Revolution and Salvation

Abstract

The suspicion that a theological framework informs the leftist revolutionary projects was used to denounce them as crypto religious movements with otherworldly objectives. Evidence from the protocols recorded by Swetlana Alexijewitsch suggests that the post-soviet experience is indeed characterized by a feeling of lost faith in some transcendent goal. I argue that the Russian revolution inherited theological conceptions from the Hegelian concept of history. Contrary to widespread diagnosis, however, such a heritage draws more on the political expertise present in the theological tradition than establishing a transcendent knowledge about the course of history. Hegel and the Marxists knew rather well that an historical project such as a revolution presupposes a goal that is present in the actual world but aims at the profound transformation of this very actuality. Ideas as freedom and equality evoke the vision of a world that is delivered from domination and exploitation. As the religious movements before them, the revolutionaries had to create a community that was devoted to their historical aim in order to reach deliverance from the actual ills. The communist party was the failed attempt to create a militant organization with such universal pretensions.