Some time later, he wrote:
This is not the kind of fear of death when, in the heat of the battle, amidst the rattling of machine guns, the buzzing of bullets, and the screeching of shells a man is playing with danger because he knows that his death is a matter of chance. He accepts death as a possibility. In battle, death is not frightening: one moment and it’s over. What is terrible for the human soul is the awareness of an imminent, inescapable death, when there is no hope for another chance and when you know that nothing in the world can stop the approaching end, when there is less and less time before the terrible moment, and when finally they tell you: “your grave is ready.”47
The verdict was read on October 7 at 3:00 a.m. Several hours later, Trotsky wrote to Smilga that, given Mironov’s behavior at the trial, it might be expedient to pardon him. “The slowness of our advance into the Don Area requires concentrated political action with the objective of splitting up the Cossacks. In order to accomplish this mission, perhaps we could use Mironov, summoning him to Moscow after the sentencing and then pardoning him by a Central Executive Committee decision on condition that he go behind the lines and start a rebellion there.” Trotsky had begun to reconsider the Party’s Cossack policy around the time Mironov was captured in mid-September. It is impossible to know whether he staged the whole trial in order to pardon Mironov in the end, for “educational purposes.”48
Ivar Smilga and Valentin Trifonov (Courtesy of Olga Trifonova)
Smilga seemed happy to oblige. In a conversation with Trifonov the same day, he said that he “did not consider the killing of Mironov and his comrades useful.” As he explained later, “the pardoning of a middle peasant—such was the political meaning of this trial.” The Politburo promptly voted to stay the execution. On the night of October 8, Smilga entered the cell of the condemned and told them of the decision. According to Smilga’s recollections, Mironov, whose hair had turned completely gray overnight, “sobbed like a child and solemnly vowed to dedicate the rest of his strength to fighting for the Soviet order.”49 On October 11, while still in prison, Mironov wrote an appeal to the Don Cossacks:
Our old, silver-haired Don has lived through untold horrors.
Because of the backwardness and ignorance of its sons, it is turning into a desert.
Brother Cossacks! The killed, executed, and tortured people on both sides cannot be resurrected. It is beyond the ability of human beings. But the decision to stop more killings and executions is our decision to make. And we must do it, come what may. It is in our hands, it depends on us.
I am appealing to you, the Cossacks of the Don, as someone who has, in a sense, returned from the other world.
I am talking to you from beyond the grave, which, empty, has just been filled with earth behind me:
Enough. Enough! Come to your senses, think hard before it is too late, before everything has been lost, while it is still possible to find a way toward peace with the working people of Russia….
I say this as a prophet….
The idea of Communism is sacred.50
Two days later, the Orgburo of the Central Committee ordered the Nizhny Novgorod Provincial Party Committee to release Nadezhda Suetenkova from prison, where she was being held as a hostage. Two weeks later, on October 26, 1919, the Politburo resolved to appoint Mironov a member of the Don Executive Committee, publish a revised version of his appeal to the Don Cossacks, and allow him to travel to Nizhny Novgorod “to be with his family.” In January 1920, he was admitted to the Communist Party.51
In late August 1920, Trotsky appointed Mironov commander of the Second Cavalry Army, and Mironov’s former judge, Dmitry Poluian, a member of his Revolutionary Military Council (“let bygones be bygones,” he wrote in his telegram). The “Second Cavalry” distinguished itself in the fighting against Wrangel and played an important part in the occupation of Crimea. Mironov was awarded the Order of the Red Banner and, in January 1921, recalled to Moscow. The Civil War was over, the invading armies defeated, the false prophets gone, and the era of “coercive self-discipline” (as Bukharin put it) about to begin.52
Mironov and Nadezhda traveled by special train. Their infant daughter had died in the fall, and Nadezhda was pregnant again. At railway stations along the way, Mironov was greeted by large rallies and what he called “mass pilgrimages.” In Rostov, he was visited by Smilga, who was then commander of the North Caucasus Front. Before setting off for Moscow, Mironov went to his hometown of Ust-Medveditskaia, where he heard stories of searches, arrests, starvation, food requisitioning, unhappiness among returning Red Army soldiers, and of an armed uprising led by one of his former officers. As Mironov wrote later, “what I heard from the villagers made a strong impression on me. At the front, amidst constant battles, I had no idea of how difficult our country’s situation was, but now, having found myself away from the army and among the peasants, I felt great pity in my soul for their condition, because every single one of them had something to complain about.” Mironov made several speeches against “false Communists,” food requisitioning, and the continued ban on private trade and peasant markets. At a meeting in his house, several of his old friends and one new acquaintance agreed to keep him informed and send coded reports to him in Moscow. The new acquaintance was a secret police agent. On February 12, 1921, Mironov and Nadezhda were arrested and sent to the Butyrki prison in Moscow.53
According to Nadezhda, male and female inmates would be taken for walks in the same prison courtyard, but in separate circles. “During one of the walks, I suddenly saw him. We ran up to each other and embraced. I told him about my situation and asked him what I should do. He was pale and agitated, but he told me not to worry and to take care of myself and the baby, whatever happened to him. The guards yelled at us and told us to separate. I was greatly shocked by that meeting, and started having all kinds of terrible thoughts.” They saw each other several more times. On March 31, Mironov gave Nadezhda a copy of a letter he had written to Kalinin, Lenin, Trotsky, and Kamenev, in which he expressed his sense of vindication over the Party’s decision, made two weeks earlier, to replace forcible requisitioning with the “new economic policy” (NEP) of legalizing trade. “I remember he asked me to be sure to come to the walk on April 2 because he was hoping to get an answer to his letter by then. But from what I remember, on April 2 the walk was cancelled.”54
On April 2, the VChK Presidium ordered Mironov’s execution. He was shot later that day in the prison courtyard during the scheduled walk in which only he participated. There was no trial and, apparently, no warning. He was spared “the awareness of an imminent, inescapable death, when there is no hope for another chance and when you know that nothing in the world can stop the approaching end.” Nadezhda remained in prison for another four months. As one of the investigators put it, “Mironova is guilty insofar as she denies the guilt of her husband, considering his actions only from her point of view.” She was never informed of Mironov’s fate. On two occasions, she threatened to go on a hunger strike. It is not known whether she ever did. In late August or early September, she gave birth to a baby boy who died “several years later.”55
6
THE NEW CITY
Most millenarian sects died as sects. Some survived as sects, but stopped being millenarian. Some remained millenarian until the end because the end came before they had a chance to create stable states. Christianity survived as a sect, stopped being millenarian, and was adopted by Babylon as an official creed. The Hebrews and Mormons survived their trek through the desert and traded milk and honey for stable states before being absorbed by larger empires. The Muslims created their own large empires bound by routinized millenarianism and threatened by repeated “fundamentalist” reformations. The Münster Anabaptists and the Jacobins took over existing polities and reformed them in the image of future perfection before losing out to more moderate reformers. Only the Bolsheviks destroyed the “prison of the peoples,” vanquished the “appeasers,” outlawed traditional marriage,
banned private property, and found themselves firmly in charge of Babylon while still expecting the millennium in their lifetimes. Never before had an apocalyptic sect succeeded in taking control of an existing heathen empire (unless one counts the Safavids, whose millennial agenda seems to have been much less radical). It was as if the Fifth Monarchists had won the English Civil War, “reformed all places and all callings,” contemplated an island overgrown with plants that the heavenly father had not planted, and stood poised to pull up every one of them, “root and branch, every plant, and every whit of every plant.” The fact that Russia was not an island made the challenge all the more formidable.
There are two fundamental ways in which states relate to organized salvation professionals. The first is to assume a position of neutrality and treat various claims to a monopoly of the sacred with more or less equal condescension. This is characteristic of many traditional empires (including those ruled by nomadic warrior elites) and post-Christian liberal states “separate from the church.” As Gibbon said of the Antonines, “the various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful.” This does not mean that such states are “secular” in the sense of being indifferent to sacred legitimacy; this means that they are self-confident enough about their own claim to sacred legitimacy not to need reinforcement from prophets unrelated to the divinity of the ruling lineage. The Western liberal states are no exception in this regard: by calling other would-be monopolies of the sacred “religions” and not calling their own anything in particular, they demonstrate the un-self-conscious strength of the official faith.1
There is no such thing as a “disenchanted” world or a profane polity. No state, however routinized, is fully divorced from its sacred origins, and no claim to legitimacy is purely “rational-instrumental.” Particular governments may justify their right to rule in terms of due process, but the states they represent do not. Some laws may be proclaimed more “fundamental” than others, and some fundamental laws may be protected by priestly interpreters or Supreme Court justices whose mission is to sanctify changing practices in their light, but such constitutional traditions are much weaker than their rabbinical predecessors because of their more obvious circularity (all positive legislation is bound by a constitution, which is itself a piece of positive legislation). One solution is to root constitutional regimes in “natural law” and derive the rights of citizens from the “rights of man” and their heirs (“human rights”). Another, much more powerful, solution is to prop up legal-rational forms of authority with the sacred attributes of immortal nations. Monoethnic liberal states that can rely on existing tribal myths invest a great deal of effort in their elaboration and nationalization; those that cannot tend to equate nations with states and celebrate them accordingly. In the United States, the cult of national shrines, the ubiquity of the flag and the anthem, and the frequency of the ritualistic public praise of the warrior class are remarkable for their un-self-conscious ostentation. A state insulated by its own sacrality has no reason to worry about the flimsiness of its legal-rational scaffolding or the claims of a few self-doubting “denominations” (salvation monopolies that have lost the belief in their monopoly). Threatened by a serious challenge to the sacred center of its legitimacy and by the danger of mass conversions within the elite, the twentieth-century American state proclaimed its Communist subjects “un-American” and vigorously defended itself for as long as the threat remained serious. “The doctrine of tolerance” is reserved for the vanquished and the irrelevant.2
The other way for states to relate to competing salvation-granting institutions is to identify with one of them. Such monogamous states are usually classified according to the nature of the relationship between their political and ecclesiastical branches. At one end are the regimes in which the priestly bureaucracy is clearly subordinate to the political one, as was the case in the Russian Empire. At the other are what Weber calls “hierocracies” (the rule of the holy, otherwise known as “theocracies” or “ideocracies”), in which salvation specialists dominate the polity, as in some Tibetan, Judaic, or late Egyptian states; Calvin’s Geneva; the Puritans’ Massachusetts; and the Islamic Republic of Iran; among others.
States associated with a particular salvation-granting institution can be classified according to how they deal with alternative (unofficial) salvation providers on their territory. At one end are the unitary states (mostly hierocracies at the height of their salvation enthusiasm and strictly monogamous states such as Catholic Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella) that attempt to impose absolute uniformity of practice and conviction through expulsion, conversion, or extermination. Elsewhere along the spectrum are various forms of accommodation.3
The state that the Bolsheviks presided over at the end of the Civil War was a would-be hierocracy with serious unitary aspirations. All branches of rule—administrative, judicial, military, and economic—were controlled by the Communist Party, which remained a faith-based group with voluntary membership contingent on personal conversion. It remained a sect, in other words: the only requirements for entry and retention were scriptural competence and personal virtue as measured by senior members. It was not a priesthood ruling over a full-fledged hierocracy, insofar as most of the state’s subjects were unconverted heathen. The head of the Party was the head of the state, whatever his formal title. The state itself was the Russian Empire run by a millenarian sect.
In regard to rival revelations, the NEP-era Bolsheviks were less consistently totalitarian than some of their predecessors: they violently attacked Christianity, Islam, and other keepers and vessels of false sacrality, but they did not ban them outright—partly because of the extraordinarily large number of the unconverted they had to deal with, but mostly because they considered beliefs that did not speak the language of social science as unworthy opponents. They viewed “religion” the way dominant Christian churches viewed “pagan” beliefs and practices: with scorn but without fear or a sense of immediacy. Such relative tolerance was not extended to the servants of the bourgeoisie or the appeasers from among their fellow sectarians.
All enemies of the Bolsheviks could be roughly divided into defenders of the old world or false prophets of the new. The latter consisted of various pseudo-Marxists, classified according to degree and method of appeasement; non-Marxist socialists, classified according to distance from Marxism; and integral nationalists, seen as unwitting representatives of the bourgeoisie (all non-Bolsheviks were seen as unwitting representatives of the bourgeoisie, but fascists and their kin were considered central to the pre-Armageddon phase of bourgeois false consciousness).
In fact, all early-twentieth-century revolutionaries, wherever they found themselves on the class-as-nation to nation-as-class continuum, shared a loathing for the world of old age, decay, effeminacy, corruption, selfishness, irony, artificiality, and cowardly compromise (including liberalism, parliamentarism, and democracy). Opposing them were the ideals of vengeance, violence, masculinity, simplicity, sincerity, certainty, self-sacrifice, brotherhood, and a faith in the coming renewal and necessity-as-freedom. Communists and integral nationalists were to the French and English revolutions what the Protestant Reformers had been to early Christianity: rebels against routinization and restorers of the original promise. Some of them were millenarians. But only the Bolsheviks were in power.
■ ■ ■
The Soviet state rested on two pillars: specialized government ministries inherited from the old regime (as “People’s Commissariats”) and a hierarchy of regional Party committees culminating in the Central Committee and its various bureaus. The regional committees supervised all aspects of life in their jurisdictions; the Central Committee supervised everything without exception. All Party officials, including people’s commissars and their key deputies, belonged to a universal system of appointments that emanated from the Central Committee Secretariat and rad
iated downward through various regional committees: the closer to the top, the greater the proportion of former students and the broader the expected area of expertise. The person at the very top had to be omniscient and irreplaceable. Sverdlov, who had “carried in his memory a biographical dictionary of Communists,” was replaced by large administrative staffs and formal chains of command, but key appointments continued to be made on the basis of personal acquaintance that stretched back to the prerevolutionary underground and the Civil War revolutionary-military committees. A three-year interregnum at the top of the Central Committee Secretariat (filled, more or less ineptly, by Krestinsky and Molotov) was followed by the appointment of Stalin as general secretary in May 1922. Lenin had had Sverdlov; Sverdlov had had his “magic notebook.” After Lenin’s death, Stalin would become a perfect blend of Lenin and Sverdlov.4
The Party was surrounded by millions of unconverted “non-Party” outsiders who were now subject to Party rule. As a villain in Andrei Platonov’s 1926 The Town of Gradov puts it, “So, like I was saying, what exactly is this Provincial Party Committee? Well, I’ll tell you: the party secretary is the bishop, and the Provincial Party Committee is his—bishopric! Right? And the bishopric is wise and serious ’cause this is a new religion, and it’s a lot stricter than the Orthodox kind. Just try skipping one of their meetings—or Vespers! ‘Hand over your party card,’ they’ll say, ‘so we can put a little mark in it.’ Just four little marks, and they’ll put you down as a pagan. And once you’re a pagan, there’ll be no more bread for you! So there!” The main difference was that there was no one above the Party secretary in his region, that the general secretary was the de facto head of state, that the lowliest priest could also be a judge and executioner, and that no priest had a permanent parish.5
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