But normally they saw each other as opposites. Christians tended to think of socialists as atheists or Antichrists, and socialists tended to agree (while considering Christians backward or hypocritical). In standard socialist autobiographies, the loss of “religious” faith was a prerequisite for spiritual awakening. One crucial difference was that most preachers of a Christian apocalypse were workers and peasants, while most theorists of workers’ and peasants’ revolutions were students and “eternal students.” The students were usually the children of clerks, clergymen, teachers, doctors, Jews, and other “proletarians of mental labor”: professional intellectuals as metaphorical Jews (chosen, learned, and alienated) and Jews as honorary intellectuals irrespective of what they did for a living. They all grew up as perennial prodigies, as heirs to a lost sacred mission, as strangers among people they called “the people.” They were, for the most part, hereditary members of the intelligentsia.
The Vilno Bolshevik Aron Solts believed that the source of his “opposition to the powers that be” was his Jewishness, which he associated with legal inequality, “relative intellectualism,” and sympathy for revolutionary terrorists. Nikolai Bukharin claimed that his father, a teacher and sometime tax inspector, did not believe in God, “enjoyed saying something radical every once in a while,” and often asked Nikolai, who had learned to read at the age of four, to recite poetry for family friends. Bukharin’s friend and Swamp “agitator” Valerian Obolensky (whose job in the winter of 1907–8 was to write leaflets for the Gustav List workers) grew up in the family of a veterinarian of “radical convictions and high culture” who taught his children French and German and encouraged them to read Belinsky and Dobroliubov (“not to mention the great fiction writers”). Another early convert to Bolshevism, Aleksei Stankevich, attributed his awakening to the feeling “that Mother and Father were much better educated, more intelligent, and more honest than their milieu.” (His father, a teacher in Kostroma and Kologriv, was “driven to drink” by the idiocy of provincial life.) “All this led our youthful minds deeper and deeper into doubt and confusion.”2
Aron Solts
Nikolai Bukharin
Valerian Obolensky (Osinsky)
(Courtesy of Elena Simakova)
To be a true intelligent meant being religious about being secular; asking “the accursed questions” over lunch and dinner; falling deeper and deeper into doubt and confusion as a matter of principle; and feeling both chosen and damned for being better educated, more intelligent, and more honest than one’s milieu. Whether a member of the intelligentsia could find the answers to the accursed questions and still be a member of the intelligentsia was open to question. Lenin thought not (and did not consider himself one). The authors of the antiradical manifesto Signposts believed there were no nondoctrinaire intelligentsia members left (and considered themselves an exception). Most people used the term to refer to both the confused and the confident—as long as they remained self-conscious about being better educated, more intelligent, and more honest than their milieu. The proportion of those who had overcome doubt kept growing. Most believed in the coming revolution; more and more knew that it would be followed by socialism.
There were two kinds of socialists: Marxists and nationalists. Or rather, there was a wide range of possible definitions of collective martyrdom—from the Mensheviks’ reliance on the timely self-realization of the sociologically correct proletarians; to the Bolsheviks’ expectation that Russian workers and peasants might start a revolution out of turn, by way of exception; to the Populists’ faith in the Russian peasant as a universal redeemer by virtue of his uniquely Russian communalism; to the Bundists’ insistence on the need for a Jewish specificity within Marxist cosmopolitanism; to the uncompromising tribal millenarianism of the Armenian Dashnaks, socialist Zionists, and Polish nationalists. Even at the extremes, the distinction was not always clear: the Marxists talked of “hereditary proletarians” as a caste with its own culture and genealogy; the most radical Russian nationalists were known as Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), not Russian nationalists; and the most radical non-Russian nationalists represented their nations as the world’s original proletarians. Everyone spoke the biblical language of tribal chosenness and suffering for humanity.
Feliks Kon
One of the oldest Bolsheviks, Feliks Kon, grew up in Warsaw, in a Jewish family of Polish nationalists. “Patriotism was a substitute for religion,” he wrote in his memoirs. “Of the latter, only the formal, ritualistic side remained.” Once, on Passover, as his grandfather “was presiding over the table and leading the prayers,” an uncle returned from foreign exile, where he had been hiding from “the Muscovites”: “The prayers were forgotten. Everyone, from the little ones to my old grandfather, sat listening to his stories with rapt attention. ‘Rather than talking about the flight of the Jews from Egypt,’ said Uncle to Grandfather, ‘let’s talk about the martyrdom of Poland.’ Grandfather readily agreed.”
At seventeen, Kon learned of the heroism of the Muscovite revolutionary terrorists and stopped talking about the martyrdom of Poland. The exodus came to represent universal liberation.
It was a change of faith, of cult…. A dead, ossified faith had been replaced by a living, vibrant one…. I was ready to do battle with the whole world of lies, hypocrisy, humiliation, and falsehood, the world of grief and servitude…. It was clear as day to me that I must go to other seventeen- and eighteen-year-old ardent young men and share with them my faith and my truth, for us to unite, come together, “do more studying”—I vaguely understood the necessity of that—and then, all of us together, leave behind “the gloaters, idle blabberers, and blood-stained executioners” for “the camp of the dying,” to reveal to them the reasons for their grinding slavery, open their eyes to the force living within them, awaken that force, and then … then … then … the great deed would be done: the world of slavery and untruth would sink into the abyss, and the bright sun of liberty would shine over the earth.3
Karl Radek
Serial conversions involving a variety of national and cosmopolitan options were common on the Russian Empire’s western periphery. Another ardent young man, Karl Sobelson, moved from the cult of Heinrich Heine and Nathan the Wise (which he described as typical of Galician Jews), to Polish patriotism “complete with its Catholic shell” (at which point he became “Radek”), to socialism “understood as a quest for Polish independence,” to radical Marxism in a variety of national guises. Closer to the imperial center, spiritual awakening tended to be represented as a generic revelation of the misery of the surrounding world, with the finer distinctions regarding the nature of the last days becoming apparent later, as a result of sober reflection.4