Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

by Tom Holland

The Bolsheviks had come a long way since their visit to the museum of natural history in London. The party that back in 1905 had seen fewer than forty delegates attend its congress now ruled a vast and ancient empire. So huge was Russia that it accounted for almost a quarter of the world’s Christians. Scorning the pretensions of Rome, its monarchy had claimed a line of descent from Byzantium, and the title of ‘Orthodox’ for its church. Revolution, though, had come to the self-proclaimed Third Rome. In 1917, the Russian monarchy had been overthrown. The Bolsheviks, under the leadership of Lenin, had seized power. Marx’s chosen people, the industrial proletariat, had been brought to the promised land: a communist Russia. Those unworthy to live in such a paradise – be they members of the royal family or peasants with a couple of cows – had been slated for elimination. So too had the Church. Even though Lenin himself had havered, fretting that it might prove counter-productive to offend believers, the demands of revolutionary logic had proven remorseless. ‘In practice, no less than in theory, communism is incompatible with religious faith.’21 The clergy had to go. In 1918, their churches had been nationalised. Bishops had been variously shot, crucified upside down, or imprisoned. Then, in 1926, the conversion of a particularly venerable monastery into a labour camp had enabled two birds to be killed with one stone.