“We All Walked under God...” (Stalinism in the Russian History of the Twentieth Century and How It Can Be Understood in Accordance with K. Marx’s Theory of Alienation)

This article attempts to comprehend the pre-revolutionary, revolutionary and post-revolutionary situation in Russia of the twentieth century not as a delayed Renaissance, if we project the logic of Western history onto Russia and if we keep in mind how the rise of culture and art in Russia in the first decades was perceived and evaluated in this country. Rather, the situation of transitivity that arose in connection with the revolution and the chaos that accompanied it testified to the revival and activation of its medieval layers in Russian culture, which was facilitated by the fact that the reality of the new, i.e. industrial or, in other words, mass society contributed to the breakthrough and activation of traditional layers of culture. The processes clearly went beyond the boundaries of those norms that had been formed in the Russian Empire. Thus, outside the imperial tradition, the reality of universal brotherhood or, to use the terminology of the English anthropologist W. Turner, “communitas” spontaneously arose. This circumstance turned out to be one of the reasons, firstly, for the emergence of political leaders claiming to be “leaders” and, secondly, for their transformation into sacred figures that can be likened to mythological heroes or “cultural heroes”. The “cultural hero” in the myth is the figure who brings something new to the world that has not yet existed. Naturally, Stalin, continuing Lenin’s work, built a socialist society that had never existed before. Thus, in the situation of revolution and subsequent construction of socialism, everything associated with the utopian idea of socialism is sacralised. That includes the leader himself. Politics is beginning to be perceived by analogy with religion. Returning to one of the fundamental concepts of Karl Marx – the concept of alienation, the author shows that the revolution, which aims to remove social alienation and gain freedom for human self-realization, in reality led to the emergence of new “gods”, or rather, idols, blocking the realization of goals achieved through revolution. The individual is once again alienated.