ABSTRACT
Communism in Russia came as a result of an inherently utopian revolutionary movement that aimed at creating historically an as yet nonexistent society based on equality, common ownership over the means of production and soviets as a form of governance. The revolution, however, did not happen in a cultural vacuum but within a cultural context that was, for centuries, shaped by Eastern Orthodox Christianity. This chapter provides a critical discussion of existing theories about the role of Orthodox Christianity in the revolution and argues that there were certain “elective affinities” between the non-messianic utopian aspects of Orthodox Christianity and the utopianism of Marxism, which in 1917 and during the civil war that functioned as a quasi-proletarian cultural hegemony and political consciousness guiding the majority of people to approve, embrace, and, most important, persevere with the revolution.
