Joseph Kellner's "The Spirit of Socialism"

Joseph Kellner is a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union at the University of Georgia.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse, with the following results:

Page 99 of The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse finds one Sergei Chevalkov, formerly a colonel in the Soviet Union’s land-based nuclear defense forces, late in the process of converting to a millenarian sect. In keeping with one major theme of the book, he is explaining to me (in interview) why neither his former work (in both its technical and philosophical aspects) nor the Soviet worldview contradict the teachings of Vissarion, the sect leader who, in 1991, proclaimed himself the Second Coming of Christ. Chevalkov, who considers Vissarion to have reconciled all of the world’s spiritual and intellectual currents, was an early and zealous convert, who quickly became the high priest of the sect upon relocating to their survivalist commune in southern Siberia, where my interviews were conducted.

The Page 99 Test, in this case, has succeeded admirably. The book’s analysis shifts regularly between the experience of individual converts, believers and radicals of the early 1990s, and a broad cultural and intellectual portrait of late-Soviet and post-collapse Russian society. Here on page 99, the reader finds the former, in appropriately colorful form. It is a book of eccentrics, oddballs and heretics in some ways, but one that finds such people to be far closer to the center of Soviet society and culture than one would assume—with Chevalkov an excellent example. His story addresses a central question of the text, namely, how and why so many people, possessed of Soviet values and Soviet resources, came to adopt novel and radical worldviews that most would consider un-Soviet, all in the few years surrounding the country’s collapse. With these questions answered—read to see how!—the book then draws a new and I hope compelling picture of Soviet life and its legacies in the new Russian Federation. But its largest conclusions don’t concern the Soviet Union alone. The reader ought to come away thinking about the relationship between science and faith; reckoning with the conditional and fragile nature of their own worldview; and considering how different Russia’s crisis in the 1990s really is from our own crisis today. Page 99 won’t get you there entirely, but it’s not a very long book on the whole.

Learn more about The Spirit of Socialism at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue