(Part 1: Russia as the eastern half of Christianity)
Part 2: The Western philosophical origins of the Russian revolution
I established in the first part of this series that Czarist Russia was, in essence, a proxy for all of eastern, or Orthodox Christianity.
When the communist revolution of 1917 destroyed this system, it not only took down with it - in one fell swoop - a millennial faith-based society, but created a gaping hole in the global family of civilizations that could only be filled by a radically new creed, whose sheer novelty would be its central claim to legitimacy.
After 100 million deaths worldwide in the 20th century at the hands of atheistic communism, including more Christian martyrs than in the previous 19 centuries combined, as well as the direct triggering of a violent reactionary backlash which killed 50 million in World War II, wiped out European Jewry, and divided the world into two camps that for decades threatened each other with thermonuclear annihilation, the Russian revolution can clearly be viewed as having an utterly apocalyptic dimension.
How in the world did so many souls get dragged down into the abyss decade after decade, most notably in Stalinist Soviet Russia and Maoist China, but also in gruesome mini-replays such as Cambodia (1970s) and, one might argue, even into the present century (North Korea)? The obvious answer is the unique combination of radical secularism with absolute despotism that was first realized by the communists in Russia and thereupon became a global force largely via its spread to China.
This part of the series will outline the radical secularist side of the communist revolutionary formula, by tracing the progressive decoupling of religious faith from political thought and practice in Europe since about 1500. Russia in 1917 represented the last in a chain of upheavals in European Christian societies brought about by this decoupling, which invariably triggered conflicts of varying degrees of violence as the forces of tradition resisted those of change; because Russia was last, hers was a clash between the most durable autocratic system in Europe against the most intellectually sophisticated, well-organized, and ruthlessly determined radical movement the continent had ever witnessed. The results were cataclysmic, especially when considering the subsequent chain of events over the 20th century, and yet, it is important to understand how and why this whole episode was the direct consequence of the history that preceded it.
At the close of the middle ages (circa 1500), European Christendom was at a crossroads. Its Eastern Orthodox branch had been wiped out with the destruction of the Byzantine empire and fall of Constantinople to the the Muslim Turks, and was only in the nascent stages of being resurrected in an ultimately grander incarnation in the form of Czarist Russia. At the same time, its Western Catholic branch was undergoing a devolution of temporal authority from the Roman papacy to increasingly powerful Renaissance monarchs and princes that had consolidated their territories at the expense of the feudal nobility, even as the imperative to find an all-water route to the Orient and the Indies (to outflank the mighty empires of Islam) launched the age of exploration and Western European mastery of the oceans.
Increasingly unfettered from the Pope and the Church hierarchy, Western Europe launched the modern era with the Reformation and scientific revolution (1500s), and commenced a four-century ascent to global domination of every other civilization from 1500 to 1900. Major watersheds in this rise were: the peace of Westphalia (1648), which essentially enshrined each nation-state's sovereign right to choose its own form of government, thus elevating the nation-state above the Church in political precedence; the settlement of the Americas, especially North America (1600s), as an effective laboratory for untested ideas and methods of social organization and governance; and critically, the industrial revolution (circa 1750), which ushered in a completely new epoch of human activity and altered the very fabric of social relations. These all culminated in the historic fruits of the Enlightenment (17th and 18th centuries) which have become the very foundation of the contemporary world: the American (1776) and French revolutions (1789).
The American and French revolutionary period (circa 1776-1815) saw a further segregation of Western European thought into distinctly "Atlanticist" and "continental" wings. The former, founded upon the English and Scottish Enlightenments, emphasized private property rights, rule of law, and a separation of religion from state that was thought to be key to the success of both; these ideals were the basis of the American revolution and undergirded the rise of so-called "laissez-faire", free market capitalism in Britain and the United States. The latter, with its origins in the French Enlightenment, also promoted individual rights, but more as a means to the ultimate end of a just and equitable organization of the collective state and society; thus its liberal elements acquired such concerns as the egalitarian redistribution of wealth, an overhaul of the residual quasi-feudal stratification of society, and most significantly, a removal of traditional organized religion from not just governance, but general civic and public influence; these were the principles underlying the French revolution and undergirded the rise of the various strains of modern socialism.
This Atlanticist-continental divergence was a direct function of the respective positions of religion in the Anglo-American versus the continental European worlds: in the former, religion had steadily been eased out of social and political power structures and increasingly privatized since the 1600s with comparatively little violence; in much of the latter, religion and its associated social structures had remained largely intact in their archaic and rigid forms, even as society itself changed dramatically in the 1700s. The radicalization of the French revolution, in which the nascent republic erupted with horrific violence against the deposed monarchy, aristocracy, and clergy, was the consequence of this unresolved tension and fear of reactionary retrenchment.
The Napoleonic era (1799-1815) represented an accord between the revolution and the Church, whereby the former essentially co-opted the latter into a subservient but relatively secure position, thus mediating between those who wanted to extinguish religion and those who wanted to roll back the revolution. This equilibrium, which Bonaparte's conquests spread throughout Europe, truly matured in France herself only through two more iterations of revolution in 1830 and 1848, during the second empire of Napoleon III (1852-1870), and became a founding pillar of a new kind of increasingly secular national statehood that would peak in Europe in the late 19th century.
Meanwhile, heavily influenced by French republicanism, a new breed of predominantly German thinkers led by Georg Hegel laid the foundations of modern political philosophy in the first half of the 1800s, particularly with regard to the evolution of state and society in the new industrial age. The Hegelians, as they were called, branched off into a "right" and "left" faction, which respectively became the conservative nationalist and progressive socialist wings of political ideology that have retained their influence in the West to the present day. Notably, both right and left Hegelianism reinforced the tendency of the continental school of European thought to emphasize the whole over the individual. This planted the seeds of both extremes of totalitarianism which arose in Europe in the following century: fascism and communism.
Marx himself, a hard left Hegelian, published the Communist Manifesto as a young radical in the revolution of 1848, inspired by a sweeping vision of international workers' revolt against the capitalist (i.e. bourgeois) ruling class to establish a classless society (communism) in which material sufficiency for all would replace God as man's highest happiness. The revolution of 1848 had begun in France but attained its longest-lasting effects in his native Germany: within a generation she was unified as a single centralized state for the first time by an alliance of Prussia's military might with the economic nationalism of other German polities which had subscribed to right Hegelianism, a union that was crowned by Bismarck's resounding defeat of Napoleon III's second French empire in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.
Along with the unification of Italy for the first time since the Roman empire over the previous decade-plus, along with the first truly significant communist uprising, the Paris commune (1871), this fundamentally altered the political landscape of continental Europe, ending an over two-century French domination and setting up an unprecedented period of nationalist rivalry between the so-called Great Powers (Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Russia), which collectively industrialized rapidly in four-plus decades of no major conflict between them (1871-1914) and, along with the upstart United States, propelled European Christian civilization to new heights of global domination in the golden era of imperialism (1880-1914).
And so, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, all the key ideas and principles, and even most of the actual modes of action and organization, that would vie for supremacy - capitalism versus socialism, nationalism versus internationalism, democracy versus dictatorship - took their clear shape across Europe.
Yet it was now Russia's turn, at long last, to be fundamentally transformed by the momentous social, economic, and political changes which had begun far to her west and had steadily worked their way eastward across the European continent over the course of the 1800s. By 1900 she was the only remaining true absolute monarchy among the Great Powers, whose rule remained inseparably united with the spiritual authority of her ancient Church even in the face of considerable socioeconomic changes. While the Kaiser's German empire ceded much domestic policy to the parliamentary social democrats, and Hapsburg Austria exercised an increasingly decentralized control over the polyglot collection of territories that formed her own empire, Russia moved in essentially the opposite direction under Alexander III (1881-1894) and Nicholas II (1894-1917), rolling back even the limited local democracy instituted by Alexander II after the emancipation of the serfs (1861); similarly, the regime redoubled its efforts to solidify Russian control over subservient nationalities on its periphery.
As it turned out, these were futile attempts by the decaying Czarist system to prolong its archaic and untenable autocracy, with ultimately dire consequences for the empire. The state's hardening of opposition to reform inevitably hardened the reformers themselves, creating a vicious cycle that would eventually spiral into violent confrontation. At the turn of the 20th century, the critical mass of socio-political elements which would topple the entire edifice of the Czarist state had begun to coalesce: its vigor was the relatively small but key minority of industrial workers, many of them peasants who had taken factory jobs since the late 1800s; its leadership was a tiny but influential elite of the urban intelligentsia.
There was considerable diversity of opinion within the reform movement, with truly radical Marxist socialists (i.e. those who advocated armed insurrection) such as Lenin's Bolsheviks only a small minority. More moderate socialist reformers aspired to the trade-unionist, social-democratic track that had made impressive gains in Germany without officially altering that state's monarchic character; still more moderate liberals whose focus was constitutional reform were stronger than all the socialists combined. This was the political landscape of Russia on the eve of the first round of its revolution, the 1905 revolution, which traces directly to the later, much larger events of 1917.
In the next part of this series, we will see how and why the Czarist state's continued reactionary retrenchment necessitated more repression of its own citizens, thereby not only hastening its own fall, but in the process ensuring that the most uncompromisingly radical and violent faction of the revolutionary movement - the communist Bolsheviks - would eventually rise to subjugate all others.
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