Live Not by Lies

society, outside of the imperial court’s bubble, believed that the system could carry on. But Tsar Nicholas II and his closest advisers insisted that sticking to the proven ways of traditional autocracy would get them through the crisis. The leadership of the church also ignored internal calls for reform from priests who could see the church’s influence wasting away. Russia’s intellectual and creative classes fell under the sway of Prometheanism, the belief that man has unlimited godlike powers to make the world to suit his desires.
In retrospect, this seems almost unbelievable. How could the Russians have been so blind? It was, in a sense, a problem of the imagination. Reflecting on the speed with which utopian dreams turned into a grisly nightmare, Solzhenitsyn observed:
If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the “secret brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.2
It wasn’t just the tsarists who didn’t see it coming but also the country’s leading liberal minds. It was simply beyond their ability to conceive.
Why Communism Appealed to Russians
Marxism is a highly theoretical, abstract set of doctrines that cannot be easily grasped by nonspecialists. It took Russian intellectuals by storm because its evangelists presented Marxism as a secular religion for the post-religious age.
Though Karl Marx, communism’s German-born prophet, despised religion, he gave birth to a vision of political economy that uncannily paralleled the promises of apocalyptic Christianity. The political philosophy that would come to bear his name construed history as the story of the struggle between classes. Marx believed that class inequality—caused by the rich exploiting the toiling masses—was responsible for the world’s misfortune. Religion was, in Marx’s words, “the opium of the people,” functioning as a kind of drug that dulled their suffering and prevented them from seeing their true condition. Marx preached a revolution that would wrest control from the rich (capitalists) in the name of the proletariat (workers) and establish an all-powerful government that would redistribute resources justly before withering away. Crucially, Marx and his followers forecast the revolution as a bloody showdown between Good (the workers) and Evil (the capitalists) and prophesied the victory of justice and the establishment of an earthly paradise.
Marx believed that his teachings were based in science, which, in the nineteenth century, had displaced religion as the most important source of authority among intellectuals. The nineteenth century was the golden age of European liberalism, in which nations that had been ruled by kings and aristocracies struggled to reform themselves along constitutional, republican lines. Russia firmly rejected reform. Russian liberalism foundered in the face of tsarist autocracy and the indifference of the peasant masses.
As the century wore on, educated Russians were aware of how far their agrarian country was falling behind modernizing, industrializing Europe, both politically and economically. Younger Russians also keenly felt the shame of their liberal fathers’ failures to change the system. In the midst of Russia’s decline, Marxism appealed to restless young intellectuals who were sick of the old order, had lost faith in reforming it, and were desperate to tear the system down and replace it with something entirely different.
Marxism stood for the future. Marxism stood for progress. The gospel of Marxism lit a fire in the minds of prerevolutionary Russian radicals. Their priests and the prophets were their intellectuals, who were “religious about being secular.” Writes historian Yuri Slezkine: “A conversion to socialism was a conversion to the intelligentsia, to a fusion of millenarian faith and lifelong learning.”3
Far-left radicalism was initially spread among the intellectuals primarily through reading groups. Once you adopted the Marxist faith, everything else in life became illuminated. The intellectuals went into the world to preach this pseudoreligion to the workers. These missionaries, says Slezkine, made what religious believers would call prophetic revelations, and by appealing to hatred in their listeners’ hearts, called them to conversion.
Once they had captured Russia’s universities, the radicals took their gospel to the factories. Few of the workers were capable of understanding Marxist doctrine, but the missionaries taught it to those capable of translating the essentials into a form that ordinary people could grasp. These proselytizers spoke to the suffering of the people, to their sense of justice, to their often-justified resentment of their exploiters. The great famine of 1891–92 had laid bare the incompetence of the Russian ruling classes. The evangelists of Marxism issued forth prophetic revelations about the land of milk and honey awaiting the masses after the revolution swept away the ruling mandarins.
Most of the revolutionaries came from the privileged classes. Their parents ought to have known that this new political faith their children preached would, if realized, mean the collapse of the social order. Still, they would not reject their children. Writes Slezkine, “The ‘students’ were almost always abetted at home while still in school and almost never damned when they became revolutionaries.”4 Perhaps the mothers and fathers didn’t want to alienate their sons and daughters. Perhaps they too, after the experience of the terrible famine and the incompetent state’s inability to care for the starving, had lost faith in the system.
In 1905, waves of civil unrest swept across Russia. The empire’s defeat in a war with Japan the year before further destabilized the throne and fostered