The Stalin Cult as Political Religion

Political religion is a concept that gained prominence around the middle of the twentieth century, being associated for many with the idea of a totalitarian regime. Political religion was seen as a secular ideology whose followers took it up with the enthusiasm and commitment normally associated with adherence to religion. Comprising liturgy, ritual and the sacralization of politics, it created a community of believers, and usually had a transcendental leadership and a millennial vision of a promised future. This paper will explore the utility of this concept for understanding leader cults in authoritarian regimes. Such cults have been prominent features of authoritarian regimes but there is little agreement at the conceptual level about how they should be understood. One of the most powerful of such cults was that of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union from 1929 to 1953. This paper analyses this cult in terms of liturgy and ritual and concludes that despite some aspects that are common between the cult and religion, most ritualistic aspects of religion find no direct counterpart in the cult.

Totalitarianisms as political religions in the 20th century

Despite all contents of secularisation, a certain kind of religious element is important in every modern totalitarian system, like Communism or National Socialism. Therefore, totalitarian systems can be regarded as political religions. The following historical and philosophical reflections on the history of ideas of political religions will contain three major parts: First, early uses of the concept ‘political religion’ by Campanella and Clasen in the 16th and 17th centuries will be considered, then the interpretation of totalitarianism as political religion will be analysed, with regards to Eric Voegelin, Raymond Aron and several ramifications, and finally, the perspective of political messianism in Jacob Leib Talmon’s work will be discussed.

‘Missions’ and Extracurricular Activities

The Napolas’ varied programme of extracurricular activities, ranging from semi-pagan ceremonies celebrating the National Socialist ‘political religion’ to opportunities for pupils to realize their artistic ambitions through music, art and design, and amateur dramatics, all formed part of the schools’ all-encompassing programme of ‘total education’. Pupils also routinely embarked on school-trips to foreign countries as far afield as Finland or Greece, as well as undertaking propagandistic excursions to contested ‘borderland regions’, and taking part in regular exchanges with US academies and British public schools. As they matured, pupils would undertake annual labour ‘missions’ (Einsätze), during which they would live and work for several months alongside farmers, miners, or industrial labourers. This chapter explores all of these aspects of the Napolas’ programme in detail. The aims of these activities were expressly political, bolstering the Napolas’ overall ideological effectiveness, as well as ostensibly supporting their claim to be furthering social progress, in accordance with the equalizing ideology of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft. Once again, the NPEA were often more successful in this regard than other Nazi educational and recreational institutions, including civilian schools, the Hitler Youth, the Reich Labour Service (RAD), and the Strength through Joy leisure organization (Kraft durch Freude/KdF). In this context, the Napolas also offered their pupils substantial scope for the cultivation of individual self-fulfilment. However, although the NPEA programme drew upon the child-centred principles of the reform-pedagogy movement, its ultimate aim was to instil pupils with National Socialist values, instrumentalizing them in the service of the national collective.

The Political Religion of Communism in Hungarian Children’s Choir Compositions between 1958–1989

Like all cultures, totalitarian regimes develop their own symbols and rituals. As such symbols, music and music making play an important role in expressing values, norms of the community, as well as in providing models for living in it (Geertz, 1973). They are especially valuable tools for educating children. This paper summarizes the result of a pilot study in the lyrics of choral pieces for children, that were distributed along with the state-published methodological journal, Énektanítás [Teaching Singing] and its continuation, Az ének-zene tanítása [Teaching Singing-Music] between 1958–1989. Using political religion (Gentile, 2006) as conceptual framework for content analysis, the study presents: 1) how different characteristics of the communist doctrine appeared in the lyrics of choral pieces and 2) how they changed over time, outlining the life-cycle of the regime itself from militant mass movements to giving place to expressions of individualism and alternative faiths until it would dissolve in the end.

ENGLISH: Warm and Cold Sources of Conflict and Conflict Resolution in Abrahamic/Semitic Traditions

All the three Abrahamic religions are considered as the monotheistic sources of violence around the globe. The Bible, both the Old and the New Testaments are criticized for encouraging radical religiosity, chauvinism and othering leading to violence in the name of religion while the Quran is blamed for promoting highly political religion which encourages violence in the name of Jihad. Both the militant movements affiliated to these religions and their leftist critics cherry-pick the verses of these holy books and demonstrate them as the religious grounds of radicalism leading to violent extremism. The current endeavor highlights such “warm” sources from the main religious books of these religions which can be/are used to promote violence and become sources of conflicts. It is opined that such sources are highly contextual, and not meant to be generalized in every situation. On the other hand, “cold” sources from these religious books are also unearthed as the timeless teachings of these religions which are both eternal and meant to be propagated to general public for the nurturing the society on peaceful and cooperative grounds so that they avoid conflicts in the first place and even if conflicts do arise, resolve them nobly.

Lenin’s Memorization as a Hierotopic Project

This article traces the implementation of the concept of ‘temple consciousness’ in hierotopic processes, including the construction of monuments and the organization of memorial sites. The memorials were designed to stand as an eternal reminder of an event that was experienced as a common heroic story in its symbolic representation. The study shows the transit and transformation of memorial discourse in the Soviet and post-Soviet symbolic spaces, which manifested itself in the redefinition of memorial sites in the direction of either actualization or levelling of the cultural and historical memory, given the dominant ideological paradigm. The sources of research, in addition to architectural and artistic monuments, include the mythopoetics of the mass culture, which also acts as a projection of ideology and contains archetypal patterns of the collective unconscious.Lenin’s memorialization as ‘the leader of the world proletariat’ became useful. The memorial policy of the Bolshevik Party was influenced by the ideas and events that took place back in history, including the discovery of the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun in Luxor (1922) and the teachings of Russian cosmologist Nikolai Fedorov in the work Philosophy of Common Cause published in full in 1913. The use of religion should point to key preconditions that have ensured the development of Soviet ideology which should be codified through the dominance of religion, in particular as ‘political religion’ or ‘secular religion’. The peculiarity of this phenomenon is the merging of two forms of thinking: political and religious.In addition, the Bolshevik atheists allowed the bodily resurrection of Lenin considering their unconditional belief in the “science of the future”; incidentally, they were not mistaken, because the leader’s body, engaged in the research work, survived until the invention of the cloning procedure. The secularized religious energy was mobilized to achieve political goals, which made possible the implementation of a totalitarian system, revealing the imitative essence of totalitarianism, which parasitized on religious thinking. Lenin’s Mausoleum is seen as a reliquary temple in the view of the communist cult of Eternity, which became the basis of Lenin’s cult.The levelling of the cult of Lenin began in the 1970s, which was facilitated by the pompous celebration of his 100th anniversary, which gave rise to political anecdotes as a symptom of the destruction of Lenin’s myth. The Revolution of Dignity (2013–2014) in Ukraine contributed to the dismantling of monuments to Lenin which were seen as personifications of Soviet-style ‘Leninism’ and symbols of imperial-Russian oppression.The purpose of this article is to substantiate the legitimacy of the author’s proposed concept of ‘political hierotopy’.

An Evolutionary Cognitive Approach to Comparative Fascist Studies: Hypermasculinization, Supernormal Stimuli, and Conspirational Beliefs

After summarizing Roger Griffin’s Fascism: An Introduction to Comparative Fascist Studies (2018), I describe the academic subfield of Comparative Fascist Studies (CFS). I argue that CFS could be strengthened by integrating it with cognitive science, evolutionary psychol­ogy, and religious studies. That biocultural integration would make it more effective as both a scholarly endeavour and an antifascist vaccine for democratic societies. I explain the role of traditional mass media and digital social media in the rise of dominance-style leadership and radical-right populism, construct a neurosociological revision of the CFS concept of fascism as a “political religion,” and characterize ultranationalism as a set of maladaptive supernormal stimuli. These revisions of CFS aim at providing a cross-disciplinary frame­work able to explain the spread of alt-right conspiracy theories online and offline.