Founded by Georgii Plekhanov after his return from a pilgrimage to the Spasovtsy on the Volga, the Social Democrats changed the perspective of the Russian revolutionary movement. The agnostic proletariat, rather than the religious peasantry, would be the bulwark of revolution. Two big issues were at stake, the people and the state. The early enthusiasts, Shchapov and Bakunin, believed in the secret wisdom of the common people, which would manifest itself if they were freed from interference from the state. The professional revolutionaries, Plekhanov and Lenin, found this unacceptable: it was precisely the state, understood as the apparatus of violence, which they singled out as their tool. For them, that traditional hope of Russian socialists, the commune, was a feature and creation of Russia's "oriental society", an outdated institution that had to be overcome (Baron 1958).
The populists exaggerated their cultural distance from the peasantry precisely in those instances when they wished to overcome that distance. Among the people, they imagined harems and cannibalism, compared their experience to Arabic tales, and spoke about Chinese ceremonies. Disappointed with popular sects or, rather, the historical account of these sects, they reverted to terrorism, which launched a vicious cycle of violence that led to the Revolution. Worshipping the heroic past of revolutionary terrorism, they repressed a part of its historical legacy that connected it to the Russian sects. Nevertheless, even the Social Democrats continued working with the sects. The young Leon Trotsky began his revolutionary career with propaganda among urban sectarians (Trotsky 1990: 1/130).
The Exemplary Farm
The emphasis on the religious underpinnings of the Russian revolution has become popular in more recent literature (Etkind 1998, 2003; Manchester 1998, 2008; Rowley 1999; Halfin 2000; Malia 2006; see also fictional accounts: Sharov 2003; Meek 2005). Indeed, religion and revolution were allied in the minds of the two pre-rev- olutionary generations, but the specific mechanisms of their interaction were complex and sometimes deceitful. Revolutionary leaders proclaimed their atheism, and there is no reason to distrust them. Most of them were, indeed, secular intellectuals. But the revolutions they produced, or planned to produce, were not necessarily secular. An heir and revisionist of the populist tradition, Lenin suggested a combination of the "progressive vanguard" and the "backward peasantry" as the route to Russian revolution. Leading peasantry to the civilization of the future was a radically new version of that internal colonization that Lenin perceptively found in Russian provinces (see Chapter 2). This project was dependent on the perception of the peasantry as a disguised, non-self-conscious world of religious dissent and political protest. The Orthodox clergy remained faithful to the monarchy, but the peasantry was religious in a different way. To capture the leadership over the selected groups of the dissenting peasantry and to exploit them for political purposes meant a chance for revolution in Russia. The deep hybridization between religion and politics manifested itself in varied, unstable versions.
Aware of the cultural gap that separated them from the peasants, radicals hoped to use religious symbols to communicate their political aims. Many of the populists were children of priests. Those who graduated from church schools and seminaries knew the Orthodox rhetoric, but were typically discontent with church practices. Others were noblemen with university degrees who pursued highly individualized versions of religious-political synthesis. Populists were fascinated with the social structures of sects, which they identified with the primordial socialism. They interpreted the sects' apocalyptic expectations as a promise of the coming revolution. Though the task of the young socialists was to turn themselves into the leaders of mystical communities and, then, to bring them to the goals that were entirely foreign for these communities, not all these propagandists were cynical manipulators, like Kurtz from Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The whole spectrum from the most pragmatic cynicism to the most naive enthusiasm was tested. In this spiritual domain, the enthusiasts were more successful than the manipulators.
Academic scholarship, political activism, and religious fervor were often indistinguishable for these intellectuals. While the academic aspects of their activism shaped public display, the religious ones remained in the private imagery, which left its traces mainly in personal diaries or memoirs. Within the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries that was led by Chernov, the leading expert on the Schism was Aleksandr Prugavin, an ethnographer who, like many of his Russian colleagues, acquired his profession in political exile; he believed in the approaching union of sectarianism and socialism until the day he died in a Bolshevik prison (Prugavin 1881, 1904, 1917). Within the Party of Social Democrats that was led by Lenin, Vladimir Bonch- Bruevich provided the ethnographic expertise (Etkind 1996, 1998; Engelstein 1999). Leading the double life of a terrorist networker and a sectarian aficionado, he visited many sectarian communities, but
Figure 17: Lenin and Bonch-Bruevich, October 16, 1918. Moscow, Kremlin.
found his ideal in the emigre Dukhobory (Spirit-Strugglers) villages in Canada. Bonch-Bruevich's book about them is the ode to mystical socialism, perhaps the most mesmerizing portrait of "the people" ever written in Russian. Ironically, this people had already moved to Canada, while the author moved to the Kremlin (Bonch-Bruevich 1918).
The commandant of the Smolny headquarters of the Bolsheviks in 1917 and the chief-of-staff in the first Lenin government, in 1921 Bonch-Bruevich organized the exemplary sovkhoz (Soviet farm) near Moscow, on an estate that earlier belonged to Savva Morozov. He resettled there a community of the Khlysty from St. Petersburg, who called themselves the Chemreki, with their leader Pavel Legkobytov. Relying on their efficiency in dairy farming and trusting their honesty in accounting, Bonch-Bruevich hoped to establish an example of practical communism that other Russian communes and communities would follow. In 1922, together with a number of agricultural officials, he signed the "Call to Sectarians and Old-Ritualists in Russia and Abroad." This document praised sectarians for their "millennial experience" with collective agriculture and invited them to emerge from their underground and to return from emigration. An analogue to Catherine's Manifesto of 1763 (see Chapter 7), this document promised the sectarian communities the land that was confiscated from the noble landowners, thereby presenting the sectarians as beneficiaries of the Revolution. Also like Catherine, the People's Comissariat of Agriculture established a governmental body to oversee the new resettlement, the "Committee for the Settlement of Sectarians and Old-Ritualists in State Farms, Free Lands, and the Former Estates." During the Civil War in 1919, the Lenin administration gave sectarians an exemption from military service, a sign of their favored but passive status. As much as the Bolsheviks admired the non-acquisitive character of sectarian economies, they detested the non-violence that was preached and practiced by them (Etkind 1998).
Never fulfilled, promises of popular support led Bonch-Bruevich to the summit of very real power. From 1917 to 1920, hundreds of the top governmental orders were signed with two names, Lenin's and Bonch-Bruevich's. The long-standing friendship between the two shows that the fascination with sectarians remained a respected preoccupation among revolutionary leaders. After Lenin's death, Bonch- Bruevich focused on creating the Lenin cult and, in this context, initiated a new discussion on the affinity between the sectarians and the Bolsheviks at the Thirteenth Party Congress in 1924. Outliving his academic subjects and political opponents, Bonch-Bruevich died in 1955, while serving as director of the academic Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism that was, meaningfully, located in a cathedral. In this museum, he himself was the most unique exhibit.