had
It was very successful in Sweden, where a friend of Grand Duke Paul, A.B. Kourakine, imported it in
1776-1777. It took root in Russia during the visit of Gustav III, who brought with him the most
important constitutional documents of Masonry. However, all the efforts made to unite all the Russian
lodges into a single system with a single Grand Master, the Duke of Sudermanie, brother of the King of
Sweden, failed when Yelagin realised the danger of allowing the leadership of the movement to pass
into foreign hands, while Nikita Panine, assistant to the Grand Master, was in charge of the country's
external affairs. The two systems therefore remained separate and Prince G.P. Gagarin, oberprokuror in
the Senate and friend of Paul [the Grand Duke (1754-1801), son of Catherine II and Peter III], took over
the leadership of the Swedish system. Two of Panine's nephews, princes A.B. Kurakin, and
N.V. Repnine, belonged to it at one time or another and seventeen lodges joined it for varying periods
between 1780 and 1790. But finally, the most influential of the Masonic groups developed in Moscow
where, having broken with the Swedish system, in 1781 he created a new "scientific" lodge, "Harmony",
of which N.I. Novikov became a member I. G. Schwarz was the great inspirer" (53).
I. G. Schwarz (1751-1784), Transylvanian by birth, arrived in Moscow in 1779 to take up a post as
professor of German at the University, "a position he no doubt owed to his connections with the
masonry". In 1781, he went "to Germany in order to associate the Russian Freemasons, who until then
had depended on the Swedish Grand Lodge, with the Rosicrucians of Berlin (who depended directly on
Johann Christoph von Wöllner, Minister of Justice and author of the famous edict against
Enlightenment thought, Wöllnisches ou Preußisches Religionsedikt of 9 September 1788). Through this
action
Schwarz secured one of the most eminent, but secret, positions in the hierarchy of Freemasons in
Russia. After his death in February 1784, Baron G. J. Schröder became the agent of the Freemasons.
liaison with Berlin, as did Novikov, [...] who became an effective member of the Rosicrucians in the
summer of the same year (54)". (54) As soon as Schwarz returned to Moscow in February 1782, "the
'Harmonie' lodge was reorganised as a Rosicrucian centre, subordinate to Theden and Wöllner. Schwarz
himself was given the task of recruiting Masons and directing their activities; he had to send his superior
in Prussia an annual report on his new brethren, as well as ten roubles for each recruit. Then, at the
Wilhelmsbad Masonic Convention in 1782, he obtained recognition for Russia as the eighth province
under the authority of the Grand Master of the European Strict Observance, Duke Ferdinand of
Brunswick" (55).
Novikov (1744-1818) and his brothers, conscious heirs to mystical sectarianism, had set up "a vast
programme of concrete initiatives, with a view to a general reform that would lead to the creation of a
new culture and, consequently, a new world. All the agitation and
the effervescence that had reigned in Russian spirituality for a century converged in this programme".
Like the activities of the sectarians of the seventeenth century, it goes without saying that those of the
Novikov's circle" were not opposed to religious institutions. On the contrary, the particular position of
weakness of the Church and the spread of Western mystical concepts since the last century were the
main reasons for this,
the eclecticism of Russian culture in the eighteenth century, which was in the midst of a renaissance,
meant that Novikov's group saw their membership of the Rosicrucian movement as the restoration of a
vital past, a classical philosophical and religious heritage. And all this was in perfect accord with the
precepts of Russian Orthodoxy, and even more so to extract from its precepts their most authentic core
(56)." The Russian Rosicrucians formed the hard core of the Freemasonic nebula, whose teachings and
activities prepared the ground for the revolution. "Only those who chose to live their faith and place
themselves at the service of God and their fellow human beings were admitted to Rosicrucian circles
(57).
Although, as we have seen, the old believers and sectarians were aware of Jewish mystical doctrines
from the end of the seventeenth century, and certain Russian emperors of the time had received vague
notions of them from their "doctors", it was not until the second half of the eighteenth century that
they were considered to be "mystical".
infiltrated all aristocratic circles, with the establishment of the first Masonic lodges around 1750 and
the first Rosicrucian lodges around 1780. Judging by the catalogue of Novikov's personal library, which
he himself compiled from the cabalistic writings of the Christian cabalists of Western Europe, "Russian
Freemasons had access to almost all the
sources of Masonic, occult and Christian Kabbalah available at the time" (58). Like Pico della Mirandola
and other Christian cabbalists, they saw the occult sciences in general and the Kabbalah in particular as
the repository of an ancient wisdom that could help them decipher not only the Old Testament but also
the New Testament and the writings of the Fathers of the Church. Of all the cabalistic books, it was the
Sefer Yetzira, which deals with the ten levels or powers of the emanation or manifestation of the divine,
defined as the En-Soph, the "Endless", the "Immanent God", and which is supposed to provide a
mystical interpretation of the Jewish scriptures, which they considered to be the oldest and most
important receptacle of Jewish tradition. In addition, certain hermeneutical methods such as gematria,
notaricum and temurah became extremely popular in Masonic circles. In practice, Russian Freemasons
refused to use their knowledge of the Kabbalah, but since it was understood that their individual
salvation depended on the improvement of society and, more generally, of humanity, in other words,
on tikkun, they made a point of participating in charitable works, creating a national education,
reforming morals and dabbling in alchemy.
It was in this frame of mind and with this heavy explosive baggage that Novikov, a Freemason publisher
from St Petersburg who had been forced to close down because of falling sales of the two satirical
newspapers he published, arrived in Moscow in 1778, where he had been appointed director of the
Moscow University printing works thanks to the support he had received from his Moscow Brethren.
Within a few months, Novikov and his Rosicrucian collaborators had transformed the Moscow
University newspaper (Moscow News) into a vehicle of information capable of shaping public opinion. It
served as a front for even more subversive activities. "In 1784, members of the sect set up a limited
company, the Moscow Typographical Society, which was registered with the police and provided
detailed reports of its activities to Prussian Masonic superiors. Novikov had also acquired a clandestine
press which printed works of occult and Rosicrucian literature in Russian translation; at the request of
Prussian officials, I. Lopoukhine also had his own press, which printed books on mysticism and alchemy.
These productions bore no
They did not indicate where they were published and were not submitted to the Chief of Police before
being printed (59). The typographical society and the clandestine press operated under the control of
the Rosicrucians.
Despite these successes, Novikov realised that he needed to surround himself with reliable and dedicated
men,
devoted and, above all, well-to-do. This is how he became close to Moscow high society, which, satisfied
with the editorial line of the "Moscow News", opened wide the doors of its salons to him, where he
soon made the acquaintance of N. Troubetzkoy, Grand Master of the Reichel Osiris Lodge, whose house
had become the meeting place for intellectuals, noblemen and academics attracted by Reichel's moral
doctrine or its esoteric aspects. Schwartz, a Transylvanian by birth who arrived in Moscow in 1779 to
take up a teaching post at the University, was one of them. The three men became friends. In 1781,
Osiris had fifty-six members, from a wide variety of social classes and professions, a number of whom
held important positions in administration and government (60). No doubt Troubetzkoy, remembering
that Reichel had told him that "to study true masonry, you need a secret lodge with very few members",
found
that it counted for too much, because shortly afterwards he created the Harmonie lodge, which Novikov
joined.
A lodge is an association of Freemasons under the presidency of a Venerable. Masonic initiation
comprises thirty-three grades, the first three of which are apprentice, journeyman and master, and the
last of which is Sovereign Grand Inspector General. The obedience is a federal group made up of at least
three lodges. Any Freemason can belong to several lodges and even several obediences at the same
time. This was the case for Novikov and Schwarz. They belonged to the
of some of them. The metastatic proliferation of lodges, apart from being the consequence of splits
which are themselves no more than a reflection of the psychic ambivalence and inner conflicts which
characterise the personality of any individual attracted to theories such as those of Freemasonry, is a
phenomenon inherent in any secret society. Not only is Masonic doctrine known in full only to the
highest ranks of a lodge, but it is also known only to those who are not members of the lodge.
was not revealed and exposed to the same extent to all lodges. A Lodge of Martinist obedience such as
the Brothers of the Light, whose "Unknown" was Schwarz and Novikov represented the executive
power, seems to have been in the secret, given that its members were aware of the two main points of
the Martinist programme: "2. To develop all the possibilities inherent in man and to reach the summit
of the "mountain top" (sic) to which the Nazarene frequently referred; 3. To establish a religion to
which all nations can subscribe, so that they are able to act jointly - without, however, encroaching on
one another - and to establish peace, founded on the
freedom of action and cooperation (61). Such a programme could only be revealed, detailed and
explained to individuals who were likely to adhere unreservedly to it, who were selected beforehand
from among the members of the various paramaasonic groups that Novikov founded for this purpose
from the end of the 1770s onwards. "In November 1779, a "pedagogical seminary" was founded and
attached to
Living off donations from eminent masons under Schwarz's direction, it initially took in 6 students, who
had grown to 30 by 1782, each costing 100 roubles a year. This was followed in March 1781 by the
creation of the Society of University Graduates, which had two functions: on the one hand, to select and
prepare material for publication in the
A special seminar for translators was organised and a house bought for the two study groups, where
Schwarz and a German underground press were also housed. A special seminar for translators was
organised and a house bought for the two study groups where Schwarz and a German underground
press were also housed. The edifice of Masonic activity was crowned by the creation of the Moscow
Society of Friends of Science in 1782, under the patronage of the governor of Moscow.
General Zechariah Chernyshev (a mason) and Archbishop Plato. It was intended to serve as a forum for
the intellectual life of the capital, as well as subsidising students attending university courses and
publishing and distributing textbooks. Masonic ideals were disseminated through a number of works at
the time, as well as through songs accompanying the rites" (62).
It was also crowned by the creation of a literary society. "In a nutshell, it was a philanthropic,
cosmopolitan and peaceful association of literate people, with an inner circle of the most important
literary figures.
The "great" nobles on one side, representatives of various social strata (scholars, members of the
clergy, merchants, artists) on the other, as well as an audience of cultured women...".
"Similar in this respect to the Society of Learned Friends (which had preceded the Typographical
Society), the literary society envisaged seems to have been conceived as a link between the secret
circles of the Rosicrucians and the public. This is clear from the way the meetings were organised: an
inner circle of "Great Ones" retired to Schwarz's widow's room [Schwarz had died in 1784] for secret
deliberations, while the guests met in an almost public place: cultivated ladies, scholars from various
disciplines, representatives of merchants and artists. The Moscow literary society can be seen as a
partial application of the project for a "republic of scholars" [that of Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, a
German playwright (1751-1792) who was one of the main representatives of the Sturm und Drang
literary movement]. Three main tasks are proposed,
tasks which, moreover, relate to Moscow as a metropolis: "to renew and embellish the churches of this
capital"; "to inspire good morals in all the citizens of this enormous city";
"To find solid funding for all possible schools. The ritualised sequence of meetings
was in three parts. After pronouncing the solemn vow to ignore all social, cultural and religious
inequalities between men, there were "learned" lectures on the fine arts, particularly architecture, and
on improving the city in relation to its inhabitants. This is followed by sermons by seminarians ("the
future pastors of the whole nation") in different languages - no doubt as a reminder of Pentecost. Then
came the climax, when - as in the great competitions of the academies - the distinctions and awards for
the moral treatises were announced,
awards resulting from a democratic vote: the prize for the best treaty is "awarded by a plurality of votes
"We find here an emphatic declaration of equality, fraternity and understanding between men - echoes
of contemporary events and currents of thought in France and America (reference is made to the
"primitive rights of men"), but seen through the prism of Freemasonry and Christian mysticism" (63).
With the advent of Catherine II (1729 - 1796), the "philosopher empress", the Russian Freemasons
believed that the time had come for them to emerge from the semi-clandestinity in which they had
been living.
intrigued and dreamed of regenerating mankind. By the early 1790s, there were almost a hundred
lodges in Russia, and it had even become fashionable to join them. Most of the philosophers, scientists,
writers, celebrities and Orthodox theologians - in short, "the most distinguished people in the empire
were members of Freemasonry".
"Catherine's attitude towards Freemasonry, of which so many of her courtiers were members, was
initially marked by amused tolerance. But this turned to aversion following the visit to Saint Petersburg
of Count Cagliostro, a Sicilian charlatan by the name of Giuseppe Balsamo and a pseudo-alchemist
rather than a Freemason. In 1780, the sovereign published an anonymous attack on the
"absurd society" and later mocked Cagliostro as Kalifankjerston in her play The Imposter, in which
she depicts him extorting gold from his victims" (64).
On 21 April 1792, Catherine II issued a warrant for Novikov's arrest on suspicion that, following the
liquidation of the Typographical Society a few months earlier, he had joined forces with Troubetzkoy and
Tourgueniev to persuade Grand Duke Paul to join Freemasonry and had continued to publish and sell
banned works on the occult and Freemasonry. The Brothers of the Light, who naturally had nothing to
reproach themselves for, immediately burnt all their publications.
archives. Despite the praise he received from Plato, Metropolitan of Moscow and allergic to Catherine's
policies, Novikov was imprisoned in the Schlüsselburg fortress and sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
Catherine II had not yet been laid to rest when her successor to the throne, Paul I, who was
a member of the Brothers of the Light, released Novikov and authorised the Brothers to resume their
work and activities discreetly, under the guise of philanthropic works.
Paul I died in 1801. Alexander 1st (1777-1825), "after the French war, showed great
He sincerely wished for the good of his subjects and included Martinists in his councils. He entrusted
one of them, Prince Galitzin, with the departments of religion and public education. Galitzin and other
Martinists got back into the swing of things; they founded Bible societies protected by the government;
translations of several religious works, such as Jean Stilling, etc., were published. N. Labzin published a
periodical newspaper in Russian, Le Messager de Sion (The Messenger of Zion), written in a completely
mystical style" (65).
From 1811 to 1815, the lodges that had reopened in the capital and in other cities grouped together. "But
Schroeder's system, imported from Germany, which rejected the Swedish high grades, led to a number of
problems.
discussions which led to the closure of the Grand Lodge [it had taken the name of the Order of Vladimir]
and the formation of two groups in its place: L'Astrea and La Provinciale. The liberal system of the
The first attracted all the sympathies, so much so that in 1822, it had twenty-four lodges under its
auspices, while the other brought together only six. The most distinguished people in the empire were
members of Freemasonry. But the elected Grand Master of L'Astrea, General Kushelef, seems to have
taken fright at the democratic organisation of the institution [...]", so much so that, eighteen months
after being elevated to the post of Grand Master, he went so far as to address a memorandum to the
Tsar in which he "set out the dangers that could result for the State from the existence of a
Freemasonry association".
A society that proclaimed freedom of thought". "On 1 August 1822, the Minister of the Interior, Count
Victor Pawlovich Kochubei, received a ukase from the Emperor ordering the closure of all lodges. The
Minister of the Interior communicated the order to the Grand Masters, who obtained permission for
the workshops to meet in order to settle accounts and declare the association dissolved" (66).
The Napoleonic Wars of 1813-1814 had a profound effect on the development of political ideas in
Russia. During their stay in Paris, the Russian officers, recruited from among t h e most educated and
idealistic members of the nobility, had become familiar with civilisation and culture.
"They had been deeply impressed by the difference between the Russian political system and the liberal
and democratic institutions of Western Europe. They had been deeply impressed by the difference
between the Russian political system and the liberal and democratic institutions of Western Europe. The
constitutional government of Western Europe had dazzled them. They returned home full of political
ideas that were not yet widely known in Russia. What they saw there disgusted and displeased them.
They began to form circles and clubs where they read philosophical and sociological works and
discussed liberalism. The young officers were proud of their dignity and eager to play a leading role in
the regeneration of their country. They had helped France to free itself from Napoleon, and they had no
trouble persuading themselves that they were destined to free France from Napoleon.
Tsarist Russia. Under their influence, a wave of liberalism spread through Russian youth, who began to
draw up plans for reform and to try to find a way of implementing them. À
Abroad, they had learned of the existence of liberal secret societies: they formed innumerable of them on
Russian soil. These "beau monde" were not hostile to the regime insofar as they believed that the Tsar,
whose main adviser at the time was the liberal M. Speransky, the son of a priest from
campaign, had liberal opinions and that he would soon give Russia a constitution. As the Tsar did not go
down this road, a number of officers took a hard line and formed yet another secret society, known to
some as "The Society of True and Faithful Sons of the Fatherland" and to others as "The League of
Virtue".
Novikov. At first, the members of this society focused on the emancipation of serfs and tried to encourage
the nobility to speak to the Tsar about it. Convinced that the nobility would not
would never consent to such a measure, the League then focused on the introduction of a
constitutional monarchy in Russia. The League's rules and laws betrayed the influence of Freemasonry.
Dissolved in 1818, it immediately reconstituted itself under other names and was behind the coup
d'état that took place in St Petersburg on 14 December 1825.
Three years earlier, at the Congress of Verona, Metternich had sent Alexander I a special memorandum
on secret societies. As Alexander himself had been seduced by the intrigues of the sects, so that it was
not possible to tell him to what extent he had been fooled by them at times, it contains only an
overview of their action in contemporary monarchies, as known to the Prince of Metternich. Here is an
extract:
"Of all the evils afflicting society today, the one that deserves the particular attention of governments
is the criminal activity of cults.
"One of the weak points of the human mind is the tendency that has always been present in it.
dragged into the vague field of mysticism. There is a crowd of restless minds, tormented by the need to
create an occupation, whose activity, unable to fix itself on objects of definite utility, pushes them
towards sterile abstractions. Fooled by their disordered imagination and by anyone who wants to use
their mania for perverse purposes, these men have always been, for the societies of the world, the most
dangerous of all.
like a breeding ground for followers [...].
"Nationality and political boundaries have all disappeared for the sect. Paris is undoubtedly the
headquarters of the Radicals of the whole of Europe, and every day will do more to demonstrate the
truth of this fact.
"The faction has an equal grudge against all States; pure monarchies, constitutional monarchies,
republics, everything is threatened by the Levellers (67)".
It was all in vain. After Alexander I issued a decree banning Freemasonry, it continued to work
clandestinely until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. At one point, the leader of clandestine
Freemasonry was Prince Lanskoy (1787 - 1862), the Russian Empire's Minister of the Interior, who
became one of the main advocates of reform.
of Alexander II, Emperor of Russia from 1855 to 1881. A number of those who supported the liberal
reforms in Russia belonged to esoteric groups specialising in the study of the Kabbalah. For example,
Sergei Maslov (1793-1879), a high-ranking Rosicrucian who was secretary of the Imperial Agricultural
Society of Moscow from 1830 to 1860, translated in the 1850s a voluminous work (Philosophie der
Geschichte Oder Über die Tradition) by the Christian Kabbalist F. J. Molitor (1779-1860), for whom "it is
impossible to understand Christianity in its deepest dimension without first having a good
understanding of Judaism, which is the source of this religion". This statement was all the more
welcomed by Russian Freemasons as they were trying to find a link between
Orthodoxy and the "true Kabbalah", which they identified with what R. Guénon later called the
"primordial tradition", while interest in the Kabbalah and Hasidism was growing among the Russian
clergy and in Russian religious schools.
Occult beliefs and practices continued to play a predominant role at the imperial court, where, as
Robert Warth (68) has shown, Rasputin had been preceded by a long series of magicians, astrologers
and mystics whose charlatanism was in no way inferior to their charisma, but whose
his influence on the Tsar and Tsarina was no less important. Rasputin's arrival at court corresponded with
the special attention that peasant spirituality and the
popular superstitions in certain Russian intellectual circles linked to Gogol and to the more or less
commiserate interest shown by the Tsar and Tsarina themselves in anything that glorified
instinct, for the irrational, for the little people, the "small" (69).
Freemasonic lodges and esoteric groups, which had dwindled into insignificance as a result of the
crackdown on secret societies in the decade following the assassination of Alexander II, resurfaced as a
result of the political and social unrest in the Russian Empire in 1905 and 1907.
They persuaded the Tsar to grant them a constitution and establish a parliament. Meanwhile, Russian
interest in occultism, spiritualism and oriental mysticism had only increased. The Kabbalah continued to
attract a variety of local esoteric groups, the most active of which was the
formed around Grigorij Ottonovič von Moebes (1868-1934), an occultist who had proclaimed himself
Grand Master of the Russian branch of the Martinist Order and who, unlike the sulphurous Papus
(1865-1916), the co-founder of the Martinist Order, had an in-depth knowledge of the Kabbalah (Von
Moebes and his followers were arrested in 1926 by the GPU, the USSR State Police).
On the other hand, in the early years of the twentieth century, esoteric circles had been
gradually opened up to individuals who did not have the same social status as the Freemasons of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A number of them belonged to the middle class, they were
scientists, engineers, artists, lawyers, etc. Politically, they were left-wing, socialist or mystical. Politically,
they were left-wing, socialist or mystical, even nationalist. Many of them declared themselves to be
anti-Semitic.
Their hostility towards the Jews did not prevent them from being fervent followers of the
Kabbalah, as they believed that this ancient secret knowledge did not belong to the Jews alone,
but was in fact of Egyptian origin and that Moses, whom they considered to be an Egyptian, had
merely passed it on to the Aryans through the intermediary of the Jews. This fable had been
accredited by the Jesuit Anthanasius Kircher (1601-1680), before being peddled in the nineteenth
century by Fabre d'Olivet, Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, de Guaita and Schuré, authors who were all
highly regarded in Russian occultist circles. Von List (1848-1919) and the Cistercian monk von
Liebenfels (1874-1954) went so far as to speak of an "Aryan Kabbalah" and a "German Kabbalah"
(70).
On the eve of the Bolshevik coup d'état, Russian esotericism was characterised by a syncretism of popular
magical beliefs and practices, which, while not unique to the Russians, were nevertheless
were no less inevitably conditioned by their own race of the soul, a magma of more or less orthodox,
more or less Gnostic religious elements and the teachings of the various occultist currents which, from
Freemasonry to Rosicrucianism, Martinism to Spiritualism and Anthroposophy, had appeared in
European countries since the seventeenth century. The millenarianism that was more or less latent in
the magma of the orthodox sects then collided with the utopian constructs of the secret societies.
Whether mystical or rationalist, orthodox sects and secret societies were all concerned with the general
concept of an ideal future society to be built.
Before examining the strong utopian component of the ideas, philosophies and ideologies of
Among the many and varied forces, allied or antagonistic, that were at work in nineteenth-century
Russia, it is appropriate to focus on a Russian intellectual of the period who attempted to make the
esoteric teachings of the Kabbalah literally orthodox.
The Soloviev case
This overview of the various occult currents that swept through Russian society from top to bottom at
the end of the nineteenth century would not be complete without a mention of one of the most ardent
and influential promoters of the Kabbalah in that country, V. Soloviev (1853-1900), whose work we
shall see later in this article.
However, he did not turn a deaf ear to the theories of a true "enlightened man". Soloviev was the most
important thinker in the "Russian religious renaissance" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries.
century. His desire to build an ideal "Universal Church", the Church he believed would reconcile
opposites, East and West, man and woman, heaven and paradise, led him both to speculative mysticism
and to the traditional practices of Judaism.
In 1875, Soloviev, then Professor of History at Moscow University, "asked for leave to go to London to
study Indian, Gnostic and medieval philosophy" and, as his English correspondent reveals, "to discover
the English occult scene". Disappointed by what he saw, or at least by what he was shown, but by no
means despondent, he continued his research in the field. "His travel diary is full of examples of
automatic writing, references to alchemical symbols and occult diagrams. He wrote fervently: 'Kabbalah
and Neoplatonism, Böhme and Swedenborg, Schelling and I.'" Quite simply. "At that point in his life, he
considered the Kabbalah to be a secret, occult phenomenon, and he was looking for the key to
initiation. As he gradually discovered, through study, convergences with his own intuition of God, he
came to see it as a mystical doctrine, legitimately correlative to orthodoxy, whose truth was accessible
to all" (71).
In 1879, Soloviev went to school with a rabbi called Goetz, with whom he formed a close friendship. At
the same time, he began to study the Talmud and quickly became a good connoisseur of pre-Christian
and Old Testament Jewish thought. In the early 1880s, he made the acquaintance of many other Jews,
who welcomed him as one of their own and made him an honorary member of one of their largest
organisations, the Society for the Dissemination of Culture among Jews in Russia. In this way, he
defended the Jews in articles and lectures when, following the assassination of Alexander II by
terrorists, they fell victim to pogroms (72). His commitment to the Jews stemmed from his conception
of history, his conviction that there was a fraternal continuity between Judaism and Christianity and
that Jews and Christians would be reconciled through the conversion of the latter to Christianity.
In 1896, Soloviev prefaced an article by Baron David Günzburg entitled Kabbalah: The Philosophy of the
Kabbalah.
mystique des Juifs, which he arranged to have published in a prestigious journal. The article and the
preface attempted to establish the theological integrity of the Kabbalah by dissociating it from
Freemasonry, Gnosticism, theosophy and the other esoteric doctrines that fascinated Russians at the
time. At the same time, they sought to highlight the similarities between the Kabbalah and Orthodoxy
by showing that the relationship between God and man, which Soloviev proclaimed to be
essential for the future of Russia, was at the heart of both doctrines. "Curiously, Soloviev's interest in the
Kabbalah arose at a time when the Jewish question was becoming increasingly pressing in the Russian
Empire, and his work on Jewish mysticism therefore has both a political and a social significance.
theological. Ultimately, Soloviev's writings on the Kabbalah and his repeated use of cabalistic
terminology reflect the philosopher's efforts to legitimise Jewish mysticism as a system which, although
outside the Church [...], could nevertheless inform and perhaps reform Russia and the Orthodox Church
through its message about the relationship between God and humanity" (73).
Soloviev continued to study the Kabbalah until his death.
The utopian factor
In Semitic religions, millenarianism is the belief that the Messiah will reign on earth for a thousand years
before the Last Judgement. In a restricted sense, it is the collective attitude that vows an idea to play a
quasi-divine liberating role for humanity or a group, to accomplish an exceptional mission.
A harbinger of the profound influence that millenarianism exerted on Marxism in the nineteenth century
was the sudden development of the politico-religious theory of the "Third Rome" in Russia in the second
half of the fifteenth century.
The signing of the Act of Union between the Greek and Roman Churches by Metropolitan Isidore in
Florence in 1439 had been seen as a betrayal by the Russians. With the fall of Byzantium in 1453, this
resentment was compounded by the idea that Russia was the "defender of the true faith". At the end of
the fifteenth century in Novgorod, just as the Orthodox were waiting for the end of the world (since the
Orthodox believed that the world would last 7,000 years and, according to a Byzantine tradition of
rabbinic origin, they dated the creation of the world to 5508 BC, they expected it in 1492), another idea
emerged according to which Moscow was the successor to ancient Rome and not just to the second
Rome, Byzantium. This idea did not find much support in the upper echelons of power, which continued
to
gravitate in the orbit of Byzantium. "From the reign of John III (1460 - 1505), who was married to the
niece of the last Byzantine emperor (Zoë-Sophie Paléologue) and who had borrowed from the Eastern
Empire his
Moscow had become a little Byzantium. The grand-ducal court was modelled on that of Constantinople.
The Kremlin was embellished with magnificent churches and palaces built by Milanese architects.
During the reign of Basil III (1503-33), the absolutism of the sovereigns of
Moscow had become even stronger and all the forces of the State were concentrated on unifying Russia.
" (74).
At the end of the seventeenth century, Peter the Great dampened the messianic hopes that had been
rekindled by Nikon's unconditional support for the idea of the "Third Rome". When the empire was
proclaimed in 1721, Peter the Great refused the title of Christian Emperor of the East proposed by the
Senate. On the other hand, the Panslavism preached by the Croatian Catholic priest Jury Krijanic from
the mid-eighteenth century onwards met with no success in Russia.
It was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that real messianic and millenarian movements
began to flourish in Russia. In addition to the followers of The New Zion, mentioned above, the
members of the most messianic branch of the "khlysty" sect saw themselves as the chosen ones
forming "the new people of Israel". Loubkov was one of the Christs of the khlysty when he proclaimed
himself Head of the New Israel, king of the 19th century, son of the clear ether who possesses wisdom
and power over the whole earth. His teachings were accepted in several important khlysty centres. In
1905, Loubkov settled in Rostov on the Don, which became the centre of the New Israel communities.
These existed not only in the south of Russia, but also in the west and in the east.
Siberia. The only difference between the teachings of the khlysty and those of Loubkov is that he
considers himself to be the "only messiah" and denies the possibility of the existence of several Christs
at the same time. In 1906 he composed and printed a catechism of the faith of the New Israel, a mixture
of scriptural and patristic texts with fanciful commentaries. From the moral point of view, the followers
of the New Israel preach absolute freedom of relations between the sexes, even for the closest
relatives" (75).
Condraty Malevanny, "a former schtundist who proclaimed himself 'Jesus Christ' in 1891", founded the
Malevantsy sect shortly afterwards. His teaching was clearly eschatological. He proclaimed the
imminent advent of the Last Judgement. God the Father would then announce to the world that he was
his messenger and all peoples would worship him. The Malevantsy movement became very important
from 1889 onwards.
took on an anti-social character and epidemic hysteria. After Malevanny was interned in a nursing
home, his successor Jean Lyssenko proclaimed himself the "holy spirit" of his predecessor. Like the
Khlystys, the Malevantsys professed dualism and reincarnation" (76).
At a time when the Tsarist regime was fighting relentlessly against these sects, Alexander I was
captivated by the millenarian views fermenting within them. The "idea" of a mission he was called upon
to fulfil did not crystallise until 1813, after the Russian campaign. Admiral Chichagov wrote a history of
the war against Napoleon, interspersed with quotations from Holy Scripture. He spoke of the mystical
role of the Russian sovereign in the destiny of Europe. Alexander I also found numerous allusions to his
future role as arbiter of European affairs in Psalm XCI, sent to him by an unknown correspondent in
Riga, probably the Baroness of Krudener" (77). It was she who suggested that he
conclude a "Holy Alliance" with Ferdinand of Austria and Frederick William of Prussia. The "Holy Alliance",
whose protocol begins with the words: "In the name of the most holy and indivisible Trinity",
"This is not a diplomatic treaty, but a religious pact, one of the most important monuments in the world.
extraordinary in its idealism and messianic utopianism" (78). The deed was drawn up in the modest flat of
a friend of the Baroness de Krudener, the Lyonnais Nicolas Bergasse, a former disciple of Mesmer and
author of a treatise entitled De la foi des êtres et de leur destin.
Alexander I's messianic leanings had far-reaching consequences for Russia. On the one hand, at least
until he came to his senses and changed his mind about the failure of his "mission", they led him to
show benevolence towards the secret societies which, under the leadership of Prince Troubetskoï,
fomented the riot of 26 December 1825. On the other hand, they contributed to a reawakening of
Russian national consciousness and gave rise among the Russian educated class to the feeling that
Russia had a providential mission in Europe, a feeling that was only confirmed by the hypothesis that the
historian Fallmerayer put forward in 1830 in his Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea während des
Mittelalters that the Slavic nations were likely to dominate the Latin and Germanic nations in the near
future.
"The Polish uprising of 1831 gave rise to a patriotic revival in Russia. This was exalted by Pushkin in his
famous poem "To the Slanderers of Russia". He spoke for the
first accurate account of the Panslavist theory, which at that time was not widespread in Russia. He
wondered whether the Slavic streams would all flow into the Russian Sea, or whether the Russian Sea
would be exhausted. The leader and founder of Orthodox messianism, Alexis Khomiakov, wrote of
the Polish insurrection: "The Slavic Eagles will bow to the Eagle of the North, Russia" (79).
Russian messianism crystallised into two trends in the 1840s. One formed under
the influence of the political and religious thought of Schelling and other German Romantics, which had
itself been influenced by Gnosticism (in 1848, Schelling himself confided to Prince Odoievski, founder of
the first philosophical circle in Russia: "Strange is your Russia, one cannot determine what it is destined
for or where it is going, but it is destined for something great. "The other originated with Hegel and the
French socialists, whose theses were not themselves entirely devoid of Gnostic components.
For some, Christianity was destined to play an almost divine liberating role for the Russian people:
according to S. P. Shevyrev (1806-1864), a historian of Russian literature who was profoundly influenced
by
J. Böhme, "It is in Russia above all that we can hope for a development of universal Christianity". For
others, it was Russia that was destined to play the role of providential liberator for humanity:
Dostoyevsky, in his Discourse on Pushkin (1880) affirmed that "The mission of the Russian people is
pan-European and universal. To become a true Russian perhaps means only to become the brother of
all men, the universal man [...] Our future lies in Universality, not acquired by violence, but by the
strength that we will draw from our great ideal: the reunification of the whole of Europe.
humanity". The two points of view coexisted with Pierre Tchaadaev (1794-1856), who wrote to his
friend Tourgueniev in October 1935: "We have [...] the mission of teaching Europe an infinite number of
things that it cannot understand on its own. Don't laugh: you know that this is my deep conviction. The
day will come when we will be the intellectual heart of Europe, just as we are already its political heart,
and our future power based on reason will surpass our own.
This will be the logical outcome of our long isolation. This will be the logical outcome of our long
isolation. All great things have come from the desert. A powerful voice resounding in the world in those
days will serve in particular to accelerate the fulfilment of our destinies." (Letter to
Tourgueniev, October 1935, OEuvres); two years later, he confided to another of his correspondents:
"Russia has an important task to accomplish: to fulfil all the promises of Christianity before any other
country, because Christianity has remained pure in our country from all contact with human passions
and earthly interests, because it has only prayed and humbled itself in imitation of its divine Founder,
and because it will probably receive its last and most astonishing inspirations because of this" (Letter to
Orlov, 1837, Works, p. 215).
For some, messianism took a theistic form; for others, it was part of an atheistic philosophy. Soloviev, for
whom messianism resided in the conviction of a people "to be the chosen bearer and the realizer of the
historical destinies of humanity" and for whom "it is only the Christian idea (or what is the same thing,
messianic) of the Kingdom of God, revealing itself
(80) The Russian idea, Russia's mission, is to achieve "free theocracy", theandry (the union of humanity
with the divinity) by applying the Trinitarian principle to the social sphere. "According to him, three
forces have ruled the world: the force of an inhuman God, the force of humanity without God and the
Revelation of a superior world. The people who are the bearers of this third divine force must not
It must not only be free from constraint or be subjective, but must rise above particular interests. It must
have absolute faith in the positive reality of a higher world and must be submissive to it. According to
Soloviev, these qualities belong to the Russian people. They are worthy of witnessing
because the power he is to reveal to the world is not of this world, and wealth and order have nothing
to do with it. He therefore advocates an ideal society that will be theandric... In our world here below
this ideal could be realised by the union of the Russian Orthodox Empire and the Roman Pontiff (81).
"At the same time, an atheist like Bakunin stormed: "Out of the ocean of blood and fire will rise in
Moscow, high in the sky, the star of the revolution to become the guide of liberated humanity". "We
can therefore speak of a continuity between religious messianisms of ancient origin, politically inspired
secular-democratic messianism and revolutionary messianism of an apparently more economic and
social nature. Between Marxists claiming to be atheists and Christians claiming to be
If they claim to be revolutionaries in the very name of their faith, there had to be a common denominator
which is none other than a form of messianism, underestimated by both sides and by their adversaries
(82).
Moreover, the various currents of nineteenth-century Russian messianism had two features in
common: the obsession with freedom, whether spiritual freedom in the case of Khomiakov, political
and social freedom in the case of A. Herzen (1812-1870), or freedom from all constraints in the case of
Bakunin and the anarchists; the obsessive idealisation of the people as a "theophore people" in the case
of A. Herzen (1812-1870), or freedom from all constraints in the case of Bakunin and the anarchists; and
the obsessive idealisation of the people as a "theophore people" in the case of A. Herzen (1812-1870).
Dostoyevsky, or the people as the bearers of a social ideal in the case of areligious or anti-religious
thinkers.
These ideas were prevalent in early Christianity, particularly in the Christian communities of Asia, with
the Pseudo-Barnabas, Papias, Cerinthus, Justin of Nablus, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Methodius of
Olympus, Jerome and others, Millenarian ideas resurfaced on several occasions, partially in the Catholic
Church, with the "philosophy of history" of the Cistercian monk and theologian Joachim de Fiore (V.
1130-1202), the Spiritual Franciscans, and completely in the currents stemming from the Reformation
or in heretical Christian sects. In the latter, it gave rise, on the one hand, to a genuine religious
movement based on the belief in the advent of a new reign or kingdom, conceived as a return to the
conditions existing at the origin of time and, on the other hand, to a "spiritual" movement based on the
belief in a new kingdom, conceived as a return to the conditions existing at the origin of time.
A system of thought that challenges the existing social and political order, which is considered decadent
and corrupt, and expects collective redemption through a belief in a lost paradise or the return of a
charismatic providential man who will destroy the forces hostile to God.
Millenarianism comprises three movements, which can be found both in Jewish prophetism (Book of
Zephaniah, Book of Micah) and in early Christianity (Gospel of Luke, Epistle of James). In the first
instance, it pronounces a curse on the rich while glorifying the poor, equating wealth and private
property with impiety while regarding poverty as a synonym of
salvation. Secondly, he denounced the corruption of the existing order and announced its destruction
and imminent replacement by a new society in accordance with God's will, founded on egalitarian
principles. In the third part, he prepares for the coming of the kingdom by founding small religious
communities whose organisation is based on these egalitarian principles.
Samuel, whom the Acts of the Apostles saw as "the first of the prophets" and the Talmud as "the
teacher of all the prophets", founded "schools of prophets" in which (I Samuel, XIX, 20) "there was
absolute equality between the members; work was compulsory for all; everything was done in
common: housing, work, meals". These communities lasted for four centuries. But the most
accomplished example of community life in Jewish society was undoubtedly the Essene community, a
religious and social community where goods were held in common". According to the New Testament,
the first Christian communities practised the egalitarian precepts given by Jesus Christ.
Christ and the prophets: "The multitude of those who believed were of one heart and one mind.
No one claimed to be the owner of what he possessed, but everything was held in common. The
Apostles bore witness with great power to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and the power of grace
was upon them all. Not one of them was destitute, for all those who
who owned fields or houses sold them, and they brought the price to make it available to the Apostles. A
share was distributed to each of the brothers according to his
needs. Joseph, whom the Apostles had nicknamed Barnabas (which means "the man of comfort"), was
a Levite from Cyprus. He had some land and sold it, bringing the money with him and laying it at the
Apostles' feet". (Acts of the Apostles 4, 32-37) "The apostles do many extraordinary and amazing things,
and people are struck by this. All the believers are united and they pool everything they have. They sell
their property and valuables, they share the money between them, and everyone receives what they
need. Every day, with one heart, they faithfully gather in the temple. They share bread in their homes
and eat their food with joy and a simple heart" (Acts of the Apostles 2, 43-46).
A number of Christian sects tried to revive this collectivist ideal by force in the Europe of the "Middle
Ages" and the "Renaissance", such as the Lollards in France.
England, the Hussites in Central Europe and, as we have seen, the 'rationalists' and mystics in Russia.
Despite the persecution they had suffered over the centuries, these millenarian sects enjoyed a revival
in nineteenth-century Germany. It should be noted that egalitarianism was also fashionable in German
high society. " W. Weitling, the founder, according to Karl Marx, of European communism, was directly
influenced by this fermentation: his utopian socialism would eventually lead to a communitarian
experiment in the New World: Communia."
"In 1844, Engels met the French socialists and communists. And what did he find? That the French
Communists were Christians: "One of their favourite axioms is that Christianity is Communism". Of
course Engels did not agree with this statement, but he could not but be deeply struck by the religious
atmosphere in which French socialism was developing [...] He noted a double movement in "French
Communism": a reference to the past of Christianity (the state of community described in the Acts of
the Apostles), a reference to the future based on the text of the Apocalypse on the millennial kingdom.
Simon, Fourier, Cabet) are those where these references are patent". (83) Indeed, Saint-Simon set out to
resurrect primitive Christianity: "This enterprise is of the same nature as that of the foundation of
Christianity: its direct object is to improve the lot of the last class of society and its general aim is to
make all men happy [...]"; Babeuf himself extolled his project: "Let us liquidate the hold of private
property: on the ruins of the appropriation of the soil, let us create a social patrimony, that the republic
be the sole owner: like a mother, it will provide each of its members and in equality: education, food
and work. This is the only way to rebuild Jerusalem.
(84). Fourier, on a considerably less mystical slope, set out to create a new "Church", a place for the
orgy of a divinised humanity justified in all its desires, where morality would not be a factor.
He claimed to be a Christian of "love" and condemned the Christianity of "distrust and fear" (85). As for
Cabet, he radically opposed the teaching of
He argues that "according to Jesus, the Apostles and the Fathers of the Church, Christianity cannot exist
without Communism and that no one can call himself a Christian if he is not a Communist. And,
conversely, Communism is nothing other than true Christianity".
Engels was well aware that "the history of primitive Christianity offers curious points of contact with the
modern workers' movement. Like the latter, Christianity was originally the movement of the oppressed. It
first appeared as the religion of slaves and freedmen, of the poor and the disenfranchised, of peoples
subjugated or dispersed by Rome. Both Christianity
as well as working-class socialism, preach an imminent deliverance from servitude and misery".
(Correspondence, Volume IV, Paris, Editions sociales, 1974, p. 148)
"Moses Hess, Marx and Engels' master of communism, saw this communism at the end of a History of
Humanity (1837), at the end of which "the new Jerusalem will be founded in the heart of Europe" (86).
Marx was "perfectly familiar with French and English utopian communism. His friend, Moses Hess, with
whom he worked in 1841 at the Rheinische Zeitung, had spent several years in France and had become
acquainted with the Saint-Simonians, the Fourierists, the Proudhonians, Buchez and Leroux; this had
resulted in two works on French socialism. Marx was also familiar with the book by Lorenz von
Stein Socialisme et communisme en France published in 1842 [...] Now Hess was also in contact with
the German religious communist Weitling, whom Engels said in 1844 should be considered the "founder
of German communism". It is true that Marx broke with Weitling, but an objective examination of the
documents and the influences forces us to recognise that there is, in spite of everything, a certain
continuity between the Christian millenarian tradition on the one hand, and utopian communism and
original Marxism on the other (87)".
Karl Mardochai Levi Marx was born in 1818 into a Jewish family that had converted to Protestantism for
reasons of convenience, and was baptised at the age of six. His ancestors, on both his father's and
mother's sides,
Hirschel, Marx's grandfather, had been a rabbi in Trier. Marx's grandfather Hirschel had been a rabbi in
Trier. Hirschel's mother, Eva Moïse Lvov (1753-1823), counted among her ancestors a number of
famous rabbis, including Meir Katzenellenbogen, the head of the Padua Talmudic School. Karl Marx
entered the college in 1830 and passed his final exam five years later. The first written exercise, on the
subject of "Considerations of a Young Man Choosing a Profession", betrayed religiously inspired
humanitarian ideas: "Religion itself," he wrote, "teaches us that the Ideal towards which all strive has
sacrificed Himself for mankind. Who would dare to deny this? If, then, we have chosen the situation in
which we can do our utmost for Him, we can never again be crushed by the burden, since the latter
will be nothing other than the sacrifices made for the love of all". The Christian tone of
The second, whose subject was "The union of the faithful with Christ according to Saint John XV, 1-4,
demonstrated in its foundation and essence, its absolute necessity and its effects", was even more
pronounced:
In this way," he wrote, "union with Christ communicates an elevation of the soul, a comfort in the midst of
the world.
affliction, a quiet confidence, an openness of heart to all that is great and noble, not by
The union with Christ produces a joy which the Epicureans seek in vain in an empty philosophy, which
the greatest thinkers pursue in vain in the hidden depths of knowledge. Union with Christ produces a joy
that the Epicureans sought in vain in an empty philosophy, that the greatest thinkers vainly pursued in
the hidden depths of knowledge". He added: "By the love with which we love Christ, we at the same
time direct our hearts towards our brothers who are intimately linked to us and for whom He gave
Himself as a sacrifice (88)."
In 1837, after two years of university life, Marx informed his father that a fundamental change had
occurred in his thinking. He had turned from Romantic poetry to philosophy and, in particular, to Kant,
Fichte and Hegel. Over the next two years, he became increasingly critical of Christianity, less for
philosophical reasons than because he felt that
the Prussian State and the Protestant Church were completely uninterested in the welfare of their
subjects. He had been reinforced in his humanitarianism by reading Saint-Simon, who specifically
criticised Christianity at the time for failing to improve the condition of the poorest classes. His criticism
of religion in general and Christianity in particular became much more explicit in his doctoral thesis,
entitled "The difference between the philosophies of nature of Democritus and Epicurus". During his
exile in Paris, where he began to collaborate with Engels, it was Feuerbach's writings that had a decisive
influence on his thinking. He embraced the cause
democracy and the idea that only democracy as popular sovereignty could make socialism possible and
that, to begin with, only the full emancipation of the proletariat could make democracy possible. "The
chimera, the dream, the postulate of Christianity: the sovereignty of man, but man as a foreign being,
different from real man, becomes in democracy a concrete reality, a presence, a secular maxim (89)".
Consequently, it is not
He went so far as to compare Christ to the State: "In the same way that Christ is the mediator to whom
man imputes all his divinity, all his perplexity...".
Religiously speaking, the State is the mediator to which man transfers all his non-divinity, all his human
spontaneity.
At that time Marx's thought was still profoundly influenced by Hegel (1770-1831) and Feuerbach
(1804-1872), and it could be said that he was just as much or just as little a Christian as Feuerbach, for
whom "the 'true atheist' is not one who denies God, the subject; it is one for whom the attributes of
divinity such as love, wisdom, justice are nothing. And the negation of the subject is not at all
necessarily the negation of the attributes". "Marx was attached to the essential values of Christianity as
human and natural values" (90). The essence of the State
democratic, "it is not Christianity, but the human basis of Christianity. Religion remains the ideal, not the
secular, conscience of its members, because it is the ideal form of the degree to which the human being
is a human being.
(91) The "human basis of Christianity" is essentially and historically Semitic. The "human basis of
Christianity" is essentially and historically Semitic.
Whatever criticisms Marx subsequently levelled at Semitic religions and "utopian" socialism, notably in
Capital, the fact remains that his doctrine took up a number of the leitmotifs of primitive Christianity:
the condemnation of wealth and individual property, the idealisation of the community of goods, the
equation of the rich with the oppressors and the poor with the oppressed, the aspiration to social
regeneration and a universal community. He was aware that there were points of contact between
certain Judeo-Christian ideas and his own.
conceptions, since he wrote that "the love of neighbour preached by ancient Christianity, which some
recognise as the revolution of communism, is one of the sources from which the idea of social reforms
derives" (92). When, in the Deutsche Brüsseler Zeitung of 12 September 1847, he declared that "the
social principles of Christianity justified ancient slavery and magnified the
medieval serfdom; they also know how to defend the oppression of the proletariat, if need be", he wisely
added, "even if they do so with a somewhat apologetic expression on their faces".
In Marx "the religious hope of millenarianism is not abolished: it merely underlies the scientific
demonstration and is overdetermined by it" (93). Above all, it is dusted off and brought up to date, since
it would have been absurd to address the proletariat of the nineteenth century using the same rhetoric
that Paul used in his epistles to the slaves of the Roman Empire. The substance of the message remains
essentially the same. Only the form of the discourse is
essentially different. Thus, in Marx's texts, the "just redeemer", the "suffering servant", the eternally
alienated, the eternally oppressed, of Isaiah becomes the destined "proletariat",
as the eternally oppressed, the eternally alienated, to destroy the iniquitous existing order and build a
new society on its ruins. "As in Christian millenarianism, he combines elements borrowed from Jewish
prophetism and the apocalypse of John. It is significant, moreover, that in Marx's early texts, the
proletariat is much less a specific sociological group than a kind of figure of alienated humanity, an
ideal-typical figure" (94)? For Marx, only the proletariat can "redeem" (sic) humanity and, since the
decay of present-day humanity is extreme, its redemption - its redemption - can only be achieved by a
struggle to the death between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. "Communist ideology [...] owes a
great deal to an archaic eschatology [...] In Marx himself, it appears mainly in the form of a conviction
that history is a given course, all set to culminate in the ultimate age, an age of "freedom" when men
will be freed once and for all from all subordination and constraint. This conception of history was
widespread and variously expounded by the philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries;
before Marx, it had been eloquently expounded by Lessing, Schelling and Auguste Comte, for example.
Its origins, however, go back much further, and Lessing, who was the first to give a modernised version
of it, was well aware of its importance.
that he was taking up a prophetic tradition established by Joachim de Flore [...] Marx differs from his
predecessors in his conviction that this 'age of freedom' would not come into being peacefully but
through an uprising of the proletariat and an expropriation of the bourgeoisie (95)...".
"As in the millenarian scenario, there can only be salvation in the total destruction of the planet.
of the old world; a strategy of rupture, not improvement. This gigantic battle between Good and Evil,
between the forces of disintegration and the forces of regeneration, is reminiscent of the myths of the
past.
soteriological: salvation is achieved by a total reversal of the existing state of affairs. The concept of
"Revolution" expresses this total reversal, this absolute break, this brutal and violent rupture politically
expressed by the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat (96).
In Semitic religions, "Satan" is God's adversary. L'Invocation d'un désespéré (97) is not an atheist or
agnostic poem: it is an irreligious poem. It challenges religion, challenges it from the point of view of
Semitic religions. Consequently, L'Invocation d'un désespéré can be considered a satanic poem stricto
sensu. In Ulanem (98), a drama for which Marx wrote the first part
act in 1839, which he never completed, the Satanism is even more pronounced. The main character in
this drama, Oulanem, whose name is an anagram of Manuelo, a first name derived from Emmanuel
(Emmanuel is the name Isaiah gave to the messiah; it means "God is with us" in Hebrew), has made a
pact with the devil. Before he died, he declared:
"Lost. Lost. My time has come. The clock of
time has stopped,
The pygmy house collapsed.
Soon I'll embrace eternity in my bosom, Soon
I'll declare over humanity
Horrible curses."
And again: "If there is something capable of destruction, I will throw myself into it, even if it means
leading the world to ruin. Yes, this world that stands between me and the abyss will be shattered into a
thousand pieces by my curses. Given the decisive role played by Marxism and its many epigones in the
crisis of the modern white world, it is clear that these words were prophetic.
As Eliade masterfully diagnosed, Marx "takes up and extends one of the great eschatological myths of the
Asiatic-Mediterranean world, namely: the redemptive role of the Just One (the 'chosen one', the 'one',
the 'one', the 'one', the 'one', the 'one', the 'one', the 'one', the 'one').
It is the "anointed", the "innocent", the "messenger", nowadays the proletariat) whose suffering is
destined to change the ontological status of the world. Indeed, Marx's classless society and the
consequent disappearance of historical tensions find their most exact precedent in the myth of the
Golden Age which, according to multiple traditions, characterises the beginning and end of History.
Marx enriched this venerable myth with a whole Judeo-Christian messianic ideology: on the one hand,
the role of the "Golden Age" in the history of mankind, and, on the other, the role of the "Golden Age"
in the history of the world.
On the other, the final struggle between Good and Evil, which can easily be compared to the apocalyptic
conflict between Christ and Antichrist,
followed by the definitive victory of the former. It is even significant that Marx takes up the Judeo-
Christian eschatological hope of an absolute end to history.
There is no motif in Marxian doctrine that does not have its counterpart in the Judeo-Christian
millenarian theme. "And Marx's genius is undoubtedly to have clothed the old millenarian hope in the
prestige of historical and economic science" (99).
A very common mistake is to think that so-called utopian socialism is in this respect the product of a
process of secularisation of messianism. This is how J. Evola erred when he wrote in "Trasformazioni del
`Regnum" (La Vita Italiana, 1937) that "It is not the original Jewish messianic idea but its corruption and
materialisation that constitutes the real point of reference of the subversive forces that aim to destroy
our civilisation for good and to exercise satanic domination over all the other forces at work on earth".
He corrected his point of view a few years later in The Myth of Blood by acknowledging that, from the
outset, "the 'kingdom' that is supposed to have been promised to the Jewish people was not
interpreted in a mystical and supraterrestrial sense but as a kingdom destined to 'possess all the riches
of the earth'. It has been observed that the very way in which the Jewish people conceived of the
relationship between man and divinity, a relationship based on a mechanism of services and rewards,
shows that mercantilism must have formed the essence of the "kingdom".
Judaism in antiquity. It is well known that, in the Law, the Torah, the messianic idea was already closely
linked to earthly goods and wealth; yet it was this idea that would later give rise to capitalist
speculation and eventually lead Israel to use the economy as a
instrument of power" ("Il Giudaismo nell'antichità", 1941). The "kingdom of God" was materialistically
conceived long before the time of the prophets (Isaiah 60:10-12), for example in Deuteronomy 20, 2
Chronicles 1:12, 1 Samuel 2:32, Genesis 45:20. The Hebrews originally expected the "kingdom of David"
to be restored as a "kingdom of this world" by divine intervention,
but by political means. It was only later, in the diaspora, that the hope of the
As the restoration of a Jewish state receded, the Hebrews came to conceive of it religiously and
mystically rather than politically and practically, and the emphasis shifted to the fact that it was to be
created by Yahweh and not by His people. The causal link between the concept of the kingdom and
historical reality, contingency, was loosened in Deutero-Isaiah, an anonymous work written around 550-
540. But it
was not broken, for the Jews "never forgot that the source of future hope was faith in the restoration of
Israel as a free people among the nations, on this earth, in the land of Canaan. A tension [...] therefore
persisted in [Jewish] eschatology between the political, particularistic and worldly elements and the
transcendent, universalist, religious elements", an eschatology in which the Gentiles were considered as a
specific historical and political entity and as a "free people".
the manifestation of a mythical, cosmic force hostile to God. Of these two profoundly different
conceptions of the kingdom to come, the first "is older and more truly Jewish than the second".
The ideal of [Jewish] kingship belonged at one and the same time to the present and the future and
could be applied at any time to a historical person (101).
The populist factor
Russian populism was neither a political party nor a body of coherent doctrine, but a major radical
movement. It was born during the great social and intellectual upheaval that followed the death of
Nicholas I and the defeat and humiliation of the Crimean War. It made itself known and gained
influence during the 1860s and 1870s, reaching its apogee with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. It
was never more than a congerie of small independent groups of conspirators, who sometimes acted in
concert and sometimes in isolation. Although these groups tended to differ on
their ends and means, their agreement on the essentials and their political solidarity make it possible to
consider them as a genuine movement. Like their predecessors, the Decembrist conspirators in the
1820s and the Herzen and Belinski circles in the 1830s and 1840s, they regarded the government and
social structure of their country as an obsolete, barbaric, stupid and odious moral and political monster
and devoted their lives to its total destruction. Their general ideas were not original. They shared the
democratic ideals of the European radicals of their time, and also believed that the struggle between
social and economic classes was the factor that would lead to the destruction of their country.
They supported this theory not in its Marxist form (which only reached Russia in the 1870s) but in the
form in which it had been taught by Proudhon and Herzen and before them by Saint Simon, Fourier and
other French radicals and socialists, whose writings had been introduced legally or illegally into Russia
for several decades.
The theory that social history was dominated by class struggle, the core of which is the notion of
oppression of the 'haves' by the 'have-nots', was born during the Industrial Revolution in the West, and
its most characteristic concepts belong to the capitalist stage of economic development. Economic
classes, capitalism, cut-throat competition, the "haves" and the "have-nots" are all part of this concept.
and their "exploiters", the evil power of unproductive finance, the inevitability of the increasing
centralisation and standardisation of all human activities, the transformation of human beings into
commodities and the consequent "alienation" of individuals and groups, the "alienation" of the whole
of society.
the degradation of human existence, all these notions are only fully intelligible in the context of the
development of industrialism.
Until the 1850s, Russia was one of the least industrialised countries in Europe. An industrial proletariat
had indeed developed there, but by the middle of the nineteenth century, it was no more than a handful
of workers.
not two or three per cent of the empire's population. This is why the cause of the "oppressed" was still
largely that of the agricultural workers, who formed the lowest stratum of the population and the vast
majority of whom were serfs. The populists saw them as martyrs whose sufferings they were
determined to avenge and as paragons of simple, uncorrupted virtue, whose social organisation (which
they largely idealised) was the natural foundation on which Russian society was to be rebuilt. The
populists' main objectives were social justice and social equality. Most of them were convinced, after
Herzen, whose revolutionary propaganda in the 1850s influenced them more than any other doctrine,
that the essence of a just and equal society already existed in the Russian peasant commune, the
obshchina, organised in the form of a collective unit called the mir. The mir was an organisation of
collective land ownership. Its decisions were binding on all its members and formed the cornerstone on
which, according to the populists, a federation of autonomous groups freed from private property in
favour of collective property and organised according to the theory popularised by the socialist
Proudhon could be established. The populist leaders believed that this form of cooperation offered the
possibility of building a free and democratic social system in Russia, since it was rooted in the deepest
instincts and traditional values of Russian society and of all human societies; and they believed that the
workers (by which they meant all productive human beings), in town and country, could achieve this
system in a much less violent and coercive way than had been the case in industrial Western Europe.
This system, since it was the only one to derive naturally from basic human needs and from the sense of
right and good that existed just as naturally in all men without exception, would ensure justice, equality
and the fulfilment of human faculties. As a corollary, the populists believed that the development of
industry
Capitalism was a terrible scourge, destructive of body and soul; but it was not inevitable. They denied
that social or economic progress was necessarily linked to the Industrial Revolution. They maintained
that
the application of scientific methods and truths to social and individual problems, although it could and
often did lead to the development of capitalism, was possible without this sacrifice
fatal. They believed that it was possible to improve life through scientific techniques without necessarily
destroying 'natural' village life or creating a huge, impoverished and anonymous urban proletariat.
Capitalism seemed irresistible only because it had not been sufficiently combated. Like their French
masters, the Russian socialists had a particular hatred of the state institution, because they saw it
simultaneously as the symbol, the consequence and the cause of capitalism.
the main source of injustice and inequality, a weapon wielded by the ruling class to defend its own
privileges.
The failure of the liberal revolutions that had broken out in the countries of Western Europe in 1848
reinforced their conviction that salvation could not be found in politics or in political parties: it seemed
clear to them that the liberal parties and their leaders had neither understood nor made a serious effort
to defend the fundamental interests of the "oppressed" populations of their countries. What the vast
majority of peasants in Russia or workers in Europe needed was food and clothing. Political rights,
voting, parliaments, republican forms were meaningless and useless to half-naked, starving
ignoramuses; such programmes were an insult to their misery.
The populists shared with the Russian nationalist slavophiles a hatred of the bourgeois social pyramid of
the countries of Western Europe, which was accepted with complacency or ardently defended by the
conformist Russian bourgeoisie and the Russian bureaucracy that this bourgeoisie admired.
The populists, unlike the Slavophiles, did not believe in the uniqueness or destiny of the Russian people.
They only believed that Russia was a backward nation that had not reached the stage of social and
economic development that the Western nations had reached in
on the road to unbridled industrialism. Most of them were not advocates of historical determinism, so
they believed that it was possible for a nation to avoid this fate. They saw no reason why Russia could
not benefit from "Western" science and "Western" technology without paying the appalling price that
the industrialised countries of Western Europe had paid. They argued that the despotism of a
centralised economy or government could be avoided by adopting a federal structure of autonomous,
socialised units of producers and consumers. They believed that organisation was desirable but not an
end in itself. The ideas of the populists were often vague and there were
There were significant differences between them, but they found enough common ground to
constitute a movement in its own right. They broadly accepted Rousseau's educational and moral
ideas, without subscribing to his statolatry; Saint-Simon's anti-political conceptions, without being
supporters of the technocratic centralism he advocated. They shared the idea of conspiracy and
violent action preached by Babeuf and his disciple Buonarroti, but not their Jacobin authoritarianism.
They stood shoulder to shoulder with Sismondi, Proudhon, Lamennais and the others.
They were the creators of the notion of the welfare state, against the laissez-faire and centralism,
whether nationalist or socialist, provisional or permanent, preached by Liszt, Mazzini, Lassalle and Marx.
They sometimes came close to the positions of the Christian socialists of Western Europe, without,
however, adhering to any religious belief, because, like the encyclopaedists of the previous century, they
believed in 'natural' morality and scientific truth. These were some of their common beliefs.
The first bone of contention between the populists was their attitude towards the peasants, in whose
name they claimed to do everything they did. For some, it was necessary to train specialists to educate the
ignorant peasants and, eventually, to incite them to resist authority, to revolt and to
destroy the established order before the rebels themselves had fully understood the necessity or
significance of these acts. This was the view of such different personalities as Mikhail Bakunin (1814-
1876) and Nikolai Spechnev (1821-1882) in the 1840s; it was preached by Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828-
1889) in the 1850s and was ardently advocated by the Jacobins of "Young Russia" in the 1860s and Piotr
Zaitchnevsky (1842-1896), the organiser of the Moscow student revolutionary movement in the same
years; It was preached by the writer and mathematician Pyotr Lavrov (1823-1900) in the 1870s and
1880s, as well as by his rivals and adversaries, the advocates of organised "professional" terrorism
Sergei Netshayev (1847-1882) and Pyotr Tkachev (1844-1886) and their followers, not only the Socialist-
Revolutionaries but also the most fanatical Russian Marxists, in particular Lenin and Trotsky. In the
pamphlet he published abroad in 1902, which remained his best-known work until 1917, Lenin
supported the project to create a "Russian Marxist state". Lenin supported the idea of training
professional revolutionaries who would make a profession out of the art of fighting the political police.
Activists such as Tkachev, Netchaïev and, in a less political sense, Pisarev (1840-1868), whose admirers
became known as nihilists, also anticipated Lenin in their contempt for democratic methods.
From the aristocratic point of view, it has always been understood that those who know must govern
those who do not know. From the plebeian point of view, those who don't know but think they do
must manage those who don't, and the uneducated masses must be saved by all available means, if
necessary against their will, if necessary by trickery, deception or violence: this was naturally the point
of view adopted by the most radical populists and which Lenin was not slow to adopt.
The second area of disagreement among the populists was their attitude to the state. All Russian
populists agreed that the state was the embodiment of a system of coercion and inequality and therefore
intrinsically evil; neither justice nor happiness were possible as long as it
would remain. Tkachev specified that, as long as the capitalist enemy had not been entirely destroyed,
the weapon of coercion, the pistol wrested from his hand by the revolutionaries, should at no price
be thrown away but should be turned against it. In other words, the machinery of the State should not
be destroyed but should be used against the counter-revolution that would inevitably occur; it could
only be discarded when the last enemy, as Proudhon put it, had been liquidated and humanity
therefore no longer needed any instrument of coercion. It was
followed by Lenin. Lavrov, who represented the central current of populism and reflected all its
indecision and confusion, advocated not the immediate and total elimination of the state but its
"marginalisation". Chernyshevsky, the least anarchist of the populists, saw the state as the organiser
and protector of voluntary associations of peasants or workers and found a way to see it as both
centralised and decentralised, a guarantee of order, efficiency, equality and individual freedom.
However divergent their opinions on the attitude towards the State and the peasants, these
The thinkers all started from the apocalyptic vision that once the reign of evil autocracy, exploitation
and inequality had been consumed in the fire of revolution, a natural, harmonious, just order would
naturally and spontaneously arise from its ashes, needing only the benevolent guidance of enlightened
revolutionaries to achieve perfection. This great utopian dream, based on simple faith in regenerated
human nature, was a vision that the populists shared with the political theorists Godwin and Bakunin,
Marx and Lenin. It was based on the scheme of sin, fall, resurrection and the road to earthly paradise,
the gates of which will only open if people find a true path and follow it. It had its roots in the religious
imagination of mankind, so it's not surprising that it had many features in common with the beliefs of
the Old Believers and, in general, of most movements of religious dissidence for whom, since the great
religious schism of the seventeenth century, the Russian state and its rulers, particularly Peter the Great,
represented Satan's kingdom on earth; these churches, which had been in power since the end of the
twentieth century, were also in power since the beginning of the twentieth century.
The dissenters provided a large number of potential allies for the populists, whom they endeavoured to
mobilise, hoping to make contact with the peasants through them. The first contact between the
populists and the Old Believers took place in the 1840s in London, under the impetus of Alexander
Herzen (1812 - 1870).
Herzen is regarded as the father of populism. He was a friend and admirer of Proudhon. The
revolutionary doctrine of this Russian philosopher, writer and political essayist was based on the theory
that Russia could avoid capitalism and forge its own future on socialist and democratic foundations.
of the obshchina. "The people, long regarded with indifference or disdain, were to become an object of
veneration, the only virtuous guardians of Russia's eschatological destiny. Thus Narodnichestvo
("veneration of the people") was to become an article of faith for the radical intellectual elite, whether
the people liked it or not (102).
The most influential figure of the new generation of radical intellectual elite was undoubtedly Nikolai
Chernyshevsky (1828-1889). Born into a family of priests, Chernyshevsky transposed populism to the
political arena; "his political convictions were marked by asceticism, by the
The ideal of the religious ministry that a clergyman carries out for his parishioners was transformed in him
into the ideal of a priest. The ideal of the religious ministry that a clergyman performs for his parishioners
was transmuted in him into
a desire to serve the people as a whole in the social and political spheres [...] Disappointed by both the
results of the emancipation of the serfs and Herzen's aristocratic socialism, he persuaded himself that
only a revolution from below could bring about a lasting improvement in the lot of the peasants, and
that in the meantime the duty of intellectuals was to spread socialist ideas among the people and show
what a society based on cooperatives might look like" (103).
By the age of eighteen he had come to the conclusion that his country had to start from scratch. Like
Tchadayev and, to a lesser extent, Bakunin and Herzen, he showed great humility.
He often doubted his own courage and steadfastness, and often rightly so, for after believing that the
only force capable of establishing true equality was dictatorship, he turned round and said, "I'm going to
do you a favour. He often doubted his courage and steadfastness, and often rightly so, for after
believing that the only force capable of establishing true equality was dictatorship, he turned round and
placed all his hopes in the lowest strata. The one thing he never doubted was that he was destined to
follow in Herzen's footsteps and exercise a great
revolutionary influence on his time. The idea of a union between all branches of the intelligentsia had
been circulating for some time and Chernikhovsky set about making it a reality. Under his direction, the
literary journal Sovremmnik became the focal point for the dissemination of populist ideas and, in the
absence of any centralised revolutionary organisation, served as a transmission belt for the disparate
circles of ambitious young radicals who had sprung up in the wake of Alexander II's reforms.
Chernikhovsky published a didactic novel in Sovremennik in 1862 and 1863: What to do, subtitled "A
story about new men".
The hero of the novel is a man for whom life's problems are not solved by asserting personal freedom
but by fulfilling the task that falls to him and his absolute opposition to despotism; a man who is "one
with the cause that is a necessity, that fills [his] existence, that takes the place of his private life"; an
ordinary, banal individual, meticulous and impassive, the antithesis of the romantic revolutionaries
portrayed by Turgenev: Rakhmetov is the prototype of the "new man", an expression that the former
seminarian Chernikhovsky evidently borrowed from Paul of Tarsus. From a racial point of view, it is
particularly interesting that Rakhmetov, "a fanatical character, but religiously fanatical", borrows his
features from oriental ancestors and that "part of his strength derives from his Tatar ancestry". Like so
many other Russian aristocrats, he came from a noble, Russified Tatar family (104).
Rakhmetov "wandered through Russia like the valiant men of the bylines, and above all he read Book V
of Isaac Newton's Works, that is, Newton's interpretation of the Apocalypse.
eschatology like the terrorist Doudkine of Biely. Moreover, he took up the strap of the Volga haleur, the
"bourlak", and became a giant of the people, a Nikituchka, from the day he "decided
to acquire physical strength". He didn't waste a minute on secondary things or secondary beings. His first
nickname was Nikitouchka Lomovoj, a reference to his aura of valour.
legendary. But his second nickname is "the Rigorist", which refers to his ascetic figure: he spent four
days reading without sleeping, he slept on a bed of nails, and he was caught with his back and his
clothes completely bloodied".
"Invisible" to ordinary people, the hero of What to Do, through these exercises in mortification of the
flesh, offers people a message of edification that has not yet been fully revealed. According to Luke the
Evangelist, it was to John the Baptist that the people asked the question: What am I to do? John had just
said to the people: "You offspring of vipers, who showed you the way to escape the wrath to come?
Produce fruit that testifies to your conversion [...] For I tell you, God can raise up children to Abraham
from these stones. Even now the axe is ready to strike at the root of the tree". And then the people ask
the question: What then must we do? This sombre atmosphere of the threat of Judgement colours the
whole didactic novel of Russian atheism (105).
Religious elements abound. They are even more numerous in the drafts.
Rakhmetov served as a model for the activists of the next three generations. Who," wrote
Marxist G. Plekhanov, read and reread this famous book? Who has not been attracted by it and
benefited from its influence, who has not been purified, improved, strengthened and emboldened?
Who, after reading this novel, has not reflected on his own life, has not subjected his own aspirations
and inclinations to a rigorous examination? It gave us moral strength and faith in a better future. "He
enthused my brother [Alexander Ulyanov. He was executed in 1887 for his part in the attempted
assassination of Tsar Alexander III], I was enthusiastic about it myself, it ploughed me from top to
bottom", said Lenin of this utopian novel, in which he had a great deal of influence.
used the title for his famous manifesto. In her Memoirs, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, wrote that
"he had not only read it, but often re-read it". What impressed the future leader of the Russian
revolution about Chernyshevsky was that "not only did [he] demonstrate the need for every intelligent
and truly honest man to become a revolutionary, but he also showed - and this was even more
important - what a revolutionary should look like, what his principles should be, how he should achieve
his goals, and what methods and means he should use to achieve them" (106).
Despite the importance that some populists attached to economic or sociological issues, the fundamental
approach, tone and perspective of most populists was moral and sometimes
truly religious. These men believed in socialism not because they considered it to be
It was not because they believed it to be inevitable, nor because they considered it to be effective, nor
even because they considered it to be the only reasonable doctrine, but because they believed it to be
right. The populists proclaimed themselves to be atheists, but socialist values and orthodox values
merged in their minds.
Dobrolyubov, like Chernikhovsky, came from a family of priests. Chernikhovsky often said of him that he
was the only man who was really close to him. Chernikhovsky provided the framework in which populist
feelings and desires were born and laid the political foundations on which Dobrolyubov's revolutionary
enthusiasm rested. He was the first fruit of populist ideas. He was the first to demonstrate the influence
they could have on young men and to show how they could awaken in them an irresistible desire to
follow them and carry them forward in their personal and political lives. With him the era that had
begun with the self-examination of a young Bakunin reverent towards the Hegelian Idea came to an
end. Then began the period in which the love of the people translated into the ambition to become a
peasant or a worker. The aspiration to equality gave rise to student "communes"; their aversion to
Russian hierarchical society led young revolutionaries to break with the surrounding world.
Dobrolyubov was the man who awakened these indeterminate energies, which were soon to be
channelled into the revolutionary movement.
The answer to the question posed by Chernikhovsky's novel lay in student "communes" (groups of young
men living together and sharing all their possessions) and production cooperatives, through which they
thought they could make contact with the population of the cities; their ultimate goal was to transform
Russia into a federation of village communes and industrial cooperatives; the New Testament and
historical studies of Russian Gnostic communities were on their reading list. These "communes" became
the hotbeds of all the populist conspiracies of the 1860s. The leader of the one in St. Petersburg
spoke of creating "a universal religion". He likened his circle to an "order of knights" and welcomed into
its ranks members of the Gnostic sect of "The Virility of God", which taught that every individual was
potentially destined to become a god.
Naturally, Dobroluybov could not expect all the intellectual elite, all the educated classes, to accept his
extremism. His preaching soon caused a rift between the great mass of "right-thinkers" and the few
who had to sacrifice everything to "action".
Afanasy Shchapov (1830-1876) took the opposite path: he did not start out with the desire to enlighten
and instruct the masses and then try to get to know them, become their equal and guide them. His
starting point was the people
It tried to gauge its traditional institutions and social life in relation to the State, 'Western' culture and the
intellectual elite.
Shchapov was Siberian. His ancestors had fled to Siberia at the beginning of the seventeenth century to
escape persecution by Raskol. They had been deacons and sacristans for generations.
Shchapov himself, like Chernikhovsky, studied at the seminary. This predisposed him to writing the
history of Raskol, which was then being rediscovered. The first fruit of his
The first of his studies was The Schism of the Old Believers, a long work published in 1858 which is a
study of the social and political significance of dissident sects and their development and differentiation
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His thesis is that the schism of the Old Believers
had been the culmination of a process of crystallisation of religion into formalism under the influence of
a "bookish and Judaic spirit", and that this formalism served to express a "clerical democratic ideology".
The criticism of The Schism of the Old Believers in Sovremennik had a profound influence on him and
led him to reconsider the central argument of his book. He lost interest in the study of the
development of religious expression that had been adopted in the past by the
movement of resistance to the State, to focus on the structural and social elements of this opposition.
Despite these criticisms, The Schism of the Old Believers was such an immediate publishing success that
Shchapov was appointed to the chair of history at the Kazan Theological Academy, where he had
studied. He began his lecture with an address that marked the end of the first phase of his studies and
made him the spokesman for a new populist trend, narodnost (perhaps best translated as "ethnicity")
and regionalism. He immediately became very popular with students because of his seditious rhetoric.
For this reason, he was arrested on the orders of Alexander II and taken to St Petersburg. Under
pressure from public opinion, he was released by the Tsar. When he was released from prison, he found
a job at the Ministry of the Interior [...] In the Russian capital, he resumed and deepened the political
and historical research he had begun in Kazan in 1859. He reconsidered the question of Raskol and
wrote a
little book to show that a regionalist or, as he often put it, "federal" vision of Russian history made this
religious phenomenon much more understandable. Raskol had represented a protest against the State
because it had fought to defend the "lands" against centralisation. It was democratic because it had
defended the traditional organisations of the Russian people, for whom it had become the mythical,
religious personification of strength. Raskol thus represented the sole culture of the peasants; the sects
had succeeded in adapting to the people's way of life. Raskol was the backbone not only of the
"resistance" but also of the peasant revolts.
By contrasting popular institutions with the state, by calling for an assembly that would give expression
to the traditional structure of the Russian people, and by praising the most extreme aspects of the
antithesis between state and society, Shchapov paved the way for revolutionary populism and
Bakunin.
In 1862, however, Chernikhovsky finally convinced Shchapov that what was really important was not
the traditional forms but "the economic well-being of all classes". More importantly, no institutional
change could lead to economic improvement. The traditional institutions of the Russian people were
backward and closely bound up with customs and prejudices that stood in the way of rapid economic
development.
Chernyshevsky himself had not seen clearly enough that the root of all evil lay in a lack of scientific
knowledge. The situation in Russia could only change once it had
would have assimilated modern technical knowledge. The duty of the intelligentsia was to make the
people understand this.
Shchapov died in Irkutsk in 1876 without having succeeded in making the people understand this.
Prior to the nineteenth century, the Russian insurrectionary tradition had its roots in the
Pugachevshchina (the Russian Peasants' War) and the palace revolutions instigated by the soldiers of
the Imperial Guard regiment during the eighteenth century. However, none of these sporadic
convulsions really sought to challenge the principle of autocracy or the social relations of the time. In
many respects, the failure of the Decembrist coup d'état of 1825 only served to accentuate the rift that
already existed between an educated elite committed to the philosophy of the Enlightenment and to
nationalist and Slavophile ideas, and a poor peasantry attached to its traditions. Despite this gulf, or
because of the romantic idealisation of the peasantry that developed among the intelligentsia as it
widened, the latter began to criticise Tsarism in the name of the people, and by the end of the 1840s
were in conflict with the other forces - intellectual, occult and social - that were more or less openly
opposed to this political regime. An idealist, Hegelian and liberal up to that point, it showed a growing
interest in the
This was due, on the one hand, to her refusal to serve the Tsar and, on the other, to her cultural
eclecticism and education. Since, on the one hand, their refusal to serve the Tsar increasingly separated
them from the mainstream of the Russian nobility and, on the other, their cultural eclecticism and
education isolated them from the peasantry, the radical intelligentsia came to form a layer of déclassés.
So the intelligentsia, most of whose members were of noble or bourgeois origin until the mid-1860s,
soon received reinforcements from young revolutionary activists of low Raznochintsy extraction, whose
determinism, positivism and utilitarianism soon overwhelmed the idealistic pathos of their elders. This
new revolutionary spirit was reflected in a clandestine leaflet circulated in the summer of 1862 by
Young Russia, a terrorist organisation related to Young Italy and Young Germany, whose aim was the
murder of the imperial family and social levelling.
This leaflet, entitled "To the younger generation", differed significantly from other contemporary
publications of this kind. In particular, it emphasised the need to destroy existing political and social
relations in Russia and raised the problem of relations with the older generation.
energetically than it had been elsewhere. This extremism and desire for action succeeded in clearly
formulating the fundamental problems of the relationship between the revolutionary elite and the
masses. All this was the work of a young man of nineteen, P. G. Zaitchnevsky (1842 - 1896) and a small
group of his fellow students. By the age of nineteen he had read some of the classics of socialism
"He had also read a few history books and had come into contact with the peasants who had suffered
under the reforms. These experiences were enough to convert him to Jacobinism and convince him to try
to apply the lessons of Barbès to the contemporary situation in Russia. Denounced for his extreme views,
he was arrested and imprisoned with other conspirators from his group in St Petersburg, where his cell
soon became a small club where students met to discuss matters.
The manifesto began: "Russia is entering the revolutionary stage of its existence". This was no longer
simply an expression of growing distrust of the machinery of Russian government. It was already an
expression of absolute faith in a new force. Revolution was latent in the order of things; no middle way
was possible; there was no more room for reforms or palliatives. Two groups, two "parties", faced each
other: the emperor's party, made up of the wealthy and ruling classes, however liberal their ideas; and
the "people's" party, in permanent revolt against the authorities, even if this revolt could be open or
concealed, depending on the circumstances. From this state of affairs could only emerge "a revolution,
a bloody and merciless revolution, a revolution that must radically transform all the foundations of
present-day society and exterminate all supporters of the existing order [...] We do not fear this
revolution, although we know that rivers of blood will flow and that perhaps even innocent victims will
perish".
To achieve this objective, Young Russia intended to rely mainly on the Raskolniki and the "people", i.e.
the peasants, whom it urged to violently oppose the act.
the emancipation of the serfs promulgated a few months earlier, not because it did not satisfy the
interests of the peasants, but because it set Russia on the road to capitalism and thereby threatened
the country's independence.
It also relied heavily on the army, whose officers were increasingly critical of the court. It also relied
heavily on the army, whose officers were increasingly critical of the court.
Populism and Jacobinism took on a new dimension in the revolutionary movement of the 1860s. Young
Russia" simply proposed a ruthless political method to implement a programme that was common to
all populists: collective ownership of land with the introduction of redistribution mechanisms
controlled by village assemblies. The aim of this
Jacobinism was not, in fact, democracy but peasant socialism. And it was this characteristic - this specific
element of Russian Jacobinism, which a contemporary Russian historian described as an "infantile
disease" - that manifested itself early on in this manifesto. By advocating the seizure of power by a
subversive and highly disciplined revolutionary elite, the establishment of a ruthless dictatorship and the
transformation of social, economic and political life, Zaitchnevsky, the founder of this organisation of
conspirators, sowed the seeds of a form of Jacobinism.
in the fertile soil of Narodnichestvo (the ideology and movement of the Raznochintsy).
While Sovremennik's populism had survived the waves of arrests that had hit revolutionary circles in
the early 1860s and had continued the tradition of Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, it had abandoned
any hope of a complete transformation of Russia in the short term. Sovremennik had tended to put all
his trust in the "people" and the "peasant". In opposition to this attitude, men appeared on the scene
who reaffirmed the essential role that could be played by a "critical elite", whom they contrasted with
the passive crowd, incapable of revolt. Thus was born nihilism.
From the political point of view, nihilism was at the very origin of the current which led to Russian
Bakuninism and Tkachev's Jacobinism. The others, insisting on the political function of an enlightened
and decisive minority, led to Jacobinism and the theory of a revolutionary elite.
From a moral point of view, Russian nihilism did not imply pessimism and disenchantment but, on the
contrary, the will to overcome bitter disappointment and the desire to "go to the end of one's ideas and
commitments". This had a major impact on politics. Nihilists relied solely on themselves. They paid no
heed to the ruling classes or even to the myth of the "people" and "peasants"; "personal emancipation"
(i.e. the formation of independent, critical individuals) was more important than social emancipation.
They identified this emancipation with the spread of technical and scientific knowledge.
To accomplish this task of education, it was essential to train a class capable of conceiving of its own
existence from the point of view of modern science and of renouncing sentimentality and romanticism.
From a philosophical point of view, Russian nihilism cannot be understood as the negation of all belief,
because "For the Russian atheist, unbelief is a faith, a faith that is more active, more religious, in the
etymological sense of the term, than ordinary religious faith" (107). Not for nothing does Chekhov have
the main character of his novel The Way (1886) say: "Russian life is an uninterrupted series of bouts of
faith, and as for unbelief or denial, well, if you want to know, it is not tasted at all. If the Russian man
doesn't believe in God, it only means that he believes in something else" Likharev adds: "I'll tell you
something about myself. My soul has been endowed with an astonishing capacity for belief. For half my
life I was - God forbid! - in the ranks of the atheists and nihilists, but there has not been a single atheist
or nihilist in my life.
I believe". On the other hand, it is particularly interesting to note that he considers himself to be a slave
to science, just like the faithful in Semitic religions,
particularly in Christianity and Islam, sees himself as a slave of God. He enters into scientific activity in
the same way as he enters into religion. At the same time, the Catholic writer P. Claudel was extolling
the virtues of modern technology, which he saw as nothing more and nothing less than an instrument
of Providence.
J. Kristeva is thus perfectly "entitled to wonder whether the structure of nihilism is not secretly intrinsic to
Orthodox mysticism", insofar as nihilism and Orthodox mysticism are characterised by both passivity (in
the etymological sense of the word: "confused, in disorder") and sentimentality, superstitious in
Orthodoxy, cynical in nihilism. Mystical exaltation "will be transferred to the nihilist movement, and also
to atheist and communist currents, in such a way that these apparently liberating and critical ideologies
are transformed into de facto religious ideologies, in the sense that they are based on the uncritical
affective allegiance of the subjects who claim to belong to them" (108). Moreover, if the nihilists took one
aspect of the
While Herzen's and Chernyshevsky's "egoism" as a theory and their exaltation of economic calculation
and cold utilitarianism did not prevent them from romantically embracing the egalitarian spirit of the
revolutionary movements of 1848 and trumpeting their hatred of the bourgeoisie, their "egoism" and
their "realism" did not prevent them from romantically embracing the egalitarian spirit of the
revolutionary movements of 1848 and trumpeting their hatred of the bourgeoisie. It is much easier to
call for a renunciation of the
sentimentality than to actually renounce it. It is even sentimental to call for a renunciation of
sentimentality.
The movement personified by Nikolai Ichutin (1840 - 1879) was the largest and most significant
revolutionary organisation after the self-dissolution of the first Zemlya i Volya (Land and Volya).
Liberté), a clandestine society of a few dozen young intellectuals, students and officers.
opposed to both the state and the liberalism that had reigned in the mid-1860s. It was both socialist
and terrorist and, because of the way it combined these two elements, it constituted the first typically
and purely populist nucleus.
Ichoutine was the first true incarnation of the revolutionary portrayed in Que faire? There have been
three great men in the world," he said, "Jesus Christ, Paul the Apostle and Chernyshevsky. Ichoutine's
group quickly became powerful and influential. It was made up of his old school and university friends,
young students expelled from university for their subversive activities and, in
their commitment to the "Towards the People" movement. Some of them sacrificed their property and
their careers to their cause. Self-sacrifice was in fact the dominant idea of the group. Most of its
members devoted themselves to creating cooperative associations or mutual aid societies among
workers, craftsmen and students, in accordance with the principles laid down by Chernyshevsky in
What to Do? Of course, Ichutin was not the first to try to create
But he was the first to introduce particularly Machiavellian ideas into this type of project. He was
completely indifferent to the means that would be used to build the future socialist society that he
called for. The murder of the Tsar was to be the shock that would provoke a social revolution or at least
force the government to make substantial concessions to the peasants.
Around the tiny group of "new men" inspired by these ideas, a revolutionary organisation gradually
grew up that reflected this extremist psychology. It consisted of around ten students, many of whom
were extremely poor. Some of them were of peasant origin, but most were the sons of country priests
whose way of life resembled that of the peasant masses. In 1885 they founded a secret society they
called "The Organisation", within which was formed an even more secretive cell which took the name of
"Hell" and whose aim was terrorism and, more specifically, the assassination of the Tsar. Ichoutine
boasted that "L'Enfer" was merely the Russian branch of a European revolutionary committee whose
avowed aim was to exterminate all monarchs. One of the members of "L'Enfer" carried out the deed on
4 April 1866.
Karakozov's shot at Alexander II put an abrupt end to the collaboration between the two countries.
the emperor and the liberal intelligentsia in the direction of reform, a collaboration that had made
possible the emancipation of the serfs and certain changes in local administration and justice. And so
began the period of what is traditionally called the "White Terror". Muravev, who had bloodily crushed
the Polish rebellion in 1863, was put in charge of the Ministry of the Interior. He organised a system of
repression aimed at eradicating the revolutionary forces by hitting the intellectual tendencies that had
given rise to them. Between 1866 and 1868, not a single group in Russia was able to engage in
clandestine activities or make its ideas known by giving a more general meaning to its internal debates.
But this does not mean that clandestine groups stopped springing up.
of the fertile soil of student meetings or that the spirit that had manifested itself in Ichoutine's "The
Organisation" did not continue to spread underground.
All the sources agree that the peasants supported the Tsarist regime. The attempted assassination of
the Tsar only served to demonstrate the strength of the link between the monarchy and the peasant
classes.
workers and peasants. This link could not be exploited to incite violence against the nobility, as the
revolutionaries had hoped. An abyss still separated them from the people.
In the early 1860s, intense revolutionary experiments fuelled by feverish reading of works from
Western Europe and the hasty application of their theories to the situation of the peasants in the Volga
basin gave rise in Kazan and Moscow to a typically Russian phenomenon, the Khozdenie v narod
("Towards the people") movement. The students called it "the apostolate", and the word expresses the
atmosphere of religious enthusiasm that inspired them. The first known "apostolic" pilgrimages date
back to March 1863. They were inspired by a student called Ivan Yakovlevich Orlov. Like so many of his
fellow students, he was Siberian; like so many of his fellow conspirators, he was the son of a priest.
When, in 1870, the cycle of reforms finally came to an end, and with it the phase of conspiracies based
on confidence in the peasants' resistance, the Khozdenie v narod movement began again. It was made
up of several groups. The most important of these was the Ruble Society, founded in 1867 by Hermann
Lopatin (1845-1918) and Felix Volkhovsky (1846-1914) with the aim of "better understanding the
enigmatic sphinx known as 'the people'", as one of its founders put it.
Having learnt the lessons of the failed assassination attempt on the Tsar, they set themselves the goal
of establishing a link between the intelligentsia and the people, not through terrorism and conspiracy,
but through patient and thorough preaching. Lopatin became one of the most active revolutionaries of
the 1870s and 1880s, a friend of Marx and Engels and the translator of part of Capital.
Khozdenie v narod was a resounding failure, a real fiasco. The ardent hopes of the young radicals had
vanished in the face of a gruff peasantry that was at best indifferent and at worst openly contemptuous
of their ill-fated efforts to forge a conscience.
revolution through propaganda and agitation. Confronted with the abyss that separated
Narodnichestvo and narod, its idyllic beliefs and prosaic reality, the radical intelligentsia was
languishing, when in 1877 the trial of the members of Khozdenie v narod who had been arrested three
years earlier gave it a welcome and timely publicity boost.
On the failure of this movement and on the whole pre-revolutionary period we have the
first-hand account from Emile Dillon, Daily Telegraph correspondent in Russia from 1887 to 1914 and
friend of Russian politician Sergei Witte: "In the 1970s the two main groups advocating revolution were
keen to draw on the emancipated peasants and to
energise. But they had no knowledge of the people, whose soul was, according to a Russian proverb, a
dark forest. So they decided that the best way to achieve their goal was to
to immerse themselves in the peasantry, to live the unenviable life of the labourer and to take an active
interest in the upheaval that would lead to the millennium. As a result, men and women from all over
the intelligentsia swelled the ranks of these apostles and, sometimes selflessly, sometimes
complacently, without restraint, discipline or consistency, they began to lead the life of grinding poverty
and deprivation to which the muzhik has long been accustomed and which he drowns in debauchery
and turpitude. The worship of the people, whom they hoped to indoctrinate and inspire, was the new
religion that the intellectuals preached and sometimes tried to practise. They regarded the nation as a
mystical body, much as Roman Catholics regarded their Church; but they went further than Catholics
and worshipped the object of their veneration, sacrificing their well-being and in some cases dying for it.
Yet they were aggressive atheists, who indiscriminately borrowed their dogmatic denial from foreign
authors. Their aim was
unattainable, their efforts did not follow any guidelines, their dogmas were not dogmatic enough
But they thought they could harness the divinity they had created to their chariot and drive it to a
marvellous Utopia. Anyone who disagreed with them was anathematised and even those who didn't
agree with them were excommunicated. For there were no despots more intolerant than they (109)."
Ichoutine was the last populist revolutionary to base his activities on the great hope that the
countryside would reject the government's policy towards the peasants.
The revolutionary ferment that inspired Ichoutine and his group was embodied in all its violence in
Sergueï Netchaïev (1847 - 1882). He developed the sentiments and ideas of "Inferno" with a cruelty that
had no equal among the revolutionaries of the 1860s but which is reminiscent of the exhortation of
Vissarion Bielinski (1811 - 1848) (110) not to hesitate to cut off heads in the name of the love of
humanity and the happiness of the greatest number.
"One of the agents that contributed most to preparing the political and social cataclysm [of 1917] was
the University and the licentious and libellous ragheads who met there" (111). Most of them were
peasants.
Let's digress for a moment: if by university we mean an institution of higher learning, then the jami'ah,
which spread throughout the eastern part of the Abbasid empire from the tenth century onwards, was
the most important institution of higher education in the Islamic world.
the first example of such an institution. The University of al-Karaouine, founded in Fez in 859 by Fatima al-
Fihri, is recognised as the oldest university in the world. The first colleges and universities in Europe
were influenced in many ways by the madrasas that existed in Islamic Spain and the Emirate of Sicily at
the time, and the Crusaders also had the opportunity to study their structure and operation in the
Middle East. Of Semitic origin,
The University is particularly well suited to the needs of a Semitic youth brought up according to certain
traditions and imbued with certain beliefs. Transplanted to our continent, it produced nothing good. In
the "Middle Ages", it produced legists and, from the eighteenth century onwards, parasites such as
bureaucrats and, under democratic conditions, parasites such as technocrats.
the typically modern superstition of "studies" and "diplomas". In Russia, as in Western Europe, it was,
along with the Church, the only institution that allowed the "social ascent" of the lowest strata of the
population and, by repercussion, the gradual submergence of aristocratic principles by the purely
materialistic values of the plebs and the bourgeoisie. This submergence began earlier in Russia, as
peasants already formed the bulk of the student contingent in the first decades of the nineteenth
century. "Gifted with an extraordinary receptiveness, a hypercritical mentality, an immense desire to
learn everything combined with insurmountable laziness and constant inconstancy, the student of
peasant origin regarded science with fear, took "Western" theories and ideas at face value and referred
to them to judge institutions.
and doctrines of his own country. Driven by a passion for the abstract, he adored science, or rather
'Western' pseudo-science, which he understood more easily, like a member of a tribe living in the 'West'.
on the shores of Lake Baikal loves his fetish. He had neither the equipment, nor the training, nor even
the ability to synthesise and work constructively (112).
Netchaev was eager to get to know and influence the student body. He had already read a lot, especially
about politics. At the time he was particularly interested in the French Revolution and Babeuf. He made
contact with a group of anarchists inspired by Buonarroti's Conspiracy for Equality, known as Babeuf's
Conspiracy, and befriended Tkachev. Eventually he joined a kind of clandestine committee that had
been formed to lead the various student movements along revolutionary lines. He had clarified some of
his political ideas and was already stubbornly trying to put them into practice. He was convinced that
the peasants' revolt was not only very close, but that its exact date could be predicted. The revolt, he
thought, was certain and so he set out his plans in a Programme of Revolutionary Action which he wrote
in collaboration with Tkachev. The programme reflected the ideas of their faction, which had appeared
suddenly between 1868 and 1869 and whose aim was to control the student movement and use it for
wider purposes. The existing order was not sustainable. It was therefore possible and even essential to
create an organisation to hasten its end. Union" and "insurrection" were the two fundamental points of
this programme. Revolution seemed to them to be a "historical law". But to prepare for the revolution it
was essential to create the greatest possible
number of "revolutionary prototypes" and to develop in society an awareness of a final and inevitable
revolution. The desire to act on a psychological level (the "prototypes
Their belief in immediate revolution was to be theorised by Bakunin, who had been deeply impressed
by Netshayev's personality. Their belief in immediate revolution was theorised by Bakunin, who had
been deeply impressed by Netshayev's personality and made him the "prototype of the revolutionary"
par excellence in the poem he dedicated to him in 1869. Together they wrote The Revolutionary's
Catechism, a pamphlet published anonymously whose contents expressed the feelings and ideas that
had been forming in the revolutionary movement since Ichoutine, in a relentless style that gave them
exceptional force.
The Revolutionary Catechism is presented as a series of practical tips on the technique of conspiracy
and the rules of operation of a clandestine association engaged in a fierce struggle with the surrounding
world. A sense of dedication, discipline and class consciousness flowed naturally from the situation in
which revolutionaries found themselves. But in The Revolutionary's Catechism, each of these rules is
taken to its extreme: loyalty becomes absolute, fanatical devotion; the desire to achieve a goal
translates into the denial of anything not related to it, hatred and the will to destroy. This ruthlessness
provides a source
of energy that constitutes the historical novelty of this document. It was violent enough to include even
the Machiavellian ideas of Ichoutine. The tactical advice on how to use others and oneself to win the
cause is expressed with such irresistible passion for the
It is a supreme goal that, under a thousand different aspects, is reminiscent of the doctrine "omnia
munda le mundis" ("All is pure to those who have been purified by faith", Luke 11.41).
As we have seen, the significant common denominator between the religious nationalist and atheist
rationalist currents that ran through Russian thought at the end of the nineteenth century was the
vision, tinged to varying degrees with messianism and millenarianism, of an ideal future society to be
built revolutionarily on the ruins of an established order deemed iniquitous; As we have also seen, the
Russian intelligentsia firmly believed that this ideal society could only be achieved through revolution.
suicidal, because "the intelligentsia devoted all its energy to the disintegration of the status quo,
believing that any other regime would be more satisfactory in any case and that force had to be used to
get rid of the existing authorities" (113). Whatever the outcome and collateral damage of the
revolution, Chernyshevsky in 1861 was "passionately looking forward to the revolution which
I hope so, even if I am aware that for a long time, perhaps for a very long time, it will bring nothing good,
that, perhaps for a long time, all that will come of it will be even greater oppression than that which we
know" (114). This revolutionary romanticism "perfectly expresses the religious fanaticism and devout
fervour that permeated the entire intelligentsia",
"a burning spirituality deeply rooted in the national character and past of the Russian people".
(115). The Russian intelligentsia thus ended up "constituting a kind of revolutionary priesthood, a
religious order" (116).
None better than the authors of the Revolutionary Catechism expressed this absolute, rationally
mystical, chaotically "totalist" character of revolutionary action, in the robot portrait they drew up of
the nature of the "new men" announced by the character
and of the structure of the revolutionary organisation they were destined to lead, whose "mechanism
[...] is kept hidden". For Netchaev, "the revolutionary is a man lost in advance, who has no particular
interest, who has no private affairs, who has no feelings, who has no personal ties, who has no property
and who does not even have a name. Everything in him is absorbed by a single interest to the exclusion
of all others, by a single thought, by a single passion - the
revolution". Similarly, the teaching of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church "urges, [...] implores every
man to renounce all that he possesses, to divest himself of his goods in order to give them away and
place them in communion with his brethren; and not being able to demand this community in the name
of the State, he nevertheless pursues its realization, with incredible fervour."
There is another major similarity between the teaching and work of the Church and the Catechism of
the Revolutionary: the desire to introduce militants into the whole of society in order to change it. "The
revolutionary can - and often must - live in society, pretending to be something he is not. The
revolutionary must penetrate everywhere, in all the middle and lower classes, in the merchant's shop,
in the church, in the offices, in the army, in the literary world, in the secret police and even in the
imperial palace." Similarly, the Church "teaches
by practical example even more than by words, the absolute community. Through a slow but
uninterrupted process spanning almost two thousand years, it has instilled the spirit, tradition
It has taken all trends and aspirations to the very heart of humanity, to the very bowels of civil society. It
has enveloped this society on all sides in an immense network of institutions which, in the most diverse
forms, are already preparing and partially realising the community within it". No
only the Church had, in its monasteries, under the name of lay brothers and sisters
Not only did it have monastic communities made up entirely of lay people, who worked in various
trades; it also attached to the monastic communities an immense multitude of lay people, in the third
orders of Francis, Dominic, Augustine and a host of others, had innumerable congregations of ordinary
faithful and lay communities teaching, schooling, university, scientific, literary, artistic and of all kinds;
Moreover, since the Middle Ages, it has never ceased to cover the soil of France and other European
countries with agricultural associations living in community of goods, food, work and life. The secular
world was thus penetrated, hemmed in, enveloped entirely in the narrow meshes of this immense
network linking it to the international community that Judeo-Christianity has never ceased to try to
build (117).
Infiltration and infiltration were far from being invented by the Trotskyists.
Having established his model of revolutionary organisation, Netchaev set up a network with the aim of
provoking a popular uprising to coincide with the ninth anniversary of the decree.
emancipation of the serfs. However, the people did not move and the Netchaevshchina sank into its own
fratricidal plots in the wake of this failure, which temporarily marked the populists' renunciation of the
Jacobin cult of political conspiracy and its implicit amoralism and their return to
the social idealism of their beginnings. However, the Netchaevshchina was to have a profound influence
on subsequent generations of revolutionaries, with Netchaev taking his place alongside Razine, Pugachev
and the Decembrists in the pantheon of Russian revolutionary martyrs.
In addition to peasants and students, the workers were the object of the populists' revolutionary
proselytism. It fell to the Chaikovskist populist movement to lay the foundations for the first
Russian workers' organisation. There had been no real workers' movement in the 1860s, only a series of
protests, disturbances and isolated strikes which had broken out".
These disturbances were largely a reflection of the difficulties peasant workers had in adapting to the
new conditions created by the abolition of serfdom in February 1861. These disturbances were largely a
reflection of the difficulties experienced by peasant workers in adapting to the new conditions brought
about by the abolition of serfdom in February 1861.
The revolutionary intelligentsia wanted to build a bridge between the villages and the factories. In
previous decades, the revolutionary intelligentsia had developed theories on the socialist and
collectivist nature of the obshchina. The revolutionary intelligentsia presented the obshchina to the
workers who
The revolutionary intelligentsia was later forced to admit that it was not easy to get the working classes
to accept the ideas of the peasants. Later, however, the revolutionary intelligentsia was forced to admit
that it was not easy to make the working classes accept the ideas of the peasants, for the latter were
already beginning to acquire a different mentality which led them to demand something new from the
intellectuals. But for the time being
populism enabled the revolutionary intelligentsia to fulfil its task as mediator. By
Through members of the revolutionary intelligentsia, the traditions inherited from the Mir and the
Obshchina began to breathe new life into the egalitarian and socialist aspirations that the Judeo-
Christian roots of Orthodoxy had had no trouble in nurturing in the Russian racial soil.
Radicalised by their realisation that neither the peasantry nor the working class constituted an
insurrectionary force as such, and that all the avenues followed to organise an agitation
and propaganda had proved to be hopeless, a handful of extremist activists
embarked on a campaign of political violence. Having reconstituted Zemlya i Volya, they put themselves
at the forefront of this campaign. Zemlya i Volya was the first revolutionary group not to bear the name
of its founders or inspirers. The Zemlya i Volya of the 1860s had also tried to become a party, although it
was made up of a multitude of small, poorly organised groups. The Zemlya i Volya of the 1870s, on the
other hand, was a revolutionary party in the sense that the term took on in the
It was made up of men who were devoted to the cause and did everything they could to bring together
and lead all the other revolutionary forces. Many currents joined Zemlya i Volya: the spirit of devotion
of the Tchaikovskists, the religious feeling that had inspired the "Towards the People" movement, the
anarchism of the Jew Rabinovitch and the humanism of the Jew Malikov, some of the specific elements
of Russian Jacobinism, etc. All these currents were in harmony with Zemlya i Volya. All these currents
merged into Zemlya i Volya, making it the most powerful organisation of the 1870s. All the elements that
made up Russian populism worked together in a "professional" manner.
". The party redefined the more genuinely populist ideas about the relationship between a peasant
revolution and an urban movement and adopted more skilfully and on a larger scale the various tactics
that had already been tried, such as propaganda, disruption, public demonstrations, strikes and finally
terrorism. It sought to reaffirm the principle of an assembly of close-knit conspirators determined to
employ a strategy based on disorganisation and terror.
And so, throughout Russia and particularly in the south, the bloody struggle between the authorities
and the revolutionaries resumed after what had seemed a temporary halt during the summer and
autumn of 1878. The situation was now somewhat similar to that which had existed more than ten
years earlier in Moscow, when the "resistance" had learned with displeasure that Karakozov had
decided to shoot the Tsar. But this time the regicides who were part of Zemlya i Volya had the support
of the hard core of their terrorist comrades. On the morning of 2 April 1879, a few weeks after the Jew
Grigori Goldenberg had pistol-whipped the governor of Kharkov, Prince Kropotkin, the anarchist's
cousin, Alexander II was taking his usual stroll around the Winter Palace when Alexander Solovev fired
five shots at him. None of his bullets hit the target. The Tsar
fled, stumbled and fell, but was unhurt. Solovev was arrested, imprisoned and tried, and hanged on 28
May.
The government's response to the attempted assassination of the Tsar was to declare a state of
emergency and introduce repressive measures. In fact, only a small proportion of the proposed
measures were implemented quickly. The commission of enquiry, despite its apparent practical
ineffectiveness, had
had nevertheless analysed the situation well and had set out the broad outlines of the government's
policy for 1879. Society" was politically passive: the educated classes remained neutral; the working
classes showed little inclination to support the government without
In return, they set their sights on the properties of the lower nobility and the State. It was therefore
not advisable to call on them. There was only one option left for the government: to fight the
revolutionary organisations on its own.
Even as it continued to proclaim the populist belief in the narod and the imperative of social revolution
and rejected the overtures made to it by a liberal faction
In the embryonic stage of the Zemstvo movement, which sought to exploit revolutionary agitation to
emphasise the need for constitutional reform, Zemlya je Volya ventured into new political terrain. Faced
with the inertia of the peasantry and the unlikelihood of an insurrectionary crisis in the immediate future,
the concept of revolutionary constraint, i.e.
imposing a social revolution on the people by means of a coup d'état carried out by a minority of
individuals, the vanguard movement of the revolutionary intelligentsia began to win the esteem and
sympathy of the Zemlevoltsy, the members of Zemlya i Volya.
But the emerging conflict between the social ethos of the Narodnichestvo and the need to gain political
power quickly to prevent the establishment of links between capitalist forces and bourgeois
constitutionalism was to cause Zemlya je Volya to fall into a schism between those who were convinced
that it was possible to make the peasantry aware of their cause through education and propaganda and
those who advocated political terror. The latter founded the Chernyi Peredel (Black Distribution)
movement; the former, the Narodnaya Volya (People's Will), an organisation very close to Netshayev
that operated from January 1878 to March 1881.
Even the most active sections of society placed the responsibility for the struggle on the shoulders of
the revolutionaries. Since the intelligentsia were incapable of suggesting a programme, they could not
encourage populists to engage in terrorism. Until the end of the 1870s, terrorism had been a symptom
of the increasingly marked political orientation of populist and socialist currents.
In Narodnaya Volya, he became the symbol of the individual fight between the revolutionaries and the
This was a situation in which neither side had any room for manoeuvre. The originality and strength of
Narodnaya Volya lay solely in its attempt to
synthesis of an armed clandestine political struggle and the desire for a social revolution capable of
pitting the people against all the ruling classes.
In the eyes of the revolutionaries, it was now time to translate into politics the fundamental principle of
populism, namely that the survival of the obshchina had predisposed the Russian people to the
"populists".
socialism. The day when the revolutionary power (or even the old State under the pressure of terrorism
and the revolutionary activity of the populists) appealed to the people and convened a constituent
assembly that would finally represent the peasants, the vast majority of those elected would be
socialists. The
The free will of the people would thus be expressed by the election of deputies determined to bring
about a "social upheaval", which was not a "despotic utopia" but the very expression of the historical
evolution of the whole of Russia.
Narodnaya Volya, like all the previous populist movements, tried to appeal to
the intelligentsia and students, hoping to find in them the revolutionary energy and enthusiasm that it
had had little success in arousing in the educated class. Some of the young recruits from these circles
soon became professional revolutionaries, entrusted with delicate missions involving conspiracy and
terrorism. But it proved impossible to breathe new life into the student movement or to manufacture
strikes and protests. On the other hand, the political outlook of Narodnaya Volya's executive committee
enabled its members to penetrate circles that had been untouched by revolutionary propaganda ten
years earlier. Now it was the army's turn. The economic crisis that hit Russia hard in 1881 also
highlighted the political nature of Narodnaya Volya's activities among the workers. The working classes,
both in the capital and in the provinces, were aware that the regime was "easily inflammable". An
insurrection in St Petersburg would give the signal to the smaller towns and the countryside. The
workers would act because they had met the socialists and had been seduced by their promise of a new
life. In a revolution, their role would be that of an elite. The Programme of the Workers' Members of
the Narodnaya Volya, published in 1880, laid the foundations for the organisation it intended to set up
in the factories. This programme, one of the fundamental texts of the Executive Committee, took as its
starting point the socialist and populist ideal that Narodnaya Volya shared with Zemlya je Volya.
In the autumn of 1879, the Narodnaya Volya committee adopted terrorism as the supreme goal of all its
efforts. With its rigid hierarchical structure based on the principle of "elective centralism" and its
pursuit of revolutionary dictatorship in the name of the people, Narodnaya Volya reflected an
increasingly virulent political tension in the populist movement. Since they had come to the conclusion
that the Russian state continued to derive its moral and coercive authority from the autocratic
institution, the revolutionary strategy of the Narodovoltsy, which consisted of creating the conditions
for demoralisation and paralysis favourable to a coup d'état, was to crystallise around regicide.
Two more assassination attempts were made on the Tsar in the following months. The fifth, on 1 March
1881, proved to be the successful attempt. The grenades thrown at the Tsar had been invented and
manufactured by Nikolai Kibalchich, a pioneer in aerospace research to whom Nikita Khrushchev paid
tribute in April 1961 on the occasion of Gagarin's space flight. He was arrested and hanged along with
Sofia Perovskaya, a Jewish noblewoman who had played a key role in the logistical preparations for the
attack. Gesya
Gelfman (or Helfmann), another of the Jewish supporters of "revolutionary free love" who had taken part
in the assassination, only saved herself thanks to the clemency of the Russian authorities, who, given that
she was a Jew, were able to take her life.
was pregnant at the time, commuted her death sentence to life imprisonment.
The terrorist campaign at Narodnaya Volya prevented the adoption of the constitutional reforms
proposed by Mikhail Loris-Melikov and, by extension, the emergence of a new layer of government.
more moderate intellectuals. Moreover, the hiatus between the state and the educated classes was to
benefit a future revolutionary vanguard which did not take long to learn the lessons that could be
applied to the future.
It was the heir to a cell of professional revolutionaries deprived of any real popular support. Finally, the
industrialisation of Russia and its somewhat hesitant steps towards modernisation were to provide the
framework for a dialogue and hybridisation between the Russian populist tradition and the pervasive
influence of Marxism.
Many populists subscribed passionately to Marx's critique of capitalist accumulation and its corollary,
human exploitation and alienation, and to his denunciation of the capitalist 'superstructure' and
concomitant bourgeois-constitutional freedoms. However
very few approved of the orthodox interpretation of the Marxian theory of "historical materialism"
according to which Russia would be forced, as Western Europe had been, to pass through the capitalist
stage before reaching socialism; even fewer adhered to the scientific socialist theory according to which
the liberation of the world could only come from the working class and the proletarianisation of the
peasant masses could serve the cause of "universal progress
(118). As a result, influential populist ideologues such as Tkachev, whose relative adherence to
economic materialism and vision of a highly centralised vanguard earned him the title of "the first
Bolshevik", remained deeply attached, in the eyes of their Marxist critics, to a "subjective" and
"voluntarist" form of Russian particularism incompatible with Marx's concept of an "objective" and
therefore "universal" historical process.
Many Marxist historians and scholars have, however, drawn attention to Marx's singularly ambivalent
attitude to Russian populism. In an 1881 letter to the Chernyi Peredel activist Vera Zasulich and in his
preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto in 1882, Marx significantly revised the
dismissive stance he had initially taken towards the Narodnichestvo and its attachment to the "rural
stupidity" of the village commune, now envisaging the obchtchina as a potentially regenerative force
central to the passage
Russia's direct commitment to communist development. He thus turned out to be a much less "classical"
Marxist than most of his supporters, and particularly the circle of his Russian admirers, who were
formulating their own orthodox Marxist critique of populism in Geneva under the tutelage of Georgy
Plekhanov (1856-1918), a disciple of Chernyshevsky and Bielinsky.
For the exiled Plekhanov, who had aligned himself with Chernyi Peredel at the time of the Zemlya i Volya
schism, the universalist character of Marxist theory and the Marxian synthesis of social revolution and the
He saw Marxism as a complete theoretical system and, having adhered unconditionally to its systematic
and universalist principles, he had to analyse the Russian situation from a strictly Marxist perspective.
He regarded Marxism as a complete theoretical system and, having adhered unconditionally to its
systematic and universalist principles, he had to analyse the Russian situation from a strictly Marxist
perspective. Thus, in laying the theoretical and strategic foundations of Russian social democracy,
Plekhanov concluded that Russia had to pass through the capitalist stage in order to become socialist. In
order to speed up the process of capitalist development, which the autocracy was hindering at the time,
the socialist revolution had to be preceded by a bourgeois-democratic revolution. A revolutionary
intellectual elite versed in Marxist historical dialectics had to assume the leadership of a Russian socialdemocratic
party capable of guiding the industrial working class in its struggle to overthrow the tsarist
system,
thus creating the dynamic conditions favourable to the establishment of a dictatorship of a politically
conscious and majority proletariat.
Together with a coterie of émigrés, Plekhanov formed the Group for the Emancipation of Labour in
1883, whose main tasks were to translate and disseminate Marxist literature and to convert the new
generation of radical intelligentsia and workers to Marxism. They took the name "Social Democrats".
One of their recruits was Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov (1870 - 1924), who soon took the nom de guerre of
Lenin (119).
The Tolstoy case
"Russian novelists [...], in the absence of any public life, have played a political and social role for Russia,
in the realm of fiction to which censorship obliged them to resort, similar to that of the philosophers of
the eighteenth century; they have served as spiritual guides, they have broadened and deepened the
feeling and the need for freedom; there is no literature more revolutionary than Russian literature.
Tolstoy is the Slavic Rousseau. Like Rousseau, he stirred up the most generous sympathies for the
oppressed classes, and brought them to the pinnacle. He never ceased to be a fervent disciple of
Rousseau, the father of anarchism and socialism, as well as a religious prophet.
However, unlike Rousseau, "Tolstoy is a privileged man who is ashamed of his privileges; he will become
a people and serve the cause of the people" (120). He was the embodiment of Russian populism. Over
time, however, he "ended up losing confidence in the vocation of the Slavic people, and transferring it
to the Chinese peasants, who, frozen in age-old custom, plough their fields so peacefully (121)!
Like many other populists, he was unstable. "His story is that of a very excitable mind in times of great
excitement. Born in 1828, died in 1910, he spent his youth under the absolutist reign of Nicholas I,
fought at Sebastopol, witnessed the emancipation of serfs, of
the assassination of Alexander II and the triumph of theocratic and police reaction, the growth of terrorist
attacks, the Russo-Japanese war and the first popular uprising that heralded the decline of a regime
similar to that of Byzantium. These events made a deep impression on Tolstoy's mind, despite the fact
that he had always steered clear of party politics. In him, the sagacious observer of human miseries and
weaknesses was coupled with an enthusiast gifted with a strong imagination and an ungovernable
sensitivity, over which reason and experience had no hold" (122). For him, "Emotion and passion thus
become infallible arbiters [...] This intrepid pursuit of the ideal, this hunt for the absolute, is usually the
prerogative of youth; maturity and the trials of life lead to the limitation of desires and hopes. Tolstoy's
ambition for the infinite is all the more ardent as he approaches middle age, when the first attack of the
revolutionary fever that is now devouring his people will have taken hold of him (123)".
Like a number of other populists, he had high aristocratic origins, a dissipated and tormented youth and
had taken part in the Caucasus and Crimean campaigns and travelled abroad.
Like a good number of other populists, he "had lost his orthodox faith at an early age, called himself a
positivist, while retaining the habit of prayer and self-examination; he kept a diary, reproached himself for
his faults and vices, especially sensuality. Proud, obstinate, irritable, he liked to contradict, suspected
sincerity in others, and without succeeding in correcting himself, always showed himself to be repentant.
(124) ". This pathological introspection was coupled with a sickly exhibitionism, which, in 1862, led him
not simply to confess his "past errors" to the woman he had just married, but to give them to her to
read.
Like a number of unbalanced people who lose their faith in childhood, he rediscovered it in middle age.
"As early as 1874, he began to feel troubled. In his novels, his preoccupation with the great problems of
life, death and religion began to emerge. Tolstoy was increasingly haunted by them, searching while
groaning. Pascal, Schopenhauer, whose portrait adorns his bedroom, and Ecclesiastes are his bedside
books. Life seemed an evil to him, and he realised that philosophy was powerless to alleviate it. Pilgrims
pass by on their way to venerate the relics of saints. He envied them and felt them close to his heart
(125). Like Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon sect, he was visited in the woods: "On a beautiful
spring day, he was alone in the middle of the woods; he listened to the sounds of the forest, and God
revealed himself to him in this universal blossoming (126)...".
Like a number of those who rediscover the faith in middle age, far from rejoining the Church, he
repudiated it, believing that it had betrayed the message of Christ. His morality was that of the Gospels
and, consequently, he advocated the cosmopolitan spirit, in Christianisme et patriotisme (sic), on the
pretext that, according to monogenism, men would be the sons of the same father; he reviled that "which
he considered to be the cause of economic oppression, [?private property, denounced by Saint Jerome
and Proudhon as theft, by Rousseau as the source of all wars and the greatest evils...". (127) As a good
humanitarian, he condemned the violence of the State, while finding very mitigating circumstances for
those who used it against the State. He repudiated the State like the Church. He had no confidence in
revolutionaries, but considered revolution inevitable.
Thus the violent revolution will inevitably precede the true revolution, "that which will replace corrupt
Christianity and the regime of domination which derives from it with true Christianity, the basis of
equality between men and of true freedom, to which all beings endowed with reason aspire (128)".
". Always in perfect harmony with the Gospel, he affirmed that "Not only must we not fight our enemies,
but we must love those who oppress us and slander us, as the Christian law commands" (129). It is
almost needless to say that he did not follow this precept.
He "based his hopes on a transformation of the hearts of men, when they had been shown what is
right and what is wrong" (130). This confidence, which William James conveniently describes as
To be "naïve", "would be to hand humanity over to the enemy; not to resist evil would be to condemn it
to extinction. The entire social order is based on resistance to evil. If society feels hit, instead of turning
the other cheek, it strikes back. Despite Tolstoy and the Quakers, we accept that violence must be met
with violence, that invaders must be repelled, vagrants driven out, thieves rounded up and murderers
punished. Justice consists in punishing as well as rewarding" (131).
There was nothing new in Tolstoy's religious and social doctrine: he merely gave it the stamp of his
personality. Nothing was more common at the time in Russia, England and the United States than
the appearance of sects that separated themselves from the Churches by interpreting certain passages of
Sacred Scripture. Tolstoy's entire thought is a paraphrase of the Sermon on the Mount, a return to
primitive Christianity.
Meanwhile, "the anarchists scoffed at Count Tolstoy's Christian anarchism. They did, however, see him as
a valuable helper: "The old man rambles, but he's useful to us; he's tearing society apart (132)
". Tolstoy thus entered the pantheon of those whom Lenin later described as "useful idiots". The
Bolsheviks were not ungrateful to him: "Never, according to Chertkof, were Tolstoy's leaflets
had been as widespread as in the first months of the Provisional Government. Hostile to all
However, Tolstoyism contributed to the social awakening that was to lead to the political revolution.
After their coup d'état, the Bolshevik dictators, anxious to win over the peasants, claimed to have
annexed to themselves the memory of Tolstoy, who would have abhorred their violence carried out in
the most odious military form. They
devoted millions of roubles to disseminating his works, and commissioned Maxim Gorky to promote the
popular art that Tolstoy had modelled. The Red Guards protected the
Yasnaia Poliana's [Tolstoy's wife] home against gangs of looters. The house and estate were nationalised
(133)...".
Tolstoy had done "the service of arousing, by furious attacks on the old regime, in the name of the
Gospel, the revolutionary spirit, and, on the other hand, what doctrine is more favourable to despotism
than that of non-resistance to crime? Machiavelli remarked: "One can tyrannise without fear men who
are more disposed to bear insults than to avenge them (134)".
Gnostics, mystics and radicals
Numerous links existed in nineteenth-century Europe and the United States between Gnostics, mystics,
occultists and radical socialists. In the United States, various communities with fundamentally Gnostic
and occult doctrines tried to live communist lives. But not all of them. Victoria Woodhull (1838-1927),
married to a former colonel in the US army who had become president of a spiritualist association, was
at the time the figurehead of the
feminism. A promoter of feminist Marxism, spiritualism, free love and cosmology, Woodhull believed
that spiritualism represented not only religious inspiration but also cultural, political and social
revolution. She published the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto in her own
newspaper and tried unsuccessfully to persuade Karl Marx that the aims of spiritualism and
communism were the same. She was also the first woman stockbroker in New York. A. Besant (1847-
1933), president of the Theosophical Society, sister of the Freemason Sir Walter Besant and a
Freemason herself, took part in the International Congress of Socialist Workers held in Paris from 14 to
20 July 1889, where she received a standing ovation (135).
Occultists, mystics, occultists and radical socialists constituted what historian James Webb calls "a
progressive resistance" united by a common opposition to the established order. Webb writes that
"socialists and occultists worked hand in hand".
Dissident Christian mystics, spiritualists, occultists and radical socialists often played a leading role in
contemporary political movements for 'social justice', 'workers' rights', 'free unions' and 'women's
emancipation'. Nineteenth-century occultists and socialists together called for a new age of universal
brotherhood, of
justice and peace. They all had a charismatic vision of the future - a radical alternative to the
old political, social, economic and religious power structures. And more often than not, the common
enemy they faced was the 'unholy' alliance of State and Church.
Lenin and the "spiritual resistance
"Men can only participate in a great social movement making history by narratively representing their
action as a battle for a just cause" (136). "The general strike of the syndicalists and Marx's catastrophic
revolution are myths" (137).
Members of religious sects played an important role in the formation of Bolshevism, the unique brand of
revolutionary Marxism created by Lenin. Indeed, the fact that Marxism, in its aggressive veneration of
atheism and scientific materialism, regarded religion with contempt as "the opium of the people" did not
prevent certain Bolshevik leaders from using concepts of "religion" and "religionism" to their advantage.
directly borrowed from occultism and radical Gnosticism. Nor did the materialist point of view of
communism, the name by which Bolshevism was later known, prevent the "
This was the first time that the Russian "spiritual resistance" had lent its invaluable support to Lenin's
revolutionary cause.
One of Lenin's earliest supporters was the radical Russian journalist V. A. Posse, who published a Marxist
newspaper called Zhizn (Life) from Geneva. Zhizn aimed to enlist the support of communities
Russian dissident nuns, whose struggle to overthrow the tsarist autocracy was gaining momentum.
Posse's publishing house received financial support from the Jew V. D. Bonch-Bruevich, a Marxist
revolutionary and specialist in Russian Gnostic sects. Posse managed to finance Zhizn thanks to Bonch-
Bruevich's connections in the "spiritual resistance" movement of Old Believers and Gnostics.
Zhizn's aim was to reach a large audience of proletarian and peasant readers who would one day form a
popular front against the hated Russian government. Lenin soon began writing articles for Zhizn. Lenin
appeared to Posse as a kind of mystical sectarian, a Gnostic extremist, whose asceticism was matched
only by his self-confidence. Both Bonch-Bruevich and Posse were impressed by Lenin's zeal to build an
effective revolutionary party. Lenin despised
religion and showed little interest in Zhizn's religious orientation. The Russian Jewish Marxist thinker
Plekhanov, one of Lenin's early mentors, openly expressed his hostility to the paper's religious bent. He
wrote to Lenin to complain that Zhizn "talks about Christ and religion on almost every page. In public I
would call it an organ of Christian socialism".
Zhizn's publisher went out of business in 1902 and his activities were successfully transferred to Lenin.
The very first Bolshevik publishing house was set up in 1903-1904 by Bonch-Bruevich and Lenin. Both
men saw Russian sectarians as valuable revolutionary allies. As one researcher notes, "Russian religious
protest exerted an attraction on Bolshevism even before this movement had made a name for itself".
Bonch-Bruevich came to revolutionary Marxism under the influence of the social teachings of the Russian
novelist Leo Tolstoy. Like Lenin's wife, Krupskaya, he began his career as a journalist.
revolutionary by distributing Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You, a work imbued with neo-
Gnostic themes. In 1899, Bonch-Bruevich left Russia for Canada to live with the Doukhobors, Russian
Gnostic communists whose persecution for refusing to pay taxes and serve in the army had driven them
into exile. Bonch-Bruevich reported on the secret doctrines of the Doukhobors and wrote down their oral
teachings
which they called the "Living Book". On his return to Europe in 1901, Bonch-Bruevich informed Lenin of
the fundamental principles of these Gnostic communists. The Doukhobors, with their radical rejection
of Church and State, their denial of the uniqueness of the historical Christ and their disregard for the
Bible in favour of their own secret tradition, were of some interest to the founder of Bolshevism.
In 1904, Bonch-Bruevich, with Lenin's support, began publishing Rassvet (The Dawn) in order to spread
revolutionary Marxism among religious dissidents. His first editorial attacked all the Russian tsars for
their persecution of old-believers and sectarians and declared that the purpose of the paper was to
report events taking place all over the world, "in the various parts of our vast motherland and in the
ranks of sectarians and schismatics".
Rassvet combined communist and apocalyptic themes that were both compelling and understandable to
the Russian 'spiritual resistance'.
In the early years of the twentieth century, Russia was in a revolutionary frame of mind. Bonch-
Bruevich wrote that this would soon lead to "the awakened people going into insurrection". He
urged his Communist revolutionaries to use the language of "spiritual resistance" to persuade the
masses that government was "Satan" and that "all men are brothers" in the eyes of God. He wrote: "If
the sectarian proletariat needs to hear the word 'devil', identify that old concept of an evil principle
with capitalism and identify the word 'Christ', as a concept of eternal good, with happiness and
freedom, with socialism" (138).
The Russian people were ripe for Lenin's communism. Bolshevism," wrote an anti-communist
Russian in 1919, "is a Russian word. But it is not just a word. Bolshevism is a typically Russian
phenomenon. It is deeply linked to the Russian soul. The National Socialist propaganda minister, Dr
Goebbels, observed that no tsar had ever understood the Russian people as deeply as Lenin, who
had given them what they wanted most - land and freedom.
Communists and the occult
"Occult literature can only be perplexing and impatient for those who consult it for the first time; for
they will find in it a motley mixture of the dung of all cultures and occasional fragments of a philosophy
that may be profound, but is almost certainly not.
subversive to the equilibrium of the society in which he lives. The occult sciences constitute the body of
rejected knowledge: in other words, a resistance whose fundamental unity is that of Opposition to the
Existing Order (139)".
A Marxist pamphlet written before 1917 and later reprinted by the Soviet government bluntly declared
that man is destined to "take possession of the universe and carry his species to distant cosmic regions,
to take over the entire solar system. Human beings will be immortal". The Jew Anatoly Lunacharsky
(1875-1933), the first People's Commissar for Public Education in the newly-formed Soviet state,
believed that, as religious belief had been a powerful engine of change in history, Marxists should
conceive of the struggle to transform nature through labour as their own form of devotion and the spirit
of humanity as their God.
Lunacharsky and Maxim Gorky (1868-1936), two close friends of Lenin, were familiar with the whole
range of occult thought, including Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy and Helena Blavatsky's theosophy.
These two leading Bolshevik revolutionaries shared an interest in ancient mystery cults, religious
sectarianism, metapsychology and Gnosticism. Carlson argues that Gorky's vision of "a New Nature and
a New World, later assimilated into his
socialist expression as the Radiant Future, is fundamentally theosophical". Gorky appreciated the
writings of the occultists Emanuel Swedenborg and Paracelsus, as well as those of Fabre d'Olivet and
Édouard Schuré.
Drawing on the images of the ancient solar mysteries, Gorky, in Children of the Sun, declared: "We, the
people, are the children of the sun, the shining source of life; we are born of the sun and will conquer
the dark fear of death". In A Confession, the people became God himself, a
the creator of miracles, the possessor of true religious consciousness, he became immortal. Gorky
envisaged a bright future of work for the love of work and of man as "master of all things". Revealing
his knowledge of metapsychology and faith healing, Gorky recounts how a gathered crowd uses its
collective energy to cure a paralysed girl. He was deeply impressed by research into the transmission of
thought and wrote extensively about "the miraculous power of thought", expressing the hope that one
day reason and science would destroy fear.
The ideas promoted by Lunacharsky and Gorky became known as "God's building", which has been
described by one researcher as "a secular regeneration movement with mystical aspects".
". God-building implied that a human group, through the concentration of human energy it unleashed,
could perform the same miracles that were attributed to supernatural beings. God-builders saw early
Christianity as an authentic example of a collective God-building, Christ being nothing other than the
focus of collective human energy. The time will come," writes Gorky, "when all the wills of the people
will once again merge in one point. Then an invincible and miraculous power will appear and God will
be resurrected". A few years earlier, Fyodor Dostoyevsky had written in The Possessed: "God is the
synthetic personality of an entire people".
According to Mikhail Agursky, "For Gorky, the building of God was first and foremost a theurgical rite,
the creation of the new Nature and the annihilation of the old, and was therefore one with the Kingdom
of the Spirit. He saw God as the result of a collective theurgical work, the result of human unity and the
negation of the human ego.
Before the Bolshevik putsch, Lunacharsky's political propaganda was essentially based on words and
images borrowed mainly from Gnostics and members of Russian religious sects. In one pamphlet, he
urged readers to refuse to pay taxes or serve in the army; he also urged them to form local revolutionary
committees, claim ownership of their land, overthrow the autocracy and replace it with a socialist
"fraternal society". Indeed, in his writings, Lunacharsky attached as much importance to Christ as to Marx.
Christianity, in all its forms, even the purest and most progressive," he wrote, "is the ideology of the
oppressed classes, of the desperate serfs, of those who do not believe in their own strength.
Christianity is also a weapon of exploitation". But Lunacharsky realised that there was also an
underground spiritual tradition, whose mysterious language and symbols could be used to mobilise the
people for revolutionary ends.
Sunacharsky's early plays and poems are permeated with occult elements such as references to the
"astral spirit", white magic and demonology. He dealt with Gnosticism, the Logos, Pythagoras and solar
cults in a two-volume work entitled Religion and Socialism. Following the usurpation of power by his
Bolshevik comrades, Lunacharsky wrote an occult-inspired play entitled Vasilisa the Wise. He never
completed the "dramatic poem" Mitra the Saviour that he had begun after the publication of this play.
He is
It is significant that, as we shall see below, Lounacharsky and Bonch-Bruevich, an expert on Russian
Gnostic sects, were credited with giving rise to the "Lenin cult", which dominated Soviet life after the
Bolshevik leader's death in 1924.
Soviet power and the "spiritual resistance
Following the destruction wrought by the First World War and the total collapse of Imperial Russia,
Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power by force in October 1917.
According to one Russian academic, this plot would probably not have succeeded without the active
support of the Russian "spiritual resistance". A fortiori, the Bolsheviks would not have been able to
"consolidate their power if millions of members of Russian sects had not taken part in the total
destruction wrought by the revolution, which took on a mystical character for them. Like the medieval
Gnostic sects of the Anabaptists, Bogomils, Cathars and Taborites, they considered that the State and
the Church were the receptacle of all kinds of evil and that their destruction and devaluation were a
mystical duty".
The "spiritual resistance" put its arms at the service of the Communist cause all the more spontaneously
as Communism seemed to be fulfilling its wishes. The apocalyptic and messianic themes popularised for
centuries by the Russian "spiritual resistance" manifested themselves in the Bolshevik revolution and
fuelled the aspiration to build a classless, communist society. The dream of a communist paradise
created by human hands on earth, a new world completed by technology, social justice and fraternity,
was to be found in both Marx and the "spiritual resistance".
Russian spiritualism. It also appeared in occultism in the broadest sense: "[...] occultism was part of a set
of ideas that inspired mystical revolutionism, which is based on the belief that
Major earthly events like the revolution reflect a realignment of cosmic forces. The revolution therefore
had an eschatological significance. It would lead to "a new heaven and a new earth" populated by a new
type of human being and characterised by a new type of society, cemented by love, shared ideals and
sacrifice.
Dialectics," wrote Lenin, "is the theory that shows how opposites can be and usually are (and become)
identical - under what conditions they are identical by becoming identical.
Converting one into the other - why human understanding must not take these opposites to be dead,
petrified, but alive, conditioned, mobile, converting one into the other". Several centuries earlier, the
Muslim gnostic Djalâl ad-Dîn Rûmî had said: "Things that appear to be opposites can in fact work
together".
Lenin married Marx's dialectical materialism with the long tradition of Russian socialism and the gnostic,
apocalyptic and messianic elements with which it is imbued. In the same way, he reconciled the Marxist
cult of science, atheism and technological progress with the Russian conception of justice, truth and
devotion to the community. What's more, the Bolshevik leader equated the Marxist call for proletarian
internationalism and world revolution with the old Russian notion of universal brotherhood. Violently
opposed to all religion, atheist Bolshevism was inspired by
It became, in the words of one of Lenin's comrades, "the most religious of all religions".
After the Bolshevik coup of 1917
The great losers of Leninism were esoteric circles and occultist circles. The big winners - among others -
were the sectarians and gnostics, if only because Lenin promulgated a law exempting members of
religious sects from military service.
The group most representative of Russian socialist messianism in 1917 was the Left Socialist
Revolutionaries. For this party of romantic revolutionaries, Russia's suffering during the war was akin to
crucifixion and the "October Revolution" represented redemption. Russia was to be used to create a
new world. The Socialist-Revolutionaries of the Left entered the Sovnarkom (Council of People's
Commissars) in November 1917, thus building a bridge between the Bolsheviks and the peasantry,
whose support the Socialist-Revolutionaries enjoyed. They also joined the Cheka in large numbers,
where they did wonderfully well. The adoption of their agrarian policy by the Bolsheviks further
strengthened their ties. For them, however, no compromise was possible with the "old world";
consequently, they saw the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk as a betrayal of the world revolution and left the
Sovnarkom when it was signed. Subsequently, they tried to provoke a war with Germany by terrorist
acts.
R. V. Ivanov-Razoumnik, the literary editor of the Socialist-Revolutionary Left newspaper, founded a
magazine in 1918 called The Scythians, to which a group of poets and writers close to the SRG, such as
Blok, Bielyï, Zamiatine, Essenine, etc., contributed. Their emblem was a Scythian horseman,
symbol of their struggle against the West. The magazine was the epitome of the messianic
revolutionary mood of the time. Rodin identified Russia with the "Messiah" in his poem To the
Motherland; Christ is Risen, another of his poems, was written in the aftermath of the "October
Revolution". Blok (1880-1921) and Bielyï (1880-1934), both influenced by Soloviev's eschatology,
expected an imminent cosmic struggle against the Antichrist. Interested in Gnosticism, Blok believed he
recognised a "spiritual content" in the political and social unrest of the "October Revolution" and the
bloody civil war that followed. He revealed what he believed this content to be in his poem
The Twelve, in which a Christ carries the red flag of the revolution; Trotsky described this poem as "the
most important work of our time". A member of the anthroposophical movement, Bielyï hailed "the most
important work of our time".
The "1917 Revolution" was the first stage in a much wider cultural and spiritual revolution. For both
Bielyï and Blok, the "1917 Revolution" was above all a powerful theurgical instrument. Bielyï saw
theurgy as a means of rapidly changing the world in collaboration with God. Despite the turmoil and
carnage, for these Russian occultists, the revolution contributed to a new creation. Two of the most
exalted of the "Scythian" poets were Nikolai Klyuev (1887-1937) and Sergei Essenin (1895-1925). Their
poetry is imbued with esoteric symbols and Russian messianic themes. Essenin, in line with Gnosticism,
proclaimed his contempt for the old God of the Church and called Russia the "new Nazareth"; he
supported the Red Army and tried to join the Bolshevik party, only to commit suicide in 1925, convinced
that dark forces had taken over the country.
revolutionary movement. Klyuev compared Lenin to the archpriest Avvakum Petrov (1620-1682), who
had led the opposition to Nikon's reforms. The occultist, having felt betrayed by the
He was arrested and died in deportation in 1937. The Gnostic and Symbolist poet Valery Bryusov (1873-
1924), who had dabbled in magic, occultism and spiritualism before 1917, claimed that Russia's destiny
was shaped by mystical forces.
The "October Revolution" was part of an "occult plot". He joined the Bolshevik Party in 1920. Many of
those directly or indirectly linked to the sectarian dissidence joined the Communist Party and found
employment in various Soviet organisations.
By the early 1920s, Bolshevism had consolidated its hold over much of the former Russian Empire. The
Communist Party appeared to be the monolithic embodiment of the will of the people. The new Soviet
state, with its Marxist-Leninist ideology, became the supreme arbiter of all thought. As part of the
modernisation of Russia and the construction of a technologically advanced Soviet Union, occult notions
were publicly branded as superstitions and openly ridiculed. All secret societies, including theosophical
circles and anthroposophical circles, were dissolved. Freemasonry was roundly condemned and its
lodges closed. Leading occultists were sent into exile. Members of the Rosicrucian nebula, who were
interested in Kabbalah in both theory and practice, were persecuted at the end of the 1920s and died in
the
concentration in the 1930s. The conditional tense is appropriate because, as K.
Burmistrov, "almost everything we know about them and their doctrines comes from the archives of the
Russian secret services" and that "a large part of these archives has not been opened to researchers".
On the other hand, the fact that the laboratory set up by members of a Rosicrucian small group led by a
certain Emesh Redivivus to practise telepathy and carry out experiments with so-called magical objects
and drugs was located in the basement of a building next to that of the People's Commissariat for
Internal Affairs (NKVD), the Soviet political police, leaves one wondering (140).
The fact remains that "[t]he Bolshevik revolution did not eliminate interest in the occult sciences. Certain
pre-revolutionary occult ideas and symbols took on a more 'scientific' meaning.
". Mixed with compatible concepts, they quickly spread throughout Soviet art, literature, thought and
science. Soviet political activists who did not believe in the occult sciences used symbols, themes and
techniques drawn from them for agitation and propaganda. After undergoing further transformations,
they were incorporated into the official culture of the Stalin era" (141).
"Under Stalin, occult themes and techniques, detached from their doctrinal basis, became an integral
part of official culture. The occult themes of Soviet literature in the 1920s were transformed into the
magical or fantastic elements that observers have noted in Socialist Realism. Stalin himself was invested
with occult powers" (142). Cabalistic principles and primordial impulses took on new forms, more suited
to the new reality. The ideas
esoteric ideas were dressed up in the language of a new age. For example, there were hints of
anthroposophy in the thesis of the Jewish Freudo-Marxist psychoanalyst Aron Zalkind (1886-1936) that
a new man, with new organs and a new sensibility, was being born. More generally, certain elements of
cabbalistic doctrine passed incognito into psychoanalysis and the various branches of psychology.
At the same time, the aims of the members of the occultist groups changed somewhat as a result of the
scientific discoveries that had accompanied the Bolshevisation of the country. They moved from the
theoretical study of Kabbalah to its practical applications (kaballah ma'asit). Convinced that their
experiments and cabalistic knowledge would soon be accepted by science
and that, for example, telepathy, indefinite life extension, the improvement of the human species and
even resurrection would one day be accessible to all humanity, they
strove to acquire supernatural powers through practical exercises such as meditation, visualisation and
ceremonial magic, as well as through scientific means, in most cases, as far as can be ascertained, not
for personal ends but out of altruism.
The Russian Jewish intellectual Isai Lezhnev (1891-1955) insisted on the profoundly religious character of
communism, which was "comparable to atheism only in a narrow theological sense".
Affectively, psychologically, Bolshevism was extremely religious, seeing itself as the sole guardian of
absolute truth. Lezhnev saw in Bolshevism the development of "a new religion" that brought with it a
new culture and a new political order. He embraced Marxism-Leninism and hailed Stalin as a
manifestation of the "popular spirit".
The Russian Revolution, which gave birth to the superpower known as the Soviet Union, cast a gigantic
shadow over the twentieth century. Bolshevism, the materialist worldview developed by Lenin, left its
mark on all aspects of modern thought. But the roots of Lenin's communism and of the Soviet Union lie
deep in ancient esoteric doctrines.
Was atheistic Bolshevism, despite its adoration of science and materialism, the expression of something
non-human? Many in the "spiritual resistance" passionately believed so.
The Gnostic and Symbolist poet Valery Bryusov (1873-1924), who joined the Bolshevik party in 1920, had
dabbled in magic, occultism and spiritualism before the revolution. Bryusov claimed that
Russia's destiny was shaped by mystical forces and that the 'October Revolution' was part of an occult
plot.
Cosmism
Another important Russian occultist, the famous artist Nicholas Roerich, regarded Lenin and communism
as a cosmic phenomenon. The Soviet regime returned the favour.
"In the early 1980s, the Communist authorities recognised Nicholas Roerich and the importance of his
mission (identical to that of the New Age, the themes of the Age of Aquarius, etc.). The official
magazines - for example, the organ of the Central Committee of the CPSU - published pseudo-yogic and
theosophical texts inspired by Roerich, by a certain Sidorov, which spoke of the
recognition of the legitimacy of the October Revolution and the sacralisation of Lenin's mission by
mahatmas who came to Moscow from the mythical city of Shambala in the 1920s to
to transmit magical powers to the Bolsheviks" (143). Sviatoslav, one of Roerich's two sons, was
received with great pomp by Gorbachev at the end of the 1980s, at the height of perestroika ("
restructuring"). On this occasion, he declared that Roerich was "one of the cultural pillars of Russia". In
1990, the same Gorbachev inaugurated the Roerich Centre in Moscow, of which he had been one of the
promoters. Every major Russian city now has a Roerich centre. Perestroika and glasnost
("transparency") were marked by cosmism. The expression "new mentality" (novoïe mychlényé), which
covers the notions of perestroika and glasnost, has its origins in the writings of Fedorov and Vernadski,
the pioneer of a science that was later given the name of ecology.
Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (1829-1903) was the founder of Russian cosmism. Fedorov was one of the
many illegitimate children of Prince Pavel Ivanovich Gagarin, a surname that appears on the list of
Russian surnames of Jewish origin (144). Expelled in 1852 from a secondary school in Odessa, which at
the time was home to the largest Jewish community in the Russian Empire, following a violent
altercation with one of his teachers, he taught history and geography in various towns until 1868. In one
of these, he befriended N. Peterson, another itinerant teacher (he had been the
He became a member of Trotsky's guard and, after the Bolshevik coup d'état, was appointed
commander of the Kremlin, a post he held until 1935. Peterson, from whom we know that Fedorov had
begun work on his philosophical system as early as 1864, found him a job in a Moscow library. A few
months later, he was taken on as a cataloguer at the Rumantsyev Library (now the Lenin Library), where
he worked until his death and where he came into contact with Russia's artistic and intellectual elite.
Like Berdiaev and many other Russian thinkers of the time, his thinking was strongly influenced by both
Orthodox Christianity and Hegelian philosophy. Like many of them, he had little difficulty in reconciling
religion and science within the framework of an "active Christianity", given that, rather than passively
awaiting the millennium, a good Christian would
was to help build paradise on earth. What set him apart from them were his views on how to build it. In
his eyes, there was only one evil in the world: death. He prophesied that scientific progress could enable
"Mankind" to achieve immortality and even raise the dead. Not inconsistently, he added that the universal
attainment of
immortality would lead to such a huge increase in population that "humanity" would have no
alternative but to leave Earth and colonise the cosmos.
Fedorov did not create a movement, but he did create a school. He had a more or less profound
influence on the thinking of many contemporary Russian personalities, including literary figures such as
F. Dostoyevsky, V. Soloviev, L. Tolstoy, M. Gorky, B. Pasternak and V. Mayakovsky, with whom he
corresponded, and, later, thinkers of the Russian religious revival (N. Berdiaev, S. Bulgakov, G. Fedorov,
V. Ilyine, etc.),
etc.), intellectuals, physicists, biologists and politicians. One of his closest friends was the orientalist V.
Kojevnikov - one of Lenin's collaborators when the latter was still abroad - who, after his death,
published, with N. Peterson, his manuscripts and their discussions with him under the title Philosophy
of the Common Work. Common work" translates the Greek word for "liturgy", but its meaning is much
broader than that of "mass". It is a liturgy outside the temple, the "cosmic liturgy", in the manner of
Maximus the Confessor or Teilhard de Chardin: in this sense, the entire cosmos must become the arena
of a transfiguring mystery, and scientists, philosophers and intellectuals must become its prophets
(145)." In Religion and Socialism (1908-1911), Lunacharsky "calls for a monistic and proletarian religion.
New myths and rituals were needed to supplement Marxist rationalism, which lacked the power to
convince and inspire. From then on, Christian symbols were transposed: the Father was represented by
the forces of production, the Son by the proletariat and the Holy Spirit by scientific socialism. Man
himself becomes God, but through the collective. Future collectivism will fully realise man's divinity:
humanity will attain supreme knowledge, supreme happiness, omnipotence, universal love and eternal
life. "People will be immortal insofar as they have developed their "self" beyond the limits of
individualism into a tendency towards community. Building a collectivist society therefore means
building God: hence the name of the 'builders of God' movement" (146).
"In Fedorov's system, despite the Christian terminology, God is expletive. In this respect, Fedorov's
'projectivism' is fully in line with the utopias of atheistic and socialist humanism of the 19th century, but
with one fundamental difference, which A. is right to highlight: the 'projective' is not the 'projective'.
he project of general resurrection and rational domination of natural phenomena finds its starting point
in a compelling moral imperative, in a very strong feeling of guilt on the part of the "sons" towards the
"ancestors". The common work is thus founded on a human morality, and in itself constitutes an ethical
programme designed to 'regulate' the relations between men" (147).
Fedorov found a fervent disciple in a certain Konstantin Edouardovitch Tsiolkovski (1857-1935). Hard
of hearing after contracting scarlet fever at the age of 9, he had to educate himself as no school was
open to him. His reading quickly taught him a great deal about mathematics, technology and physics.
It was at the age of seventeen that Tsiolkovsky, more or less inspired by reading the novels of Jules
Verne, first dreamt of space travel. He began to think about the problem of
the ergonomics of space vehicles. After becoming a schoolteacher, he spent all his spare time studying
aerial locomotion and, in an article published in a Russian scientific journal in 1883, came up with the
idea of launching jet-powered spacecraft into space. In 1903, in another article ("Exploration of cosmic
space by jet engines"), he published the formula for calculating the minimum satellite velocity - the
speed at which a body can remain in orbit without crashing into the body that is gravitationally
attracting it. This formula now bears his name.
At the time, however, few people took Tsiolkovsky's work seriously. Few even had the opportunity to
read "The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Jet Engines".
It was not "published", since the edition of the scientific journal in which it was to appear was confiscated
by the tsarist police. It was finally published eight years later in another Russian scientific publication
(148).
The scant attention he received from the Russian scientific community before 1917 may explain why
he chose to set out his ideas and projects in novel form. "He published [...] science fiction novels
entitled On the Moon (1895), Dreams of the Earth and Sky (1895) and Beyond the Earth (1920).
Tsiolkovsky was as interested in the philosophy of space as he was in astronautics, and in the course of
his writings he produced a veritable body of engineering work that proved extremely useful to the
designers of future Russian space programmes. But he was best known for his philosophy
cosmic. He believed that man's occupation of space was inevitable and that this purpose guided human
evolution. The launch of the first manned missions would mark the beginning of a phase
revolutionary for humanity, ready to enter into fusion with the cosmos. The beginning of space culture
would mean a change in consciousness and the realisation that the next step for the human species is
space, and that all productive energies must be directed towards this goal" (149).
The tide turned for him after the Bolsheviks usurped power. In 1918, he was made a member of what
was soon to be called the USSR Academy of Sciences, and the following year he was awarded a
state pension. "He became... a renowned scientist thanks to his theories on space flight and
interplanetary travel. He wrote his cosmic philosophy, summed up by the famous phrase "the earth
is the cradle of mankind and man cannot always remain in his cradle". Indeed, "He was not only thinking
of sending men into space, but of ensuring their survival in this environment and establishing a space
civilisation (150)...".
"His work, consisting of some five hundred articles, influenced many young Russians, who were inspired
to create rockets. His ideas had an international echo during his lifetime, and he contributed to the
creation of a global space ideology. He is the epistemic founder of Russian-European space ideology"
(151).
In the 1920s, he co-founded an academy with other "cosmists" to study Fedorov's theories. These
"Cosmists" included V.I. Vernadsky, the founder of biogeochemistry and the inventor of the concept of
the noosphere, later taken up by Teilhard de Chardin; L. Vassiliev (1891-1966),
physiologist, professor and researcher at the University of Leningrad, who was entrusted with directing
the
first Soviet parapsychology laboratory, whose work on telepathy and remote suggestion paved the way
for so-called metapsychic research. These fine people declared with a
They all believed that immortality was a "human right". Some of them held very senior positions in the
Soviet state. It is not surprising, therefore, that some of Fedorov's ideas were reflected in the economic
and agricultural policy of the USSR in the twentieth century, particularly in "man's conquest of nature",
the slogan of the industrial revolution implemented by the Communists under the First and Second Five-
Year Plans, and in the attempts made after the Second World War to change the climate of Siberia. "The
Party, adopting the formula of Bazarov, the nihilist hero of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, according to
which "nature is not a temple but a workshop, and man's role is to work in it", welcomed the struggle
against elemental forces and believed that humanity's historic vocation was to change and shape the
appearance of the created world according to the rational views of human beings.
organised" (152). On the other hand, "the conquerors of nature were bound to the object of their
conquest in a thousand ways; they loved it and often thought that there was no true happiness except
in its maternal womb. While devoting themselves to building cities and power stations, taming rivers
and piercing mountains, they often wondered whether supreme wisdom was not to be found in the
purity of the sky and the silence of the forests" (153). This contradiction, which became more acute as
the technological achievements of its victims took them further and further from the "mother's womb",
could only lead to a headlong rush forward.
Tsiolkovsky's technological evolutionism, which is based on the premise that the "human species" is
"programmed" to have a "cosmic destiny", is no more and no less than the foundation of "European"
space ideology. "The meaning of the history of the species is deciphered by Tsiolkovski and validated by
the ESA [European Space Agency], which sets him up as its founding father, making his doctrine the
basis for legitimising space activity in Europe. Working for the cosmic expansion of the species, the ESA
is based on an episteme with strong Darwinian overtones. It is, however, an ideological Darwinism in its
futuristic dimension. The vision of the future deployed by ESA in the Aurora programme is, in many
respects, ideological, since it stems from Marsism, the ideology of the conquest of Mars that is found in
most space circles, and in contemporary mythology (154)".
Tsiolkovsky's epistemology was echoed by Sergey Korolev, the mastermind behind the Soviet space
programme, and by K. Ziolkovsky, the father of aeronautics and the
He was a member of the spiritualist movement and had visions of what he called extraterrestrial
entities at the end of his life. And, of course, without his work, Gagarin (in short, he is a "
The cult of Tsiolkovsky in the post-war USSR was such that in the official press release announcing the
creation of Sputnik Such was the cult of Tsiolkovsky in the post-war USSR that, in the official press release
announcing the creation of Sputnik 1, the Earth's first artificial satellite, the USSR kept silent about his
"achievements".
and paid tribute to him alone. The Soviet leaders demanded that Sputnik 1 be launched on 17
September 1957, the hundredth anniversary of Tsiolkovsky's birth.
Another important representative of Russian utopian and futurist thought was the Jew A. Bogdanov
(real name Malinovski) (1873-1927). A former leading figure in Bolshevism, before being ousted from
power by Lenin because of his epistemology and not, as is often believed, because of his religious views
(155), he was, along with his brother-in-law Lunacharsky and Gorky, the initiator of the God-builders
movement. He also distinguished himself as a scientist and science fiction writer. The Red Star (1908),
whose main character is a Russian scientist, philosopher and political activist who travels to Mars in the
company of a Martian disguised as a human being, presents the planet as an ideal, harmonious,
communist, egalitarian (in terms of sexuality) society that the Russians hope to import to Earth.
L'Ingénieur Menni (1913) recounts
how the Martians established communism on their planet. It should be remembered here that in the
Talmud, in the Kabbalah and in Gnosticism, the angel of Mars, Samael, is equated with what is known as
"Satan" in the demonology of the Semites (156).
As a scientist, Bogdanov practised as a doctor and was the founder of the Central Blood Transfusion
Institute of the Soviet Union (Moscow, 1926), the first of its kind. "The importance he attached to
technology as a means of building an ideal society was reminiscent of Fedorov's "philosophy of the
common work", but without taking into account Fedorov's idea that religious and spiritual development
should accompany technological progress. Another difference between them is that, although Bogdanov
sent his character to Mars, his only concern was for the Earth [...] Like Bogdanov, Fedorov and the
Cosmists Vernadski, Tsiolkovski and Chizhevsky all saw science as vital to the survival of humanity, but,
unlike Bogdanov, they foresaw that its survival would require the colonisation and domination of a part of
the universe larger than the Earth".
(157). Whether or not Bogdanov was influenced by Fedorov's pseudo-philosophical constructs on
immortality, the fact is that his views on blood transfusion show that he never had his feet on the
ground. Indeed, he advocated a "physiological collectivism" consisting not only of total blood
transfusions between young and old, but of a worldwide exchange of blood to merge humanity into a
single family.
Kahal, Golem, Ghetto
It is in this context that the decision to mummify Lenin's corpse in the
The Marxist-Leninist movement, whose philosophical basis is materialism and scientific atheism, cast
doubt on the existence of the human race. Marxism-Leninism, whose philosophical basis is materialism
as well as scientific atheism, cast doubt on the existence of the "human race".
survival of the soul after death. This did not prevent him from proclaiming that Lenin was immortal"
(158). At least his mummy was.
"The idea for the mummification came from the executive troika of the Funeral Commission, which was
appointed a week after the funeral and given the task of looking after the body and building a tomb.
This troika was made up of L. Krasin (who played the key role), whose real name was Goldgelb, a former
criminal who had later become a broker; V. Molotov, whose real name was Skryabin; and A. S. Enukidze
(a Georgian). It is significant that the Funeral Commission was later renamed the Funeral Commission.
Commission for the immortalisation of the memory of V. I. Ulianov.
"Krasin played a decisive role in choosing the architect of the mausoleum (A. V. Shchusev) and in its
decoration. It was he who came up with the idea of a transparent sarcophagus to preserve and display
Lenin.
Trained as an engineer, he was also responsible for building a refrigeration system that would keep the
body intact by circulating cold air inside the sarcophagus [...] It is likely that Krasin wanted to preserve
Lenin's body for his eventual resurrection. Krasin had been a close companion of Bogdanov in the prewar
period and had been a member of the Vperyod group, which included all the "builders of God"
(159).
In a speech given in 1921 at the funeral of Lev Yakovlevich Karpov, Krasin said: "I am certain that the
time will come when science will be all-powerful, when it will be able to recreate a dead organism. I'm
certain that the time will come when we'll be able to use
a person's vital elements to recreate their physical person. And I'm certain that when that time comes,
when the liberation of humanity, using all the power of science and technology, will make it possible to
recreate a physical person, I'm sure it will be possible.
technique will be able to resurrect the great historical figures. Fedorov couldn't have said it better.
The last three lines of Mayakovsky's poem Komsomolskaya (1924) ("Lenin lived/Lenin lives/Lenin will
live") were one of the key slogans of Soviet propaganda until the banks were forced to close down.
At the end of the 1980s, the international financial institutions that had put the USSR on life-support in
the 1930s decided unilaterally that it was time for it to collapse.
From 1917 to 1989, from the Bolshevik coup d'état to the formation of the USSR, from Leninisation to
'de-Stalinisation', from the 'Cold War' to perestroika, we need to distinguish between the opportunistic
and Machiavellian use of concepts and teachings.
by the Soviet leaders and intelligentsia, and what corresponds to an adherence to these esoteric
We must not be fooled by appearances into believing that, because many people do not understand the
concepts and teachings behind them, they are willing to use them in practice and spread them to
brainwash an entire people and build a communist-type society. In this respect too, we must not be
fooled by appearances into believing that, because a large number of
of esotericists and occultists incurred the wrath of the Soviet regime, because esotericism and occultism
were officially mocked and consigned to oblivion, and the activities and influences of the occultists and
esotericists were officially condemned.
The apparent lack of interest in the occult sciences on the part of the Soviet patriarchs and the almost
complete absence of direct references to the occult in their political discourse and praxis tend to show
the opposite. To begin with, everything that is occult remains by definition concealed and secret, and
the fact that the KGB archives have only been partially opened shows, unsurprisingly, that Russia does
not intend to reveal everything about the occult activities of the former USSR's intelligence service, of
which it is itself a product.
In fact, while it may well be that the cult of Lenin, the cult of Stalin or Stalinist Socialist Realism, in some
of their aspects, bear witness to a more or less conscious manipulation of the themes and themes of
occult symbols that were well known to the Russian masses, given the anti-Semitism of a large proportion
of them, it will be easy to agree that, for example, the display of the Star of David on the walls of public
buildings in the early years of the Communist regime and the adoption of
The five-pointed star, the pentagram, proposed by Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Bronstein) (1879-1940) as
the emblem of the Red Army, was not the best way to win them over to the cause of communism.
The many gross historical errors, zany interpretations and absurd theories contained in Le Matin des
magiciens, whose arguments are also based on massive recourse to the most dubious secondary
sources, mean that any mind with the slightest bit of discrimination can only agree with its authors in
describing it as a story that is "sometimes legendary and sometimes accurate". On the other hand, the
primary sources on which J. Bergier based La Guerre secrète de l'occulte show that he was not wrong
to assert that the Soviet political police arrested parapsychologists with the same zeal as dissidents, but
instead of sending them to the Gulag, they put them to good use. In 1923, Russian anthroposophical,
theosophical and occultist circles had been shaken by a wave of arrests, a few months before the
psychiatrist V. Bechterev (1857 - 1927), a former colleague of Pavlov's, was appointed director of the
first Russian parapsychology laboratory at the University of Leningrad. In 1974, arrests were again
ordered in these circles and, what's more, parapsychology was outlawed in the USSR, even though the
KGB had set up its own laboratory for parapsychological and, more specifically, telepathic research
within the bio-information section of the Inter-Union Scientific and Technical Society of Radio-
Technology and Electro-Communication A. S. Popov, better known as the Popov group. The fact that
research into the paranormal was conducted behind closed doors is self-evident, but it would
undoubtedly have puzzled ordinary Communists who read in the 1956 Soviet Encyclopaedia that the
telepathic phenomena were an "idealistic anti-social fiction" was that they were conducted by a regime
whose entire worldview was based on a materialistic doctrine.
Elements borrowed from a certain magic and the occult forces that correspond to it managed to infiltrate
incognito into Russian science, a science whose postulates could not be more naturalistic and
atomists in which they were dressed up in concepts, formulas and "relations", before finding practical
applications in all sorts of fields, particularly in the military field, to such an extent that they became
unrecognisable; thus, for example, the Jew I. M. Kogan, chairman of the
A. S. Popov, defines telepathy very scientifically as the simple transmission of extremely lowfrequency
waves.
There are elements that leave no room for doubt about the existence of major and predominant occult
influences in the ideology and practice of the Soviet regime.
These influences are clearly apparent in the methods employed by the Chekists, the members of the
political police created in 1917 under the authority of the Pole Felix Dzerzhinsky to combat the
"enemies of the people", to "exterminate the parasitic strata" with the aim of "hastening the advent of
classless society" (160). Before looking at what these methods were, some of which are described by
Mikhail Voslensky, a former Soviet official, in his book Nomenklatura (161), it is worth knowing that,
according to the Jewish historian Richard Pipes, "three-quarters of the members of the Cheka were
Jews, mostly scoundrels incapable of doing anything else, with no link to the Jewish community but
always willing to spare their co-religionists (162)".
Here are the methods: "In Kharkov, the victims were scalped. In Voronezh, the victims were locked in
barrels, into which nails were then driven, and the barrels were rolled. They were then marked on the
forehead with a red pentacle. In Tsaritsyn and Kamyshin, the hands of the victims were amputated with
saws. In Poltava and Krementchoug, the victims were impaled. In Odessa, they were roasted alive in
ovens or torn to pieces. In Kiev, the victims were laid in coffins containing a decomposing body and
buried alive, only to be dug up half an hour later."
There was nothing particularly original about them. Indeed, in 1 Chronicles 20:3, it says: "He brought
out the inhabitants, and cut them to pieces with saws, iron harrows, and axes; he dealt in
even all the cities of the sons of Ammon". In 2 Samuel 12:31: "He brought out the inhabitants and placed
them
under saws, iron harrows and iron axes, and put them through brick kilns; in the same way he treated all
the cities of the sons of Ammon."
The Russian Jewish newspaper Evreyskaya Tribuna wrote in its August 24, 1922 edition that Lenin had
asked the rabbis if they were satisfied with these executions. However, the article does not specify which
rabbis he asked.
The Chabad Chassidic sect was founded in eighteenth-century Russia by Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi
(1745 - 1812). Accused on two occasions of undermining state security through his activities, he was
heard each time in St Petersburg and released for lack of evidence.
"Prince Lubomirsky, who owned the town [of Liadi] and had been a great friend and admirer of Rabbi
Chneur Zalman, offered to rebuild it for his successor. At the same time, he offered his nephew a town
close to Liady, the town of Loubavitch, should he prefer it. However disinterested he was, the prince did
not lose sight of the great economic advantages that would accrue to the town and surrounding areas if
the latter were to be chosen.
was becoming the home of such an illustrious Rabbi, with hundreds of followers regularly coming and
going on Shabbat and festivals. So he was delighted when Rabbi Dov-Ber (1773 - 1827) agreed to
to settle in Loubavitch. And he immediately began construction of the buildings needed to set up the
movement and run it, offices as well as a synagogue and a school (163)."
Loubavitch, a small town now in Belarus, remained the centre of the sect until the First World War. This
is how the leaders of the Chabad came to be known as the rabbis of Loubavitch and this branch of
Hasidism as Loubavitch Hasidism. Dov Ber chose the surname "Schneersohn" or "Schneerson".
Rabbi Mena'hem Mendel Scheerson, grandson of Shneur Zalman and son-in-law of Dov Ber, was born in
1789. His grandfather, the Admur HaZakene, personally taught him the Torah, first the revealed Torah
and then the hidden Torah. He succeeded Dov Ber at the head of the sect and was nicknamed Rabbi
Tsemah.
Tzedek, based on the commentaries he published on the Mishna (a collection of traditional
commentaries on the Written Law (or Pentateuch) and rabbinic rulings, which forms the basis of the
Talmud) and the Shulhan Arukh (the most authoritative code of Jewish law).
In an attempt to restore Russia after the traumatic invasion of the empire by Napoleon I, Alexander I
saw fit to grant benefits to the Jews. The laws governing the
The "residence restrictions" established by Catherine II in the 1790s in order to assign Jews there and
prevent them from migrating from the newly annexed part of Poland to the heart of Russia were
relaxed from 1772 onwards. In vain, the authorities encouraged the Jews to work in agriculture and to
assimilate with the Russians by adopting their way of life.
Nicholas I, the successor to Alexander I, was not so kind to the "Jids", whom he
accused of being responsible for the problems of the Russian peasantry and whose "rapid advances in
the Russian economy [he] noted with horror" (164). As he was, however, suffering from one of the
many Christian fads which have always had disastrous consequences for white peoples and which, in
fact, have only ever complicated and aggravated the Jewish question, he intended to settle it by forcing
the Jews to convert to Christianity and, in order to do so, with the full approval of the Maskilim, the
Jews who, unlike the Hasidic movement, were in favour of emancipation and of
assimilation of their co-religionists, he made state schools compulsory for Jewish children and military
service compulsory for a small proportion of them (165).
Rabbi Tsemah Tsedek and the cabalist Rabbi Haïm de Volozine, who, although belonging to two
branches of Judaism hostile to each other, made common cause against these measures on two
occasions, in 1854 and 1865, on behalf of the entire Russian Jewish community, had no difficulty in
obtaining their repeal from Alexander II. The first had practically no effect and, as for compulsory
education for Jewish children, since education was not compulsory for non-Jewish children, it was to be
expected that Jewish children would become the most educated individuals in Russia: this is indeed
what happened.
Moreover, Alexander II was well disposed towards the Jews. In 1859, Jewish merchants of the first and
second guilds were allowed to leave their areas of residence. Two years later, all Jewish graduates were
allowed to work in the imperial administration. Under the impetus of a handful of Jewish capitalists,
leaders of the Haskala, an eighteenth-century Jewish movement strongly influenced by the
Enlightenment, the doors of high society were opened to the bourgeoisie, whose main representatives
were Barons Ezrel and Horace Günzburg, the founders of the first merchant bank in Russia, the Poliakov
brothers, railway magnates, the Vissotsky family, tea queens, the Brodskys, sugar moguls, etc., all of
whom were allowed to work in the imperial administration.
"The Jew is advancing", was the headline in Novoye Vremiya, a large-circulation St Petersburg
newspaper, as early as 1864. In March 1881, the bomb that shredded Alexander II lit the fuse of
revolution. The attack had been
prepared in the home of the Jewish woman Hesia Helfman (166). Numerous pogroms broke out in Russia,
Ukraine and Poland. The "Laws of May", promulgated by Alexander III in 1882 as part of the "Pogroms of
May", were the first of their kind.
Internal regulations" aimed at combating political dissent contained measures that
repressive laws against the Jews. "On 23 May 1882, a Jewish delegation, led by Baron Ginzberg [the
Rothschilds' official representative in Russia], visited the new Tsar Alexander III and formally protested
against the May Laws. The Tsar promised a thorough investigation into the question of the conflict
between Jewish and non-Jewish factions in the population of the Empire. On 3 September he pronounced
the
speech: "For some time the government has devoted itself to the Jews, to their problems and to their
relations with the rest of the population of the Empire. It has noted the sad
conditions of life which the conduct of the Jews in financial matters had imposed upon the Christian
population. During the last twenty years, the Jews have not only interfered in all branches of commerce
and business. They have also monopolised a large part of the land by purchase or lease. With a few
exceptions, they devoted their efforts, like one man, not to enriching or benefiting the country, but to
frustrating the Russian people through their wiles. The poor suffered particularly from this behaviour,
which provoked justified protests from the people and acts of violence against the Jews. On the one
hand, the government was doing its best to suppress these disturbances and free the Jews from
oppression and massacres; on the other hand, it considered that it was urgent and just to adopt radical
measures to put an end to the oppression of the Jews vis-à-vis the other inhabitants and to rid the
country of their malpractices which were, as we well know, the origin of the anti-Jewish agitations
(167)."" The deputation led by Günzburg, which had been a complete flop, was followed by the
intervention of Rabbi Shmuel Schneersohn, the fourth rabbi of Loubavitch, who warned the Tsar's
ministers, who had given him the right to take part in the debate, that they should not be allowed to do
so.
audience, that international Jewish finance would be unleashed against the Russian Empire if the May
Laws were not repealed immediately. They remained in force until 1917.
He wasn't bluffing. "The government had not only promulgated the May Laws as an act of retaliation for
the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, but also because Russian economists were not prepared to accept
that the May Laws were an act of retaliation for the assassination of Tsar Alexander II.
had urgently warned the government that the national economy was in danger of ruin unless measures
were taken to curb the illegal activities of the Jews. The economists pointed out that the Jews
represented only 4.2% of the total population, but had done so well for themselves.
The international bankers imposed economic sanctions against the Russian Empire and almost
bankrupted the nation. They imposed an embargo on Russian trade and commerce. In 1904, after they
had dragged the Russian Empire into a disastrous war with Japan, the English banking house of
Rothschild repudiated its promises of financial aid and tried to bankrupt the Russian Empire, while Kuhn-
Loeb & Co of New York granted Japan all the credit it asked for (168).
Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn, the sixth rabbi of Loubavitch, accused of counter-revolutionary activities in
1927, was arrested and imprisoned in Leningrad and sentenced to death. Pardoned at the request of
certain Western governments and the Red Cross, he was allowed to leave the USSR for Riga, where he
remained from 1928 to 1929. During a trip to the United States, he was received by Edgar Hoover at the
White House, but declined an offer from local members of the sect to settle across the Atlantic. From
Back in Europe, he took up residence in Warsaw, which he was allowed to leave in 1940 for Riga, from
where he stayed until his death.
flew to the United States where, in Brooklyn in 1946, he founded the first yeshiva and the first girls'
school of the Loubavitch sect. As soon as it was established in the United States, it was generously
sponsored by all Jewish organisations. Sixty years later, there are over 1,400 Lubavitch schools
worldwide. The sect achieved a worldwide reputation it could have done without when, in November
2008, the Chabad centre in the town of Bombai fell victim to an act of terrorism.
A Milanese by birth and an American by nationality, Rabbi Shlomo Dovber Pinchas Lazar was ordained
at the Loubavitch centre in New York in 1987. Two years later, he was given the task of re-establishing
the Loubavitch movement throughout Russia, where he was appointed rabbi of the synagogue in the
Moscow residential district of Maryina Roshcha, where he soon made friends. One of them was the
Jewish diamond dealer, philanthropist and Putinist Lev Avnerovich Levayev, one of the most valuable
allies of the Jew Roman Abramovitch, one of Vladimirovitch Shelomov Putin's favourite oligarchs (169),
who immediately granted substantial financial aid to the Russian branch of the Loubavitch sect. A
zealous member of the Hasidic movement, Levayev soon became one of the patrons of a newlycreated
group called the Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS (FEOR).
Received in the Kremlin on 12 June 2000 by Putin, who had granted him Russian nationality two weeks
earlier, Berel Lazar was elected Chief Rabbi of the CIS the following day by an assembly of forty-five
Hasidic rabbis. However, there was already a Chief Rabbi of Russia, who was recognised as such by the
Jewish Congress of Russia and its leading figure, Vladimir Guzinski, an opponent of Putin. Putin
immediately recognised Berel Lazar's FEOR as the sole representative body of Russian Jews. On 18
September 2000, the Moscow Jewish Community Centre was inaugurated by Putin, who celebrated
Hanukkah, the feast of the Maccabees, there on 21 December. In January 2001, Berel Lazar was invited
to an official dinner at the Kremlin. In order to ensure that the Chief Rabbi could eat kosher food, Putin
ordered - apparently for the first time in Russian history - that the kitchen be entirely kosher.
(170) The two have not been on speaking terms since, and Berel Lazar never misses an opportunity to
praise the Jewishness of his alter ego. He recently said: "There is not a single request made to him to
help Judaism and Jewish communities to which he [Putin] has not responded.
All requests were met (171). In the meantime, there has been a partial replacement of the "oligarchs".
Of the seven main Jewish financiers and industrialists who had made their mark under Yeltsin, Putin has
spared two, Vladimir Potanin and Mikhail Fridman. In reality, there are proportionally many more Jews
among the new ones than among the old "oligarchs" (172).
Communism is dead and buried as a political and social organisation, in other words in the form in which
it operated from 1917 to 1989 - but its spirit - so to speak in the spiritualist sense - which has its roots in
chaotic, elemental and infra-human forces which, while by definition they cannot be eliminated, can be
channelled and controlled, is still active in the form of political, scientific, economic, social and cultural
doctrines, in which a trained eye will always be able to detect its presence and action. "Perestroika is in
fact a movement that was planned as early as the end of the 1950s. Its description comes from a certain
Golitsyne, an officer in the Russian army.
a senior KGB officer who moved to the West at the end of the 1960s. We find his writings in reports
intended for the Secret Service, but also in a public work published before 1985 and Gorbachev's arrival
in power. What does he say? That perestroika was a revolutionary socialist process inspired by Lenin's
new economic policy; that it was intended to restructure (perestroika
means restructuring) socialism in the USSR, not eradicating it. Above all, it is a question of restructuring
the image that Westerners may have of socialism in general" (173).
"... it is all of the revolutionary themes contained in perestroika that are at the heart of the ecological
policy that is currently being put in place. There is no coincidence. It will be recalled that Gorbachev, in
his writings, explicitly states that ecology is a vehicle for
revolutionary. Today, Gorbachev is President of the international Green Cross.
"This [globalist] power is clearly seeking to take advantage of both democratic and liberal experience -
there are many references to liberal elements, but they are seen within a framework that in reality has
little to do with liberalism - in order to create a synthesis guided by a truly collectivist objective. This
power is based on the - liberal! - that all coercion is doomed to failure, and that non-coercive methods,
which leave the governed with the illusion of freedom, are the ones that should be used to achieve the
desired goal.
"The idea of rejecting coercion and appealing only to the feeling of freedom is a fundamental idea used
by a large number of thinkers."
Finally, the Kabbalistic concept of tikkun olam ("repairing the world") lies at the very heart of ecology.
B. K.
(1) For a scholarly introduction to Jewish esotericism, see Georges Vajda, Recherches récentes
sur l'esotérisme juif, II (1954-1962) (first article),
http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/rhr_0035-1423_1963_num_164_1_7897.
(2) Emile J. Dillon, Eclipse of Russia, George H. Doran Company, 1918, p. 11-12.
(3) Ibid, p. 13.
(4) Ibid, p. 13-14.
(5) Ibid, p. 15.
(6) Le Corbusier, L'Architecture vivante, A. Morancé, 1975, p. 22; see also Leroy-Beaulieu, A., L'Empire
des Tsars et les Russes.
(7) Emile J. Dillon, op. cit. p. 23.
(8) Ibid, p. 32.
(9) Ibid.
(10) Ibid, p. 33.
(11) Ibid, p. 34.
(12) Ibid, p. 38.
(13) Ibid.
(14) Ibid, p. 45.
(15) Julius Evola, A victim of Israel, https://evolaasheis.wordpress.com/2016/04/14/une-victimedisrael/.
(16) Emile J. Dillon, op. cit. p. 199.
(17) Ibid, p. 204.
(18) Ibid, p. 200.
(19) Ibid, p. 201.
(20) Ibid, p. 202.
(21) Ibid, p. 203-04.
(22) Ibid, p. 204.
(23) Ibid, p. 206.
(24) Angelo Solomon Rappoport, Pioneers of the Russian Revolution, New York: Brentano's, 1919, p.
235.
(25) Ibid, p. 243.
(26) Ibid, p. 254.
(27) Ibid, p. 250.
(28) Duncan P., Russian Messianism: Third Rome, Holy Revolution, Communism and After, Psychology
Press, 2000, p. 52.
(29) Ibid, p. 254.
(30) Ibid, p. 252.
(31) Ibid, p. 254-55.
(32) Ibid, p. 256.
(33) See André Chouraqui, La pensée juive, Presses Universitaires de France, 1968, p. 93.
(34) Moshe Rosman, Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba'al Shem Tov, Berkeley & Los
Angeles, University of California Press, 1996, p. 27 ff.
(35) Halak(h)a, halacha(h) (from Hebr. halakh, "to walk"). Legislative part of the Talmud; law, rule
religious tradition. "The halakhic tradition [...] seeks in the Torah and in the other sources of tradition
applications, practical interpretations, obligatory norms of action, supposed to go back to Moses, to
Sinai, and to draw from there their authority and their obligatory value" (Paul Démann, Les Juifs : foi et
destinée, A. Fayard, 1961, p. 71).
(36) Gershom Scholem, La Kabbale, une introduction, Les Éditions du Cerf, 1998, p. 298.
(37) See Immanuel Etkes, The Besht: Magician, Mystic, and Leader, Brandeis University Press,
Waltham, Mass. 2012.
(38) Moshe Idel, Ascensions On High In Jewish Mysticism: Pillars, Lines, Ladders, Budapest, Central
European University Press, Budapest and New York, 2005, p. 148.
(39) Raphael Patai, The Jewish Mind, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1977, p. 186.
(40) Emile J. Dillon, op. cit. p. 49.
(41) See F. C. Conybeare, Russian Dissenters, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1921. Most of the
developments in this chapter are taken from that work.
(42) Ward W. R., Early Evangelicalism: A Global Intellectual History, 1670-1789, New York, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 2006, p. 10.
(43) Raffaella Faggionato, A Rosicrucian Utopia in Eighteenth-Century Russia: The Masonic Circle of N.I.
Novikov, Springer, Dordrecht, p. 81.
(44) Ibid, p. 82.
(45) K. Marx, F. Engels, The Commune of 1871, "Prolongements historiques et théoriques de
la Commune", http://www.marxists.org/francais/marx/works/00/commune/kmfecom11.htm.
(46) Nicolas Berdiaev, Les sources et le sens du communisme russe translated from the Russian by
A. Nerville, Gallimard, Paris, 1951, p. 14.
(47) One of the figures who built a bridge between sectarian circles and Moscow high society was a
certain Ekaterina Filippovna Tatarinova (1783-1856), "the daughter of a German officer in the service of
Russia. She married a Russian colonel, Ivan Tatarinov, and accompanied him when the Russian army
crossed Europe to defeat Napoleon. In 1813, however, she returned to St Petersburg, separated from
her husband and saddened by the death of her young son, and lived at the Mikhailovsky Palace, where
her mother was the nursemaid to the tsarevna Maria. Madame Tatarinova then devoted herself to
charitable works and to a quest to find her son.
which led her away from her native Lutheran Church and into close relations with the Khlytsy and
Skoptsy before she converted to Orthodoxy in 1817. It soon became apparent that she had her own
personal interpretation of the Orthodox faith, as she proclaimed herself a prophetess and clairvoyant
and held meetings in her flat where she led her followers through readings from Scripture, hymns,
improvised prophecies and often frenzied dancing leading to spiritual exaltation. His followers included
many important members of government and society, including Golitsyn and the Tsar himself. Until
1822, Madame
Tatarinova also received a sizeable government pension. That year, Alexander ordered the dissolution
of all secret societies, but Madame Tatarinova was able to continue her meetings, with the
benevolence of high-ranking protectors. After the fall of Golitsyn in 1824, however, she was arrested
and banished to the Moscow region. There she formed a colony around herself, which lasted until
1835, when she was arrested again and imprisoned in a convent. In 1847, aged and weakened, she was
released and allowed to live in Moscow, where she ended her days in peace". Georges Florovsky, Les
Voies de la Théologie Russe, translation and notes by Jean- Louis Palierne, L'Âge d'Homme, Lausanne,
2001, p. 170.
(48) W. F. Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight. An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia, The
Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA, 1999, chapter: "Magic, The Church, The Law",
p. 12.
(49) It is interesting to note that in the "Middle Ages", the Basileus, to impress the ambassadors sent
to the court by foreign princes, did not hesitate to use automatons and tricks worthy of modern
science.
(50) W. F. Ryan F., ibid.
(51) Dominique de Nièvre, Une saga libérale en Russie : Les Evréinov, Juifs, marchands, nobles (1650-
1950), L'Harmattan, 2004, p. 182-83.
(52) Isabel de Madariaga, La Russie au temps de la Grande Catherine, Fayard, 1987.
(53) Ibid.
(54) Heribert Tommek, "J. M. R. Lenz in Moscow and the project for a 'republic of scholars'. Un texte
inédit sur l'ouverture d'une société littéraire auprès des francs-maçons vers 1789". Cahiers du monde
russe 46/3, 2005 [p. 617-32].
(55) Ibid.
(56) Raffaella Faggionato, op. cit., p. 82.
(57) Isabel de Madaragia, op. cit.
(58) Boaz Huss, Marco Pasi and Kocku von Stuckrad (eds.), Kabbalah and Modernity:
Interpretations, Transformations, Brill, Leiden, 2010, p. 80.
(59) Isabel de Madaragia, op. cit.
(60) See Raffaella Faggionato, op. cit.
(61) R. Swinburne Clymer, Book of the Rosicrucae, Beverly Hall Corporation, Vol. 3, 1947, p. 110.
(62) Isabel de Madariaga, op. cit.
(63) Heribert Tommek, op. cit. p. 624-25.
(64) Isabel de Madaragia, op. cit.
(65) Walerjan Skorobohaty Krasiński (comte), Histoire religieuse des peuples slaves, Joël Cherbuliez,
Paris, 1853, p. 281.
(66) N. Deschamps (R. P.), Les Sociétés secrètes et la société, ou Philosophie de l'histoire
contemporaine, Vol. 3, Seguin Frères, 1882, p. 112.
(67) Metternich (Fürst von) C. W. L., Mémoires, documents et écrits divers laissés par le prince de
Metternich, chancelier de cour et d'État : pub. par son fils le prince Richard de Metternich, classés
et réunis par M. A. de Klinkowström, Vol. 3, E. Plon, Nourrit et cie, 1881, p. 623 sq.
(68) Robert Warth, "Before Rasputin: Piety and the Occult at the court of Nicholas II". In Historian 47,
Historian 47, no. 3, 1985 [p. 323-37].
(69) Janet Ashton, God in All Things: The Religious Outlook of Russia's Last Empress,
http://www.bl.uk/eblj/2006articles/pdf/article4.pdf.
(70) Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, Cornell University Press, Ithaca,
NY, 1997, p. 76.
(71) Walter G. Moss, "Vladimir Soloviev and the Jews in Russia". In The Russian Review 29, no. 2, April
1970 [pp. 181-91].
(72) Ibid, p. 75.
(73) Ibid.
(74) Pierre Kovalevski, "Messianisme et Millénarisme russes? In Archives des sciences sociales des
religions, no. 5, 1958 [pp. 47-70], p. 49.
(75) Ibid, p. 54.
(76) Ibid, p. 55.
(77) Ibid, p. 57.
(78) Ibid, p. 58.
(79) Ibid.
(80) D. Stremooukhoff, Vladimir Soloviev et son OEuvre Messianique, Strasbourg, Commission des
publications de la Faculté des lettres, 1935, p. 115.
(81) Pierre Kovalevski, op. cit. p. 65.
(82) Pierre Fougeyrollas, Vers la nouvelle pensée : Essai postphilosophique, L'Harmattan, 1994, p. 193.
(83) Jean-Pierre Sironneau, Sécularisation et religions politiques : With a summary in English, Paris,
Mouton, 1982 p. 370. Engels wrote these words to the Graeber brothers in April 1839: "I have never
been a pietist, and I was a mystic for a while [...] Now I am an honest spiritualist, very liberal towards
others...".
(84) Paul Gourdot, Les Sources maçonniques du socialisme français, 1848-1871, Editions du Rocher,
Lonaco, 1998, p. 201.
(85) Charles Pellarin, Charles Fourier: sa vie et sa théorie, 2nd edn, L'Ecole Sociétaire, Paris, 1843, p. 516.
(86) Alain Durel, L'Empire des choses: quatuor pour la fin des temps, L'Harmattan, 2004, p. 236.
(87) Jean-Pierre Sironneau, op. cit. p. 371.
(88) "The Union of the Faithful with Christ", The Karl Marx Library, vol. V, On Religion. Translated by
S. K. Padover, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, NY, 1974, pp. 3-6.
(89) Cf. Karl Marx, "À propos de la question juive", Gallimard, Bibliothèque de La Pléiade, t. III, Paris,
1982, pp. 358-364.
(90) Id, Writings Of The Young Marx On Philosophy And Society, translated by Loyd D. Easton and K.
Guddat, Doubleday and Co, Garden City, NY, p. 14.
(91) Id. in OEuvres philosophiques translated by J. Molitor, A. Costes, 1946, p. 186.
(92) Mega I.2-441.
(93) Jean-Pierre Sironneau, op. cit, p. 380.
(94) Ibid, p. 377.
(95) Ibid, p. 373.
(96) Ibid, p. 378.
(97) Cf. Karl Marx, OEuvres complètes, Gallimard, Bibliothèque de La Pléiade, 1941.
(98) In Robert Payne (ed.), The Unknown Karl Marx, New York University Press, New York, 1971, p. 81-.
83. The redacted text can be found at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1837-
pre/verse/verse21.htm.
(99) Jean-Pierre Sironneau, op. cit. p. 210.
(100) Sigmund Mowinckel, He That Cometh: The Messiah Concept in the Old Testament and Later
Judaism [1954], Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, Grand Rapids, 2005, p. 267.
(101) ibid, p. 120.
(102) It is not uninteresting to note that Herzen attributed to the United States of America a role
as decisive as that of Russia, a socialist Russia, in the march of humanity. As de Tocqueville
remarked in "De la Démocratie en Amérique", "There are today two great
They are the Russians and the Anglo-Americans" (Marc Vuilleumier, Autour d'Alexandre Herzen:
documents inédits, published by Marc Vuilleumier et al., Librairie Droz, Geneva, 1973, p. 310), who were
to take the old continent in their stranglehold.
(103) Geoffrey Hosking, Russia People and Empire, Harvard University Press 1552-1917, Cambridge,
Mass. 1997, pp. 345-46.
(104) Georges Nivat, Russie-Europe : la fin du schisme : études littéraires et politiques, L'Âge d'Homme,
Lausanne, 1993, p. 182.
(105) Ibid, p. 182-83.
(106) Geoffrey Hosking, op. cit. p. 363.
(107) Georges Nivat, op. cit. p. 180.
(108) In idem, Them and Us: L'Europe face à ses nouvelles déchirures: textes des conférences et des
discussions: XXXVIes rencontres internationales de Genève 1997, L'Âge d'Homme, Lausanne, 1998, p.
134.
(109) Emile J. Dillon, op. cit. p. 4.
(110) Bielinski is considered to be the first Russian socialist to have introduced French utopian socialism
to Russia. "He had an enormous influence on the entire revolutionary movement" (Jean Pierre
Sironneau, op. cit., p. 389). In his Diary, Dostoyevsky recounts that Bielinsky, with whom he had just
become acquainted, "undertook from the very first days, with the most sincere impatience, to convert
him to his socialist faith" (Pierrez Pascal, Dostoyevsky, l'homme et l'oeuvre, L'Âge d'Homme, Lausanne,
1970, p. 351).
(111) Szamuely, T., "The Russian Tradition [Alexander Matejko]". In Revue d'études comparatives Est-
Ouest, vol. 9, no. 3, 1978 [pp. 223-226], p. 225.
(112) Emile J. Dillon, op. cit. p. 26.
(113) Ibid.
(114) in Lecca A., Histoire des idées politiques : des origines au XXe siècle, Paris, Ellipses, 1997, p. 419.
(115) Tibor Szamueli, The Russian Tradition, Martin Secker and Warburg, London, 1974. Quoted in
Jean- Pierre Sirroneau, op. cit. p. 389.
(116) Tibor Szamueli, La Tradition russe, Stock, 1976, p. 193.
(117) Dom Hisoard, La propriété et la communauté des biens depuis l'antiquité jusqu'à nos jours, vol. 1,
Berche et Tralin, 1869, p. 221.
(118) "The scientific theory of social revolution postulates that the development of the capitalist regime
follows definite laws, according to which capital is concentrated in an ever smaller number of owners,
while the masses of the population undergo the process of impoverishment. On the other hand, the
production of foodstuffs grows faster than their consumption, and the major industrial countries suffer
from a shortage of food.
The day must necessarily come when the overproduction of foodstuffs becomes chronic. The day must
necessarily come when the overproduction of commodities becomes chronic, and this evil cannot be
remedied by the unstable and unorganised capitalist regime. Economic anarchy will then lead to social
revolution; the enormous masses of the proletariat, who will have passed through the school of
revolutionary discipline in the large factories, will easily triumph over a handful of princes of capital.
Then the expropriation of the expropriators will take place. The wealth accumulated thanks to the
progress of science and the tireless labour of hundreds of millions of workers will be socialised and a
new era will begin.
will begin in the history of mankind". (Landau-Aldanov, M. A., Lenin, Paris, J. Povolozky, 1920, p. 78-9)
(119) The developments contained in this chapter are taken for the most part from the work by
the historian F. Venturi's Il Populismo Russo, Turin, Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1952 and P. Wadey's DESS
The Russian Revolutionary Tradition: From Narodnichestvo to Marxism-Leninism, 2010.
(120) Jean Bourdeau, Tolstoï, Lenine et la Révolution Russe, Alcan, 1921, pp. 2-3.
(121) Ibid, p. 44.
(122) Ibid, p. 3-4.
(123) Ibid, p. 4.
(124) Ibid, p. 5.
(125) Ibid, p. 9.
(126) Ibid, p. 11.
(127) Ibid, p. 35.
(128) Ibid, p. 42.
(129) Ibid, p. 54.
(130) Ibid, p. 41
(131) Ibid, p. 54.
(132) In Ibid, p. 58.
(133) Ibid, p. 59.
(134) Ibid, p. 60.
(135) The Times reports on the July 1889 "Possibilist" Congress in Paris,
http://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/1889/workers-congress.htm.
(136) Georges Sorel, in Philippe Nemo and Jean Petitot, Histoire du libéralisme en Europe,
Presses universitaires de France, 2006, p. 732.
(137) Georges Sorel, Réflexions sur la violence [1907], Paris, éd. du Trident, 1987, p. 23.
(138) Jack Conrad, Fantastic Reality. Marxism and the Politics of Religion, 3rd edn,
corrected, JC Publications, 2013, p. 412.
(139) James Webb, The Occult Underground, Open Court, 1974, p. 192.
(140) See Boaz Huss, Marco Pasi and Kocku von Stuckrad (eds.), op. cit.
(141) Later, in so-called Western countries, the cabalistic concept of Tikkun came to inform fields as
varied as psychology - since healing the patient came to be inextricably linked in the mind of the
psychologist with the desire to "make the world a better place" - and nature conservation (Karen E.
Starr, Repair of the Soul, Routledge, 2008, p. 2).
(142) Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, op. cit. p. 28.
(143) Collective, Eurasia, Vol. III, No. 4: The Return of the Third Rome, avataréditions, p. 105. On
the Roerichs' links with occultism and secret societies, see Markus Osterrieder, "From Synarchy to
Shambhala: The Role of Political Occultism and Social Messianism in the Activities of
Nicholas Roerich", in Birgit Menzel, Michael Hagemeister and Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (eds.), The New
Age of Russia Occult and Esoteric Dimensions, Verlag Otto Sagner, Munich and Berlin, 2012. The
opening of archives and the recent publication of various diaries and personal papers of the Roerichs
and several of their closest collaborators have revealed that their ultimate goal - the 'Great Plan' (Plan
Velikii) - was to establish a pan-Buddhist country (Novaia Strana) from Tibet to southern Siberia. This
"New Country" was conceived as the manifest, earthly expression of the invisible Kingdom of
Shambhala. This utterly utopian project does more than suggest that the Roerichs and their
collaborators were merely pawns on a chessboard, that their "Great Plan" was only the visible part of a
much vaster plan, the details of which they were never informed: that of a world state.
(144) See http://www.bullypulpitgames.com/projects/games/big_store/brighton_beach_names.pdf.
(145) J. C. Polet, Patrimoine littéraire européen, Vol. 12 - Mondialisation de l'Europe (1885-1922),
Brussels, Éditions De Boeck Université, 2000, p. 201.
(146) Collectif, Tisser le lien social, Paris, Éditions de la maison des sciences de l'Homme, 2004, p. 318.
(147) Cf. Jean-Claude Lanne and Michael Hagemeister, "Nikolaj Fedorov: Studien zu Leben, Werk
und Wirkun". In Revue des études slaves, t. 62, fasc. 4, 1990 [p. 970-971].
(148) George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin (eds.), Intersections: Fantasy and Science Fiction,
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL, 1987.
(149) Thomas Michaud, Le Marsisme, Les Éditions Memoriae, 2008, Paris, p. 105.
(150) Ibid, p. 104.
(151) Ibid.
(152) François Laplantine and Massimo Introvigne, Le Défi magique, Vol. 1, Presses Universitaires de
Lyon, 1994, p. 294.
(153) Marc Slonim, Histoire de la littérature russe soviétique, L'Âge d'Homme, 1985, Lausanne, p. 95.
(154) Thomas Michaud, op. cit. p. 107.
(155) Tumarkin N., Lenin Lives: The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia, Harvard University Press, 1983, p. 22.
(156) Sabine Barin-Gould (Rev.), Legends of Old Testament characters: from the Talmud and other
sources, Macmillan, London, 1871, p. 3.
(157) George M. Young, The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His
Followers, Oxford University Press, New York, 2012, p. 186.
(158) W. Awdejew, Lenins Mumie: okkulte und rassische Aspekte, http://www.velesovasloboda.
org/misc/awdejew-lenins-mumie.html.
(159) Weaving the social fabric, p. 319.
(160) Israël Goldberg, Prince d'Israël: le journal de Rabbi Yosseph Yits'hak Schneerson de Loubavitch,
L'Harmattan, 2008, p. 144.
(161) In benton L. Bradberry, The Myth of German Villainy, Bloomington, IN, AuthorHouse, 2012, p. 103
; cf. M. Voslensky, La Nomenklatura. Les Privilégiés en U.R.S.S. [Nomenklatura, Tiden, Stockholm, 1982],
Pierre Belfond, 1980.
(162) "The desire of the Jewish Bolsheviks to conceal their Jewishness and dissociate themselves from
their people sometimes took on grotesque dimensions. For example, Karl Radek (Tobiach Sobelsohn),
falsely quoting Heine as saying that the Jews were a 'disease' when he had written that the Jewish
religion was a 'misfortune', told one of his German friends that he wanted to 'exterminate' ('aussroten')
all Jews." In Benjamin Frankel, A Restless Mind: Essays in Honor of Amos Perlmutter, Franck Cass,
London, 1996 p. 265.
(163) Nissan Mindel, Nissan Rabbi DovBer Chnéouri, The "Intermediate Rabbi",
http://www.fr.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1045548/jewish/Rabbi-Dov-Ber-Chnouri-Le-Rabbi-
Intermdiaire.htm.
(164) Maj. W. G. Carr, Des Pions sur L'échiquier, Cadillac, Éditions Saint-Rémi, 2002, p. 192.
(165) "The law on conscription, introduced in 1827 by Nicholas I, imposed military service for twentyfive
years on 7%o Russian men over the age of eighteen and for thirty-one years on 10%o Jewish boys
over the age of twelve.
The six years of preliminary service are intended to ensure the conversion of these Jewish children to the
Jewish faith.
Christianity". Laurence Leitenberg, La population juive des villes d'Europe. Croissance et répartition,
1750-1930, Éditions scientifiques internationales, Bern, p. 18.
(166) Cdt. Carr W. G., op. cit. p. 194.
(167) Ibid, p. 195-97.
(168) ibid, p. 197.
(169) His mother was Maria Ivanovna Shelomova.
(170) Cf. Marshall L. Goldman, The Piratization of Russia: Russian Reform Goes Awry, Routledge,
London, 2003, p. 132.
(171) See http://www.collive.com/show_news.rtx?id=19899&alias=putin-now-has-a-chazakah.
http://www.hassidout.org/sj/beth-habad/israel/115-jerusalem/31350-poutine-en-visite-au-kotel-avecle-
rav-berel-lazar
(172) Cf.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140814215902/http://martinfrost.ws/htmlfiles/oct2008/russianbusiness-
oligarch.html;
https://web.archive.org/web/20171015110651/http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTINVTCLI/Resour
ces/JUNE7&8PAPERBraguinsky.pdf.
(173) See Pascal Bernardin, La Face cachée du mondialisme vert,
https://web.archive.org/web/20160306205259/http://euro92.com/edi/biblio/bernardin2.htm.