Yuri Slezkine’s monumental new study, The House of Government, also situates the Russian Revolution within a much larger drama, but one that resists the modernization narrative and instead places the Bolsheviks among ancient Zoroastrians and Israelites, early Christians and Muslims, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Puritans, Old Believers, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Rastafarians, and other millenarian sects. As sworn enemies of religion, the Bolsheviks would have hated this casting decision and demanded to be put in a different play, preferably with Jacobins, Saint-Simonians, Marxists, and Communards in supporting roles. Slezkine, however, has claimed these groups for his story as well, insisting that underneath their secular costumes they too dreamed of hastening the apocalypse and building the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. The Bolsheviks, it seems, were condemned to repeat history—a history driven not by class struggle, as they thought, but by theology. [...]
Slezkine came to a very different conclusion: despite their insistence that class, not nationality, was the deepest source of human solidarity, the Bolsheviks had turned out to be nation-builders of the first order. Their “chronic ethnophilia” inspired “the most extravagant celebration of ethnic diversity that any state had ever financed,” and was largely responsible for the formation of the very national-territorial units that burst forth as newly independent states in the 1990s. To capture the process of socialist nation-building, Slezkine deployed a perfectly Soviet metaphor: the communal apartment, the sprawling pre-revolutionary living space partitioned after 1917 into separate rooms, each housing an entire family, with a single shared kitchen and bathroom per apartment. “Remarkably enough,” he wrote, “the communist landlords went on to reinforce many of the partitions and never stopped celebrating separateness along with communalism.” [...]
Slezkine’s version of the secularization thesis is simultaneously more specific and much broader. In their thinking and their interactions with one another, on the one hand, Bolsheviks displayed the particular form of religious fervor associated with millenarian sects, namely the desire to eradicate “private property and the family as the most powerful and mutually reinforcing sources of inequality,” thereby fashioning, once and for all, a “simple, fraternal society organized around common beliefs, possessions, and sexual partners (or sexual abstinence).” Millenarian sects with apocalyptic dreams, on the other hand, have appeared in many different religions and historical eras. Indeed, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Mormonism (to name a few) are, according to Slezkine, “institutionalized embodiments of unfulfilled millenarian prophecies,” churches that sought to routinize the teachings, if not all the practices, of the rebellious sects that gave birth to them. [...]
One aspect of the Russian Revolution for which The House of Government does offer an explicit explanation is its demise. Most histories of the Soviet Union emphasize the failure of the command economy to keep up with its capitalist rivals. Slezkine, however, is not terribly interested in economics. In his account, the Soviet experiment failed, half a century before the country’s actual collapse, because it neglected to drain the oldest, most persistent swamp of all—the family.
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