The Changing Face of Power: Revolution and Accommodation in the Development of the Soviet Ceremonial System: Part II

Abstract

This study analyses the development and significance of Soviet official ceremonial events (calendar festivals, life-cycle ceremonies, pilgrimage and institutional ceremonial) in four phases, culminating in the present elaborate and integrated system of mass participation. These events and their symbols are interpreted as both an instrument and a reflection of social change: their 'overt' message is linked with the policies of the government in specific circumstances; their 'covert' message reveals changing power and status relationships and the inexorable, if uneven process of adaptation and accommodation of a revolutionary regime to national traditions and 'grass-roots' needs and realities. The attempt to secure the universal acceptance of a dogmatic ideology encouraged the development of such ceremonial, as with other fideistic movements which have won power. The first part of the article discusses central concepts and problems and traces the evolution of Soviet ceremonial to the death of Stalin. Problems; concepts; approaches The nascent Marxist movement of the I840's has been characterised by Hobsbawm (i 959: 169-73) as 'anti-ritualistic' and 'matter-of-fact', in contrast to earlier, 'primitive rebels' of the ritual brotherhood type. This 'wholly modern revolutionary organisation' seemed to achieve its logical culmination in Lenin's creation of an austere, disciplined and single-minded functional party which we have come to regard as typically 'Communist'. Yet in the world's first Marxist state, after sixty years an industrialised super-power, there flourishes a consciously encouraged system of 'ritualistic' ceremonial, comparable in forms and scale to that of the major religions, but based on an atheistic belief-system. Our essential problem is to explain how this seemingly paradoxical change came about. The fact that, despite its 'matter-of-fact' organisation, the Marxist (and especially Bolshevik) movement has always had a fideistic and metaphysically dogmatic character has been noted by many scholars (Fuilop-Miller 1927; Aron I955; Monnerot 1949; Parsons 1951: 526-33; Redlikh I955; Daniels I962: 3I5-6i). The idea of Bolshevism as a 'pseudo-religion' has become discredited through its association with unfashionable 'totalitarian' and 'functionalist' approaches; in any case the 'faith' element seemed less important after the disillusionment caused by the 'debunking' of Stalin in 1956 and I96I. But the symbolic behaviour which usually accompanies dogmatic faith and has always played an important part in Soviet public life has until recently