Walter Rodney: A People's Professor

By Curry Malott and Elgin Bailey

Republished from Liberation School.

In a recent book on the ongoing relevance of Walter Rodney’s work, Karim F. Hirji notes that, “as with scores of progressive intellectuals and activists of the past, the prevailing ideology functions to relegate Rodney into the deepest, almost unreachable, ravines of memory. A person who was widely known is now a nonentity, a stranger to the youth in Africa and the Caribbean” and the U.S. [1]. Rodney’s theoretical and practical contributions to the socialist movement warrant an ongoing engagement with his life story and major texts.

Rodney’s most recent, posthumously-published text, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World, offers an important perspective on the time period in which it was written and the internal position of the author. Rodney’s family worked with Robin Kelley in taking Walter’s extensive lecture notes on the Russian revolutionary era and forming them into a complete manuscript.

This essay, which complements our new study guide on The Russian Revolution, offers a brief overview of Rodney’s background historical context. Highlighting aspects of Rodney’s individual life demonstrates that his commitments were not just the result of his own individual experiences and conclusions, but were part of and emerged from the revolutionary crisis ripping through the world at the time. To better comprehend A View from the Third World, we turn to Groundings with My Brothers, which Rodney produced as a relatively new professor in Jamaica. In that book, Rodney reflects on the dialectical pedagogy he developed to make his academic labor part of the global movement against capitalist imperialism, which he also called the white power structure [2].

What is clear throughout Rodney’s work is the influence of the materialist insight that, while people make history, they cannot make it as they please, but it in the context of existing material conditions. Rather than start with abstract slogans or formulas, Rodney’s place of departure is an assessment of concrete conditions. For example, Rodney begins Groundings with a political assessment of the situation in Jamaica and he begins A View from the Third World with his analysis of the historical situation that gave way to Russia’s revolutionary era.

Raised in struggle

Walter Rodney was born March 23, 1942 into a working-class Guyanese family. According to Walter’s partner, Dr. Patricia Rodney, his parents introduced him to community activism at an early age. Growing up in Guyana in the 1950s, when the socialist movement was influential, “sociopolitical engagement was not uncommon among Guyanese youth” [3]. This was an incredibly exciting era to be a part of. It was a time of qualitative changes as the people of Guyana set out to build a whole new social and political system. “Walter and I, and our peers,” Patricia writes, “were strongly influenced by the political climate and the infectious spirit for independence that called and moved Guyanese of all generations to action” [4].

In contemporary U.S. society—a society that has been gripped by a deep reactionary counter-revolutionary force in response to the era of Walter Rodney’s generation—critical education tends to be viewed as something that can assist students in developing a critical consciousness. During the era that preceded the current one, when the colonized and oppressed world was in rebellion against colonialism and imperialist capitalism, it was the people, as Patricia Rodney alludes to above, who brought revolutionary commitments to education, not the other way around.

Walter Rodney was therefore one of countless students who took a sense of possibility with him to Queens College in Guyana. While at Queens College, Rodney became president of the historical society and deepened his interest in activism. In 1960, he won an Open Arts scholarship to the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica. Patricia notes that “it was as a student in Jamaica that Walter first felt the disconnect between his life on campus and the grassroots community that surrounded the university” [5]. Rodney then attended the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, earning a doctorate in history in 1966 at the age of 24.

While in London Rodney deepened his political commitments through a deep study of Marxism with a group of Caribbean students who would meet at the home of C. L. R. James on Friday evenings for hours on end.

Becoming a people’s history professor

Rodney accepted his first teaching position at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania in 1966, but only stayed a year. However, Rodney would return to Tanzania for five years in 1969. Vijay Prashad says that Tanzania at the time was at the “highpoint” of its “experiment with self-reliance and non-alignment, which was then called ‘African socialism’” [6].

Shortly after beginning teaching in Tanzania, “the radical students from across the region formed the University Students’ African Revolutionary Front” as a response to Tanzania’s president Dr. Julius Nyerere’s Arusha Declaration of 1967, which called for a more direct move to socialism [7]. Nyerere was the leader of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), one of the post-WWII independence movements under British-controlled Tanganyika. Support for TANU grew and by 1960 the first elections were planned for the East African country. On December 9, 1961, Tanganyika became an independent republic and changed its name to Tanzania. In 1969, C. L. R. James concluded that, as a result of these developments, Tanzania stood “as one of the foremost political phenomena of the twentieth century” [8].

James specifically points to Nyerere’s focus on rethinking secondary and higher education as Tanzania’s “most revolutionary change of all…in order to fit the children and youth…for the new society which the government…seeks to build” [9]. Many of the students from across the continent Rodney encountered at the University of Dar es Salaam brought transformative, revolutionary determination, optimism, and organizational capacities with them. As a product himself of this revolutionary era, Rodney was well positioned to not just learn from, but contribute to, the radical student movement.

In 1967, Rodney was offered a position as a history professor in Jamaica at the University of the West Indies (UWI), where his contributions flourished. As a professor in Jamaica, Rodney was “torn by the lack of connection between academia and the working class” and having “a strong desire to bridge these worlds” [10]. It is fitting then that “unlike other professors at UWI, he chose to live with his young family outside the insular university compound housing” [11]. Rodney continued to use his position as a university professor to untether his academic labor (e.g., writing and teaching) from the white power structure of bourgeois state forces to contribute to the liberation struggles of the oppressed. Refusing to put the narrow self-interest of his academic position before the broader interests of the working class, Rodney’s commitment to revolution represents not only a recurring theme throughout his work (including A View from the Third World) but of the broader liberatory atmosphere of the times.

Rodney developed a practice for bridging the gap between academia and the working class called groundings. Groundings are a dialectical process of dialogue and exchange aimed at building the revolutionary movement. Rodney saw his studies, travels, and experiences as contributions to groundings, which he shared informally in working-class public spaces and privately through formal lectures.

Groundings with My Brothers is a collection of lectures developed for their practical relevance. These lectures include tidbits of reflections on practice and pedagogy, but mostly include the content that contributed to the process of groundings. In offering a class analysis of Jamaica and various contributions to the Black Power movement, Rodney situates the Soviet example within this broad framework. His interest in revolutionary Russia was part of this larger project of charting “a new direction for Black Studies and African studies” [12]. As he writes in the second essay in Groundings:

Since 1911, white power has been slowly reduced. The Russian Revolution put an end to Russian imperialism in the Far East, and the Chinese Revolution, by 1949, had emancipated the world’s largest single ethnic group from the white power complex. The rest of Asia, Africa and Latin America (with minor exceptions such as North Korea, North Vietnam and Cuba) have remained within the white power network to this day. We live in a section of the world under white domination—the imperialist world. The Russians are white and have power, but they are not a colonial power oppressing black peoples. The white power which is our enemy is that which is exercised over black peoples, irrespective of which group is in the majority and irrespective of whether the particular country belonged originally to whites or blacks [13].

For Rodney, the Russian Revolution represented the first major victory in the global movement against racist capitalism and imperialism, which he experienced in various forms as a young person in Guyana and as an adult in Tanzania. Since capitalism is essentially a globally interconnected system, all progressive movements in the capitalist era are also related to and connected with others, while unavoidably maintaining their context-specific uniqueness. Beyond the larger historical interconnections of popular uprisings in the capitalist era, Rodney draws parallels between the experiences of poor peasants in tsarist Russia and the formerly enslaved of the Third World. The practical lessons gleaned from these connections, as highlighted below, are the raw materials for his groundings.

The Third World’s perspective

Reflecting on his own position as a professor, Rodney asks if “people like us here at the university” will follow the example of Cuba and join the Soviet and Chinese-led struggle against white power, against capitalism/imperialism? Even though most who have studied at the University of the West Indies are Black, reasons Rodney, “we are undeniably part of the white imperialist system” and “a few are actively pro-imperialist” and therefore “have no confidence in anything that is not white.” Even if the professoriate is not actively and openly anti-Black but still “say nothing against the system…we are acquiescing in the exploitation of our brethren” [14]. This silence, Rodney points out, is secured through an individualistic approach to progress, displacing the long tradition of collective struggle. As a result, “this has recruited us into their ranks and deprived the [B]lack masses of articulate leadership.” Part of the answer to the question, what is to be done is for Rodney, “Black Power in the West Indies” which “aim[s] at transforming the intelligentsia into the servants of the [B]lack masses” [15].

Like his other works, Rodney’s approach in A View from the Third World is an example of what commitments to Black liberation looked like in practice. In the Foreword to Rodney’s first posthumously published book, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905, George Lamming offers some crucial insights into the practical lessons Rodney saw in past movements, relevant to our understanding of his approach in A View from the Third World: “every struggle planted a seed of creative disruption and aided the process that released new social forces” [16].

Groundings and the Russian Revolution

Revolutionary Russia was an important source of hope in Rodney’s groundings. A View from the Third World deepens the practical relevance of his groundings on the subject by offering a thorough rebuttal and exposure of bourgeois propaganda aimed at discrediting the Russian Revolution as authoritarian, anti-democratic, and so on. Rodney also speaks to the practicality of revolution by engaging the questions of organization, assessment, and tactics and by examining, for example, the differences between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Finally, while demonstrating the correctness of the Bolsheviks, Rodney does not shy away from surfacing their mistakes, highlighting the insights their successes and mistakes offer contemporary organizers.

Rodney engages these tasks through the method of historiography. A View from the Third World compares and contrasts bourgeois, Soviet, and independent socialist writings on the Russian revolutionary era with an eye toward underscoring relevant lessons for the liberation struggles of his time and place. For example, in the first chapter, Rodney points to the international context to situate his “dialectical materialist” approach to historiography noting that, “there is every reason to be suspicious of the Western European (and American) view of the Soviet Revolution, and there is every reason to seek an African view” [17]. Rodney argues for the necessity of historical accounts that advance the view of the oppressed, of those systematically underdeveloped by the capitalist-imperialist system from which Russia was the first to make a break. In developing this view, he addresses various accusations that the Russian revolutionary era was anti-democratic or authoritarian.

Rodney describes many of the critiques against the Soviet Union, from multiple political positions, as idealist, deterministic, or stageist, because they do not deal with the concrete, materialist balance of class forces but rather with abstract concepts of the ideal, such as predetermined stages of development. Rodney engages the question of Marx and Engels’ predictions regarding where socialism would first emerge as a point mobilized to discredit either Marx and Engels or to claim the Russian revolution was a departure from Marxism.

Marx and Engels’ predictions of the socialist future—which were far and few in between—were informed by dialectical or historical materialism rather than idealism, since they were based on the information they had available rather than on predetermined, universal stages of development. Rodney writes that “historical or dialectical materialism is a method that can be applied to different situations to give different answers. Marx’s comments on Western Europe were based on a thoroughly comprehensive study of the evidence that he had before him… Hence to say anything about Russia would also require close study of what was going on in Russia” [18].

The practical relevance of Rodney’s groundings work to build a mass movement is readily apparent here: without an assessment of concrete conditions, organizers are left with irrelevant and/or incorrect abstractions and formulas not likely to gain much traction. Driving home the practical implications of this point for organizers, Rodney is instructive:

Marxism is not a finished and complete product contained in a given number of texts… Marxism is a method and a worldview. Neither Marx nor Engels believed their interpretations were unassailable given the limited amount of scientific and accurate data available to them, as well as their own limitations. Furthermore, new situations arising after their time required new analysis. This is where Lenin made his major contributions” [19].

From questions of spontaneity in the February Revolution to the issue of dissolving the Constituent Assembly in the October Revolution, Rodney makes a strong case for supporting the Russian Revolution and its Bolshevik leadership. He refutes the claim that the U.S., for example, was more democratic than the Soviet Union because it had two major parties. The difference, Rodney points out, is that the U.S. had a bourgeois democracy where the major parties represented the interest of the capitalist class, while the Soviet Union had a proletarian democracy whose ruling party was responsible to–and largely emerged from–the working class and peasantry.

Rodney also addresses the major debates within the international socialist movement. For one example, he foregrounds the international significance of the harsh condemnation of the Bolsheviks by the German socialist Karl Kautsky, “who had known both Marx and Engels since his youth, and after their deaths he became their principal literary executor” [20]. Kautsky argued that Marx’s conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat as proletarian democracy was not yet possible in Russia since the proletariat were not the majority. Consequently, Kautsky concluded that the Bolsheviks’ seizure of state power represented an anti-democratic dictatorship that imposed its will on the peasantry. Rodney summarizes Lenin’s response to Kautsky, setting the record straight that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the political domination of the exploited classes over their former exploiting ones.

Groundings against reactionary academia

Rodney exposes the counter-revolutionary role of academia as one of the primary locations producing anti-Soviet propaganda. Explaining the hegemony or dominance of the bourgeois approach to revolutionary Russia and history more generally, he interrogates “the university institutions that are responsible for the vast majority of research and publications in the field” as “an important element in the superstructure.” Elite universities exist to “serve the interests of the capitalist or bourgeois class” [21]. At the individual level, for example, “the conservative historians always expose themselves by their contemptuous attitude toward the working people” [22].

Even more explicitly exposing the role of universities in serving the larger interests of the bourgeoisie, Rodney points to a 1957 publication by R.N. Carew Hunt, who was “widely believed to be a British intelligence agent” parading as a “scholar and authority on the Soviet Union” [23]. Beyond individual professors, Rodney implicates entire university projects such as Stanford University’s Hoover Institution for War and Peace, which “is notorious for its connections with the CIA, the Pentagon and the State Department” [24].

Using himself as an example to deepen the practical relevance of his critique, Rodney rhetorically asks, “what is my position? What is the position of all of us because we fall into the category of the black West Indian intellectual, a privilege in our society? What do we do with that privilege? The traditional pattern is that we join the establishment…How do we break out of this…captivity” [25]. He offers three suggestions for academics: 1) to confront pro-imperialist and racist knowledge production; 2) to challenge the idea that racial harmony defines our “post-racial society” by moving beyond the intellectual division of labor in bourgeois academies; and 3) to connect with the masses of Black working and poor people.

Expanding on these directives, Rodney makes an important pedagogical statement that, in challenging the many myths of white supremacist imperialism in the process of connecting with the masses, “you do not have to teach them anything. You just have to say it, and they will add something to what you are saying” [26]. As a result of engaging the Jamaican working class as subjects with valuable knowledge, “Rodney encountered a Black Power movement in Jamaica that was already well underway” [27]. But it was a two-way street, and what Rodney contributed was “a framework that critically examined the impact of slavery and colonialism and that gave a foundation for interpreting the current situation of Black and oppressed peoples in these newly independent countries, who continued to be marginalized” [28]. In the Introduction to A View from the Third World, Robin Kelley affirms this contention, writing that “the way Rodney engaged society as a university lecturer was considered ‘strange’ and even dangerous that it was interpreted as a challenge to the establishment” [29]. Outlining what this pedagogy, this practice, looked like in motion, in action, Rodney elaborates:

“I lectured at the university, outside of the classroom that is. I had public lectures, I talked about Black Power, and then I left there, I went from the campus. I was prepared to go anywhere that any group of [B]lack people were prepared to sit down to talk and listen. Because that is Black Power, that is one of the elements, a sitting-down together to reason, to ‘ground’ as the brothers say. We have to ‘ground together.’…[T]his…must have puzzled the Jamaican government. I must be mad, surely; a man we are giving a job, we are giving status, what is he doing with these guys, [people they call] ‘criminals and hooligans’[?]…I was trying to contribute something. I was trying to contribute my experience in  , in reading, my analysis; and I was also gaining, as I will indicate” [29].

Rodney’s groundings emerged from this powerful combination of research and teaching with his eagerness to learn from, and be taught by, those looked down on by mainstream academia. Committed to the revolutionary fervor of the times, the resulting perception and treatment of Rodney as a threat to the establishment was not an effective deterrent. Rodney’s remarkable and unyielding achievements are among the fruits of the post-WWII revolutionary crisis. As the crisis of capitalism and of the white power structure deepens, so too does the influence of Rodney’s life and legacy.

Conclusion

By the age of 38, Rodney had become part of the same “tradition of intellectual leadership among Africans and people of African descent in the Americas” that includes “Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. DuBois, George Padmore and C. L. R. James” [30]. It is important to note that for Rodney, scholarship was not simply an academic exercise but one central to making the academy relevant to the liberation of the oppressed. Jamaican professor Verene A. Shepherd argues that it is Rodney’s pedagogy that is the model for the activist academic, a model that remains relevant because activists in academia are still rare and still desperately needed [31].

A recurring theme throughout not only A View from the Third World, but throughout all of Rodney’s work, is  Marx and Engels’ caution against “applying the dialectic mechanically” because the specific historical development of the balance of competing class interests does not proceed in predetermined, inevitable ways, and that what people do matters [32].

The Liberation School study guide for A View from the Third World will help today’s organizers and activists do just that.

References

[1] Karim F. Hirji, The Enduring Relevance of Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (New York: Daraja Press, 2017), xi.
[2] For a more in-depth analysis of Rodney’s pedagogy see Jesse Benjamin and Devyn Springer, “Groundings: A Revolutionary Pan-African Pedagogy for Guerilla Intellectuals,” in Keywords in Radical Philosophy and Education: Common Concepts for Contemporary Movements, ed. D. Ford, (Boston: Brill, 2019), 210-225. For more on Rodney’s life, legacy, and pedagogy, see Devyn Springer and Derek Ford, “Walter Rodney’s Revolutionary Praxis: An Interview with Devyn Springer,” Liberation School, 12 August 2021. Available here.
[3] Patricia Rodney, “Living the Groundings–A Personal Context,” in W. Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers, ed. A.T Rodney and J. Benjamin (New York: Verso, 2019), 77-85, 77.
[4] Ibid., 77-78.
[5] Ibid., 78.
[6] Vijay Prashad, “Foreword,” in W. Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World (New York: Verso, 2018), vii-xiii, viii.
[7] Ibid., viii.
[8] C.L.R. James, A History of Pan-African Revolt (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012), 118.
[9] Ibid., 128.
[10] Rodney, “Living the Groundings,” 80.
[11] Robin D. G. Kelley, “Introduction,” in W. Rodney, The Russian Revolution, xix-lxxiii, xxviii.
[12] Carole Boyce Davies, “Introduction: Re-grounding the Intellectual-Activist Model of Walter Rodney,” in W. Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers, xi-xxii, xvi.
[13] Walter Rodney, Groundings with My Brothers (New York: Verso, 1969/2019), 11.
[14] Ibid., 28.
[15] Ibid., 29.
[16] George Lamming, “Foreword,” in Walter Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905 (Kingston, Jamaica: Heinemann, 1981), xvii-xxv, xix.
[17] Walter Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World, (New York: Verso, 2018), 3.
[18] Ibid., 50.
[19] Ibid., 150.
[20] Ibid., 105.
[21] Ibid., 12.
[22] Ibid., 15.
[23] Ibid., 14.
[24] Ibid., 18. For a different example of the same line of inquiry, see Gabriel Rockhill, “The CIA & the Frankfurt School’s Anti-Communism,” Monthly Review, 27 June 2022. Available here.
[25] Rodney, Groundings with My Brothers, 66.
[26] Ibid., 67.
[27] Kelley, “Introduction,” xxviii.
[28] Ibid., xxviii.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Lamming, “Foreword,” Rodney, xvii.
[31] Verene A. Shepherd, “The Continued Relevance of Rodney’s Groundings,” In W. Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers, 101-108.
[32] Rodney, A View from the Third World, 170.

Religion and the Russian Revolution

By Sonia Calista

In his 1905 article "Socialism and Religion", Lenin explained the Social Democratic Labour Party's attitude towards religion in general and the Russian Orthodox Church in particular. Noting the proletarianization and resulting secularization of the urban workforce in pre-revolutionary Russia, he wrote:

The modern class-conscious worker, reared by large-scale factory industry and enlightened by urban life, contemptuously casts aside religious prejudices, leaves heaven to the priests and bourgeois bigots, and tries to win a better life for himself here on earth. The proletariat of today takes the side of socialism, which enlists science in the battle against the fog of religion, and frees the workers from their belief in life after death by welding them together to fight in the present for a better life on earth.[1]

Lenin lays out a dichotomous proposition for the proletariat and the party: the choice to struggle either for heaven or earth; one must accept materialism and "scientific socialism" or religion. Many within the church's hierarchy and among the parish clergy similarly framed these two competing worldviews as incompatible. Naturally, these churchmen rejected materialism and socialism, favoring secular and religious traditionalism and the promotion of charity while typically stopping short of endorsing structural reforms to address urban exploitation or solve the problems of land reform that had plagued Russia for decades.

Yet, in the years leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917, urban clergy, orientated towards the workers' struggle sought to bridge the divide between these two choices. For these urban clergy of pre-revolutionary Russia, the world and its material conditions could be transformed by a social justice oriented Gospel. After the revolution, these Russian clergymen found themselves in an uneasy alliance with the new Soviet authorities, and by 1922 these "renovationist" clergy had organized themselves into the Живая Церковь, or "Living Church"- a church organization that would be controlled in large part by Soviet authorities in a war to undermine and destroy the traditionalist and usually politically reactionary Russian Orthodox Church from which it had sprung. These Living Church clergy became participants in a war against tradition and, unwittingly, against all varieties of religious belief and practice. The Living Church was eventually rejected as a pseudo-Church by most ordinary believers and the Soviet assault on religion, broadly speaking, intensified. Though the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church was deeply wedded to an oppressive, autocratic state, and was thus understandably challenged by Soviet rule, religious belief in general need not have borne the brunt of militant atheism. This is especially true in light of recent research that explores the role of urban clergy intent on reform and social uplift. Not only did the policy of militant atheism undermine basic religious freedoms, it was a poorly conceived political strategy, turning large swaths of the peasantry into enemies, and ultimately doing little to advance the goals of the revolution.

Context

To understand the position of the Russian Orthodox Church in the early 20th century one must look back to the secular and religious reforms of the 18th and 19th centuries. In the eighteenth century Russia underwent a dramatic transformation that resulted in the formation of the Imperial Russian state. On the foundations laid by Peter the Great, eighteenth century Russia moved from the traditional and culturally guarded world of old Muscovy to a more secular and westernized modern state. Naturally, the Russian Orthodox Church, the centerpiece of Russian spiritual and cultural life, was affected by these changes.

The abolition of the Orthodox Patriarchate in 1721 and its replacement by a more tightly controlled Synod based on existing Swedish and Prussian models worked to restrict the Church's autonomy. Peter took another blow at the Church's independence by placing it on a state budget and confiscating its lands, thereby limiting its economic autonomy and power. As a result, ecclesiastical authority became more subservient to the will of the state. It is within this context of increased rigidity that the Church functioned, with the results "trickling down" to the clergy.

As a result of Peter's reforms the clergy, once solely responsible for service and obedience to the Church, were forced to become servants of the state on economic, legal, and ethical levels. The Petrine state demanded service from all groups within society according to their particular station. Since Peter did not view the clergy as a social group, but another service order, clergy came to lose rights previously held in old Muscovy. The influence of the state upon the Church as well as the clergy's own desire to protect and provide for their own, transformed the white clergy (i.e non-monastic parish clergy), "into a clerical estate-caste"[2]. A combination of state service obligations, tax status, juridical status, mixed with old cultural trappings and ways of thinking eighteenth century clergy existed, according to historian Gregory Freeze, in a closed sub-culture separate from mainstream society. The clergy found themselves on one side faced with Petrine reforms coming down from above while on the other faced the will of their parishioners. Freeze alludes to the idea that this caste-like but non-culturally cohesive group of clergy was rendered basically ineffectual to "check the whims of landlords, soften the crunch of serfdom, or even hold the stormy peasants in pious submission". [3] This weakness, Freeze suggests, allowed for revolutionary sentiment to foment in the century to follow.

In 1722, a year after the abolition of the Patriarchate, Peter forced clergy to reveal any subversive information that had been confessed by a penitent as well as to swear allegiance to the tsar and state's interests. The relationship between priest and bishop also underwent a change in the eighteenth century. The main catalyst for this change was the bishop's subordination to the Synod that restricted the autonomy the bishop formerly enjoyed. The Synod took steps to standardize the relationship of priest and bishop as they tried to create uniformity and regularity in their bishop's practices. "The Church", Freeze writes, "internalized the state's model of bureaucratization". As a result of this strengthening of administrative ability, the bishop was able to exert more control upon the actions of priests at the parish level. Part of this control existed in the bishop's demand that more sermons be given by priests in order to combat heresy and to increase the knowledge of the "simple minded" parishioners. In an effort to raise the status of the clergy by creating an educated clerical class, Petrine reforms called for the building of seminaries and compulsory religious education for potential clerics. From the point of view of the Church hierarchy the seminary would come to serve three major purposes. First, it could train priests to perform services better. The seminary would also serve the function of teaching priests Orthodox theology and by doing so aid in the fight against Old Belief and superstition. The seminary would also serve the Church by creating more educated candidates to take high-ranking positions within the Church.

Further isolation of the "clerical estate" occurred as a result of a weakening of the bond between clergy and parish community during the eighteenth century. In pre-Petrine Russia the parish stood as an autonomous cultural and commercial center within the community with parishioners exerting great control over the life of the parish. The reorganization of parishes according to lines drawn up by bishops, Freeze suggests, resulted in a loss of a sense of community. Contributing to the breakdown between clergy and parish community was Peter's demand that priests reveal anti-state confessions and read state laws in the church. This "spying for the police imposed on the 'servants of God'"[4] is what Lenin criticizes in his 1905 tract "Socialism and Religion". After the Petrine reforms, even if the Church had "internalized" models of state bureaucratization, the alliance between state and Church was indeed strong, and remained so for the next two centuries.

Eve of the Revolution

At the time of the Great Reforms of the 1860s the caste-like nature of the clerical estate was challenged. In 1867, the clerical estate was abolished, and the church schools were opened to people of all classes. This opened the door for believers to pursue a genuine religious calling. Additionally the monastics and bishops, who had often harbored contemptuous attitudes towards a parish clergy they saw as ignorant, backwards, and drunken, began to have their authority challenged by the initiatives of the less powerful parish or "white" clergy who had deeper ties to the people. Between 1860 and 1890 parish priests began to preach more and more on moral issues, becoming true "pastors", not mere "servers" administering the sacraments. Extra-liturgical preaching, or beseda, were created, which consisted of open discussions of faith - initiated in large part as a response to a similar contemporaneous Catholic initiative. In time, secular philanthropists, clergy, and the laity began working together for the alleviation of poverty and social uplift.[5] Russian Orthodox thinkers began to argue more forcefully that the Church had a greater responsibility to society, and that it should place greater emphasis on leading believers towards building a new society based on the gospel and its principles- principles like justice, mercy, and charity. After the Revolution of 1905 many of St. Petersburg's parish clergy, to the chagrin of their more moderate brother priests, began to intensify this push for reform and the social application of gospel principles. In this context, Lenin drew a line in the sand, making something of an appeal to the more reform-minded and sometimes radical clergy:

However abject, however ignorant Russian Orthodox clergymen may have been, even they have now been awakened by the thunder of the downfall of the old, medieval order in Russia. Even they are joining in the demand for freedom, are protesting against bureaucratic practices and officialism, against the spying for the police imposed on the "servants of God". We socialists must lend this movement our support, carrying the demands of honest and sincere members of the clergy to their conclusion, making them stick to their words about freedom, demanding that they should resolutely break all ties between religion and the police. Either you are sincere, in which case you must stand for the complete separation of Church and State and of School and Church, for religion to be declared wholly and absolutely a private affair. Or you do not accept these consistent demands for freedom, in which case you evidently are still held captive by the traditions of the inquisition, in which case you evidently still cling to your cozy government jobs and government-derived incomes, in which case you evidently do not believe in the spiritual power of your weapon and continue to take bribes from the state. And in that case the class-conscious workers of all Russia declare merciless war on you. [6]

These "awakened" clergy, as Lenin described them, leaned towards socialism as early as 1905 when a group of thirty-two parish priests joined with lay Christian socialists to propose reforms that included the separation of church and state, democratic church administration, a move to the Gregorian calendar (instead of the Julian), and the use of the vernacular (instead of archaic Church Slavonic) for church services. [7] Hailing primarily from St. Petersburg, these highly educated priests typically studied at the St. Petersburg Ecclesiastical Academy and had regular contact with other students and intellectuals pursuing secular careers. Defying the stereotype of the backwards, drunken, uneducated rural priest with no religious vocation, these priests were well equipped to grapple with Russia's most pressing problems. Moving beyond simply performing liturgical rites, they saw their mission as deeply connected to the world around them. In this vein, these priests created the Society for Moral-Religious Enlightenment, in which they developed an Earth-centered Social Gospel message for late Imperial Russia- a message not dissimilar to the one promulgated by their contemporary in America, Walter Rauschenbusch, whose 1907 Christianity and the Social Crisis conjured up the voices of the Old Testament prophets to critique American capitalism.

The most prominent of these renovationist clergy was Alexander Vvedenskii, who attributed the decline of the Church to reactionary clergy and the Church's rejection of science. His goal was to renew the church in order to correct the causes of clerical conservatism. On becoming a priest in 1914 Vvedenskii immediately began implementing liturgical innovations that, he hoped, would enliven parish life through greater inclusion of the laity in church services. Similarly, Boiarskii, a priest and close friend of Vvedenskii, took an interest in the plight of factory workers and became more radical- eventually accepting a kind of fusion of Christian morality and the ideals of the burgeoning revolutionary movements. The renovationists made some advances after the abdication of the Tsar when Vladimir Lvov became the chief procurator and purged a number of conservative bishops from the Church, laying the groundwork for a long awaited church council that would save the Church from the stagnation and backwardness brought on by the Petrine reforms of the 18th century. In March 1917, the reforming and and radical clergy of St. Petersburg created the Union of Democratic Clergy and Laity- an organization that was socialist in character, opposed the restoration of the monarchy, and advocated for the separation of Church and state. [8]

From the fall of the provisional government in February 1917 the renovationists remained in a kind of limbo. Long awaited Church reforms had not come quickly enough and the future of the Church, so intimately linked to the state, was uncertain. It was not until after the October Revolution that the renovationists, in the form of the Living Church, would find their place in the new Soviet society. The Bolsheviks were initially reluctant to take the renovationists on as partners, but in 1921 the Soviet government sought to use the renovationists as a wedge against what they considered to be a reactionary official Orthodox Church.

The 1921 famine created a pretext for an attack on the Church. The Bolsheviks confiscated Church valuables and liturgical items containing precious metals and jewels were seized from the churches and monasteries and sold in order to mitigate the effects of the famine. This confiscation of wealth weakened the Church and, by 1922, helped prepare a path for Soviet sponsored renovationist control of the Church. The Bolsheviks' goal was not to present an alternative vision for religion in Russia, but to divide and destroy the Church in its entirety. The renovationists then established their own supreme Church Administration to replace the former Church administration; however, lay believers saw the renovationists as traitors who had displaced legitimate Church authority, including the authority of the much loved Church leader Patriarch Tikhon, who had been accused of sabotage and put under house arrest in Donskoy Monastery during the famine.[9] At the first council of the Living Church in 1922 the goal was was to remove reactionary leaders, close monasteries, and to allow bishops to marry- goals of a number of progressive Church reformers before the revolution. Living Church hierarchs enlisted the help of the state to institute these measures because much of the Church opposed them. At this point splintering occurred among the renovationists themselves, some of whom thought the reforms were too radical. In 1923 Patriach Tikhon was released from house arrest and was deposed by a council of the Living Church; however, the majority of the laity flocked back to Tikhon, rejecting the decrees of the Living Church. By then the Living Church's short stint as leader of Russian ecclesiastic life was over. Caught between the hatred of much of the laity and the suspicions of the new Soviet authorities, they were left with no support.

Following the downfall of the Living Church, the new Soviet government ramped up its persecution of religious activity. The 1929 Religious Laws forbid all manner of Church societies and Bible study, and relegated churches to the performance of rituals. By 1930 all monasteries were shut down. This led to an underground network of believers who met secretly to pray and, in some cases, continue living as monks and nuns "in the world". In the years that followed it became professional and social suicide to be seen entering a place of worship.

These attacks would, in part, cost the revolution the support of large segments of the peasantry during Stalin's drive for forced collectivization who, rather than viewing the Soviet authorities as liberators, would see them in nearly apocalyptic terms- as godless militants, intent on destroying their cherished traditional culture. The peasants of Ukraine, the Volga, the Northern Caucasus, and other areas resisted Stalin's collectivization policies, uniting as a class- the village against the state- to defend their traditions and livelihoods. These peasants understood the state's incursions not as economic policy, but as a "culture war" leveled by an anti-Christian conquering power. After the treatment of the Church in the first decade after the revolution, the traditionally religious peasantry had reasons to be suspicious. And while the Bolsheviks' stated aim was an end to the role of the exploitative Kulaks, they were also intent on eradicating the culture and local economies of the "pre-modern" peasantry. [10] Rumors of a return to serfdom swept the countryside, along with tales of slaughtered peasants, and fear of the beginnings of the reign of the antichrist. The peasants, rightly, equated communism with atheism, and responded accordingly. Collectivization efforts were met with forms of agricultural luddism- the destruction of crops, livestock, and machines, culminating in the March Fever of 1930, a mass peasant uprising. By the late 1930s the collective farm had won out and resistance took new, subtler forms- refusal to work, sabotage, and laziness. [11]

One wonders if a different approach to the "problem" of religion in Russia- and more specifically to the reactionary character of the Russian Orthodox Church- could have led to a different kind of Soviet state. While many Church leaders were staunch monarchists [12], and Russian Orthodoxy generally served as a bulwark against socialist conceptions of the state and morality, other progressive and even revolutionary minded clergy and laity shared common goals with socialist revolutionaries by 1917. Perhaps a more organic revolutionary process could have unfolded if religious sentiment was understood as an ally on the road to socialism. Instead, traditional structures of religious life were upended and religious life was dogmatically understood as antithetical to Marxism. Yet, focusing on the material origins of religious feeling, Lenin wrote that: "The combating of religion … must be linked up with the concrete practice of the class movement, which aims at eliminating the social roots of religion."[13]

He continues:

No educational book can eradicate religion from the minds of masses who are crushed by capitalist hard labour, and who are at the mercy of the blind destructive forces of capitalism, until those masses themselves learn to fight this root of religion, fight the rule of capital in all its forms, in a united, organised, planned and conscious way.[14]

If material conditions and exploitation are the rotten roots that give rise to religion, then these roots must first be addressed. The continued existence of religious feeling in "really existing" socialist states presents an interesting problem for the materialist who expects the demise of religion once the conditions that "produce" religion are "remedied". In a similar vein, Marx wrote that, "religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions."[15] If religion is the "sigh of the oppressed", then the Marxist should not look to critique religion on ideological grounds, but to address the roots of oppression that give rise to religious feeling. But what if after the revolution people continue to "sigh"?

In their firm faith in dialectical materialism, the Bolsheviks believed that the establishment of the socialist state would, in time, give way to the "withering away" of religion. Perhaps it was this firm conviction (one might say dogmatism) that led them to opportunistically divide and conquer not just the reactionary elements in the Orthodox Church, but to attack all expression of religious faith and feeling, as if the two were one and the same. But perhaps no amount of material progress will quell the urge to answer life's ultimate questions: Why am I here? What is the purpose of life? Do my loved ones live on after they die? Why am I inspired by beauty and why do I feel, at times, like I was made for another world? Perhaps the fact that this spiritual yearning pre-dates class society is a sign that it is, to use a phrase generally maligned on the left, elemental to "human nature" and that it cannot be uprooted en masse, nor should it be if we are to respect human dignity.

The Soviet state, both under Lenin and Stalin, did not wipe out religious sentiment - it simply drove its expression underground and, when advantageous, channeled it for the state's purposes, both in the form of a tightly controlled patriarchate under Stalin and subsequent Party leaders, and when the state needed to comfort and inspire the nation. Eleven days after Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin spoke to the people of Russia. After addressing the crowd with the customary greeting of "comrades", his language shifted. For the first time he employed language that would have been familiar and comforting to many, but seemed, in this instance, out of place. He addressed the people not just as "comrades", but as "brothers and sisters". This form of intimate address was the language of the Church- the language of the opening greetings of a prepared sermon.

Notes

[1] Vladimir Lenin, "Socialism and Religion," Marxists Internet Archive, December 3, 1905, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/dec/03.htm.

[2] Gregory Freeze, The Russian Levites (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1977), 218.

[3] Ibid., 222.

[4] Lenin, "Socialism and Religion".

[5] Jennifer Hedda, His Kingdom Come (Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008), 62.

[6] Lenin, "Socialism and Religion".

[7] Edward E. Roslof, Red Priests: Renovation, Russian Orthodoxy, and Revolution, 1905-1946 (Indiana: Indiana University Press: 2002), 7.

[8] Roslof, Red Priests.

[9] Ibid.

[10] See Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press), 1996.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Indeed, a number of leading bishops fled Russia during the Civil War and established the monarchist Russian Orthodox Church in Exile which broke off communication and liturgical concelebration, on principle, with the Russian Church throughout the Soviet period.

[13] Vladimir Lenin, "The Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion," Marxists Internet Archive, May, 1909, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1909/may/13.htm.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Karl Marx, "A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," Marxists Internet Archive, January 1844, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm .