Curtis , Jim Stalin's Soviet Monastery: A New Interpretation of Russian Politics (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 585 The author is the Senior Historical Adviser for the UK Holocaust Educational Trust, so unsurprisingly the generic term ‘Holocaust’ is scattered throughout whenever Jews and the Jewish Question are discussed. Often, that becomes unnecessary as a cover to historical Nazi practices which should be sufficient to be named in their own right, to the extent that on page 240 an egregiously ahistorical (misleading) point is committed, viz: when Hans Frank, the former Governor of the General Government (GG), was asked at the Nuremberg Trials on 18 April 1946 ‘if he had ever participated in the Holocaust, Frank, answered in the affirmative’. Yet the words of his Nuremberg interrogator, his defence counsel, Dr Alfred Seidl, were not those given in this book. In fact, Dr Seidl asked Frank: ‘Did you ever participate in the annihilation of Jews?’ This historical record — and not fanciful myth-making — is in volume 12, page 13 of the official Nuremberg trial volumes. London John P. Fox Curtis, Jim. Stalin’s Soviet Monastery: A New Interpretation of Russian Politics. Peter Lang, New York, Bern and Oxford. 2020. xviii + 250 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $99.95: €83.30: £67.00. In this book, Jim Curtis sets himself an ambitious task to propose a new method for studying Soviet politics and culture and a new conception of Stalinism. The method is a ‘holistic’ approach to Russian culture, when (to cut it short) politics is explained by cultural stereotypes transmitted mostly through literature (p. 113). Curtis’s conception of Stalinism is that it was founded on the principles of Russian monasticism. The dictator interiorized these principles during his years in the Tiflis seminary and became firmly established in them thanks to Dostoevskii (pp. 75–82, 151–68). Indeed, Curtis claims, Stalin identified himself with Father Zosima (from The Brothers Karamazov), a paradigmatic elder whose duty (and right) was to educate novices (p. 171). According to Curtis, the vision of society as based on eldernovice relationships was also typical of other Russian revolutionaries: most of them were popovichi (priests’ sons) and shared ‘a set of mental attitudes derived from religious practices’ (p. 71). The author claims that tserkovnost´ (‘churchiness’) was crucial to ‘the attitudes of the popovichi’, which ‘subsequently informed the mentality of the Bolshevik party’ (p. 72). Curtis finds the elder-novice archetype at work in young Lenin’s idealization of Plekhanov and in his later cult (pp. 119–23). Stalin inherited and developed this tradition. Acting as a ‘sadistic elder’, he brought ‘monastic principles out beyond the wall of the monastery’ and ‘imposed the traditional vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience on the Soviet Union’ (pp. xiii, 2–3). Stalinism SEER, 99, 3, JULY 2021 586 was ‘a perverted version of […] starchestvo, or elderhood’ (p. 3). Stalin’s only goal was to humiliate people around him (p. 158). But he humiliated them by love, following Father Zosima’s precepts: ‘He seems to have persuaded himself that in creating the gulag he was acting out of love for people’ and that ‘bringing zeks [gulag prisoners] to humility’ was a way to make them happy (p. 160). The notion of Soviet communism’s religious roots is not new. Curtis claims to further develop Nikolai Berdiaev’s understanding of the ‘Russian idea’ as ‘an eschatological idea of the Kingdom of God’ (p. xv). What he adds to Berdiaev’s theory is what he believes is a historico-anthropological approach: the Russian classics of Tolstoi and Dostoevskii ‘tell us much more about the inner working of power in Russian society than people have generally realized’ (pp. xv–xvi). Curtis dismisses as ‘irrelevant abstractions’ Marxist notions of basis and superstructure and class struggle (pp. 6, 22) and claims that ‘Marxist ideology [does not offer] any particular help in understanding Soviet history’ (p. 72). Neither economy nor ideology were important for the development of Soviet society. Instead, he develops a ‘non-ideological [that is, cultural] interpretation of Stalinism’ (p. 6). Stalin, according to Curtis, was ‘more interested in art than in economic policy’ (p. xiii). More than that, he pursued no pragmatic goals at all, often ‘acted against his own best interest’, and cared only about his own inner freedom (p. 158...