Red Theology

Being Christian (and, worse, being an American Christian) does not prevent one from succumbing to politically tendentious mythologies and stupid ideas, including the claims that capitalism is reconcilable with Christianity, and socialism and communism are inherently opposed to it. A new book upends many of those silly assumptions: Roland Boer, Red Theology: On the Christian Communist Tradition  (Haymarket, 2020), 294pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us this:

In Red Theology: On the Christian Communist Tradition, Roland Boer presents key moments in the 2,000 year tradition of Christian communism. Defined by the two features of alternative communal practice and occasional revolutionary action, Christian communism is predicated on profound criticism of the way of the world. The book begins with Karl Kautsky―the leading thinker of second-generation Marxism―and his oft-ignored identification of this tradition. From there, it offers a series of case studies that deal with European instances, the Russian Revolution, and to East Asia. Here we find the emergence of Christian communism not only in China, but also in North Korea. This book will be a vital resource for scholars and students of religion and the many aspects of socialist tradition.

A New Biography of Stalin

The influence of Stalin on the destruction of Eastern Christian churches--Catholic and Orthodox--is notorious. I have read a couple biographies about him over the years, and now Princeton University Press has another one coming out this month: Ronald Grigor Suny, Stalin: Passage to Revolution (PUP, 2020, 896pp.

About this hefty new study, the publisher tells us this:

This is the definitive biography of Joseph Stalin from his birth to the October Revolution of 1917, a panoramic and often chilling account of how an impoverished, idealistic youth from the provinces of tsarist Russia was transformed into a cunning and fearsome outlaw who would one day become one of the twentieth century's most ruthless dictators.

In this monumental book, Ronald Grigor Suny sheds light on the least understood years of Stalin's career, bringing to life the turbulent world in which he lived and the extraordinary historical events that shaped him. Suny draws on a wealth of new archival evidence from Stalin's early years in the Caucasus to chart the psychological metamorphosis of the young Stalin, taking readers from his boyhood as a Georgian nationalist and romantic poet, through his harsh years of schooling, to his commitment to violent engagement in the underground movement to topple the tsarist autocracy. Stalin emerges as an ambitious climber within the Bolshevik ranks, a resourceful leader of a small terrorist band, and a writer and thinker who was deeply engaged with some of the most incendiary debates of his time.

A landmark achievement, Stalin paints an unforgettable portrait of a driven young man who abandoned his religious faith to become a skilled political operative and a single-minded and ruthless rebel.

On Pining for Past Slavery and Servitude

I've been at several academic conferences over the last decade in which I keep hearing lectures from researchers deep inside Russia repeatedly discovering potent pockets of nostalgia for the Stalinist era--sometimes even replete with pseudo-icons of Uncle Joe inside Orthodox churches! We might think this very strange, but for those of us who have read Erich Fromm's 1941 international best-seller, Escape from Freedom, this makes a great deal of sense. As he demonstrated there (in what his biographer Lawrence Friedman calls his most important and profound book), most of us, at least some of the time, rather prefer slavery to freedom, and rather like having strongmen of various sorts tell us what to do.

It is not a shock, therefore, to hear of such stories elsewhere across the formerly communist states of Eastern Europe. Some of them are captured in a recent book I just came across: Witold Szablowski, Dancing Bears: True Stories of People Nostalgic for Life Under Tyranny, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Penguin, 2018), 256pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

For hundreds of years, Bulgarian Gypsies trained bears to dance, welcoming them into their families and taking them on the road to perform. In the early 2000s, with the fall of Communism, they were forced to release the bears into a wildlife refuge. But even today, whenever the bears see a human, they still get up on their hind legs to dance.

In the tradition of Ryszard Kapuściński, award-winning Polish journalist Witold Szabłowski uncovers remarkable stories of people throughout Eastern Europe and in Cuba who, like Bulgaria’s dancing bears, are now free but who seem nostalgic for the time when they were not. His on-the-ground reporting—of smuggling a car into Ukraine, hitchhiking through Kosovo as it declares independence, arguing with Stalin-adoring tour guides at the Stalin Museum, sleeping in London’s Victoria Station alongside a homeless woman from Poland, and giving taxi rides to Cubans fearing for the life of Fidel Castro—provides a fascinating portrait of social and economic upheaval and a lesson in the challenges of freedom and the seductions of authoritarian rule.

The Maisky Diaries

For those interested in political diaries, and for those who want glimpses inside the mind of Soviet diplomacy before and during the Second World War, then I commend to you The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St James's, 1932-1943 by Ivan Maisky and edited by‎ Gabriel Gorodetsky. Published by Yale University Press in 2015 in this condensed version (the fuller three volumes are also available), they offer revealing insights into all the largely unsuccessful diplomatic maneuvers between Britain, the USSR, and France, inter alia, in trying to prevent what everyone seems to have regarded as inevitable: another war with Germany. And then of course once war was underway, we see renewed attempts at building an alliance to defeat Hitler.

Though he says almost nothing about the plight of Eastern Christians in the USSR, he does on a couple of occasions very off-handedly dismiss Christianity in unsurprising terms as a silly bourgeois tradition--until he meets the so-called red dean of Canterbury, Hewlett Johnson. Maisky seems to find Johnson's unflagging support of the USSR useful and encouraging if at times a little de trop. But Maisky seems almost unnerved by Johnson's desire for justice for the poor, suggesting that if more Christians were like this then they might not justify dismissal everywhere as guilty of so much middle-class twaddle and superstition.

Maisky was a clever and cunning figure to survive the purges of the late 30s in the Soviet Union, and also in knowing what information to reveal and what to conceal in official communications between London and Moscow. He also developed the neat trick of reporting to Stalin confidential conversations with British cabinet ministers and Foreign Office officials in London in which Maisky put his own plans into the mouths of British officials and then reported these back to Stalin as a way of encouraging him to think about some idea or other that Maisky would not openly advocate lest he fall afoul of the regime and wind up dead.

He would survive, and then, like Churchill, go on to write (also in a semi-official capacity) some of the history in which he was himself a participant. As David Reynolds revealed in his splendid and deeply fascinating In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War, both sides used the writings of their statesmen after the war to retouch (to put it mildly in some cases) parts of the historical record in view of the politics of the immediate postwar and early Cold War periods. What they left out was often as revealing, and often more so, than what they put in.

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.

The Quest for a Usable Past

We are living in a time when questions of memory, memorialization, and forgetting are perhaps more prevalent and more controverted than ever. I have for several years been examining these questions, and continue to do so in a variety of venues and with regard to a number of incidents and periods in particular, as readers of this blog will know.

This month will see another volume join the discussion: Claudia Florentina-Dobre and Cristian Emilian Ghita, eds., The Quest for a Suitable Past: Myths and Memory in Central and Eastern Europe (Central European University Press, 2017), 164pp.

About this book, the publisher tells us:

The past may be approached from a variety of directions. A myth reunites people around certain values and projects and pushes them in one direction or another. The present volume brings together a range of case studies of myth making and myth breaking in east Europe from the nineteenth century to the present day. In particular, it focuses on the complex process through which memories are transformed into myths. This problematic interplay between memory and myth-making is analyzed in conjunction with the role of myths in the political and social life of the region. The essays include cases of forging myths about national pre-history, about the endorsement of nation building by means of historiography, and above all, about communist and post-communist mythologies. The studies shed new light on the creation of local and national identities, as well as the legitimization of ideologies through myth-making. Together, the contributions show that myths were often instrumental in the vast projects of social and political mobilization during a period which has witnessed, among others, two world wars and the harsh oppression of the communist regimes.

Crazy Communistic Christians

In one of the first books he published over his long, distinguished career as the most important moral philosopher of our time, Alasdair MacIntyre bluntly argued in Marxism: An Interpretation (which was later revised and republished as Marxism and Christianity) that “the two most relevant books in the modern world are St. Mark’s Gospel and Marx’s National Economy and Philosophy; but they must be read together.” (For those unfamiliar with MacIntyre, I give something of a retrospective of MacIntyre's writings here; I show here how revoltingly he has been traduced by some oversharing blogger; and discuss something of his use of Marx and Freud here.)

MacIntyre has returned to a new engagement with Marx in his newest book, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (Cambridge UP, 2016). Here, MacIntyre says, we must learn “from Marx just what it was about capitalism—that appropriation of surplus value—that transformed the relationship of the cultural and social order so radically." While recognizing the prosperity capitalism has brought some, MacIntyre also insists in his latest book on recognizing that it has also “destroyed…traditional ways of life, created gross and sometimes grotesque inequalities of income and wealth, lurched through crisis after crisis, creating recurrent mass unemployment and left those areas and those communities that it was not profitable to develop permanently impoverished and deprived.” All this Marx had clearly foreseen two centuries ago.

The deceptive and destructive power of capitalism today is such that we often fail—at least, ironically, until Donald Trump came along—to take seriously those inequalities and those deprived and destroyed areas that have been increasing in the last several decades. And it is not just politicians who fail to own up to this: many churchmen have also often gone along with, or at least failed to criticize, these developments, which MacIntyre, in an updated 1995 preface to his Marxism and Christianity, sees as a dereliction of ecclesial duty: “Capitalism is bad for those who succeed by its standards as well as for those who fail by them, something that many preachers and theologians have failed to recognize. And those Christians who have recognized it have often enough been at odds with ecclesiastical as well as political and economic authorities” (here one thinks immediately of Dorothy Day, as Lance Richey and I tried to show in our book).

MacIntyre’s earliest published writings on Marx were from the 1950s and 1960s. Those writings were reprinted in 2008 in the collection, Alasdair MacIntyre's Engagement with Marxism: Selected Writings 1953-1974, edited by Paul Blackledge and Neil Davidson.

All these thoughts came back to me today in reading David Bentley Hart's op-ed in the New York Times, "Are Christians Supposed to be Communists?" Hart's work on re-translating the New Testament has forced this question upon him again, as he notes in this op-ed and elsewhere.

It is certainly a question worth considering again and seriously because it's never been adequately answered by Christians of the last century and more. The capture of the Christian imaginary and its colonization from within by advanced capitalism remains, to my mind, one of the most insidious problems of our time. Certainly my students this semester, reading, inter alia, Vincent Miller's Consuming Religion have, with great diffidence and discomfort, raised this question of whether we should be "communists." I have no great answers to this, but when men like Hart and MacIntyre say we need to be asking such a question anew, it behooves all of us to sit up and listen.

A Note on Trotsky's Life on the Day of His Death

I claim no great expertise in Russian revolutionary history, and even less in the life of Trotsky. So take this for what it's worth: just a very simple note to say that, in this centenary year of the revolution, my bedtime reading has included Robert Service's fascinating Trotsky: A Biography (Belknap Press, 2011), 648pp. One of the virtues of this book is to disabuse people of the line one sometimes hears that Trotsky would have been far kinder than Stalin was, and was far less inclined to the use of mass violence. Conquest pours considerable doubt on this claim, and I am in no position to say otherwise.

It is interesting to see how, almost until the end, Trotsky seemed to expect that people would finally come around again to his views and welcome him back from, first, internal exile in Russia, and then in Turkey, France, and finally Mexico. For someone as clever as Trotsky was, and as ruthless as he could be in some circumstances, he seems in the end to be been done in repeatedly by--call it what you will--a naivete or an intellectual's overconfidence in the power of ideas combined with an over-great trust of people to put ideas before themselves, as Trotsky sometimes seems to have done. How else to explain how wantonly he would talk to just about anybody and everybody (not a few of whom were Soviet agents, as one must surely have expected), and how utterly careless he seems to have been about personal security, even after a very near-miss by assassins in Mexico before finally being done in by Ramón Mercader and his infamous ice ax in August 1940.

Robert Service has also authored biographies of the other two big men of the Russian triumvirate: Stalin: A Biography (2006); and Lenin: A Biography (2000).

I have not (yet) read either of those, and perhaps never will. Having read, about a decade ago, Simon Sebag Montefiore's Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar I am not sure I have the desire to enter again into the catalogue of horrors which Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky did so much to usher in.

They ushered Soviet communism in at The End of Tsarist Russia: The March to World War I and Revolution, a book by Dominic Lieven I have just begun. It is very well done so far, linking the socioeconomic problems of the Romanov dynasty, the war, and the revolution together to show what a sprawling complex scene was to be found in the Russia of the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Religious Freedom in Russia

I know several Christians who, even before the Olympics shone the light on Russia, have been willfully indulging in what I can only regard as a certain kind of historically myopic romanticism about the country for its stance on certain moral questions, chiefly "homosexuality." They think they have found in Russia, Vladimir Putin, and the Russian Orthodox Church perhaps the last remaining powerful Christian bulwarks against trends that seem irreversible in the rest of Europe, North America, and elsewhere (at least outside the Islamic world). As tempting as it is to think in these terms, I find it untenable to do so for several reasons, not least recent Russian history, much of which is within very recent memory. This is a country with too long a track record of destroying its own citizens in the name of various ideologies and totalitarian thugs, some with crowns on their heads. To assume that all traces of this libido dominandi have been wiped out, that all perpetrators of various forms of torture, persecution, and execution have been extirpated from every inch of the country--or even modest sections of it--is, it seems to me, absurdly naive and a gross violation of the psalmist's counsel to "put not your trust in princes and in a son of man in whom there is no help."

My unease with seeing Russia today as an unadulterated incarnation of "Holy Russia" or the "Third Rome" or a new model of Christian "symphonia" or other pious rubbish is only magnified after having just finished reading Koenraad De Wolf's fascinating and moving new book, Dissident for Life: Alexander Ogorodnikov and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in Russia (Eerdmans, 2013), xii+303pp. About this book we are told:

This gripping book tells the largely unknown story of longtime Russian dissident Alexander Ogorodnikov -- from Communist youth to religious dissident, in the Gulag and back again. Ogorodnikov's courage has touched people from every walk of life, including world leaders such as Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher.

In the 1970s Ogorodnikov performed a feat without precedent in the Soviet Union: he organized thousands of Protestant, Orthodox, and Catholic Christians in an underground group called the Christian Seminar. When the KGB gave him the option to leave the Soviet Union rather than face the Gulag, he firmly declined because he wanted to change "his" Russia from the inside out. His willingness to sacrifice himself and be imprisoned meant leaving behind his wife and newborn child.

Ogorodnikov spent nine years in the Gulag, barely surviving the horrors he encountered there. Despite KGB harassment and persecution after his release, he refused to compromise his convictions and went on to found the first free school in the Soviet Union, the first soup kitchen, and the first private shelter for orphans, among other accomplishments.

Today this man continues to carry on his struggle against government detainments and atrocities, often alone. Readers will be amazed and inspired by Koenraad De Wolf's authoritative account of Ogorodnikov's life and work.

Though having read works on the Gulag, the de-Kulakization and collectivization campaigns of mass starvation, the NKVD/KGB, the Russian Revolution, the state of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church under communism, and biographies of figures such as Stalin, Khrushchev, and Solzhenitsyn--as well as wider works on imperial policy, the tsars, the Romanovs, Russian spirituality and iconography, Russian theologians, and Russian wars, including the Crimean War, and World War I and II--I was still repeatedly taken aback by the descriptions of the abuse suffered by Ogorodnikov for simply being a Christian. I was well aware of what communism did to Christians, and the millions of martyrs it created. But perhaps my memory has gone a bit soft after two decades since the collapse of the evil empire. This book is a fresh reminder of all those horrors, and not just in the dark days of the Brezhnev era, but even well after the USSR officially collapsed and ended. Even through the 1990s, and into the last decade, Ogorodnikov was still being severely harassed by various Russian officials for the "crime" of running a shelter and soup-kitchen near Moscow. How he has survived all this can only be seen as a miracle and gift of God.