AHR Forum

"Redeemer Empire": Russian Millenarianism

DAVID G. ROWLEY

[T]he Russian people, in accordance with their metaphysical nature and vocation in the world, are a people of the End. Apocalypse has always played a great part both among the masses of our people and at the highest cultural level among Russian writers and thinkers. In our thought the eschatological problem takes an immeasurably greater place than in the thinking of the West and this is connected with the very structure of Russian consciousness.

Nicolas Berdyaev, The Russian Idea.1

In 1907, Anatolii Lunacharsky published Religion and Socialism, in which he argued that Marxism was the highest form of religion because it would satisfy in the real world the yearning for justice and righteousness that religions only promise in the hereafter. He also pointed out the parallels between Marxism and Christian eschatology: the suffering of the proletariat and the passion of Christ, the socialist revolution and the Day of Judgment, and socialism and Christ's millennial reign on earth.2	1
In 1995, Valerii Khatiushin published "If We Understand, We Will Be Saved," in which he argued that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the work of Satan. Khatiushin asserted that Satan's legions were preparing a five-year bloodbath for Russia, in which Russia, like Christ, would be crucified. In the year 2000, he prophesied, Russia would be resurrected as the leader of the world.3	2
The visions of Lunacharsky and Khatiushin certainly seem to substantiate Nicolas Berdyaev's characterization of the Russians as a millennial people. Yet these expressions of millenarian expectation raise serious questions about the project of identifying and comparing cultural forms and traditions. Do religious and secular expressions of the millenarian vision really express the same idea? Is it possible to have a millenarian "tradition," and, if so, what cultural vehicle carries the millennial idea from one generation to the next? Looking for answers to these questions in the Russian context provides a new vantage point from which to examine the nature of Russian imperial ideology and national identity, the place of Communism in Russian history, and the political and ideological choices now facing the Russian Federation.	3
I will argue that, first, the use of the unqualified term "millenarian" to apply to secular and mainstream as well as to religious and marginal movements has served as a pejorative critique of modern, secular "millenarianisms" and produces serious misunderstandings of the millenarian idea. Second, the millenarian idea of an end of human history and the beginning of an earthly paradise does not entail unrealistic thinking or pathological behavior. Millenarian expressions may be used in a purely metaphorical sense. What distinguishes between "religious" and "secular" millennialism is not the idea of the millennium but the social meaning and function of that idea. Third, one powerful cultural vehicle for millenarianism in Russia has been the ideology of Russian imperialism, and it is to this tradition that the millennialism of the Communist revolution can be attributed. Fourth, the imperial style of thought is the antithesis of modern nationalism, and the millenarian outlook in an imperialist guise has been a symptom of Russia's failure to become a nation-state. Finally, since the point of Khatiushin's millenarian tirade is to mourn the collapse of the Soviet empire and to call for the regeneration of a Greater Russia, the extent to which he represents contemporary Russian political culture is of crucial importance for Russia's future.	4
Based simply on the concepts they employ, it seems self-evident that Khatiushin and Lunacharsky confirm the trend in the interpretation of Russian culture that holds the Russians to be a millennial people and the Communist revolution to be a product of millenialism.4 Certainly, Khatiushin would seem to reinforce such an interpretation since a Russian, Christian apocalypse is central to his vision. Khatiushin quotes Fedor Dostoevsky that "no atheist can be a Russian," and says that "Russia is a heavenly country; to be a patriot means to carry in you the deathless Russian soul—a part of the transcendent Russian soul." Khatiushin depicts the suffering of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union as nothing less than the final act in the struggle between God and Satan. "The Prince of Darkness," he writes, "has taken offense at Russia and is expending all his powers here."5 Satan's agents, the Jews, are behind the world conspiracy (in which the Communist Party played a role): "first to introduce and then to destroy Soviet power." Not only that, Khatiushin insists that they are preparing the way for the bloody czar-despot, "as predicted in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion."6	5
Russia's suffering duplicates the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Khatiushin writes that "Christ came in order to take upon himself pain, blood, and humiliation in order to save the human race," but that salvation only lasted for two thousand years. Now humankind, to be saved again, must itself suffer. Russia will be the first to take upon itself "pain, blood, and humiliation," and Russia "will be the first to be purified."7	6
Khatiushin points to signs and omens that portend the end of the world. The birthmark on the forehead of Mikhail Gorbachev ("Mikhail the Marked") is the mark of the Devil. Haley's comet foretold the Chernobyl disaster, and wormwood grows at Chernobyl. Therefore, since the Book of Revelation speaks of a great star "whose name is wormwood" that will fall to earth, make the waters bitter, and kill many people, the Chernobyl meltdown proves that the return of Jesus must be at hand.8 Khatiushin reports that when the Shoemaker-Levi Comet smashed into Jupiter, astrologers and occultists said this signified the end of the world, and he adds that it also signaled "the second coming of Christ with his heavenly host in order to finally and forever defeat the enemy of humankind." "There are only five years until the end of the old world and the beginning of the new," Khatiushin continues. "The time of the living Christ is nearing."9	7
If the themes of Christian eschatology are explicit in Khatiushin's article, however, they are more problematic in Lunacharsky's work. Whereas Khatiushin speaks literally of the return of Christ, Lunacharsky only draws an analogy between socialism and religion. Lunacharsky set as his goal "a more or less deep investigation into the interrelationship between religion and socialism; to determine the place of socialism among other religious systems."10 What connects socialism and religion, in Lunacharsky's view, is not their belief in the supernatural but their concern for the poor. He asserts that Judaism was a religion of labor in which God stood for the poor and downtrodden against the oppression of the wealthy. "Christianity in Rome and Palestine," he adds, "was a movement of the proletariat." And, in the early church, "Christianity fostered a sense of unity and brotherhood among the unfortunate, the cast off, the despairing." The heroism of Christian martyrs "revealed the height of enthusiasm that is awakened by the idea of communism." Christian millenarians of the Middle Ages, he points out, also believed in the brotherhood of the poor, hated the rich, and rejected the evil society in which they lived. Lunacharsky insists that medieval millenarianism was both communistic and revolutionary.11	8
Lunacharsky draws a series of parallels between the proletariat and God or Christ. Just as Jehovah struck down Sodom and Gomorrah, so will the workers destroy the Satanic capitalists of the modern world. Lunacharsky deplores Christ's meekness (not at all an appropriate model for the militant proletariat), but he emphasizes that Jesus was a carpenter and thus one of the laboring masses. He offers an extended analogy between the proletariat and Christ. The three wise men—Robert Owen, Mikhail Bakunin, and Karl Marx—bowed down at the manger of the newly born proletariat. Did not Labor feel anger at the merchants and bankers and want to drive them from the temple of life? Moreover, Lunacharsky suggests that the suffering of the workers in the revolution parallels the crucifixion of Christ. "And on the hill of Golgotha arises a new Messiah, his blood has been spilled and they have nailed him to the cross . . . But it is impossible to kill Labor, it is resurrected and continues its heavy struggle; it carries its cross from Golgotha to Golgotha . . . for in truth the Savior of the World never dies."12	9
Ultimately, however, Lunacharsky's images are only metaphors for the socialist movement. The real difference between Christians and proletarian revolutionaries, according to him, is simply that Christians are passive and workers are active. The socialist paradise toward which Marxism points will be realized on earth through human and not divine agency. Christians, he says, believed that a transcendent God would create the new world; the workers know they will have to do it themselves.13	10
Of course, the writings of Lunacharsky and Khatiushin do not, in themselves, prove that "Russians are a people of the End." In the context of a purported Russian millenarian tradition, however, their use of the language of Christian eschatology provides the opportunity to investigate the implications that their visions might have for understanding Russian history. They also highlight an ambiguity in the scholarly use of the term "millenarian," and I shall discuss their broader significance for millenarian movements before examining the specific case of Russia.	11
Comparison of the millenarian expressions of the two writers immediately brings into question the appropriateness of the unqualified term "millenarian" to encompass them both. Khatiushin can be read as a literal expression of the Christian doctrine, based on the Book of Revelation, which holds that Jesus Christ will return to earth to defeat Satan and rule over a transfigured world for one thousand years.14 Lunacharsky can be called "millenarian" only because of the parallels he draws between the Marxist conception of proletarian revolution and Christian eschatology. This raises the fundamental issue of using "millenarianism" as a concept in history and the social sciences. Is millenarianism to be defined by its ideas alone or does it signify a particular approach to social and political existence?	12
The predominant use of the term "millenarian" by historians and social scientists has been to generalize into a typology of human behavior the beliefs and actions of certain early Christian communities who rejected Roman civilization, who allowed themselves to be martyred for their faith, and who lived in expectation of Jesus' imminent return.15 As Christianity became a more worldly religion (ultimately, the official religion of the Roman Empire), church fathers Origen and Augustine argued that Revelation expressed symbolic and not literal truth.16 From this point on, literal belief in an imminent apocalypse appeared only in movements that deviated sharply from mainstream culture.	13
Indeed, it was the spectacularly irrational and self-destructive behavior (from the point of view of secular, mainstream society) of people who expected Christ's imminent return in medieval Europe that has provided the most commonly used model for millenarianism. Norman Cohn's classic study Pursuit of the Millennium, which examined Christian millennial movements in the Middle Ages, pioneered a scholarly tradition of treating millenarianism as a "phantasy of salvation" and a social pathology.17 Cohn portrayed medieval millenarian movements as violent and wholly negative social rebellions—suicidal products of economic vulnerability and social alienation.18 Analogous social phenomena have been discovered among peoples in nearly all ages and regions of the world and have been categorized as millenarian on the basis of their violent and counter-cultural characteristics. Weston La Barre's definition of such movements as "crisis cults" reinforced Cohn's representation of millenarian behavior as abnormal and pathological.19 This remains the most widely accepted understanding of the term.20	14
Not all scholars who use the term in this counter-cultural sense treat it as a wholly negative phenomenon. Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill, for example, agree with Lunacharsky in interpreting many European millenarian movements as progressive manifestations of class struggle by the lowly against their oppressors. Similarly, historians such as Peter Worsley and Michael Adas have treated non-European millenarian movements as struggles against colonialism.21 However, even when these authors adduce rational and progressive explanations for millenarian behavior, they agree with Cohn and La Barre that such movements were profoundly counter-cultural. Indeed, their rejection of the society in which they live is their defining characteristic.	15
It is in this sense that Alida Metcalf and David Ownby employ the term in their contributions to this Forum. Metcalf examines the kind of millenarianism that spreads "during times of disaster, crises of subsistence, civil war, colonialism, the rapid spread of capitalism, or relative deprivation" and that is manifested in a counter-cultural movement.22 Surely, she is correct in suggesting that few experiences are more disastrous than being enslaved and few movements are more counter-cultural than a slave revolt. Ownby, too, assumes that millenarian movements arise in response to crisis and that they challenge the social and political status quo. His argument that popular millenarianism arose from within mainstream culture but as a fundamentalist or populist reaction against it recognizes that popular millenarianism was a counter-cultural movement that threatened the political elite. Moreover, Ownby shows that, if mainstream and popular millenarianism had the same source, they nevertheless expressed their ideas quite differently. Elite expressions of apocalyptic ideas were phrased in ways that reduced their threat to the status quo; populist millenarianism, by contrast, was potentially explosive.23	16
Simultaneously with the proliferation of studies of "crisis cult" millenarianism in the 1950s and 1960s, other scholars began to apply the term "millenarian" to modern European and United States history. J. L. Talmon, in a series of works on the origins of the modern world, argued that medieval millenarianism was secularized during the Enlightenment into a revolutionary movement, which, as a dark side to the liberal tradition, ultimately produced communist and fascist totalitarianism.24 A number of other scholars have participated in the same project.25 As in the study of crisis cult millennialism, however, not all studies of this sort have been negative. For example, in Millennium and Utopia: A Study in the Background of the Idea of Progress, Ernest Lee Tuveson argues that the modern idea of progress was a faith in history as a new kind of Providence that "resulted in part from the transformation of a religious idea—the great millennial expectation, which became one of the most firmly established ideas in the Protestant mind." Other scholars have also suggested religious origins of the modern outlook, without any pejorative connotations.26	17
However, those scholars who use the term "millenarian" in a modern, secular context employ it in a suggestive and not an analytical sense. By applying "millenarian" to European visions of progress, they use the associations with religious and fanatical extremism of crisis cults to highlight the hopeful expectations of modern liberals or socialists. Yet there is a profound discontinuity between the intellectual and the crisis cult expressions of the eschatological idea. The social origins and behavior of the two kinds of millenarians are strikingly different. Crisis cult millenarianism is a movement of socially marginal and disaffected groups—usually the most downtrodden and miserable—who reveal their millenarianism in what the mainstream considers to be bizarre and antisocial behavior. Liberalism and socialism are, by contrast, movements of intellectual and political elites whose millenarianism is revealed through the publication of their ideas.	18
The two also differ in their relation to religious belief. Scholars seem generally to assume that crisis cult members literally believe in their visions of apocalypse and regeneration. No one questions the idea that second-century Christians, nineteenth-century Millerites, or Sioux Ghost Dancers (to take but three counter-cultural examples) "really" believed that history was about to come to an end and that the world about to be miraculously transformed. Indeed, it is acting out these beliefs that defines their behavior as "counter-cultural." Conversely, no one could seriously suggest that liberal or socialist intellectuals who believed in the limitless progress of European civilization "really" thought that the ordinary laws of nature would cease to operate or that a divine supernatural force would intervene to make society perfect.27 At most, their visions of the future can be called hyperbolic or metaphorical. The prevalence of the notion that such intellectuals have "secularized" Christian eschatology emphasizes the fact that these writers did no more than express the millenarian idea in the vocabulary of the mainstream culture in which they lived.	19
What the two share in common is the millenarian idea—that is, that human history is a story with a beginning and an end, with a plot determined by a transcendent logic, in which a special people play a key role. The notion of a timeless paradise at the end of this story is implicit—all stories must come to an end, and the millenarian believes that the author (or logic) of this story is beneficent. The difference between the two kinds of millenarians lies not in the quality of their belief but in how they manifest the millenarian idea. Henceforth, I will use the term "secular" to refer to those who express the millenarian idea in terms of the mainstream intellectual and political culture and the term "religious" to refer to those who express their millennialism in defiantly counter-cultural action.	20
I wish to emphasize that I use these terms not as definitions but only as useful signs for two different social manifestations of the millenarian idea. The notion that the millennium is a literal reality to the religious millenarian but only a metaphor to the secular millenarian is based on the problematic assumption that religious belief is itself not metaphorical. Moreover, the inaccessibility of other people's consciousness makes it pointless to attempt to determine what anyone "really" believes. Some people who really believe in an imminent apocalypse may adhere to all the behavioral norms of their society, while some people who don't really believe the world is on the verge of a miraculous transformation may nevertheless join (or lead) a counter-cultural movement for other reasons. (The leaders of crisis cults are often suspected of self-interested motives.) Whether or not modern Western liberals and socialists are true believers in a religious sense would seem to be equally unknowable.	21
The distinction between religious and secular millenarianism is particularly relevant to the case of the United States. On the one hand, the United States has experienced a long history of counter-cultural millenarian outbursts that can easily be subsumed under the category of "crisis cults" that reject mainstream society and are explained by reference to disaster and alienation.28 However, following Ira Brown, an increasing number of American historians have downplayed the cultic or sectarian nature of millennial movements in America and have emphasized their closeness to mainstream religion.29	22
Millenarianism in America is particularly problematic because the Puritans fit so poorly into the La Barre paradigm. It is generally understood that, like members of a crisis cult, they were deeply religious and believed in Jesus' return (whether before or after the millennium). Nevertheless, their frequent application of millenarian metaphors to North America must call into question their belief that it would be the literal (as opposed to the metaphorical) location of the Christian millennium. Moreover, they were not the socially deviant, mad, marginal, or fringe elements that constitute crisis cults as conceived by Cohn and La Barre. Just the opposite. American Puritans were members of the wealthy and powerful political elite.30	23
This is brought out with particular clarity by Susan Juster's contribution to this Forum. The possibility that the millennium is no more than a metaphor for optimistic hopes for the future is reinforced by Juster's references to the "overblown millennial rhetoric" of the first phase of the American Revolution. The "Man-child" (America) "with his spear already in the heart of the beast" is clearly a metaphor and not a literal description of anything. Moreover, Juster does not attempt to distinguish essentially between the more counter-cultural (Mother Ann Lee and the Shakers, for example) and the more mainstream (the "fusion of republican and millennial language" by men). Instead, she asserts, "Male and female prophets assumed different audiences for their texts, positioned themselves differently as divine oracles, and expounded radically different models of reading."31 These male and female millenarians shared the same idea; it is the social and political meaning they attached to that idea that distinguishes between them.	24
Moreover, a number of writers argue that the Puritans' sense of millennial mission has been carried over into American secular, mainstream political ideology.32 Ira Brown surmises that "the idea that paradise is to prevail on earth for a thousand years [is] an optimistic outlook in tune with 'the American heritage of hope' and conducive to 'progress.' In this broader context millennial thought is related to 'the mission of America' and other concepts outside the realm of religion." Ernest Tuveson agrees, arguing that the source of the American secular ideology of world leadership is religious, and he finds this attitude exemplified in Woodrow Wilson's pronouncement that "America had the infinite privilege of fulfilling her destiny and saving the world." Tuveson calls the United States a "redeemer nation," into which term he subsumes the ideas of chosen nation, a millennial-utopian destiny for humankind, and a continuing war between good and evil in which the redeemer nation plays the central role.33 Similar allusions have been made by many other historians.34	25
It would seem to be particularly difficult to attempt to situate United States presidents within the Cohn and La Barre paradigm. Such individuals can surely be considered counter-cultural or socially deviant only by their political opponents. Not only do such elected figures epitomize what it means to be a part of mainstream culture, the mood of their millenarianism is not one of despair and desperation but of power and confidence. Their millenarian attitudes cannot be explained by reference to alienation or disaster or relative deprivation.35 Just the opposite; the prevalence of millenarian rhetoric at the highest levels of American politics suggests that it serves an important mainstream political function.	26
Some reflections on the problem of political legitimation suggest why, on purely logical grounds, the colonizers of a (to them) new world would be attracted to millenarian ideas. Invading a new territory that could not be called a "homeland," that lacked any unique myth of a past golden age of national purity, and that was populated by citizens not related by descent from common ancestors, the political leaders of the United States could not rely on the kind of appeals to political legitimacy that is typical of nations.36 The United States could not represent itself as ruling only in the interests of a particular and unique people.	27
Instead, the legitimation required by the task of occupying new lands and encompassing new peoples was the same as that required by empires. Whereas nations look backward for their legitimizing myths, empires look forward. The imperial ideal exists in an as-yet-unrealized future when (potentially) all peoples share the benefits of their civilization. As a state that governs more than one people, an empire must represent itself as the bearer of a universal law superior to the particular laws and customs of nations. Even when an empire identifies itself with a people, the characteristics of that people cannot be relative and self-absorbed but absolute, universal, and outward-looking. Moreover, and most tellingly, nations take national self-interest to be their highest moral law, while peoples with a sense of imperial mission conceive of themselves as living up to ideals that are superior to their own self-interest. Nations preach self-interest; empires preach self-sacrifice.37	28
In sum, imperialism, though not identical with or necessarily associated with millenarianism, is nevertheless fully consistent and concordant with the millenarian idea. Both imperialism and millenarianism are universalist and forward looking. Both posit a special people whose mission is to sacrifice itself to hasten the day when all humanity will be blessed by the benefits of its law and civilization. Thus I would suggest that the prevalence of the rhetoric of Christian eschatology in America's dominant political discourse can be explained by America's need for an imperial form of legitimation. Millenarianism expressed in imperialist rhetoric could serve as a powerful ideological justification for expansion across a continent over which European Americans could claim no other right of possession.	29
It is significant that once the United States had occupied the center of the North American continent, the ideology of Manifest Destiny inexorably carried its leaders toward the idea of extending the benefits of its civilization to the entire world. The millenarian sense of self-sacrifice and universal mission is paradigmatically captured in these often-quoted words of Albert Beveridge to the U.S. Senate on January 9, 1900: "God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adepts in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples. Were it not for such a force as this the world would relapse into barbarism and night. And of all our race He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America . . ."38 Here, the intimate connection between millenarianism and imperialism is explicitly revealed.	30
These considerations prepare us now to examine the case of Russia, whose millenarian traditions are even richer—as well as much older—than those of the United States. Indeed, four distinct expressions of the millenarian idea can be identified in Russian society at the beginning of the twentieth century. First, Russia has had a long tradition of popular, counter-cultural millenarian sectarian activity typical of "crisis cults." At the time of the Communist revolution, the Bolshevik V. Bonch-Bruevich counted "at least two hundred messianic sects" in Russia and argued that these sectarians were "instrumental in creating for the new rulership a most favorable climate of messianic ideology."39 Second, Russian anarchists and socialists (including the Bolsheviks) can be termed millenarian in the sense in which the term has been attributed to European notions of progress. The Marxist view of history can be seen as a secularized form of Judeo-Christian Messianism.40 Third, at the turn of the century, Russia's Silver Age intellectual and artistic elite employed powerful images of apocalypse, cataclysm, and regeneration that embodied the millenarian idea.41 Fourth, from the middle of the nineteenth century, a strong millenarian theme had been associated with the legitimizing ideology of the czarist government itself. The religious notion of Moscow as the "Third Rome"42 posited a divine world mission for Russia that was enthusiastically adopted by Slavophiles, Pan-Slavs, and ideologists for the Russian autocracy.43	31
Scholars who have examined these phenomena make no attempt to distinguish among them. The various Russian expressions of the millenarian idea are taken to be the products of a single cultural tradition—all equally alien from the supposed sober and secular attitudes of mainstream modern Western civilization. While no recent scholars have made the same essentialist claims as Nicolas Berdyaev ("Russians are a people of the End"), nevertheless, by failing to distinguish among Russian millenarianisms, they seem to provide evidence for his position.	32
Indeed, it has been tempting to a number of scholars simply to combine all these disparate elements into one explanation of the revolution as a millenarian event. Talmon, for example, maintains that Europe's Messianic spirit of revolution "found its natural home in Russia, where it received a new intensity from the resentment created by generations of oppression and the pre-disposition of the Slavs to Messianism."44 James Billington catalogs the full list of millenarian elements in Russian society: the presence of a popular apocalyptic religious mentality, Messianic expectation among both Zionists and populists, widespread apocalyptic ideas among Russian artists and intellectuals, and the modern idea of progress as secularized millenarianism. Billington also alludes to the notion of "Moscow—Third Rome" when he writes that "Lenin benefitted from the Russian predilection for theories of history that promise universal redemption but attach special importance to Russian leadership."45 Nicolas Zernov has put this most explicitly: "the Communists are only following the path which was pointed out by the Moscow princes, bishops, and monks at the end of the fifteenth century. The Third International, which has chosen Moscow as its seat, is strangely in accordance with the prophecy that that city has a message of salvation for both the East and the West, as universally significant as that of Rome or Constantinople."46 Most recently, Geoffrey Hosking has remarked that "the Messianic energy of the original Russian national myth eventually found an outlet in the distinctive Russian variant of socialism, from Bakunin to Lenin, with its passionate belief in the 'people,' its expectation both of imminent destruction and of a subsequent perfect society."47	33
Moreover, there is the Revolution of 1917—massive, anarchic, violent, and hopeful. The combined images of Russian soldiers killing their officers and deserting the front, Russian peasants murdering landlords, burning their homes, and seizing their land, and Russian workers brutalizing their supervisors and taking control of factories has, not surprisingly, prompted many observers to view the revolution as a millenarian event—a crisis cult on an unprecedented scale. Norman Cohn, for example, drew a parallel between Communist revolutions and medieval millenarian outbursts.48 Michael Barkun agrees. He represents the Russian Revolution as a massive crisis cult by pointing out that the Communist revolution took place after a long period of stress involving multiple disasters, that millenarian motifs were part of the Russian tradition, that the revolution was led by a "charismatic prophet-figure capable of molding existing doctrine to the needs of the moment," and that the revolution was prepared for not only by Marxist ideology but also by a Russian popular millenarian tradition and official Russian nationalism exemplified in the notion of Moscow as the Third Rome. Barkun argues that "it was Marxism at once Russified and implanted in a situation where salvationist visions were known and accepted responses to crisis. Thus a convergence occurred between Marxism and traditional Russian messianic expectations."49	34
Though plausible simply through the weight of repetition and the multiplicity of millenarian expressions in Russia, all these explanations of the Russian Revolution are flawed by the failure to distinguish between secular and religious millenarianism and the failure to analyze their different sources. Scholars who see the revolution as a millenarian process seem to accept Berdyaev's claim that Russian millenarianism is a single tradition and that it pervades all Russian consciousness. Such a claim, however, contradicts the fundamental conception of millenarian movements as defined by Cohn and La Barre. Religious millenarianism cannot be considered part of a national tradition, since the defining characteristic of such crisis cults is their counter-cultural nature. Taborites, Anabaptists, cargo cultists, and Ghost Dancers are not understood to be millenarian by virtue of a national tradition; instead, scholars represent them as simply having seized on a culturally available millenarian vision because of its usefulness in overcoming their alienation and despair. In this sense, Russian Orthodoxy may have been the cultural source of the millennial vision that inspired "crisis cult" movements such as the Old Believers, the Skoptsy, the Khlysty, or the myriad other Russian sects that expected the imminent end of the world. This does not make them a "Russian" tradition in the sense of mainstream national culture. They are aberrations from, not products of, elite cultural or political traditions.	35
A recent trend in scholarship on Russia and the Soviet Union (both in Russia and in the West) has emphasized the cultural role of religion, the occult, and apocalyptic expectation in setting the mood for revolution and establishing the spirit on which Stalinism thrived.50 Aleksandr Etkind, for example, suggests that the Skoptsy (a cult of self-castrators with a long tradition in Russia) provided the totalitarian model that Communism adopted. Bernice Rosenthal and other contributors to The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture present a picture of Russian and Soviet life as being thoroughly saturated with apocalyptic notions, including Satanism, occultism, spiritualism, mystical anarchism, cosmism, and a wide variety of other visions of the magical transformation of the world. Rosenthal concludes that Stalinism was a politicization of this trend. "Soviet propagandists drew on (consciously and unconsciously) occult themes and symbols that were familiar to the masses." "Stalinist rhetoric," she adds, "was a negative theurgy that turned metaphors into reality."51	36
The contributors to the Rosenthal volume provide fascinating descriptions and analyses of Russian culture, yet they, like other scholars of Russian millenarianism, insufficiently distinguish between metaphor and belief and between types of social behavior. The appearance of a revolution in a land in which artists and intellectuals are engaged with occult themes and in which millenarian cults flourish is very suggestive. Nevertheless, the cultic expression of millenarianism can still be taken to be a symptom of social stress, not national tradition. Poets and artists, moreover, regularly employ metaphor and symbol as artistic devices. Whether they "really" believe in them is an open question. More to the point is the behavior and attitudes of the key players in the revolution: the masses of the Russian people and the leaders of the Communist Party, neither of whom were millenarians of the religious variety.	37
The role of the overwhelming mass of Russian people in the revolution is, on empirical grounds, demonstrably not a form of religious millenarianism. It may be true that the Russian laboring masses were driven to despair by stresses caused by acculturation to capitalism, by poverty and disaster, or by relative deprivation. Yet this desperation did not produce in them the irrational and self-destructive behavior that La Barre and Cohn find to be defining of crisis cults. On the contrary, their behavior was rational, predictable, and sane. It gives every evidence of "the tough, shrewd rebelliousness of the common people" who "played no ignoble part" in "the age-old laborious struggle against oppression and exploitation," which Norman Cohn takes to be the very antithesis of millenarianism.52	38
Studies of the Russian peasants show that their appropriation of the landlords' land and property in 1917 was prompted not by the belief that it would magically bring about the millennium but by the belief that they were rectifying an ancient injustice against them. Graeme Gill has pointed out that, far from being an act of madness, peasant activity was closely related to the normal rhythms of agricultural activity in Russia.53 The reaction of Russian peasant soldiers to the blunders and cruelty of their officers in World War I was frequently violent but wholly understandable in rational terms.54	39
The same is true of the Russian working class. Study after study reveals that Russian workers were not engaging in suicidal and mystical practices that they believed would magically transfigure the earth. They were concerned, instead, with the problem of earning a livelihood and with the entirely practical project of establishing democracy and workers' control.55 In no account do we find examples of what La Barre describes as "the indisposition to accept either disruptive feedback or the ego-critique of experience, but instead, supported by the wish-needs of fellow communicants, to indulge the appetite to believe."56	40
One does find the adjectives "utopian" and "millenarian" scattered through the scholarly literature on the Russian Revolution, but the terms are used only for vividness. The enthusiasm and optimism of a people liberating themselves from oppression may be called millenarian in a purely metaphorical sense, but this should in no way imply that those people are part of a crisis cult of the type defined by La Barre and Cohn.57	41
It should also be noted that the concept of the Russian Revolution as a massive crisis cult is undermined by a historiographical school that denies the revolution responded to mass interests at all. According to Richard Pipes, the outcome of the revolution "was determined by conflicts between small elites, and if the Bolsheviks triumphed it was not because they enjoyed greater popular support but because they were better organized, more power-hungry, and less scrupulous."58 In this view, the mood of the masses (or of poets and artists), whether millenarian or not, would have no bearing on the nature of the revolution. According to this reading of events, the revolution could only be termed "millenarian" if the leaders could be so characterized.	42
However, the leaders of the Bolshevik Party—unlike the leaders of a crisis cult—were neither mad (in the sense of being out of touch with reality) nor deviant (in the sense of rejecting mainstream traditions and customs). Bolsheviks who masterminded the seizure of power in November 1917, who managed to run the government while engaged in an all-out civil war, and who went on to stabilize the economy and reassemble most of the old, disintegrated Russian Empire into a new state in the early 1920s would seem to exhibit all the characteristics of realistic politicians and diplomats. V. I. Lenin was surely as sane as his contemporary Woodrow Wilson. (The fact that Gregory Butler places Wilson in the same category as the "West's most notorious revolutionary millennialists," in which he includes Oliver Cromwell, Lenin, and Mao Zedong, should draw our attention to the fact that he is using "millennialist" in its secular and metaphorical rather than its religious sense.59)	43
Russian Communist leaders must be sharply distinguished from Russia's millennial cults on two grounds: they are secular and not religious millenarians, and they are the heirs to a Russian mainstream millenarian tradition and not the products of disaster and despair. I have already pointed out the metaphorical nature of Lunacharsky's millenarian Marxism.60 The national tradition in which I would situate them is Russia's mainstream political culture—Russian imperialism. I have in mind, however, not the frankly religious millenarianism of "Moscow—Third Rome," as suggested by Berdyaev, Billington, Barkun, and Zernov, but the secular and metaphorical millenarianism of the czarist empire.	44
Most specialists now reject Zernov's notion that the Russian state relied on the notion of "Moscow—Third Rome" to justify its expansion into an empire. Instead, the scholarly consensus holds that the secular Russian state did not claim this Messianic justification because it did not wish to be ideologically subservient to the Russian church.61 Most recently, Marshall Poe has argued that the idea of "Moscow—Third Rome" was widely known only among "Muscovite bookmen," that it was never officially adopted by the czarist government, and that only after 1840 did the notion become popular in Slavophile and Panslav intellectual circles.62	45
Nevertheless, if the Russian state did not rely on such an explicitly Messianic doctrine as "Moscow—Third Rome," the legitimizing ideology it did develop had all the universalist, forward-looking, and self-sacrificing rhetoric that the imperial idea shares with the millenarian. As indirect a translation of Russian Orthodoxy as the American outlook was of Puritanism, Russian imperial ideology was as secular (and as religious) as American ideas of Manifest Destiny. That is, the legitimizing appeal of Russia's ruling ideology arose from its association with Christianity without explicitly appealing to any particular denomination or national form, and its intent was to justify the expansive policies of an imperial state.	46
Russia, like the United States, has, since the seventeenth century, conquered and absorbed territories for which it had no historic, nationalist claim. Indeed, empires are logically antithetical to nationalist justification.63 Thus Geoffrey Hosking, in Russia: Empire and People, stresses that the "national imperialism" of Russian czars was not directed toward nurturing a Russian nation but toward preserving the government through "greater administrative unity and coordination," and the major point of his book is intended to show "how the building of an empire impeded the formation of a nation."64	47
To justify this expansion, Russian czars made imperial rather than national claims: they ruled on behalf of God—or their own dynasty—but never on behalf of the Russian people. Ladis Kristof is one of many scholars who points out the careful distinction drawn by Russian rulers between the people (russkii) and the state (rossiiskii). He implies, moreover, that Christianity, as a universal religion, was more appropriate to imperial legitimation than Russian nationality. "The Orthodox idea, not the Russian tongue or civilization, was the spiritus movens of the tsardom. Russia was first of all Holy, not Russian."65	48
Nicholas Riasanovsky also finds that the infamous policy of "Official Nationality" (narodnost') of Czar Nicholas I was not an appeal to Russian interests at all, but was subordinated to the Russian imperial mission. Further, "in the last analysis, God provided the foundation for the authority of the tsar."66 Richard Wortman also emphasizes the tendency of Russia's rulers to represent themselves as the bearers of universal values. In Wortman's view, for Nicholas I, "there was no contradiction between national and universal; he saw Russian monarchy as the heir to the universal imperial tradition that he defended against the Turks." He used Russian Orthodoxy to make "the Russian emperor heir to the imperial heritage of Christendom."67	49
Russian Slavophiles and Pan-Slavs followed the czar in identifying the Russian people with a universal religion, and they never produced the sort of particularistic notion of nations as ends in themselves that is typical of European nationalism either. No Russian "nationalist" ever proposed a government of, by, and for Russians. Patriotic Russians continued to believe in the importance of the czar and in the idea of empire. Most important of all, by identifying Russianness with the values of the Orthodox church, these thinkers made Russians into a universal and imperial people whose national interests were subordinate to universal (religious) principles.68	50
Dostoevsky has expressed an idea that is closest in spirit (if not in vocabulary) to the American idea of Manifest Destiny: "The Russian soul, the genius of the Russian people is perhaps the most capable among all other peoples to fulfill in itself the idea of universal union and brotherhood." Riasanovsky adds that "Dostoevskii stressed in particular the all-inclusive nature of the Russians, which enabled them to understand, help, and lead all the nations of the world." Berdyaev quotes Dostoevsky: "The Russian alone has the capacity of being especially Russian precisely and only at that time that he is especially European."69	51
As I have already argued, the key distinction between nationalism and imperialism, the element that makes imperialism so amenable to millenarian associations, is the notion of a special people called to serve a historical destiny of universal significance. This attitude was to be found not only among the intellectual elite but also, as Jeffrey Brooks demonstrates, among the general literate and semi-literate population of Russia. "[T]he most humble Great Russian was invited to think of himself as generously assisting the smaller and culturally backward nationalities that comprised the empire."70 In this regard, it is noteworthy that the suffering and sacrifice of a special people for the benefit of others is a common theme of both Lunacharsky's and Khatiushin's work. Both writers compare Russia (or the Russian proletariat) with Christ as a metaphor for suffering in service to humanity. In both scenarios, whether the Russian proletariat strides "from Golgotha to Golgotha" or Russian Christians suffer "pain, blood, and humiliation," it is Russia that sacrifices itself in a universal mission to save humanity.	52
This is precisely the sort of universal/imperial/millenarian mission that seems to have inspired Russia's Communist leaders. Just as Marxism can be considered a secularized form of Judeo-Christian eschatology, the Communist revolution can be seen as a revolutionized form of Russian imperial ideology. Lenin and his comrades believed that the Russian workers were the key to bringing socialism to the world—at first because their revolution would spark a general European revolution, later because they believed that the Russian Empire sovietized into the USSR would become the model and the nucleus of a socialist world state.71	53
Like the American notion of Manifest Destiny, Bolshevik millenarianism was secular. It did not propound the literal belief in a Day of Judgment, an end of time, and the divine transfiguration of the world. Instead, the Bolsheviks were metaphorically millenarian in their belief that the Russian proletariat was leading the way to a better future for all humankind. Bolshevism thus carried on the essential imperialist and universalist mood (with Messianic overtones) of Imperial Russian political culture.	54
Indeed, the leaders of the new Soviet state merely recast the Russian Empire's old universalist and religious style of expression into the equally universalist but secular language of international socialism. The parallels that have been drawn between Communism and Russian nationalism (as Russian imperialism has been improperly termed72) reveal the similarity of their imperial pretensions. Perhaps the most extreme statement on this issue comes from Mikhail Agursky, who asserts, "National Bolshevism in its original form strove for world domination, conceived as the universal Russian empire cemented by Communist ideology."73 Agursky argues that the Communist revolution was the result of Lenin's continuation of Russian's geo-political rivalry with Germany and that an important element in the success of the Soviet Union was the allegiance of non-Communists who believed that the Soviet Union was the state most capable of advancing traditional Russian (imperial) interests.	55
That the Soviet leaders never abandoned the ideal of empire is suggested by their failure to create a true nation-state either by fostering a homogenous Soviet proletarian identity or by Russifying the Soviet population. Indeed, the same sort of tension is apparent between "Soviet" and "Russian" that Kristof found between rossiiskii and russkii. The "Soviet" Communist Party was dominated by Russians, but it did not serve the interests of Russians. In typical imperial/millenarian style, Soviet citizens were asked to sacrifice themselves for an ideal more noble than their own national self-interest. The imperial nature of the Soviet Union is further demonstrated by its demise; the union was destroyed by the same forces that have brought all modern empires to an end—the desire of their component peoples for national self-determination.74	56
It can even be argued that the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 resulted from the final appearance not only of separatist nationalism among the people of the Russian/Soviet empire but because of the desire for national self-determination by the Russian people themselves. Russian nationalism (at least the desire for Russian national self-determination) was expressed politically for the first time by Boris Yeltsin, who used appeals to Russian pride and desire for sovereignty to gain the presidency. Yeltsin subsequently played a key role in dissolving the USSR in the fall of 1991—partly influenced, perhaps, by the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.75 Indeed, I would argue that Solzhenitsyn is, in fact, the first Russian intellectual to give full expression to the modern idea of nationalism. In a pamphlet titled Rebuilding Russia, he called for Russia to separate itself from its empire and build a Russian nation-state.76 Moreover, Solzhenitsyn is relentlessly anti-millenarian. In his view, Russia has no mission in the world other than to pursue its own well-being. His nationalism is manifested in a consistent summons for a Russia of, by, and for Russians. He bitterly criticizes both Russian and Soviet imperialism for sacrificing the interests and well-being of the Russian people in the interests of empire.77	57
It is particularly noteworthy in this regard that the central focus of Khatiushin's millenarian screed was the causes and significance of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Khatiushin is no friend of Communism; what gives him anguish is the dissolution of the Russian Empire. Khatiushin attributes cosmic significance to that calamity: it heralds the final struggle between Jesus Christ and Satan. Moreover, the chief individual target of Khatiushin's wrath (after Satan, his hordes of demons, and Jews) is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. "The time has come," Khatiushin says "to say that Solzhenitsyn is the most insidious but unrecognized enemy of Russia." "His letter Rebuilding Russia appeared like a Trojan Horse to defeat and destroy the Soviet Union on behalf of a secret world government."78	58
In conclusion, however, it is not my intention to represent Khatiushin as the spokesperson of the spirit of the new Russia. Anatolii Lunacharsky and Valerii Khatiushin do not, in themselves, prove that Russians have been or continue to be a people of the End. In the context of a purported Russian millenarian tradition, their literal use of the language of Christian eschatology has been useful for providing a context in which to investigate the role of the millenarian style of thought in Russian history. Khatiushin's writing usefully exemplifies the connection between millenarianism and imperialism and reveals that imperialist ideology has not disappeared from Russia. Ultimately, however, the meaning of any individual's millenarian vision does not reside in his words or images themselves but in the context of the social movement with which he is associated.	59
What made the Russian Revolution "millenarian" was not that Lunacharsky drew explicit parallels between the proletariat and Jesus Christ or between socialism and the millennium but that the Bolsheviks believed themselves to be leading the peoples of Russia on a mission to make the world better for all humanity. Lunacharsky must be considered a secular millenarian because of his participation in a realistic, mainstream, and successful political movement. Similarly, we cannot characterize contemporary Russia as "millenarian" on the basis of one poet. Nor can we characterize Khatiushin as either secular or religious without situating him in a social context.	60
Line by line, Khatiushin's diatribe against the satanic conspiracy to destroy Russia expresses the sort of "madness" generally associated with counter-cultural millenarianism.79 On the one hand, if the Russian Federation takes on the form of a stable nation pursuing its destiny within the confines of its national borders and in the context of a world of sovereign nation-states,80 then Khatiushin can be associated with Old Believers, Flagellants, Castrates, and other Russian crisis cult sects, and his work can be read as an apocalyptic symptom of the economic, social, and political disasters that have befallen Russia since the late 1980s. On the other hand, if Russia's political leaders revive old dreams of a "Greater Russia" that would incorporate and "serve" other nations, it will be possible to understand Khatiushin's vision—like Dostoevsky's or Lunacharsky's—as a hyperbolic metaphorical expression of traditional Russian political culture's imperial and millennial mission in the world.	61
In either eventuality, however, Khatiushin's millennial visions must be seen as symptoms and not causes. If Russia's imperial ambition revives, there will be no need to seek its source in the works of Russian poets or occultists. Russian imperialism has a cultural continuity that Russian sectarian cults and movements lack, and it still provides an important element in Russian identity.81 Indeed, imperialism is the only sort of millenarianism that can be considered to be a Russian cultural tradition. If Russians are a people of the End, it is their tradition of empire-building that has so structured their consciousness.	62
David G. Rowley is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Platteville. He earned his PhD from the University of Michigan, where he worked with the late Arthur P. Mendel, William G. Rosenberg, and Stephen J. Tonsor. His dissertation was published under the title Millenarian Bolshevism: 1900–1920 (1987). Rowley has published articles on Russian Marxism and Russian nationalism in Studies in East European Thought, Journal of Contemporary History, Nations and Nationalism (forthcoming), and previously in the American Historical Review. He is currently writing a book on the tension between the national and imperial outlooks in the development of Russian political identity from 1613 until the present. Notes I wish to thank James Mochoruk for his helpful comments on this paper when I first presented it at the Northern Great Plains History Conference in September 1998. I am particularly grateful to A. E. Bothwell and Barbara Handy-Marchello for their careful reading and helpful critiques of the article in its fully developed form. I thank Kristi A. Groberg for reading a late draft and for pointing me toward some important works that I had overlooked. I am grateful, as well, for the comments and advice of Michael Grossberg and the editors and anonymous reviewers for the AHR. 1 Nicolas Berdyaev, The Russian Idea (New York, 1948), 193. 2 Lunacharsky was a philosopher, dramatist, and Bolshevik whom V. I. Lenin expelled from the Bolshevik Party in 1909 in consequence of both his attitude toward religion and socialism and his revolutionary extremism. Lunacharsky was received back into the party in 1917 and served as the Soviet Commissar of Education from 1918 to 1929. He died in 1933. A. V. Lunacharsky, Religiia i sotsializm, 2d edn., 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1908). 3 Valerii Khatiushin is a poet and publicist who regularly contributes to Russia's right-wing patriotic journals, particularly Molodaia Gvardiia. Khatiushin, "Esli poimem—spasemsia," Molodaia Gvardiia 3 (1995): 27–40. 4 This has been a common generalization ever since the revolution. It is dealt with most thoroughly in Berdyaev, Russian Idea; Nicolas Berdyaev, The Russian Revolution (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1961); and The Origin of Russian Communism (Ann Arbor, 1960). See also James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York, 1970); and Michael Barkun, Disaster and the Millennium (New Haven, Conn., 1974). 5 Khatiushin, "Esli poimem—spasemsia," 30, 33. 6 Khatiushin, "Esli poimem—spasemsia," 28, 29. 7 Khatiushin, "Esli poimem—spasemsia," 29. 8 Khatiushin, "Esli poimem—spasemsia," 32. The passage to which he refers is Rev. 8: 10–11. 9 Khatiushin, "Esli poimem—spasemsia," 33. 10 Lunacharsky, Religiia i sotsializm, 1: 8. 11 Lunacharsky, Religiia i sotsializm, 1: 184, 2: 61–62. 12 Lunacharsky, Religiia i sotsializm, 1: 186–87, 101–02. 13 A. V. Lunacharsky, "Budushchee religii," Obrazovanie 1 (1907): 22. 14 See Rev. 19 and 20. 15 For a discussion, see Michael J. St. Clair, "Early Christianity as a Millenarian Movement," in his Millenarian Movements in Historical Context (New York, 1992). 16 Indeed, in 431, a church council denounced the expectation of Jesus' imminent return as "an error and a fantasy." Yonina Talmon, "Millenarism," in The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, David L. Sills, ed. (New York, 1968), 350. 17 Norman Cohn proposes "to regard as 'millenarian' any religious movement inspired by the phantasy of a salvation which is to be (a) collective . . . ; (b) terrestrial . . . ; (c) imminent . . . ; (d) total, in the sense that it is to utterly transform life on earth . . . [and] (e) accomplished by agencies which are consciously regarded as supernatural." Cohn, "Medieval Millenarism: Its Bearing on the Comparative Study of Millenarian Movements," in Sylvia L. Thrupp, ed., Millennial Dreams in Action: Essays in Comparative Study (The Hague, 1962), 31. 18 "So it came about that multitudes of people acted out with fierce energy a shared fantasy which, though delusional, yet brought them such intense emotional relief that they could live only through it, and were perfectly willing both to kill and to die for it." Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, rev. and expanded edn. (New York, 1970), 87–88. 19 "A 'crisis cult' means any group reaction to crisis, chronic or acute, that is cultic. 'Crisis' is a deeply felt frustration or basic problem with which routine methods, secular or sacred, cannot cope . . . The 'cultic' is the indisposition to accept either disruptive feedback or the ego-critique of experience, but instead, supported by the wish-needs of fellow communicants, to indulge the appetite to believe. The term crisis cult basically includes any new 'sacred' attitude toward a set of beliefs; it excludes the pragmatic, revisionist, secular response that is tentative and relativistic." Weston La Barre, "Materials for a History of Sketches of Crisis Cults: A Bibliographic Essay," Current Anthropology 12 (February 1971): 11. 20 The notion of millenarianism as social aberrance (often with violent rhetoric if not violent action) is the understanding of the term that informs a recent collection, Thomas Robbins and Susan J. Palmer, eds., Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem: Contemporary Apocalyptic Movements (New York, 1997), even though one contributor, Catherine Wessinger, cautions against this view in "Millennialism with and without the Mayhem." See also Jeffrey Kaplan, Radical Religion in America: Millenarian Movements from the Far Right to the Children of Noah (Syracuse, N.Y., 1997). 21 E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (1959; New York, 1965); Christopher Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1971); Peter Worsley, The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of Cargo Cults in Melanesia, 2d augmented edn. (New York, 1968); Michael Adas, Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Movements against the European Colonial Order (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979); Vittorio Lanternari, The Religions of the Oppressed: A Study of Modern Messianic Cults (New York, 1965). 22 Alida C. Metcalf, "Millenarian Slaves? The Santidade de Jaguaripe and Slave Resistance in the Americas," AHR 104 (December 1999): 1531–59, 1532. 23 David Ownby, "Chinese Millenarian Traditions: The Formative Age," AHR 104 (December 1999): 1513–30. 24 Most relevant to this topic are J. L. Talmon, The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy (Boston, 1952); and Talmon, Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase (New York, 1960). 25 See Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago, 1952); Rush Welter, "The Idea of Progress in America," Journal of the History of Ideas 16 (June 1955). Most recently, Arthur P. Mendel has critically traced the millennial idea through the entire Western tradition. Mendel, Vision and Violence (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1992). 26 Ernest Lee Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia: A Study in the Background of the Idea of Progress (Berkeley, Calif., 1949), ix–x; see, for example, Clarke Garrett, Respectable Folly: Millenarians and the French Revolution in France and England (Baltimore, Md., 1975). A number of observers of U.S. millenarianism (cited below) take a similar positive view. 27 Perhaps the closest to this position has been Stephen E. Hanson, who has argued that Marx, Lenin, and Stalin believed that socialist revolution could "master time itself." Hanson, Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997). 28 Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Upper New York State, 1800–1850 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1950). Most millenarians cited in St. Clair, Millenarian Movements in Historical Context, and in Robbins and Palmer, Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem, are counter-cultural movements associated with some sort of social stress. 29 Brown pointed out, "It seems clear that millenarian faith in one form or another was entirely respectable socially and intellectually well into the nineteenth century. America's leading clergymen and college presidents subscribed to such doctrines." Ira V. Brown, "Watchers for the Second Coming: The Millenarian Tradition in America," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 39 (December 1952): 451. See also Avihu Zakai, "Theocracy in Massachusetts: The Puritan Universe of Sacred Imagination," Studies in the Literary Imagination 27 (Spring 1994): 23–31; Nathan O. Hatch, "The Origins of Civil Millennialism in America: New England Clergymen, War with France, and the Revolution," William and Mary Quarterly, ser. 3, 31 (July 1974): 407–30; Ruth H. Bloch, "The Social and Political Base of Millennial Literature in Late Eighteenth-Century America," American Quarterly 40 (September 1988): 378–96; John Mee, "Apocalypse and Ambivalence: The Politics of Millenarianism in the 1790s," South Atlantic Quarterly 95 (Summer 1996): 673. 30 It can, of course, be argued that the Puritans originated as a movement that was strongly counter-cultural in its rejection of contemporary English society. Nevertheless, by the time of the American Revolution, Puritans were fully "mainstream" in U.S. society. For a discussion of how a crisis cult became a hegemonic cultural force, see Jan Nederveen-Pieterse, "The History of a Metaphor: Christian Zionism and the Politics of Apocalypse," Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 75 (July–September 1991): 75–104. 31 Susan Juster, "Demagogues or Mystagogues? Gender and the Language of Prophecy in the Age of Democratic Revolutions," AHR 104 (December 1999): 1560–81, 1568. 32 Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's Millennial Role (Chicago, 1968); Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison, Wis., 1978); Cushing Strout, New Heavens, New Earth (New York, 1974). 33 Brown, "Watchers for the Second Coming," 457–58; Tuveson, Redeemer Nation, 212, vii–viii. 34 Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right (New York, 1995); Bercovitch, American Jeremiad. 35 Moreover, the millenarianism of ordinary Americans who have joined the Shakers, Millerites, Seventh-Day Adventists, or other mass millenarian organizations fit the "crisis cult" mentality very well. They should not be placed in the category of an "American" national tradition any more than Anabaptists should be a "German" tradition, or Ghost Dancers a "Sioux" tradition. Instead, it would be appropriate to apply Michael Barkun's criteria (see text below) and attribute their millenarianism simply to the availability of the millennial idea at a point when they were overcome by crisis. 36 Anthony D. Smith defines a nation as "a named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass, public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members." Smith, National Identity (Reno, Nev., 1991), 14. 37 What I set up here are Weberian "ideal-types" and not empirical descriptions of nations and states. In the real world, there are no "pure" nations or "pure" empires. England, for example, was a nation-state that built an empire. Even before they dissolved the Ottoman Empire, the ruling Turks exhibited a considerable sense of nationhood. Nor is the rhetoric of legitimation always consistent. For example, U.S. foreign policymakers advance two contradictory explanations for military intervention beyond their borders: compelling national-security interests (a nationalist justification) and self-sacrifice in support of international law and humanitarianism (an imperialist justification). Nevertheless, my point is that the idea and the logic of empire are quite the opposite of the idea and logic of nation. 38 U.S. Congress, Senate, Senator Beveridge of Indiana speaking for the Joint Resolution on the Philippine Islands, S.J. Res. 53, 56th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record 33, pt. 1 (January 9, 1900): 711; rpt. in Albert J. Beveridge, "Our Philippine Policy," in Beveridge, The Meaning of the Times and Other Speeches (1908; Freeport, N.Y., 1968), 84–85. 39 Vatro Murvar, "Messianism in Russia: Religious and Revolutionary," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 10 (Winter 1971): 299–300. 40 See, for example, Berdyaev, Origin of Russian Communism, 171. 41 James Billington concludes that "a brooding and apocalyptic mentality" played a key role in producing a cultural environment favorable to revolution. Billington, Icon and the Axe, 504. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal has also made major contributions to this idea. See Dmitri Sergeevich Merezhkovsky and the Silver Age: The Development of a Revolutionary Mentality (The Hague, 1975); and The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997). 42 The essential idea of "Moscow—Third Rome" is that Rome had lost its religious purity, Constantinople had fallen to the infidels, and only Moscow remained a sovereign and Orthodox capital. It was therefore understood to be the capital of that empire considered to be essential for protecting and promoting the universal Christian church. For an authoritative discussion, see Dimitri Stremooukhoff, "Moscow the Third Rome: Sources of the Doctrine," Speculum 28 (January 1953): 84–101. 43 Marshall Poe, "Moscow, the Third Rome": The Origins and Transformations of a Pivotal Moment (Washington, D.C., 1997), 11–12. 44 Talmon, Rise of Totalitarian Democracy, 253. 45 Billington, Icon and the Axe, 528–29. 46 Nicolas Zernov, Moscow the Third Rome (New York, 1937), 99. 47 Geoffrey Hosking, "The Russian National Myth Repudiated," in Hosking and George Schöpflin, eds., Myths and Nationhood (London, 1997). 48 Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, 286. 49 Barkun, Disaster and the Millennium, 186–87, 191. 50 For a review of the literature, see Laura Engelstein, "Paradigms, Pathologies, and Other Clues to Russian Spiritual Culture: Some Post-Soviet Thoughts," Slavic Review 57 (Winter 1998): 864–77. 51 Aleksandr Etkind, Khlyst: Sekty, literatura, i revoliutsia (Moscow, 1998); Rosenthal, Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, 398, 412. 52 Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, 281. 53 Graeme Gill, "The Mainsprings of Peasant Action in 1917," Soviet Studies 30 (January 1978): 63–86. 54 Allan K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army: The Old Army and the Soldier's Revolt (March–April 1917) (Princeton, N.J., 1980). 55 See David Mandel, The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power: From the July Days 1917 to July 1918 (New York, 1984); Diane Koenker, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1981); William G. Rosenberg and Diane P. Koenker, "The Limits of Formal Protest: Worker Activism and Social Polarization in Petrograd and Moscow, March to October 1917," AHR 92 (April 1987): 296–326; and Steve A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories (Cambridge, 1983). 56 La Barre, "Crisis Cults," 11. 57 Both Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York, 1989), and William Rosenberg, ed., Bolshevik Visions: First Phase of the Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1984), reveal the high hopes and utopian expectations of the revolutionary era without placing them in the category of "millenarian." As portrayed by Stites and Rosenberg, the Bolsheviks hoped to build a paradise; they didn't think it would arise through acts of magic. 58 Richard Pipes, "1917 and the Revisionists," The National Interest 31 (1993): 70. This approach characterizes not only Pipe's own recent works on the topic, The Russian Revolution (New York, 1990), and Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (New York, 1993), but also the works of a number of other notable scholars: John S. Curtiss, The Russian Revolutions of 1917 (Princeton, N.J., 1975); Walter Laqueur, The Fate of the Revolution: Interpretations of Soviet History from 1917 to the Present, rev. edn. (New York, 1987); Adam B. Ulam, The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia (New York, 1965). 59 Gregory S. Butler, "Visions of a Nation Transformed: Modernity and Ideology in Wilson's Political Thought," Journal of Church and State 39 (Winter 1997): 49. 60 Indeed, the similarities between the socialist revolutionary movement and religion have been noted by Marxists, themselves, as often as by their critics. Friedrich Engels, for example, wrote, "The history of early Christianity has notable points of resemblance with the modern working-class movement. Like the latter, Christianity was originally a movement of oppressed people: it first appeared as the religion of slaves and emancipated slaves, of poor people deprived of all rights, of peoples subjugated or dispersed by Rome. Both Christianity and the workers' socialism preach forthcoming salvation from bondage and misery; Christianity places this as a life beyond, after death, in heaven; socialism places it in this world, in a transformation of society." Quoted in Herbert Aptheker, "Marxism and Religion," in Aptheker, ed., Marxism and Christianity: A Symposium (New York, 1968), 30; from Friedrich Engels, "Zur Geschichte des Urchristenthums," Die Neue Zeit 13, band 1, no. 2 (1894): 4–13, 36–43. 61 Daniel B. Rowland, "Moscow—the Third Rome or the New Israel?" Russian Review 55 (October 1996): 591–614; Edward Keenan, "Muscovite Political Folkways," Russian Review 45 (April 1986): 138–48. 62 Poe, "Moscow, the Third Rome," 2, 10–11. 63 The most succinct and essential definition of nationalism states that "Nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent." Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983), 1. Empires, of course, encompass multiple "national units." 64 Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 397, xix. 65 Ladis K. D. Kristof, "The State-Idea, the National Idea and the Image of the Fatherland," Orbis 11 (Spring 1967): 244, 246. 66 Nicholas Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825–1855 (Berkeley, Calif., 1959), 124. 67 Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, Vol. 1, From Peter the Great to the Death of Nicholas I (Princeton, N.J., 1995), 385. 68 Nicholas Riasanovsky, Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles: A Study of Romantic Ideology (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), 180–81. 69 Quoted in Michael Cherniavsky, "'Holy Russia': A Study in the History of an Idea," AHR 63 (April 1958): 634; Riasanovsky, Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles, 206–07; Berdyaev, Russian Idea, 70. 70 Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton, N.J., 1985), 245. 71 As Stalin put it, the "new Russia" "transformed the Red Flag from a party banner into a State banner, and rallied around that banner the peoples of the Soviet republics in order to unite them into a single state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the prototype of the future World Soviet Socialist Republic." Joseph Stalin, Marxism and the National-Colonial Question: A Collection of Articles and Speeches (San Francisco, 1975), 199. 72 See, for example, Frederick C. Barghoorn, Soviet Russian Nationalism (New York, 1956); Adam Ulam, "Russian Nationalism," in Seweryn Bialer, ed., The Domestic Context of Soviet Foreign Policy (Boulder, Colo., 1981); and Alain Besançon, "Nationalism and Bolshevism in the USSR," in Robert Conquest, ed., The Last Empire: Nationality and the Soviet Future (Stanford, Calif., 1986). 73 Mikhail Agursky, Third Rome: National Bolshevism in the U.S.S.R. (Boulder, Colo., 1987), xv. 74 For a variety of interpretations of how this process occurred, see Ben Fowkes, The Disintegration of the Soviet Union: A Study in the Rise and Triumph of Nationalism (New York, 1997); Robert J. Kaiser, The Geography of Nationalism in Russia and the USSR (Princeton, N.J., 1994); Alexander J. Motyl, Sovietology, Rationality, Nationality: Coming to Grips with Nationalism in the USSR (New York, 1990); Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, Calif., 1993). 75 John B. Dunlop, "Russian Reactions to Solzhenitsyn's Brochure," Report on the USSR (December 14, 1990): 3–8. See also Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire, new postscript, 1995 (Princeton, N.J., 1993); and John Lowenhardt, The Reincarnation of Russia (Durham, N.C., 1995). 76 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals, Alexis Klimoff, trans. (New York, 1991). For an elaboration of the thesis that Solzhenitsyn was Russia's first nationalist, see my article "Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Russian Nationalism," Journal of Contemporary History 32 (July 1997): 321–37. 77 This is the predominant theme in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The "Russian Question" at the End of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1995). 78 Khatiushin, "Esli poimem—spasemsia," 38. 79 Not only does he refer to heavenly signs and portents, Khatiushin asserts that Satan has sent demons and biorobots to possess the souls of godless people, and that godless scientists, under the spell of demons, are turning people into zombies with the help of radio, television, and "the irradiation of people with psychotropic generators . . . where they live and work." Khatiushin, "Esli poimem—spasemsia," 31–32. 80 For a discussion of the prospects for this, see Geoffrey Hosking, "Can Russia Become a Nation-State?" Nations and Nationalism 4, no. 4 (1998): 449–62. 81 Solzhenitsyn has attracted few followers to his conception of Russian nationalism. The literature on Russian identity is still dominated by the imperial attitude that it is the duty of Russians to lead other peoples and to share with them the benefits of their civilization. A representative sample of the literature includes Iu. S. Kukushkin, ed., Russkii narod: Istoricheskaia sud'ba v XX veke (Moscow, 1993); Evgenii Troitskii, ed., Russkaia natsiia: Istoricheskoe proshloe i problemy vozrozhdeniia (Moscow, 1995); Troitskii, O russkoi idee: Ocherk teorii vozrozhdeniia russkoi natsii (Moscow, 1994); K. Kas'ianova, O russkom natsional'nom kharaktere (Moscow, 1994).

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