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Hazani reflects on the universal “semi-religious quality” of the radicals’ desire to regulate the natural laws. Here, again, the Bolsheviks carried on the tradition demarcated by the French Revolution. Politics aside, its visionaries sought to control infinity by defining “September 22, 1792—the beginning of the first year—as the zero point of time.” Romme’s “decreter l’eternite” aspired “to arrest the temporal flux—i.e. to conquer death.”109 To do so, the person must disappear as a conscious being: “The more perfect individual of the future highly-cultural society will feel like one of the necessary elements” of nature, and himself “will be automatic, like nature.”110
Victorious Bolshevism, a “self-consciously secular movement” in power, replicates the larger phenomenon of “active apocalyptic millennialism.”111 Illustrative indeed is Trotsky’s belief in the impending victory over physical decay in the soon-to-be-built social paradise. He concluded his Literature and Revolution (1924) with “a rhapsodic vision of the new man” born in communist revolt: “Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights on an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.”112
The Communists were proposing no less than “a salvationist religion,”113 featuring a guarantee of eternal life on earth—the issue of more than cursory preoccupation also for many Nazis, particularly in the SS. Aside from their involvement with occult practices, fascination with black magic, uncanny forms of paganism, and pseudo-scientific experiments with reviving the deceased, the Nazi version of repudiated death presupposed a form of mystic fusion with the racially pure “body of Germany;” similarly, the Bolsheviks conceptualized self-negation within the “victorious proletarian class” as secular salvation.
The conquest of death is inseparable from the totalistic mindset, with its distinction between the faithful, the potentially immortal true believers, and the abominable, the embodiment of a designated evil.114 Thus, “Islam . . . is the only Divine way of life which brings out the noblest human characteristics, developing and using them for the construction of human society. . . . Those who deviate from this system and want some other . . . are truly enemies of mankind!”115 Against them any means are justified, as they were against enemies of the Bolsheviks, whose totalitarianism represented “the modern secular form of the coercive purity.” The existential essence of their project barred a compromise, rendering immaterial any negotiations. Its adherents, the “disappointed secular zealots surpassed even the most terrible forms of religious millennialism in the violence and destruction they brought to those they sought to ‘save’” by way of terror. In the same way, across the globe “Promethean messiahs would carve the millennial kingdom onto the body social.”116
Notes:
[73] Mayer, The Furies, 235.
[74] For example, Dzerzhinskii, a Pole, in his youth wanted to “exterminate all Muscovites” (Cited in Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 802).
[75] “Sergey Nechayev 1869 : The Revolutionary Catechism,” http://www.marxists.org/subject/anarchism/nechayev/catechism.htm
[76] For numerous examples see T. I. Vulikh, “Osnovnoe iadro kavkazskoi boevoi organizatsii,” 7, Nic. 207-11; Pozner, ed., Boevaia gruppa pri TsK RSDRP (b), 170n; Aleksandr Sokolov-Novoselov, Vooruzhennoe podpol’e (Ufa, 1958), 39n; Kh. I. Muratov and A. G. Lipkina, Timofei Stepanovich Krivov (Ufa, 1968), 111; Soldaty leninskoi gvardii (Gor’kii, 1974), 201, 204; Soldaty leninskoi gvardii (kniga vtoraia) (Gor’kii, 1977), 310, 313, 316-17; V. Iakubov, “Aleksandr Dmitrievich Kuznetsov,” Katorga i ssylka 3 (112) (Moscow, 1934): 134, 138; G. Shidlovskii, “O. G. Ellek (Pamiati starogo bol’shevika),” Katorga i ssylka 9 (106) (Moscow, 1933): 143-44.
[77] Leggett, The Cheka, 269.
[78] T. S. Krivov, V leninskom stroiu (Cheboksary, 1969), 110-12, 128; S. M. Pozner, “Rabota boevykh bol’shevistskikh organizatsii 1905-1907 gg.,” PR 7 (42): 85; Ivan Myzgin, So vzvedennym kurkom (Moscow, 1964), 21; G. Z. Ioffe, Krakh rossiiskoi monarkhicheskoi kontrrevoliutsii (Moscow, 1977), 149-151; Nikolai Ross, ed., Gibel’ tsarskoi sem’i. Materialy sledstviia ob ubiistve tsarskoi sem’i (avgust 1918-fevral’; 1920) (Frankfurt, 1987), 586; Richard Haliburton, Seven League Boots (Indianapolis, Indiana, 1935), 120, 140; “Kommentarii V. I. Nikolaevskogo k knige L Shapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union” (1958 manuscript), p. 4, Nic. 519-30B; letter from B. I. Nicolaevsky to T. I. Vulikh dated 25 May 1956, Nic. 207-16.
[79] For examples of former terrorists of various ideological trends using their past experience for the benefit of Soviet organs of repression, see: William J. Fishman, East End Jewish Radicals, 1875-1914 (London, 1975), 291; Henry J. Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia from Its Origins to 1905 (Stanford, 1972), 348; R. M. Aslamova-Gol’tsman, “Svetloi pamiati I. Ia. Bartkovskogo,” Katorga i ssylka 48 (Moscow, 1928), 158-59; Zavarzin, Rabota tainoi politsii, 157; “Vospominaniia byvsh. okhrannika,” Bessarabskoe slovo (1930), Nic. 203-25.
[80] Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (Harper & Row, Publishers: New York, 1951), 83.
[81] Vladimir Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War (Princeton University Press, 1994), 408-409.
[82] Cited in Mel’gunov, “Krasnyi terror” v Rossii, 32.
[83] Cited in Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 793.
[84] Leites, A Study of Bolshevism, 384.
[85] Osorgin, Vremena, 575, 578.
[86] Mel’gunov, “Krasnyi terror” v Rossii, 188.
[87] Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 822.
[88] Cited in Budnitskii, “’Krov’ po sovesti’,” 209n.
[89] Cited in Leggett, The Cheka, 114.
[90] Iu. M. Steklov cited in Budnitskii, “’Krov’ po sovesti’,” 207.
[91] Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 829, 832, 836, 790.
[92] Unnamed author of memoirs “The Death Boat,” cited in Mel’gunov, “Krasnyi terror” v Rossii, 190.
[93] Richard Landes, “Totalitarian Millennialism: The Bolshevik Apocalypse,” Heaven on Earth: the Varieties of the Millennial Experience (upcoming in Oxford University Press).
[94] Introduction in Lion Feuchtwanger, Moscow 1937. My Visit Described for My Friends (Viking Press: New York, 1937).
[95] Chomsky cited in Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society (Transaction Publishers: New Brunswick, NJ, 1998), XXXVIII.
[96] Sartre cited in Landes, “Totalitarian Millennialism: The Bolshevik Apocalypse,” Heaven on Earth; Dmitrii Radyshevskii, “Liberaly za dzhikhad,” http://www.jerusalem-korczak-home.com/np/rad/09/np167.html
[97] Michail Ryklin, “On the Trail of Red Pilgrims,” interview to Caspar Melville, New Humanist, http://newhumanist.org.uk/1995
[98] Michael J. Thompson’s review of Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism by Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2005), Democratiya 1 (Summer, 2005), http://www.dissentmagazine.org/democratiya/article_pdfs/d1Thompson.pdf
[99] Radyshevskii, “Liberaly za dzhikhad,” http://www.jerusalem-korczak-home.com/np/rad/09/np167.html Individually, each also fears “exile from the community of true believers that had given his life so much purpose,” the fate of writer André Gide, a renegade Soviet sympathizer, who dared make public his disillusionment with Communism in Retour de L’U.R.S.S. in 1936 (Landes, “Totalitarian Millennialism: The Bolshevik Apocalypse,” Heaven on Earth).
[100] Title of the French philosopher Raymond Aron’s 1955 masterpiece, L’Opium des intellectuels—an inversion of Marx’s denigration of religion as “the opium of the people.” (Cited in Roger Kimball, Raymond Aron and the Power of Ideas,” New Criterion (May 2001), http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3345/is_9_19/ai_n28839622/
[101] Detailed discussion in Mikhail Ryklin, Kommunizm kak religiia. Intellektualy i Oktiabr’skaia revoliutsiia (“Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie:” Moscow, 2009).
[102] Leites, A Study of Bolshevism, 351.
[103] Reich, ed.,Origins of Terrorism, 31, 33.
[104] Iurii Karabchievskii, Voskresenie Maiakovskogo (“Strana i mir:” Munich, 1985), 183-184.
[105] Cited in Eliot Borenstein, Man without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917-1929 (Duke University Press: 2001), 29-30.
[106] Cited in Kirk Rodby, The Dark Heart of Utopia: Sexuality, Ideology, and the Totalitarian Movement (iUniverse, Inc.: New York-Bloomington, IN, 2009), 203.
[107] Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalinism (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 188.
[108] Cited in Leites, A Study of Bolshevism, 137.
[109] “Ce Romme est un métaphysicien obscur,” remarked perceptively a contemporary opponent of this effort to rule over time by “un alchemiste politique” (Edmond Biré, Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris pendant la Terreur, vol. 4 (Perrin: Paris, 1794), 51, http://books.google.co.il/books?id=jsLSAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA51&dq=decreter+l%E2%80%99eternite%E2%80%9D%2BRomme&hl=en#v=onepage&q=&f=false
[110] E. Poletaev, N. Punin, Protiv tsivilizatsii (Petrograd, 1923), 22.
[111] Landes, “Totalitarian Millennialism: The Bolshevik Apocalypse,” Heaven on Earth.
[112] Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (Russell & Russell: New York, 1957), 256
[113] Donald D. MacRae, “Bolshevik Ideology: The Intellectual and Emotional Factors in Communist Affiliation,” Cambridge Journal 5 (1951), 167.
[114] Moshe Hazani, “Apocaliptism, Symbolic Breakdown and Paranoia: An Application of Lifton’s Model to the Death-Rebirth Fantasy,” in Apocalyptic Time, ed. Albert I. Baumgarten (Brill, 2000),29.
[115] Syed Qutb, “The Characteristics of the Islamic Society and the Correct method for its Formation,” Milestones, http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/qutb.htm
[116] Landes, “Totalitarian Millennialism: The Bolshevik Apocalypse,” Heaven on Earth.
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