"redeemer empire": Russian millenarianism

American Historical Review

Volumn 104, Issue 5, 1999, Pages 1582-1602

  Rowley, David G ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 37849189494     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2649352     Document Type: Article

References (127)

1. Nicolas Berdyaev, The Russian Idea (New York, 1948), 193.
2. Lunacharsky was a philosopher, dramatist, and Bolshevik whom V. I. Lenin expelled from the Bolshevik Party in 1909 in consequence of both his attitude toward religion and socialism and his revolutionary extremism. Lunacharsky was received back into the party in 1917 and served as the Soviet Commissar of Education from 1918 to 1929. He died in 1933. A. V. Lunacharsky, Religiia i sotsializm, 2d edn., 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1908).
3. Valerii Khatiushin is a poet and publicist who regularly contributes to Russia's right-wing patriotic journals, particularly Molodaia Gvarcliia. Khatiushin, "Esli poimem-spasemsia," Molodaia Gvardiia 3 (1995): 27-40.
4. This has been a common generalization ever since the revolution. It is dealt with most thoroughly in Berdyaev, Russian Idea; Nicolas Berdyaev, The Russian Revolution (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1961);
5. and The Origin of Russian Communism (Ann Arbor, 1960).
6. See also James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York, 1970);
7. and Michael Barkun, Disaster and the Millennium (New Haven, Conn., 1974).
8. Khatiushin, "Esli poimem-spasemsia," 30, 33.
9. Khatiushin, "Esli poimem-spasemsia," 28, 29.
10. Khatiushin, "Esli poimem-spasemsia," 29.
11. Khatiushin, "Esli poimem-spasemsia," 32. The passage to which he refers is Rev. 8: 10-11.
12. Khatiushin, "Esli poimem-spasemsia," 33.
13. Lunacharsky, Religiia i sotsializm, 1: 8.
14. Lunacharsky, Religiia i sotsializm, 1: 184, 2: 61-62.
15. Lunacharsky, Religiia i sotsializm, 1: 186-87, 101-02.
16. A. V. Lunacharsky, "Budushchee religii," Obrazovanie 1 (1907): 22.
17. See Rev. 19 and 20.
18. For a discussion, see Michael J. St. Clair, "Early Christianity as a Millenarian Movement," in his Millenarian Movements in Historical Context (New York, 1992).
19. Indeed, in 431, a church council denounced the expectation of Jesus' imminent return as "an error and a fantasy." Yonina Talmon, "Millenarism," in The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, David L. Sills, ed. (New York, 1968), 350.
20. Norman Cohn proposes "to regard as 'millenarian' any religious movement inspired by the phantasy of a salvation which is to be (a) collective ... ; (b) terrestrial... ; (c) imminent... ; (d) total, in the sense that it is to utterly transform life on earth ... [and] (e) accomplished by agencies which are consciously regarded as supernatural." Cohn, "Medieval Millenarism: Its Bearing on the Comparative Study of Millenarian Movements," in Sylvia L. Thrupp, ed., Millennial Dreams in Action: Essays in Comparative Study (The Hague, 1962), 31.
21. "So it came about that multitudes of people acted out with fierce energy a shared fantasy which, though delusional, yet brought them such intense emotional relief that they could live only through it, and were perfectly willing both to kill and to die for it." Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, rev. and expanded edn. (New York, 1970), 87-88.
22. «A 'crjsis cuit' means any group reaction to crisis, chronic or acute, that is cultic. 'Crisis' is a deeply felt frustration or basic problem with which routine methods, secular or sacred, cannot cope ... The 'cultic' is the indisposition to accept either disruptive feedback or the ego-critique of experience, but instead, supported by the wish-needs of fellow communicants, to indulge the appetite to believe. The term crisis cult basically includes any new 'sacred' attitude toward a set of beliefs; it excludes the pragmatic, revisionist, secular response that is tentative and relativistic." Weston La Barre, "Materials for a History of Sketches of Crisis Cults: A Bibliographic Essay," Current Anthropology 12 (February 1971): 11.
23. The notion of millenarianism as social aberrance (often with violent rhetoric if not violent action) is the understanding of the term that informs a recent collection, Thomas Robbins and Susan J. Palmer, eds., Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem: Contemporary Apocalyptic Movements (New York, 1997), even though one contributor, Catherine Wessinger, cautions against this view in "Millennialism with and without the Mayhem."
24. See also Jeffrey Kaplan, Radical Religion in America: Millenarian Movements from the Far Right to the Children of Noah (Syracuse, N.Y., 1997).
25. E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (1959; New York, 1965);
26. Christopher Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1971);
27. Peter Worsley, The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of Cargo Cults in Melanesia, 2d augmented edn. (New York, 1968);
28. Michael Adas, Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Movements against the European Colonial Order (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979);
29. Vittorio Lanternari, The Religions of the Oppressed: A Study of Modern Messianic Cults (New York, 1965).
30. Alida C. Metcalf, "Millenarian Slaves? The Santidade de Jaguaripe and Slave Resistance in the Americas," AHR 104 (December 1999): 1531-59, 1532.
31. David Ownby, "Chinese Millenarian Traditions: The Formative Age," AHR 104 (December 1999): 1513-30.
32. Most relevant to this topic are J. L. Talmon, The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy (Boston, 1952);
33. and Talmon, Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase (New York, 1960).
34. See Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago, 1952);
35. Rush Welter, "The Idea of Progress in America," Journal of the History of Ideas 16 (June 1955).
36. Most recently, Arthur P. Mendel has critically traced the millennial idea through the entire Western tradition. Mendel, Vision and Violence (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1992).
37. Ernest Lee Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia: A Study in the Background of the Idea of Progress (Berkeley, Calif., 1949), ix-x;
38. see, for example, Clarke Garrett, Respectable Folly: Millenarians and the French Revolution in France and England (Baltimore, Md., 1975). A number of observers of U.S. millenarianism (cited below) take a similar positive view.
39. Perhaps the closest to this position has been Stephen E. Hanson, who has argued that Marx, Lenin, and Stalin believed that socialist revolution could "master time itself." Hanson, Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997).
40. 2S Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Upper New York Slate, 1800-1850 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1950). Most millenarians cited in St. Clair, Millenarian Movements in Historical Context, and in Robbins and Palmer, Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem, are counter-cultural movements associated with some sort of social stress.
41. Brown pointed out, "It seems clear that millenarian faith in one form or another was entirely respectable socially and intellectually well into the nineteenth century. America's leading clergymen and college presidents subscribed to such doctrines." Ira V. Drown, "Watchers for the Second Coming: The Millenarian Tradition in America," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 39 (December 1952): 451.
42. See also Avihu Zakai, "Theocracy in Massachusetts: The Puritan Universe of Sacred Imagination," Studies in the Literary Imagination 27 (Spring 1994): 23-31;
43. Nathan O. Hatch, "The Origins of Civil Millennialism in America: New England Clergymen, War with France, and the Revolution," William and Mary Quarterly, ser. 3, 31 (July 1974): 407-30;
44. Ruth H. Bloch, "The Social and Political Base of Millennial Literature in Late Eighteenth-Century America," American Quarterly 40 (September 1988): 378-96;
45. John Mee, "Apocalypse and Ambivalence: The Politics of Millenarianism in the 1790s," South Atlantic Quarterly 95 (Summer 1996): 673.
46. It can, of course, be argued that the Puritans originated as a movement that was strongly counter-cultural in its rejection of contemporary English society. Nevertheless, by the time of the American Revolution, Puritans were fully "mainstream" in U.S. society. For a discussion of how a crisis cult became a hegemonic cultural force, see Jan Nederveen-Pieterse, "The History of a Metaphor: Christian Zionism and the Politics of Apocalypse," Archives dt- Sciences Sociales des Religions 75 (July-September 1991): 75-104.
47. Susan Juster, "Demagogues or Mystagogues? Gender and the Language of Prophecy in the Age of Democratic Revolutions," AHR 104 (December 1999): 1560-81, 1568.
48. Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's Millennial Role (Chicago, 1968);
49. Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison, Wis., 1978);
50. Gushing Strout, New Heavens, New Earth (New York, 1974).
51. Brown, "Watchers for the Second Coming," 457-58;
52. Tuveson, Redeemer Nation, 212, vii-viii.
53. Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right (New York, 1995);
54. Bercovitch, American Jeremiad.
55. Moreover, the millenarianism of ordinary Americans who have joined the Shakers, Millerites, Seventh-Day Adventists, or other mass millenarian organizations fit the "crisis cult" mentality very well. They should not be placed in the category of an "American" national tradition any more than Anabaptists should be a "German" tradition, or Ghost Dancers a "Sioux" tradition. Instead, it would be appropriate to apply Michael Darkun's criteria (see text below) and attribute their millenarianism simply to the availability of the millennial idea at a point when they were overcome by crisis.
56. Anthony D. Smith defines a nation as "a named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass, public culture, a common ecanomy and common legal rights and duties for all members." Smith, National Identity (Reno, Nev., 1991), 14.
57. What I set up here are Weberian "ideal-types" and not empirical descriptions of nations and states. In the real world, there are no "pure" nations or "pure" empires. England, for example, was a nation-state that built an empire. Even before they dissolved the Ottoman Empire, the ruling Turks exhibited a considerable sense of nationhood. Nor is the rhetoric of legitimation always consistent. For example, U.S. foreign policymakers advance two contradictory explanations for military intervention beyond their borders: compelling national-security interests (a nationalist justification) and selfsacrifice in support of international law and humanitarianism (an imperialist justification). Nevertheless, my point is that the idea and the logic of empire are quite the opposite of the idea and logic of nation.
58. U.S. Congress, Senate, Senator Beveridge of Indiana speaking for the Joint Resolution on the Philippine Islands, S.J. Res. 53, 56th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record 33, pt. 1 (January 9, 1900): 711; rpt. in Albert J. Beveridge, "Our Philippine Policy," in Beveridge, The Meaning of the Times and Other Speeches (1908; Freeport, N.Y., 1968), 84-85.
59. Vatro Murvar, "Messianism in Russia: Religious and Revolutionary," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 10 (Winter 1971): 299-300.
60. See, for example, Berdyaev, Origin of Russian Communism, 171.
61. James Billington concludes that "a brooding and apocalyptic mentality" played a key role in producing a cultural environment favorable to revolution. Billington, Icon and the Axe, 504. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal has also made major contributions to this idea. See Dmitri Sergeevich Merezhkovsky and the Silver Age: The Development of a Revolutionary Mentality (The Hague, 1975);
62. and The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997).
63. The essential idea of "Moscow-Third Rome" is that Rome had lost its religious purity, Constantinople had fallen to the infidels, and only Moscow remained a sovereign and Orthodox capital. It was therefore understood to be the capital of that empire considered to be essential for protecting and promoting the universal Christian church. For an authoritative discussion, see Dimitri Stremooukhoff, "Moscow the Third Rome: Sources of the Doctrine," Speculum 28 (January 1953): 84-101.
64. Marshall Poe, "Moscow, the Third Rome": The Origins and Transformations of a Pivotal Moment (Washington, D.C., 1997), 11-12.
65. Talmon, Rise of Totalitarian Democracy, 253.
66. Billington, Icon and the Axe, 528-29.~
67. Nicolas Zernov, Moscow the Third-Rome (New York, 1937), 99.
68. Geoffrey Hosking, "The Russian National Myth Repudiated," in Hosking and George Schöpflin, eds., Myths and Nationhood (London, 1997).
69. Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, 286.
70. " Barkun, Disaster and the Millennium, 186-87, 191.
71. For a review of the literature, see Laura Engelstein, "Paradigms, Pathologies, and Other Clues to Russian Spiritual Culture: Some Post-Soviet Thoughts," Slavic Review 57 (Winter 1998): 864-77.
72. Aleksandr Etkind, Khlyst: Sekty, literatura, i revolintsia (Moscow, 1998); Rosenthal, Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, 398, 412.
73. Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, 281.
74. « Graeme Gill, 22The Mainsprings of Peasant Action in 1917," Soviet Studies 30 (January 1978): 63-86.
75. Allan K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Anny: The Old Army and the Soldier's Revolt (March-April 1917) (Princeton, N.J., 1980).
76. See David Mandel, The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power: From the July Days 1917 to July 1918 (New York, 1984);
77. Diane Koenker, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1981);
78. William G. Rosenberg and Diane P. Koenker, "The Limits of Formal Protest: Worker Activism and Social Polarization in Petrograd and Moscow, March to October 1917," AHR 92 (April 1987): 296-326;
79. and Steve A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories (Cambridge, 1983).
80. La Barre, "Crisis Cults," 11.
81. Both Richard Stiles, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York, 1989),
82. and William Rosenberg, ed., Bolshevik Visions: First Phase of the Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1984), reveal thfr high hopes and Utopian expectations of the revolutionary era without placing them in the category of "millenarian." As portrayed by Stiles and Rosenberg, the Bolsheviks hoped to build a paradise; they didn't think it would arise ihrough acls of magic. »
83. Richard Pipes, "1917 and the Revisionisis," The National Interest 31 (1993): 70.
84. This approach characlerizes nol only Pipe's own recenl works on Ihe topic, The Russian Revolution (New York, 1990),
85. and Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (New York, 1993),
86. but also the works of a number of olher nolable scholars: John S. Curliss, The Russian Revolutions of 1917 (Princeton, N.J., 1975);
87. Walter Laqueur, The Fate of the Revolution: Interpretations of Soviet History from 1917 to the Present, rev. edn. (New York, 1987);
88. Adam B. Ulam, The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia (New York, 1965).
89. Gregory S. Butler, "Visions of a Nation Transformed: Modernity and Ideology in Wilson's Political Thought," Journal of Church and State 39 (Winter 1997): 49.
90. Indeed, the similarities between the socialist revolutionary movement and religion have been noted by Marxists, themselves, as often as by their critics. Friedrich Engels, for example, wrote, "The history of early Christianity has notable points of resemblance with the modern working-class movement. Like the latter, Christianity was originally a movement of oppressed people: it first appeared as the religion of slaves and emancipated slaves, of poor people deprived of all rights, of peoples subjugated or dispersed by Rome. Both Christianity and the workers' socialism preach forthcoming salvation from bondage and misery; Christianity places this as a life beyond, after death, in heaven; socialism places it in this world, in a transformation of society." Quoted in Herbert Aptheker, "Marxism and Religion," in Aptheker, ed., Marxism and Christianity: A Symposium (New York, 1968), 30;
91. from Friedrich Engels, "Zur Geschichte des Urchristenthums," Die Neue Zeit 13, band l, no. 2 (1894): 4-13, 36-43.
92. Daniel B. Rowland, "Moscow-the Third Rome or the New Israel?" Russian Review 55 (October 1996): 591-614;
93. Edward Keenan, "Muscovite Political Folkways," Russian Review 45 (April 1986): 138-48.
94. Poe, "Moscow, the Third Rome," 2, 10-11.
95. The most succinct and essential definition of nationalism states that "Nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent." Ernest
96. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983), 1. Empires, of course, encompass multiple "national units."
97. Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 397, xix.
98. Ladis K. D. Kristof, "The State-Idea, the National Idea and the Image of the Fatherland," Orbis 11 (Spring 1967): 244,246.
99. Nicholas Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825-1855 (Berkeley, Calif., 1959), 124.
100. Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, Vol. 1, From Peter the Great to the Death of Nicholas I (Princeton, N.J., 1995), 385.
101. Nicholas Riasanovsky, Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles: A Study of Romantic Ideology (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), 180-81.
102. Quoted in Michael Cherniavsky, " 'Holy Russia': A Study in the History of an Idea,"/!//β 63 (April 1958): 634;
103. Riasanovsky, Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles, 206-07; Berdyaev, Russian Idea, 70.
104. Jeffrey Brooks, \\lien Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917 (Princeton, N.J., 1985), 245.
105. As Stalin put it, the "new Russia" "transformed the Red Flag from a party banner into a State banner, and rallied around that banner the peoples of the Soviet republics in order to unite them into a single state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the prototype of the future World Soviet Socialist Republic." Joseph Stalin, Marxism and the National-Colonial Question: A Collection of Articles and Speeches (San Francisco, 1975), 199.
106. See, for example, Frederick C. Barghoorn, Soviet Russian Nationalism (New York, 1956);
107. Adam Ulam, "Russian Nationalism," in Seweryn Bialer, ed., The Domestic Context of Soviet Foreign Policy (Boulder, Colo., 1981);
108. and Alain Besançon, "Nationalism and Bolshevism in the USSR," in Robert Conquest, ed., The Last Empire: Nationality and the Soviet Future (Stanford, Calif., 1986).
109. Mikhail Agursky, Third Rome: National Bolshevism in the U.S.S.R. (Boulder, Colo., 1987), xv.
110. For a variety of interpretations of how this process occurred, see Ben Fowkes, The Disintegration of the Soviet Union: A Study in the Rise and Triumph of Nationalism (New York, 1997);
111. Robert J. Kaiser, The Geography of Nationalism in Russia and the USSR (Princtton, N.J., 1994);
112. Alexander J. Motyl, Sovietology, Rationality, Nationality: Coming to Grips with Nationalism in the USSR (New York, 1990);
113. Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, Calif., 1993).
114. John B. Dunlop, "Russian Reactions to Solzhenitsyn's Brochure," Report on the USSR (December 14, 1990): 3-8.
115. See also Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire, new postscript, 1995 (Princeton, N.J., 1993);
116. and John Lowenhardt, The Reincarnation of Russia (Durham, N.C., 1995).
117. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals, Alexis Klimoff, trans. (New York, 1991).
118. For an elaboration of the thesis that Solzhenitsyn was Russia's first nationalist, see my article "Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Russian Nationalism," Journal of Contemporary History 32 (July 1997): 321-37.
119. This is the predominant theme in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The "Russian Question" at the End of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1995).
120. Khatiushin, "Esli poimem-spasemsia," 38.
121. Not only does he refer to heavenly signs and portents, Khatiushin asserts that Satan has sent demons and biorobots to possess the souls of godless people, and that godless scientists, under the spell of demons, are turning people into zombies with the help of radio, television, and "the irradiation of people with psychotropic generators ... where they live and work." Khatiushin, "Esli poimemspasemsia," 31-32.
122. For a discussion of the prospects for this, see Geoffrey Hosking, "Can Russia Become a Nation-State?" Nations and Nationalism 4, no. 4 (1998): 449-62.
123. Solzhenitsyn has attracted few followers to his conception of Russian nationalism. The literature on Russian identity is still dominated by the imperial attitude that it is the duty of Russians to lead other peoples and to share with them the benefits of their civilization. A representative sample of the literature includes lu. S. Kukushkin, ed., Riisskii narod: Istoricheskaia sud'ba vXXveke (Moscow, 1993);
124. Evgenii Troitskii, ed., Russkaia natsiia: Istoricheskoe proshloe iproblemy vozrozlideniia (Moscow, 1995);
125. Trditskii, O msskoi idee: Ocherk teorii vozrozlideniia nisskoi natsii (Moscow, 1994);
126. K. Kas'ianova, O nisskom natsional'nom kharaktere (Moscow, 1994).
127. David G. Rowley is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin. Platteville. He earned his PhD from the University of Michigan,