The Other Russia

Lecture 10

Right from the start a shocking declaration. Both capitalism and communism originated in the sects of the Middle Ages. Capitalism developed from puritan asceticism. Communism from orgiastic sects that preached the communality of property and women.

The doctrine, later conventionally named “communism” originated in the sects of the Middle Ages under the pen of monks, ascetics and dreamers about the physical transfiguration of man in the real terrestrial world. Indeed the Catholic Church promised transfiguration in the ideal world of essences from the other world. The most violent, passionate and furious did not want to wait, they desired to change both man and world. In this case Christianity served only as the unique starting point in the construction of a social model. They departed from it, operating with Christ and his apostles, and with life according to Christ as the only model of society. But the results attained were directly terrestrial. "A great dream, writes Alexander Etkind in his book “The Whip” (given me once by A. Dugin), was developed at several levels: the mystical level of relations with God, the political level of relations with society, and the erotic level of relations with the body. The transformed sexuality participated in it, together with economic equality, political anarchism and biological immortality. Mysticism, politics and erotica composed three dimensions”. “The world of universal prosperity, fraternal love and return to nature is a world of general usage, in which no one can individually possess anything. By natural laws, known to a lot of utopists, chiliasts and revolutionaries, the rejection of property occurs simultaneously with the rejection of family, if the project goes into more special details and property is not rejected, it is socialized, then this also occurs in parallel with the socialization of women”. The Catholic Church pitilessly suppressed alien thinking. The sects were destroyed. The popes declared crusades against the heretics.

In Dante Alighieri in "The Divine Comedy" in the thirty-eighth song of “Inferno” Mohammed turns to Dante with the following request:

“Now, say to Fra Dolcino, then, thou who perchance

Shalt shortly see the sun,

If he wish not soon to follow me here,

So to arm himself with supplies that stress of snow

Bring not the victory to the Novarese,

Which otherwise to gain would not be easy”.

That is, Mahomet, thrown in Hell as a sinner, suffering pain, transmits an advice to the heresiarch who is fighting on Earth. Dolcino Torinelli from Navara (Piedmont) was an outstanding revolutionary of the Middle Ages, the direct predecessor of the communards. He became the head of a large popular movement, being the leader of “The Apostolic brothers”. “The Apostolic brothers” preached renunciation from property and a forced realization of the early Christian Utopia. The Pope Clement V declared a crusade against Dolcino and his army. Dolcino settled on the mount Dzebello and from 1305 through 1307, he persistently resisted, overcoming starvation, snowdrifts and epidemics. He was defeated, submitted to tortures and burned. It is known that with him died his girlfriend, a certain Margherita.

In the prison library of the Lefortovo fortress I found the Umberto Eco’s novel “The Name of the Rose” and there I discovered a lot of information about the life and death of Dolcino, – the character of Dante’s “Inferno”. Before becoming a novelist at the age of fifty, Eco acquired reputation as a specialist in medieval philosophy, so his broad knowledge is absolutely trustworthy and based on the study of historical documents-ultimate sources.

Here is what I wrote down for me: “This Dolcino was the bastard of a priest of Navara’s diocese. But possibly he was born in another place in the Ossoli valley or in Romania. He grew a capable young man and was learning philology (!!!). However he robbed his tutor and escaped to the East in Trident. There he started to preach the teachings of Gerard Segarelli (A heretic, burned in 1296) in the most heretical form, claiming that he was the unique true apostle of God and that in love everything has to be common and that one can without any differentiation lay with all women and can never be accused of adultery. Even if one lies with a sister, a daughter.

How did he learn about the teaching of the false-apostle? Probably still as an adolescent he was in Parma and listened there to Gerard. It is absolutely precisely known that he started to preach in Trident. There he seduced a maiden from a wealthy and notable family Margherita or she seduced him. Then the Trident bishop banished Dolcino and his girlfriend from his diocese, but he already had thousands of followers. And with them he set up on a long tip to get to his native land. On the way they were joined by both new tempted people, tempted by his speeches and heretics-Valdes who lived in the mountains through which he went. And maybe that is what he counted on, to join the Valdes of these northern regions. On arriving to Navara Dolcino found there a situation that was extremely favorable for his mutiny.

The thing is that the vassals who ruled the country of Cathenar from the name of the bishop Vercelli were banished from their own lands. And they met the people of Dolcino as the most desirable help. (A struggle was going on between the ruling families in the city of Vercelli). The false apostles took advantage of this. And the families, in turn, took advantage of the disorders caused by the false prophets. The feudal lords recruited mercenaries to loot the citizens and the citizens turned for help to the bishop of Navara. Dolcino involved himself in all squabbles and everywhere he found an occasion to preach the war against other’s property. In the name of poverty, naturally. Dolcino with his people, which turned three thousand by that time, set camp on a mountain near Navara. On the so-called Bald Rock. And there he set up fortifications and tents and ruled a horde of men and women who lived crowded in the most shameless fornication. From there he dispatched letters to like-minded, from there he uttered the heretical teaching. He said and wrote that the ideal has to be the same for everybody – poverty and that any duties of external behavior should not stop them and that he, Dolcino was sent by God in order to disclose the prophecies of the Old and the New Testament and to interpret the Scriptures. And he called all clergy and secular clerics and preachers and Minorites the servants of Satan and dispensed anybody from the obligation to obey them. He distinguished four ages of God’s people existence. The first was the step of the Old Testament, that is patriarchs, prophets and virtuous men before Christ: on this step one should take wives so that the earth gets populated and human kind multiplies. Then came the epoch of Christ and his apostles – the epoch of holiness and virtue. On the third step the priests started to believe that they should at first acquire a fortune and later with its help rule the people: but when the love for God started to fade in the people Benedict appeared and stepped forward against any terrestrial possession.

When even the Benedictine monasteries started to amass riches appeared the brothers Saint Francisco and Saint Dominic, who even more severely than Benedict started to preach against this world’s power. But now, – proclaimed Dolcino, even in these orders the life of many prelates again entered in conflict with the good Evangelical commandments, the hour of the end of the third age has arrived and a return to apostles’ instructions is necessary.

He claimed that for the ending of the third age all the clergy with the monks and the anchorites need to die in terrible sufferings: he predicted that soon all church prelates, clergymen, monks and nuns, parishioners and all, dedicated in orders of preachers and Minorites, all the holy recluses and with them Boniface himself, the Roman Pope will be destroyed by the promised emperor which he, Dolcino will indicate and this emperor will be Frederic of Sicily (Frederic received with honors the spirituals in Sicily, banished from Umbra lands).

In his second letter, in 1303, Dolcino called himself the rector of the apostolic order and next to him he introduced as directors his Margaret (a woman!) and Longin of Bergamo, Frederic of Navara, Albert of Karenta and Valderic of Brescia.

The pope Clement V proclaimed a crusade against Dolcino as in Dolcino’s letters the latter affirmed that the roman Church is a fornicator, that no one should obey the clergymen, that from now on all spiritual leadership of the world transfers to the sect of apostles, that only the apostles are able to found a new Church, that the apostles can neglect the sacrament of marriage, that not a single pope is authorized to absolve sins, that the tithes should not be paid, that life without oaths is more perfect than with oaths and that a blessed church is not a more fitted place for prayer than any stable and that it does not matter where to honor Christ – in a chapel or in the woods.

Having settled on the Bald Rock Dolcino was forced to ransack valley hamlets, he looted everything to get provisions for his men. A real war against the neighboring villages was waged.

In the meantime came the winter of 1305 – one of the fiercest over the last few decades – and a terrible hunger set in. Dolcino spread a third letter to his confreres and many flowed to him but soon life on the mountain became unbearable and the deprivations were such that they were forced to eat horses, other living beings and boiled hay. And many died. The bishop Varicelli turned for help to Clement V and he equipped a crusade on the heretics. He declared complete absolution to anyone who will participate in it. He addressed himself to the count of Savoy, to the inquisitors of Lombardy, to the archbishop of Milan. Many came out to help the residents of Vercelli – the Navarians as well as the Savoyards, the Provencals and the Frenchmen. The bishop Vercelli headed the crusade. The vanguards of both armies kept running into each other but Dolcino fortifications were unapproachable and besides, “The Apostolic brothers” received significant support.

In the end of 1305 the heresiarch was forced to take his people away from the Bald Rock, abandoning there the wounded and the sick, unable to walk and passed to the region of Trivero and entrenched himself there on the hill that was previously called Dzebello and from this time it was called Rubello or Rebello because it became the stronghold of the insurgents. Horrible bloodshed took place. But in the end the insurgents were forced to give up. In Mars 1307 Dolcino, Margaret and Longin were brought to the city of Biella and handed to the bishop who waited for the Pope’s orders. The Pope wrote to the French king Philippe “We have the most splendid information, fraught with enthusiasm and rejoicing. The most nauseous demon, Satan’s spawn and vile monster heresiarch Dolcino by the cost of enormous danger, deprivations, battles and constant efforts finally and with his accomplices is captured and is now in our prisons by the merits of the dear brother of ours, Ranier, bishop of the city of Vercelli and he was caught on Christmas Eve and a big crowd that was with him, infected with heretic leprosy was exterminated on the same day”.

For my part I will add that the French king Philippe IV The Fair – the addressee of the pope Clement V – had just recently in 1304 destroyed in Paris the Knight Templars order and burned the Grand Master of the order De Molay on the extremity of the St-Louis Island in Paris (then it was even a separate small island called “the Jewish Island”). It is known that from the blazing bonfire the master cursed the entire royal family of the Valois and the curse came true: the damned kings died either mad or in great sufferings. The Master Templar did not have solely personal reasons for the curse, he was cruelly tortured in hopes of finding out the location of the order’s treasures. Philip The Fair moreover was guilty of black ingratitude. A few years before that, during the uprising of the Parisians against royal power the Templars hid Philip in their citadel Temple in Paris. Temple was located at the place of today’s city hall of the 3d arrondissement of the city of Paris. The city hall was built in the middle of the XIX century during the reign of Napoleon III from the stones of the destroyed Temple.

Actually the powerful order occupied a huge territory east of Paris. Even today the surrounding streets show this: rue du Temple, rue Vieille du Temple and others. And in the city hall of the 3d arrondissement Nathalia Medvedeva and me concluded our marriage after having lived together for ten years. Maybe the curse of the Templar towered over us too because after three years the marriage was dissolved.

But let us go back to Dolcino. Here is what Eco writes: “In June of the same year (1307), the first day of the month the heretics got in the hands of the secular authorities. On all church towers bells kept tolling: the condemned were put on a chariot, the executioners were also there, the guards were around and thus they were dragged through the public places of the city and on each place with incandescent pincers they tore off their limbs. Margherita was burned the first before the eyes of Dolcino who had to watch how she was being burned. Dolcino did not move a muscle on his face, just as he did not utter a moan when the pincers bit into his limbs. And thus they continued to move through the city and the executioners each time heated their instruments in cauldrons filled with glowing coals. Dolcino underwent other torments and remained silent, only when his nose was removed – he shook with all his body, and when they tore off his male member he emitted a long sigh, like a groan. His last words were uncompromising. He affirmed that he would be resurrected on the third day. After this he was burnt on the stake and his ashes were scattered downwind” Such was the end of Dante’s protagonist. As we see, strictly religion is not observed in this bloody revolutionary drama. The struggle is led for how one should live on Earth.

Medieval Europe swarmed with sects. The “spirituals” mentioned in the text, received by the king Frederic in Sicily after they were banished from Umbra were also called “The Libertines” or Adherents to the Free Spirit, or “Amorites” saw in the physical love the symbol of a spiritual liberation. Rejecting the Church and its sacraments they considered themselves to be free from sin and allowed sex with anybody and anyhow. To the brotherhood of the Free Spirit belonged the great painter Hieronymus Bosch.

A very good overview of medieval sects is made in the already mentioned book of A. Etkind “The Whip”. Etkind notices that the sect of the “adamites” that fled in 1418 from Southern France participated in Jan Hus movement. In all probability the “adamites” were the extreme radicals of the orgiastic sects. For the “adamites” private property was abolished together with all debts and taxes. The adamites practiced promiscuity, the sect was also fond of hymn chanting and ritual dances in naked form. Having occupied the entrenched island the adamites carried out night attacks on neighboring villages: blood, they believed, should flood the Earth up to the withers of a horse. “The adamites considered the Messiah already embodied in themselves, which caused the worry of more moderate Hussites. The Hussites stayed monogamous”, – writes Etkind, and continues: “In 1421 Zizka’s armies destroyed the refuge of the adamites and a year later the counterrevolution had won in Prague itself”. Zizka, it should be clarified, was the military commander of Hus’ followers. That is, moderate Hussites destroyed the radical adamites and were left face to face with the medieval burger-princely Europe that crushed them. I wanted to refine my knowledge about the Hussites, having noticed in the catalog of the Lefortovo’s library the book “Hussite wars” I ordered it. Alas, the book turned out to be removed from the list. KGB prisoners probably wore it out by reading. There were always well-read people here – the elite. Here, it is said, Blukher and Tukhachevsky were shot.

It is precisely the Hussites escaping the havoc, which had spread the variants of their teachings all over Europe and prepared the reformation. In 1517, a century later, Martin Luther nailed his 94 clauses to the doors of a provincial German church- a protest against the Catholic Church. Well, naturally, he was far from Dolcino’s accusations. However still from school times I remember that among other things Martin Luther protested against the selling of indulgencies. Martin Luther criticized the Catholic Church from the wrong side and not for what Dolcino flagellated it. Luther appealed for severity. And 17 years later it was the Munzer commune. On it we should linger more in detail.

In Germany, in the land of Northern Rhein-Westphalia, on the Dortmund-Ems canal is located the very old German city of Munzer. Actually its medieval buildings, including the Cathedral and the XV century city tower were pitilessly bombed by the Yankees during the Second World war. They were obviously restored but it’s not the same thing anymore – cement versions like in the old times, novodel [newly built] like the XXC in Moscow. Here, in Munzer the Westphalia treaty was signed in 1648. There is a university founded in 1773. In Munzer is produced cement, products from iron, wire, there are beer factories and schnapps is distilled. But it is not all this “popular economy” and not even the Munzer treaty that made Munzer famous, but the mysterious and strange social experiment that occurred there in the XVI century – the Munzer commune. The Munzer commune was in actual fact the first victorious communist society in history.

The sect of Anabaptists that had captured the city introduced common property and also husbands and wives. Herr Kautski, when he composed his history of socialism did not include there the Munzer commune, apparently from a bourgeois feeling of shame for this medieval sexual revolution.

The Munzer commune has been poorly studied. Its principal parameters are the following. The Anabaptist sect rejected the automatic baptism in infancy, referring to the Holy Scriptures. The sect insisted on the baptism of conscious believers who came to Christ consciously only. The principal Anabaptist leaders were the German Thomas Munzer and the Dutchman John of Leyden. Munzer, actually, was not entirely an Anabaptist, he rejected baptism altogether. One of the companions of the Great Reformer Luther, Munzer, the priest-intellectual joined Luther only in 1519. Munzer soon evolved towards radicalism in politics and the social structure of society. In soviet textbooks Thomas Munzer is presented as one of the founders of communism, its prophet. The beginning of such an understanding was laid by Frederick Engels. Strangely I remember the portrait of Munzer in a school textbook: a quadrangular little scholar cap, a mantle. So, Munzer developed a model of God’s kingdom on Earth. By force of arms the chosen ones had to clean the way for the New Coming. One of the principal conditions of Munzer’s teaching was his idea about Christ who is born anew in each worthy individual soul. For this one had to pass through suffering, similar to Christ’s, he, who had given birth to Christ in his soul becomes God and cannot be judged by human moral. In 1524 Munzer raised a peasant war in Thuringia. He founded a communist theocracy in the city of Mullhausen, however Luther called his army “a band of thugs” and soon Munzer was defeated, captured, under tortures admitted his heresy and was beheaded in 1525, only 36 years old.

His even younger friend and associate – the Dutchman John of Leyden – a former actor – went even farther. Soon after Munzer’s execution John of Leyden declared that Christ will soon return to Earth in order to finally found a kingdom of equality and love. John’s followers were now solidly called Anabaptists. In 1534, during the mutiny of the Anabaptists in the city of Munzer John of Leyden succeeded in seizing power. The city was renamed New Jerusalem. Also were renamed streets and days of the week. The population started to call each other “brothers” and “sisters”. John was proclaimed Messiah and king of the New Jerusalem, named John of Leyden.

The armed theocracy carried out a complete communism. Property belonged to everybody. The circulation of money was abolished, the doors of houses had to be open day and night. In public dining rooms people ate for free under the loud reading of the Old Testament. The other books were burned in front of the cathedral. Dissimulating property and food was declared a crime. Property was socialized however not in a single day. At first was socialized the property of ‘emigrants” – those who had fled the city, then those who were rebaptized later than the others and finally of all the rest. Thousands were rebaptised.

After a short period of asceticism, polygamy was established in Munzer on the model of the biblical patriarchs. The women of Munzer did not have the right to digress from their new duties. Some of the most stubborn were executed. John of Leyden had a queen and also 15 wives. Finally the polygamy had also transformed itself into promiscuity – i.e. each brother and sister had the right for copulation.

Meantime the city was besieged but for some time it successfully supported the siege. The Anabaptists sent out their agitators “apostles” in neighboring cities hoping that the Anabaptist revolution will break out everywhere. Indeed some uprisings broke out but were suppressed. In 1535 the city was taken over. The revolutionary Munzer’s theocracy was crushed. John of Leyden and other revolution leaders were captured, tortured and executed. John of Leyden at the moment of his execution was only 26 years old! The Anabaptist State existed for a year and a half, longer than the Paris commune.

The history of the Munzer commune is related inconsistently, in a hostile fashion and by the very same forces against which the Anabaptist revolution was directed. There is even a western movie with many fires, wild passions and the Anabaptist society is presented on the limit of pornography. A reckless, lustful John rushes about among his queens in bourgeois nightshirts, like a rock star.

Four hundred and something years later it happened that many political radicals, RAF members and other terrorist German organizations came out from the communes of the 60s. Of often very radical communes, where an unrestricted sexual freedom was largely practiced (on the base of the hippie movement)- promiscuity and generality of property. “The commune 1 (the terrorists Fritz Teufel, Rainer Langhans and Dieter Kunzelmann came from it) appeared on summer 1967 in Berlin. In 1968 in Berlin appeared “The commune of Viland” a lot more politicized on comparison with the Kommune 1. In the communes, apart from group sex, people were also occupied by the regular conducting of political actions, meetings and discussions, “happenings” – writes the researcher of left movements A. Kolpakidi. Is also interesting the fact that the No 1 figure of the RAF, Ulrike Meinhof completed… Munzer University! And she was born in 1934, exactly 400 years from 1534 when John of Leyden and his warriors-Anabaptists captured the city of Munzer and created the first communist state. Strange, isn’t it? The influence of Thuringia?

On the example of medieval revolutionaries Dolcino and his “apostolic brothers” and the Anabaptists of John of Leyden it becomes clear that religious extremism served as a cover for political extremism and sexual extremism. All medieval social movements were simultaneously religious. I.e. the political party implied the religious component as well, the sects rebelled and fought for a different life on Earth. This universality should be returned to the modern party – the religious and erotic components. The mix will be more explosive, tougher.