Millenarian Bolshevism: Empiriomonism, God-Building, Proletarian Culture.

There existed within the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party during the first two decades of the twentieth century a group of philosophically oriented revolutionaries who conceived of socialist revolution in religious and millenarian terms. Constituting a left wing of the Bolshevik faction, these radical philosophers believed that the socialist movement embodied the most sacred ideals of humankind, that the proletariat possessed all the attributes of God, that the evil world of capitalism must be destroyed, and that an ideal socialist paradise would spontaneously arise after that apocalypse. A. Bogdanov was the seminal thinker who elaborated the philosophy upon which millenarian Bolshevism was based. In attempting to support Marx's sociology upon positivist epistemology, Bogdanov ultimately created a voluntarist, idealist philosophy which held that collective humankind could master the elemental universe. This work follows the development of millenarian Bolshevism by studying the careers of A. Bogdanov and A. V. Lunacharsky and analyzing their relations with V. I. Lenin, A. M. Gorky, and various left Bolsheviks. Millenarian Bolshevism had its origins in a debate between positivist and idealist Marxists (principally Bogdanov versus N. Berdiaev) at the turn of the century. The first full statement of the millenarians' world-view appeared in the God-building works of Gorky and Lunacharsky. These left Bolsheviks' millenialism was ultimately manifested in early Soviet society through the nationwide organization of the Proletkult. It is the thesis of this work that the millenarian Bolsheviks were not religious deviants on the radical fringe of the Social-Democratic movement but were rather at its intellectual center. They differed from other Bolsheviks only by being more introspective and philosophically fearless. In examining their relationship with Lenin, it is seen that the millenarian Bolsheviks gave explicit expression to the voluntarist, idealist, and chiliastic spirit that was inherent in the program and organization of Bolshevism and that provided the philosophy of Soviet socialist idealism.PhDEuropean historyUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/158907/1/8215077.pd