On the Theological Roots of the Russian Revolution and Communism More Generally

We were fortunate last week to bring to Ft. Wayne a fascinating scholar who teaches just an hour south of us at Ball State University: Sergei Zhuk, whose dual doctorates mark him out as a scholar of both American and Soviet/Russian history of the 20th century.

His talk, on the centenary of the Russian Revolution, was a deeply learned and wide-ranging affair. It was especially noteworthy to me that he began with and spent some time on the deep theological roots of the revolution, and of communism in particular. In doing so, he drew on, inter alia, his 2004 book Russia's Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism, and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830-1917 (Woodrow Wilson Centre Press), 480pp.

The theological roots of communism and the revolution are also treated in this new essay by Eugene McCarraher, who is always worth reading. When and if his much-promised and much-delayed book The Enchantments of Mammon: Capitalism and the American Moral Imagination is published I'm quite sure it will be worth reading.