Valentin was deliberately, defiantly Dostoevskian. Few Russian socialists would have understood every one of his allusions or endorsed his combination of prophetic fire with self-doubting introspection, but most of them shared his vision. The revolutionaries were going to prevail because of the sheer power of their hatred. It cleansed the soul and swelled like the flood of the real day. “It rushes along to the gates of a new kingdom, drenching its path in human blood and leaving behind death, moaning, and cursing. It rushes past the cowardly and the petty, sweeping along the brave, the daring, and the strong.” It was the main weapon of the weak and the guarantee of future salvation. “Man must return to his lost paradise, and he will return there—no longer as nature’s slave or contemplator, but as its free master, ruler, and creator.”79
Most of those who shared Valentin’s vision were organized into groups located along the free will–predestination continuum. None was fully “objectivist” (the Mensheviks prepared for the inevitable by organizing trade unions), and none was free from “historical inevitability.” They knew themselves to be closely related (as former members of the same reading circles and fellow “politicals” in prison and exile) and routinely accused each other of deliberate misrepresentation. They referred to themselves as “parties” but rejected meaningful comparisons to other political organizations. Lenin called the Bolsheviks “a party of a new type.” Valentin abandoned the term altogether. “What sort of party are we?” he asked. “Parties are what they have in the West and in America. None of them, including the socialists, go beyond the legal struggle for reforms. We, on the other hand, are an army, men of fire and sword, warriors and destroyers.”80
Parties are usually described as associations that seek power within a given society (or, in Max Weber’s definition, “secure power within an organization for its leaders in order to attain ideal or material advantages for its active members”). None of the three main socialist groups in early-twentieth-century Russia were interested in securing power within the Russian state or society, however construed. Their purpose was to await and, to a greater or lesser degree, bring about, that society’s replacement by a “kingdom of freedom” understood as life without politics. They were faith-based groups radically opposed to a corrupt world, dedicated to “the abandoned and the persecuted,” and composed of voluntary members who had undergone a personal conversion and shared a strong sense of chosenness, exclusiveness, ethical austerity, and social egalitarianism. They were, by most definitions, sects.81
“Sects” are usually defined in opposition to “churches” (described as bureaucratic, specialized, world-accepting, all-inclusive, elite-friendly organizations into which most members are born) or to societies that they attempt to flee or undermine. Lists of attributes (voluntary, exclusive, egalitarian) are sometimes replaced by a continuum representing degrees of tension with the surrounding world, from a few hunted fugitives at one end to well-integrated institutions at the other. All scholarly definitions characterize sects as “religious” groups, but since the determination of whether a group is religious concerns the nature of the faith, not the degree of tension with the world, it is irrelevant to the sect/party distinction. The main three socialist groups in early-twentieth-century Russia can safely be called sects because no usable definition relies on doctrinal criteria (unless one counts group members who classify heretics in relation to a particular orthodoxy) and because all three decisively rejected the world and possessed the main structural features associated with world-rejection (and conventionally assumed to be sectarian).82
Membership in such a group gave one a great sense of purpose, power, and belonging (especially for the Bolsheviks, who stood out among the socialists as the only sect rigidly organized around a charismatic leader). But the radical abandonment of most conventional attachments, the continual sacrifice of the present for the sake of the future, and the violent casting out of money changers came—as all heroic commitments do—at the cost of recurring doubt. What if the discarded attachments were the true ones? What if the future came too late for there ever to have been a present? What if the “philistines” were only human? What if all the years in prison and exile were in vain? “What is my strength, that I should wait, and what is my end, that I should endure?” Job’s plight is inherent in all forms of submission to a force presumed to be both all-powerful and benevolent. (“If it is a matter of strength, he is mighty! And if it is a matter of justice, who will summon him? Even if I were innocent, my mouth would condemn me; if I were blameless, it would pronounce me guilty.”) It is particularly acute, however, among those who emphasize self-study and self-improvement as much as selflessness. A self that has been painstakingly worked on is not easy to sacrifice—especially if the work relies on as eclectic a reading list as Bukharin’s or Voronsky’s.83
Bukharin’s autobiographical alter ego, Kolia, has his first “profound spiritual crisis” when his little brother dies. “Is there anything that is worth one of Andriusha’s little tears? What is the point of all the actions, virtues, exploits, and expiations, if the past cannot be brought back?” The answer comes from the same source as the question:
One day, Kolia was sitting quietly by himself reading Dostoevsky when, suddenly, he hit upon a passage that shook him to the depths of his being. It was the passage in The Adolescent that described how the people of the future … would live without the consolation of their thousand-year faith. The great idea of immortality would disappear, and would have to be replaced with something else, and all of the great excess of love for Him who had embodied immortality would be transferred to nature, the world, the people in it, to every little blade of grass. They would love life and the earth irrepressibly, insofar as they would gradually become aware of their own temporality and finitude, and it would be a special, different kind of love.84
Voronsky’s autobiographical narrator has his first spiritual crisis when his sister dies:
How could this happen, I kept thinking, how could this happen? I yearn for universal happiness, I worry about the welfare and prosperity of others, and here I was, not noticing, not knowing anything about the life and hopes of my own sister…. In this way, won’t I end up establishing universal fraternity by squashing and trampling over everything ruthlessly and coldly, not noticing not only clear enemies, but human life in generaclass="underline" children, brothers, sisters? Or is this a necessary stage, because you can’t win unless your teeth are clenched, your heart steeled, and your head, clear and cold? Could it be so?85
This monologue leads up to the book’s central episode. The narrator goes to see his uncle, Father Nikolai.
In the dusty courtyard, cluttered with a cart, traveling carriage, and droshky, the guard dog Milka and a dirty pink piglet lay head-to-head in front of the kennel. Both were sleeping. The piglet was dreamily wagging the taut end of its little tail.
“Trough happiness,” I said.
Father Nikolai, a stout, calm, deliberate priest and a good farmer, glanced at the piglet and Milka, smiled, adjusted the silver cross on his chest, and continued on his way.
The narrator catches up with him, and they walk up a hill behind the village.
The lukewarm, watery sun slid toward the amber edge of the sky. To the right of the hill was a lush green meadow. Herds of cows and sheep plodded slowly and distractedly toward the village, casting long shadows behind them. We could hear the foolish bleating of the sheep and the dry cracking of the shepherds’ whips. Two colts galloped by, bucking and shaking their flowing manes. The light-colored river lay tranquil, its gentle curves gleaming with copper flashes. Beyond the river, the fields stretched into the distance. Little hamlets dotted the hills. Behind them lay the silent, solemn pine forest. The cadenced tones of distant church bells floated lazily through the air.