Rituals of confession within communities of virtuosi: an interpretation of the Stalinist criticism and self‐criticism in the perspective of Max Weber's Sociology of Religion

Abstract

This study tries to apply some key concepts of Max Weber's sociology of religion to the Leninist and Stalinist party organisations. Especially the forms and functions of rituals of confession of sins within the confines of the Leninist community of virtuosi and the Stalinist church‐dispensing grace were studied. With respect to the Stalinist purge‐machinery, the public confession of deviant acts can be considered as ritual obligation without a soul‐searching transformation of the total personality of the respective party cadre. Apparently, this practice of merely mechanically connecting external, sinful acts and corresponding punishments and retaliations only leads to outer conformity without a social control of painful feelings over sinful thoughts and a conscience which includes the total personality pattern. All of the purges and confession rituals were enacted by a ‘hierocratic domination’ (M. Weber) as a means to control, admonish and threaten a submissive apparatus with external retaliations in the case of visible moral faults and shortcomings in the conduct of party affairs. Thus the criticism and self‐criticism rituals represent public séances where through his confession the sinner contributes a piaculum to the process of the purification of the contaminated community.