Death of a heresy.

Bread lines may have accelerated the demise of Communism, but revolutions do not live by bread alone.

WHAT DIED in the Soviet Union on August 21, 1991, was, in the strict sense of the term, a heresy. For Communism was never just economic foolishness married (in its Leninist form) to draconian methods of social control; Communism was a false doctrine, a congeries of false teachings about human nature, human community, human history, and human destiny. Therein lay its power; its power to attract, and its power to coerce.

Heresy often consists in the exaggeration of one part of a complex truth, and Communism was no exception to that rule. Indeed, Communism was particularly seductive in the West precisely because the taproots of Western civilization reach back into the stories and images of Jewish and Christian eschatology and apocalyptic. But Communism was evil not just because of its view of history, but because it taught falsely about man. And from that falsehood came both the idiocies of a command economy and, far worse, the Gulag.

What was the Communist heresy? Simply put, it was the cruelest form of a more widespread evil that has beset the West since the prologue to the French Revolution: the tyranny of the political, which began with Rousseau and was itself a radically secularized version of the Jewish and Christian hope for a messianic age. In the case of Rousseau and his epigones, though, the messiah was "ultramundane": it was 99 44/100% transcendence-free. And the project was to remake flawed humanity - to usher in the messianic age of justice and righteousness - through the medium of politics. Communism, the ultimate expression of this heretical project, was Jewish and Christian eschatology forced into history, without God of God's messiah. Little wonder that those who got in the way were ruthlessly eliminated or, in one of Lenin's favorite verbs, "exterminated."

Focusing on Communism as a heresy also helps us grasp the central truth of the Revolution of 1989 and the New Russian Revolution of 1991: that these were first and foremost revolutions of the spirit, in which people said "No" on the basis of a higher and more compelling "Yes."

Throughout the Western world, pundits, academics, and reporters have seen scrambling for over two years now to fix an explanatory label on these stunning events. "Delayed modernization" seems to be the bromide of choice at the moment: the Communist countries just couldn't compete economically and technologically, don't you know? But this soft economism is simply a less odious version of the ultramundane heresy. To accept it is to buy into one of the corollaries of Rousseau's false doctrine of the human, viz., that the only real world is the world of the political. This is, of course, a most satisfying fantasy to indulge if you happen to be a member of the political class. And one shouldn't underestimate the degree to which vanity has played a role in the Western elite's grasping at this explanatory straw. But "politics" (as the term is usually understood today) just doesn't explain the revolution of 1989 and 1991.

For the great truth about these upheavals - the explanation that is commensurate with the nature of the evil that they overthrew - is that they were essentially pre-political revolutions. They were revolutions that began "before" politics, with the reconstruction of civil society. As the Polish authorities put it with unintentional accuracy during the martial-law period of 1981-83, Communism was in a "state of war" against society: politics was demanding to fill the space previously occupied by society and culture. The antidote to that tyranny of the political could not be more politics. It had to come from a revolution of the spirit, from a recovery of independent culture and a reconstruction of civil society. Not for nothing did one of the most powerful resistance groups in Poland style itself the "Committee for Social Self-Defense."

Put another way, Communism's tyranny of the political inevitably resulted in the atomization of society. Resistance required that the tissues of society be rebuilt. That meant rediscovering the virtue of social solidarity, of human fellow-feeling and a sense of mutual moral obligation. Solidarity, the virtue, preceded Solidarity, the trade union/political opposition.

A similar process has been under way in the late Soviet Union, noticed by a few Western analysts. While the media and some Western academics indulged in Gorbophilia, others looked at the rising democratic opposition to Gorbachev and at the reconstituted elements of civil society from which that opposition grew.

For several years now, S. Frederick Starr of Oberlin College has urged Western analysts to take more seriously the rapid growth of independent social and cultural organizations across the former USSR. Here, Starr argued, was the existential rejection of the tyranny of the political; here was the civic and civil opposition on whose foundations a political opposition with greater tensile strength might be built. Similarity, James H. Billington, the distinguished historian of Russian culture now serving as Librarian of Congress (and the man who certainly should be the U.S. ambassador in Moscow right now), has been writing and speaking for years about the religious renaissance under way in Great Russia and throughout the former Soviet empire.

No, and Yes

HAD Billington, Starr, and others like them been taken as seriously as they deserved, and had the lessons of that prior revolution of the spirit been absorbed, the West might not have been quite so surprised by the non-violent resistance that checked the Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight in Moscow last August and, in so doing, put the final nail in the coffin of Communism.

In the collapse of the Yalta imperial system and the ultramundane eschatological fantasy it embodied, the persistence, even the resurgence, of moral conscience has been crucial. Vaclav Havel, in his brilliant 1978 essay "The Power of the Powerless," put his finger on both, the core, and the point of maximum vulnerability, of the Communist enterprise. It was acquiescence: not enough people were willing to say "No"; too many people were willing to make those small, ritual gestures of consent by which the system reinforced its image as an unchangeable monolith. (Remember Havel's image of the greengrocer who, despite misgivings, nevertheless displays a sign reading "Workers of the World, Unite!" amidst the carrots and onions in his shop window.) That is what changed, over the past decade or so. And that change was the basis of the Revolution of 1989 and the New Russian Revolution.

But whence that new courage? Here, too, thee were ironies in the fire. For, in yet another existential refutation of both Marxist theory and Western secularism, the courage to resist was largely religious in origin. Even in its more secular forms (as among several key Solidarity intellectuals), the courage to say "No" came from a "Yes" that transcended and relativized the tyranny of the political.

The first, great symbolic reference point for the revolution of the spirit that made possible the political revolution against Communism was the pilgrimage of John Paul II to his native Poland in June 1979; the moment when millions of Poles, looking at each other at those historic outdoor Masses, came to understand that "we" were a lot more powerful than "they." The end of the line may have come last August when, as James Billington noted, Father Aleksandr Borisov, an Orthodox priest and member of the Moscow City Council, distributed some two thousand Bibles to the soldiers in the tanks outside Boris Yeltsin's Russian parliament (only one soldier refused) and another two thousand to those on the barricades protecting Yeltsin's White House. Borisov then helped convince Patriarch Aleksei to intervene, and the patriarch issue a prayer that, as Billington put it, "anathematized fratricide."

And that, as we might say in another context, was the ballgame.

Putting Politics in Its Place

THAT MOST of the policy apparatus of Western governments, and much of the fraternity of Western pundits, has simply missed this revolution of the spirit is an indication of just how deeply what Jacques Ellul called "the illusion of politics" has infected the West. To decry the tyranny of the political is not, of course, to say that politics is unimportant: but it is to put politics in its place. Which means to remember that politics, in the great tradition of the West (the tradition deliberately rejected by Rousseau, Marx, and Lenin) is not in the first instance about the getting and keeping of power. Rather, "politics" is the ongoing and public deliberation about the good man and the good society. Politics is, ineluctably, normative. Politics is, inescapably, a function of culture. And the heart of culture is cult, religion.

The pre-political revolutions of 1989 and 1991 may give birth to the era of the post-political, and sooner rather than later, Rousseau's delusion of the politically driven eschaton will survive, but its devotees will be increasingly marginal. New heresies, similarly eschatological in orientation, will emerge (some already have: look at the New Age section in your local bookstore). But their passion will not be for politics-the-contest-for-power.

The remarkable events of the past biennium have revealed that the ultramundane heresy of Marxism-Lenism is finished as a world-historical force, and that the primary struggle in the West will be at the level of culture. The new Kulturkampf in the developed democracies will touch, at points, on the world of politics; like the poor, the John Frohnmayers of this world will, alas, always be with us. But it is altogether possible, and perhaps even likely, that the men and women of the twenty-first century will look far less to the order of politics as the focus of their energies, and far more to the order of culture. We may even see the revival of a true Judaeo-Christian humanism, in place of the sundry false humanisms that have beset us these past two centuries.

That would, in fact, be a wholly fitting wrap-up to the Revolution of 1989 and the New Russian Revolution. For it was the humanism whose true roots lie in Jewish and Christian concepts of the human person, human society, human history, and human destiny that finally toppled the modern Moloch, the false and anti-human "humanism" of Marxism-Leninism. Today's springtime of nations was born from a springtime of the human spirit. We would do well to think about that, and remember it.