Eurozine, via New Humanist, features a conversation with Russian philosopher Michail Ryklin about his belief that Soviet communism became a religion for its enthusiasts on the European left:
“There is a scientific and sociological definition of religion that is very different. This view—as expressed in the work of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, as well as many anthropologists—defines religion as a kind of totalising experience, something for which people are prepared to sacrifice everything and which makes sense of their entire lives. By this definition, of course, communism is religion. For millions of people the sense of their lives was defined by communism as a set of beliefs. Communism was real religion.”
Ryklin’s book focuses on the writings of six European intellectuals—Bertrand Russell, Walter Benjamin, André Gide, Arthur Koestler, Lion Feuchtwanger and Bertolt Brecht—all of whom travelled to Moscow with high hopes for the revolution. Taken together these texts form a genre of their own, named as “returnee literature” by the French philosopher (and Ryklin’s former teacher) Jacques Derrida. Each author visited Moscow between the October Revolution of 1917 and 1939, when, Ryklin argues, the religious age of Soviet communism expired in disappointment over Stalin’s pact with Hitler.
Continue reading at Eurozine.