My talk will present Communism as a secularized messianic movement that attempted to bring the Russian population to salvation and build heaven on earth. I will discuss how the Bolshevik regime conceived of "good" and "evil" and address the carnage associated with the Great Purge (1936-38). How did Communists tell who was good and who was evil? How did they plumb the depths of the human soul? These are the central issues which my paper engages. I shall show that self-inspection, what I call the “Communist hermeneutic of the soul,” was a central practice in Bolshevism. Because the interior workings of the soul were concealed from the public eye, Communists, like the interogatees of the Inquisition, were supposed to bear witness against themselves. They had to understand who they were, to comprehend the origins and nature of their most intimate inclinations, and to subject themselves to Communist ethics, transforming themselves in some kind of autoemancipation and becoming New Men. Those who failed had no right to go on living.

How could an intimate enemy be told apart from a loyal comrade? Might virtuous activists not innocently err from time to time? In order to be able to tell the soul of the befuddled comrade and the true provocateur apart, the Party developed a quasi-judicial practice I call the “Bolshevik hermeneutics of the soul.” Because the inner recesses of the mind could not be read directly, the Bolshevik hermeneuts searched for the signs that would permit them to gauge the private thoughts and dispositions of each and every Party member. As part of their investigation, the Bolshevik hermeneuts hoped to determine whether subjects acted intentionally or out of ignorance. When an oppositionist decided to recant, he always maintained that he had fallen into error thanks to “ideological backwardness” or “political shortsightedness,” not because of something done deliberately. Once one knew why a mistake had been made one knew how to pass judgment. Questions of scientific truth and moral judgment, of consciousness and conscience, were intimately linked.

Without an understanding of the demonizing discourse that elided all differences between the oppositionist, the traitor and the provocateur, no one can hope to grasp Stalin’s onslaught upon the Party, during which the Bolshevik notion of guilt -- how it was established and punished -- underwent a thorough revision. Over the course of the 1920s and the 1930s, tolerance for the type of defense that presented the accused as a comrade in error shrank and then nearly vanished. To understand this severity, to understand why nearly every Communist suspected of anti-Party activity was shot and killed during the Great Purge, I investigate the conceptual preconditions framing the Bolshevik search for the intimate enemy.