In order to expand the discussion of Slezkine’s study, we asked scholars of religion familiar with the Soviet and other…
Bolshevism as secular religion? A discussion of The House of Government
Book blog
Scholars from varying disciplines engage in critical discussions of recent books. Additionally, scholars introduce their books with an original essay or, occasionally, an original essay reviews an important new book, connecting it to other threads of conversation in the academy and beyond.
You can read our very first book forum, on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and the continued discussion around Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age here.
Bolshevism, Orthodoxy, and secularization in Russia
When I first heard about Yuri Slezkine’s new book, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution, I…
Proximate enigmas
I’m delighted—and daunted!—for this chance at engaging the rich discussions of this forum. Nothing I say in this short space…
Millenarianism in the Soviet Union and Maoist China
As late modernizers, both Russian and Chinese societies urgently catapulted themselves into modernity, not through the gradual capitalist rationalization process…
Religion or ideology?
While I cannot nearly do justice here to Slezkine’s ambitious undertaking, I briefly touch upon two points to suggest why…
A religious revolution?
As a historian—not a scholar of religion—specialized in Hungarian, Italian, and German history, I cannot say much about Yuri Slezkine’s…
A matter of life and death
Opening his chapter on “The Faith” of Bolshevism (chapter 3), Yuri Slezkine writes that “The most obvious question about [the]…
A conversation with Yuri Slezkine
As the final installment of the Fall 2018 book forum on The House of Government, forum co-curators Sonja Luehrmann and…
Modernity’s resonances—An introduction
Respondents to the books were asked—and gamely agreed— to reflect on how these works “challenge and correct the discursive and philosophical modes of investigation…
Credulity, or Science as an intoxication
[Emily] Ogden intends to “accentuate the negative,” so the train of questions I have—questions that view science in a more…