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THE NEW INQUISITIONS: HERETIC-HUNTING AND THE INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF MODERN TOTALITARIANISM |
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7: Communism and the Heresy of Religion Karl Marx's famous assertion that "religion is the opiate of the masses" had consequences that one suspects he could not have imagined. Marx envisioned a revolution that would sweep away the social structures of the past and that would inaugurate a new form of communal society. But he could not have guessed -- when he wrote at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto that communists are "hunted" throughout Europe as dangerous revolutionaries -- that Communists themselves in only a handful of decades would become the hunters or inquisitors, and that their own fearful victims would be those who embraced religious belief and practice. Whereas figures on the right from Donoso Cortes to Schmitt and Voegelin identified with the Catholic inquisition and encouraged hunting down "heretics" or "Gnostics" in order to preserve social order, for figures on the left, Catholicism and, indeed, religion itself became the "heresy" from the dialectical materialist doctrines of Communism. Thus Communist inquisitions were not far away, once the Communists took power. Despite the deep foundation of Russian Orthodoxy within Russian culture, during the mid- to late nineteenth century, there emerged a nascent hostility to organized religion. In part, this antireligious sentiment was bound up with the emergence of Russian nihilism in the 1860s, and with the fiery anarchic sentiments of figures such as Mikhail Bakhunin (1814-1876), who urged the destruction of both state and religious hierarchy. Behind these various anti-religious currents in Russia lay the rejection of otherworldly aims and an insistence on the primacy of economic and material concerns. The stage for Communist antireligion also was set by Marxists such as Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov (1856-1918), who saw the Russian Orthodox Church as an obstacle to social transformation and who would accept no compromise with religious traditions. [1] But it was only with the ascent to power of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov [Lenin) (1870-1924) that the Communist movement could manifest the antireligious sentiments that already influenced a good part of the revolutionary thought in Russia. As Nicholas Berdyaev points out, Lenin (like Stalin) was raised in a religiously devout Russian Orthodox household, but he converted his religious devotion into party devotion, becoming a kind of secular ascetic. [2] Trotsky speculated that Lenin's "conversion" to a rigid revolutionary materialism was a reaction to the early death of Lenin's father and the imprisonment and execution of Lenin's older brother, who was barely twenty-one. [3] His religious faith shaken to the core, Lenin shifted his faith to an earthly revolution. Lenin thus became a proselyte for the perspective advanced by Marx: that religion merely served to keep people subjected to capitalist exploitation and to deaden the masses' sense of outrage at basic socioeconomic inequality. And this sense was heightened after the defeat of the 1905 revolutionary effort in Russia. Luukkanen puts it this way: "From Lenin's point of view, the post-revolutionary situation after 1905 had given rise to a multitude of doctrinal heresies including one of the most serious ideological sins, compromise with religion" [italics added). [4] This summarizes what was happening in the Bolshevik movement: religion was itself already perceived as "heresy." Lenin's rejection of religion was pathological. He called it "necrophilia," and fought bitterly against any Bolshevik compromise with religious traditions, perceiving the great efflorescence of Russian religious thought during this period (exemplified by such extraordinary creative figures as Nicholas Berdyaev [1874-1948] and Sergei Bulgakov [1871-1944), but more generally by the mystical syntheses of Orthodoxy and mysticism, especially in the tradition of Jacob Bohme) as genuine opposition or betrayal. This, the Russian "silver age," was arguably the most creative period of religious and philosophical thought of modem times, and Lenin was right to perceive it as a real threat to his ideologically rigid conception of a Bolshevik revolution. Lenin's writings and speeches are laced with venomous attacks on religion, so it is little wonder that when the Bolsheviks took power they began to institute an antireligious inquisition. But first it was necessary to consolidate centralized power, and one sees this from the beginning in Lenin's movement and his writings. He insisted on the importance of an elite, "a small, compact core of the most reliable, experienced, and hardened workers ... connected by all the rules of secrecy with the organization of revolutionaries." The leadership elite must be "professionals," that is, devoted entirely to the revolutionary cause, and they alone must direct the revolution. The masses were seen as "children who had to be protected from their own misguided inclinations." [5] And once the Bolsheviks had seized power and established a single-party system under the dictatorship of Lenin, they began to implement exactly what Lenin had defined dictatorship as: "nothing more nor less than authority untrammeled by any laws, absolutely unrestricted by any rules whatever, and based directly on force." [6] On seizing power, the Bolsheviks instituted a policy of terror. It is true that early in the revolution, the Bolsheviks abolished the death penalty, but Lenin was outraged by the news and according to Trotsky, kept repeating, "How can one make a revolution without firing squads?" [7] Trotsky said Lenin insisted on "the inevitability of terror at every opportunity," and brightened up at a subordinate's suggestion to change the name of the Commissariat of Justice to the "Commissariat for Social Extermination." Of course, such a commissariat already existed: it was the secret police, or Cheka, which by this time had taken the initiative in shooting opponents and in spreading terror throughout the country. At this time, the terror was intended to consolidate centralized dictatorial power, and was directed at political dissidents: the suppression of religion came later. Lenin argued that violence was essential for revolution, and wrote of the Communist dissenter Kautsky that he "betrayed his cloven hoof" in opposing the use of violence. Lenin writes, in "The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky," that "The proletarian revolution is impossible without the forcible destruction of the bourgeois state machine and the substitute for it of a new one which, in the words of Engels, is 'no longer a state in the proper sense of the word.'" [8] He goes on: "the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is violence against the bourgeoisie; and the necessity of such violence is particularly called for, as Marx and Engels have repeatedly explained in detail." [9] It is interesting that Lenin employs the rhetoric of Christian heresy ("cloven hoof") in condemning Kautsky and insisting upon the need for inflicting violent horrors on the population. Lenin insisted on absolute and total obeisance to party ideology. He said that "to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, or to turn away from it in the slightest degree, means to strengthen bourgeois ideology." [10] Thus, Robert Wesson observed concerning Lenin's vision for a new world that ideological compromise "was viewed as a concession to economism and consequently heresy." [11] Indeed, much of the force of Lenin's elite cadre of "Bolsheviks" derived from their strict adherence to a single totalizing ideology that formed the basis for the subsequent notion of "purging." The violence that Lenin called for was the expression of an ideological fanaticism with a millennialist fervor: the Bolsheviks were bringing into being a "new era" and a "new humanity." To do this entailed murdering "heretics" and unrepentant members of the "bourgeoisie. " The "grand inquisitor" of the Communists was Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky (1877-1926), head under Lenin of the Vecheka or Cheka, the "AlIRussian Extraordinary Commission" established on 20 December 1917, and empowered on 22 February 1918 to "arrest and shoot immediately" all members of "counter-revolutionary organizations." A "secular ascetic," Dzerzhinsky reportedly said when Lenin appointed him head of the Cheka, "We don't want justice, we want to settle accounts." Dzerzhinsky explicitly said in the summer of 1918 that the Cheka was not a court or a juridical body, and so "cannot reckon with whether or not it will inflict injury upon private individuals, but must concern itself only with one thing -- the victory of the Revolution over the bourgeoisie ... even if in so doing its sword accidentally falls on the heads of the innocent." [12] Thus Dzerzhinsky confirms in his own words exactly what Nicholas Berdyaev had observed: that the fanatical Inquisitor always seeks to reduce the complexity of life to just one thing. And it was at this time (1918) that Lenin's authoritarianism became explicit. Lenin declared to Gorky, after an assassination attempt on Lenin's life, "Whoever is not with us is against us." In this spirit, Lenin charged the Cheka with being the regime's Inquisition, rounding up and eliminating potential rivals or critics. And when European socialists like Kautsky indicated their distress at the brutality of the Bolshevik regime (see Kautsky's The Dictatorship of the Proletariat) Lenin responded with typical ridicule and fury. Tellingly, in "The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky," Lenin cited Engels in this way:
This is the brutal authoritarian spirit that brought into being the Cheka and the inquisitional dimensions of the Soviet Union. At the same time, one has to keep in mind that even though Communist atheism did have predecessors in, for instance, the Russian nihilism of the nineteenth century, Russian Orthodoxy is deeply rooted, and so Lenin could not simply obliterate religious faith with the peremptory wave of a hand. Rather, the Soviets primarily established various means of undermining religious authority, such as the "Liquidation Commission," a subsection of the Commissariat of Justice that was headed by P. A. Krasikov (1870-1939), a bitterly antireligious figure. The "Liquidation Commission," despite its sinister name, was initially responsible for instituting the separation of church and state. [14] And the Soviets soon undertook a policy of confiscating Russian Orthodox Church valuables and property. More effective forces allied against religion were in the Soviet security apparatus, which infiltrated religious groups or sects across Russia. Still, it was not simply a case of constant attack on religion: there were figures in the Soviet government during this period that were conciliatory. But Solzhenitsyn was not entirely wrong to regard the totality of the Russian Communist system as a kind of antireligious gangsterism. [15] Although it is true that there was conciliatory rhetoric toward religion on the part of Lenin and even Stalin, this was in order not to foment a rebellion among the peasants or for other strategic reasons. Even during periods when there were relatively little in the way of public attacks on religion, Trotsky in particular plotted to divide the clergy and to undermine the Russian Orthodox Church. The basic Soviet policies toward religion were by and large hostile, entailed the widespread confiscation of church land and wealth, and sometimes reached the level of witch-hunts and purges, primarily out of fear that the Church or some sect would constitute a threat to centralized Soviet power. Among the worst of these early periods were the Russian Civil War of 1917-1921 and the "Red Terror," a bloody campaign against the "bourgeoisie," or "class enemies," notable among which were clergy. Thousands of "bishops, priests, monks, and nuns perished as a result of anarchy and the Red Terror," Luukkanen records. Furthermore, "potential leaders of ecclesiastical protests in particular were vigorously persecuted" by the Cheka. Bolshevik terror "tended to be 'pre-emptive' in nature. All potential class enemies were in danger of being liquidated even before they became engaged in actual counter-revolutionaryactions." [16] Another such period came early in the reign of Stalin, when once again various officials were accused of being soft on religion. As various scholars have put it, a "search for 'heretic' scapegoats epitomized the Cultural Revolution," during which the "heretics" were not only Soviet officials who were insufficiently antireligious, but also priests and their congregations. [17] Those active in religious traditions were accused of being disloyal to the party, and of various trumped-up "political crimes" that effectively turned on its head the notion of "heresy": in the past, "heresy" was deviation from traditional religious doctrines, but now, religion itself had become a "deviation" from Communist Party dogma. This period, in the late 1920s, was only a prelude to the horrors of the 1930s under Stalin. What characterizes the Stalinist period above all is the pervasive paranoia that is the result of the appalling violence directed not only at "bourgeois" members of society, at the intelligentsia, and at the clergy (a pattern from the days of Lenin), but also and with great ferocity and irrationality, at Party members themselves. The numbers speak for themselves: a recent estimate holds that from the 1920s to the 1950s, 20 percent of all adult males passed through or died in Gulags; fifteen million were condemned to forced labor; a million and a half died in prison; over three and a half million people were condemned by the secret police courts, and roughly two-thirds of a million were murdered, many during the nightmarish years of the "Great Terror" of 1937-1938. [18] The late 1930s also were characterized by bizarre show trials, public "confessions" by former officials, and a terrifying atmosphere of denunciations, "trials" without evidence, assumption of guilt unless one could prove one's innocence before hostile functionaries, and what Nicolas Werth calls "trials for political sorcery," as well as "execution quotas approved region by region by the Political Bureau." [19] One of the most bizarre dimensions of the "Great Terror" under Stalin was the purging of Party members. By February 1937, nearly one and a half million members had been excommunicated from the Party, nearly as many as remained in the Party! But not all of the 680,000 who were executed by Stalin's terror squads were ex-Party members; the "enemies" included members of non-Russian ethnic groups, former clergy, "ex-landowners," and others who could be construed as belonging to the past rather than as Party loyalists. [20] Werth notes "most of the victims of the Great Terror were individuals placed on file by the political-police services. When the quotas were higher than the number of suspects, the NKVD either used depositions extorted during interrogations, or resorted to police raids in public places, a common practice throughout the 1930s." [21] Torture was by no means ruled out, any more than it was ruled out by the Catholic inquisitions. But there is a fundamental difference between the Stalinist purges and the Catholic inquisitions. At its worst, the Inquisition did instill fear in a society such as Spain, for instance, at least at certain periods. Even so, the fear was constrained by at least some form of internal logic: it was widely understood, at least in a rough way, what "heresy," "witchcraft," "conversion to Judaism," or "sorcery" were held to consist in, and the Inquisition restricted itself more or less to such general areas. Under Stalinism, however, there was no such internal logic -- indeed, the very point of the Stalinist purges, mass murders, show trials, and all the rest was to throw all of society into a state of terror. Nothing was stable, except perhaps the presence of the whims and scheming of Stalin himself at the center of the whirlwind. By now, it is obvious that words such as "heresy" and "persecution" are widely used by scholars in discussing the nightmarish dimensions of life under Leninism and Stalinism. Scholar after scholar uses words derived from aspects of the Inquisition in order to describe the seizure, imprisonment, torture, quasi-juridical process including secret charges and witnesses, and executions of "political criminals" or heretics. Are these comparisons to the Inquisition accurate? If anything, they underscore how much more horrific were the Communist inquisitions than their Catholic predecessors. If the Catholic Inquisitions relied upon means like secret informants and confessions extracted under torture, the Stalinist inquisitions often did not even bother with these: it was often enough merely to be accused. At their worst, the Stalinist inquisitions reveal a society gone pathological. Seen as a whole, inquisitorial Communism is worse because it seems almost limitless in its madness: anyone could be a victim, and the numbers of dead and imprisoned are consequently many, many times higher than those of any Catholic Inquisition in centuries past. For all the perversity of condemning people to torture and death in the name of religion, still there were limits to what a misguided Catholicism or, later, Protestantism could give rise to. By contrast, secular millennialism has no such limits -- indeed, once people are taken up by a secular millennialist ideology, greater evils soon follow on the heels of lesser ones, and there are no constraints imposed by the reproofs implicit in religion. It is obvious that an Inquisition flies in the face of the Sermon on the Mount, but there is no comparable reproof within Communism's history, only precedents. But with all that said, the underlying logic of inquisitions remains the same, whether they are in the service of a religious or a secular millennialist bureaucracy. Although there are clear differences between them, the religious inquisitions do foreshadow the untrammeled brutality and destructiveness of the twentieth-century secular inquisitions to come. Their implicit logic privileges an imagined millennialist future over the lives of its victims in the present or past; it fiercely denies and attacks affirmations of transcendence, while asserting instead the primacy of the strictly historical. When the Vatican condemned (for a brief time) Meister Eckhart, certainly among the greatest of Christian mystics, it was asserting the primacy of the historical over the explicit gnostic transcendence that Eckhart represented, and it was thus presaging the tyranny of "dialectical materialism" that produced the Soviet or, for that matter, Chinese Communist inquisitions. For the parallels between the various Communist inquisitions and their religious predecessors go beyond merely structural aspects. There is also an underlying continuity in the emphasis (in the ideology of both political and religious inquisitions) on the historical march toward a millennial future, and on the consequent need for an enforced unity of society in order to make this millennial future possible. In both late antiquity and in political modernity, the victims are the "Gnostics," that is, those who assert the lasting value of the transcendent in the face of powers that insist upon the total primacy of the historical or temporal. Thus the Communists instituted a merely "technical" education for an instrumentalized humanity. It was not for nothing that Berdyaev, Bulgakov, and their emigre colleagues believed Communism to be a form of "demonism." For it was not religion alone that Leninist or Stalinist (or Maoist) Communism sought to destroy, it was also the humanities and the transcendent dimensions of humanity that they sought to deny or to obliterate. Hence we find that the dynamics of heretic-hunting and the torture, imprisonment, and execution of "heretics" are by no means limited to fascist governments. One might expect to find the inquisitional model transposed into political forms sympathetic to Catholicism, but it is surprising to find the inquisition's inverted secular mirror image in Communism, here turned against Catholicism and Christianity as the "heretics." But what we are considering here is a much more complicated set of refractions and ramifications of the inquisitional archetype. What matters most for the emergence of the inquisitional dynamic is a dictatorial form of leadership, a fanatical insistence on ideological "purity" or unity, and a belief that people ought to be controlled and even exterminated for their own or for the greater good. When these factors come together, the stage is set for another new inquisition. That is what we see in the history of Russian Communism. But as we shall see, the seeds of an inquisition are also present in works sometimes deemed to be on the "right." A case in point: the work of Eric Voegelin.
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