While the Russian revolutionaries were abandoning their belief in the political potential of sects, the Russian literati were developing their interest in the subject. The most important writers of the early twentieth century, such as Lev Tolstoy and Andrei Bely, depicted sectarians in their writings (Vroon 1994). Tolstoy favored the Dukhobory, but he was also interested in the Khlysty and he corresponded with the Skoptsy (Tolstoy 1908; Heier 1970; Fodor 1989). Sects and revolution were central subjects for Andrei Platonov in Chevengur, Boris Pil'niak in The Naked Year, Maksim Gorky in Klim Samgin, and Vsevolod Ivanov in his underappreciated Kremlin. Lev Trotsky had a point when he accused fellow-travelers of the Revolution of having a "half-Khlystovian perspective on events"; the true Bolsheviks shave themselves, added Trotsky (1991: 68). Mystical populism constituted an important part of the governing ideology of the years that preceded and followed the Revolution, and sectarianism was at the center of Russian public debate (Etkind 1998). But in the real politics of revolutionary Russia, there was nothing akin to the sectarian mobilization found in the English revolution of the seventeenth century, in antebellum America, or in nineteenth-century England (Nordhoff 1875; Hobsbawm 1959; Walzer 1965; Taves 1999).
The most important case of direct political action by members of Russian religious dissent in the early twentieth century was the financial contributions made by some Moscow Old-Believer merchants to extremist parties, including the Bolsheviks. The most important, Savva Morozov (1862-1905), was a descendant of the radical community of Old-Believers who taught about the imminent coming of the Anti-Christ. Reportedly because of his youthful fascination with fireworks, he studied chemistry at Cambridge. He later owned major textile enterprises and breweries near Moscow and in the Urals. A major philanthropist, he financed the Moscow Artistic Theater and was close to its actress, the wife of Maksim Gorky. Through Gorky, he also financed the underground Bolshevik newspaper and some terrorist activities. He told Gorky about the experiments of Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge; they also discussed Nietzsche, whose philosophy Morozov compared to pyrotechnics. After Morozov's suicide, Gorky's wife received a big sum of money and passed it to the Social- Democratic underground. Morozov was buried at an Old-Believers' cemetery; many were convinced that the Bolsheviks killed him (Felshtinsky 2009). Other Old-Believer merchants, however, contributed to moderate parties (Williams 1986; West 1991). Many of them were secularized to an extent that makes it difficult to speculate about the religious sources of their politics.
The only figure of national significance who could arguably be considered a sectarian was Grigorii Rasputin, a radical in his own way, but hardly a revolutionary. The controversial and well-publicized evidence of his sectarianism did nothing to hinder his success at the court of the Romanovs. On the contrary, his populist performance determined his success at court and with the Synod. After 50 years of glorification of Russian sects by the Left, the regime of Nicholas II boasted a live sectarian who symbolized popular support for the crown (Jonge 1982; Etkind 1998). This deal was not an easy one; resistance to Rasputin's ascendance to cultural power raged furiously.
As the dynasty went native, the imperial period was approaching its end. Lev Tolstoy told a British guest that he had a sectarian peasant as his "spiritual father" and that he, Count Tolstoy, was nothing but "the interpreter to the world at large of what the Russian peasants have always known" (Stead 1888: 440). This manner of self- presentation did not hamper Tostoy's popularity but instead boosted it to new heights. After the 1905 Revolution, the famous Vekhi anthology warned the intelligentsia of its future destruction by the people. But the leading authors of the Vekhi, such as Nikolai Berdiaev, remained infatuated with the Khlysty and other sects (Berdiaev 1916, 1989). As happened earlier in Europe, many Russian intellectuals felt that "modernity impoverishes" and that religious enthusiasm "compensate[s] for modernity's costs" (Klein and La Vopa 1998: 3). Feeling a keen interest in Russian sects, Max Weber was hesitant to extend his analysis of the Protestant ethics to their variety (Weber 1995: 64, 161; Radkau 2009: 246; also Gerschenkron 1970). In keeping with his famous thesis on the Protestant ethic, some sociologists have speculated that the success of religious reformation would have facilitated capitalist development in Russia. In fact, the very same populists and socialists who talked about the Russian Luther wished to prevent the development of capitalism in Russia. Partially due to their activities, the failure of the reformation led to an anti- capitalist revolution. Even though one could argue that Weber's thesis was proven in the negative, the variety of the sectarian experience in Russia, the political aims of intellectual pilgrimages to the sectarian communities, and the massive disillusionment that the intellectuals found there are all very different from the universe of The Protestant Ethic. A different kind of sociology is needed in this case and I argue that this sociology is Emil Durkheim's. He helps to appreciate the deep affinity between the rituals of popular Russian sects, such as the Khlysty, and the theories of nineteenth-century socialists.
Whirling together in an ecstatic ritual and inviting God to inhabit their collective body, the Khlysty worshipped the Durkheimian "society writ large," an organic, cohesive community that was higher, stronger, and more real than the individuals who compose it. This image matched the aspirations that many Russian socialists projected onto their society of the future. The alleged indifference of the Khlysty to property, their abstinence from marital sex, and rumors about the ritual orgies in their communities all added to the charms that many populists, some socialists, and even a few Bolsheviks could not resist. They imagined themselves leading the enthusiastic masses of Russian sectarians, colonizing them from within and directing them towards the "scientific" goals that they believed to be not much different from the ideals of the sectarians. The religious nature of sectarian worship differed from the technocratic imagination of the faithful Marxists, but the overlap was in communitarian ideas that the activists hoped to expand and exploit. The notion of a Russian historical affinity with communism also satisfied nationalist sentiment, which the fantasy of world revolution never managed to suppress.
With the collectivization of 1928, the sectarian diversions of Russian socialists were forgotten in Russia and remained unknown abroad. However, some critics still used them to understand the nature of the new Bolshevik society. Having visited Moscow in the 1920s, the Austrian writer and Freud's editor, Rene Fulop-Miller alleged that the Bolsheviks borrowed some of their ideas and rituals from the Khlysty (1927: 71). An author of books on Dostoevsky and Rasputin, Fulop-Miller illustrated his point by yet another scene of sectarian sex, "the most wild and unbridled orgies, in which complete promiscuity is the rule" (1927: 82).
Having little to do with the historical reality of Bolshevik rule, this narrative matched the literary convention of anti-utopian writing. When Aldous Huxley wrote his Brave New World (1932) with its memorable Solidarity Service, he took inspiration from Fulop-Miller's book, The Mind and Face of Bolshevism, which he reviewed while he was working on the novel (Huxley 1958: 191; Etkind 2004). As it happened, Huxley based his frightening scene of the compulsory group sex of the future on the mid-nineteenth-century fantasy of the mythical orgy of the Khlysty.