When Jesus confronts the man possessed by demons in the eighth chapter of Luke, a collective, alien voice issues from the familiar human form: "And Jesus asked him, saying, What is thy name? And he said, Legion: because many devils were entered into him" (Luke 8:30). Dostoevskii's novel The Devils (Besy, 1871-1873), to which the continuation of this passage serves as epigraph, makes use of the rich metaphor of possession in many aspects: as madness, as ideological enslavement, as national destiny.

Much of what we know about the prerevolutionary Russian working class comes to us through the prism of its more politically active and committed element, or through the historical record of events resulting from the interaction of "conscious" and less "conscious" workers. The tensions between intelligent^ and activist workers and, to a lesser extent, between activist and nonactivist workers have been ably portrayed in various monographs; of these, however, those studies that focus on the making, so to speak, of worker activists have tended to depict their subjects either on very broad canvases or in finely drawn miniatures.

In March 1922 (in the very heat of the campaign to confiscate Church valuables), L.D. Trotskii sent a memorandum to the Politburo, arguing that the “proletarian revolution had finally reached the Church.” Indeed it had: over the next few years the Russian Orthodox Church would undergo tremendous convulsions and intense internal conflict. In May 1922, amidst a violent confrontation with the bolshevik state over the seizure of Church valuables, a small group of radical priests took control of the Church and engineered a temporary but controversial withdrawal of Patriarch Tikhon from active leadership. Their aim was not only to end the conflict with Soviet authorities (by recognizing its legitimacy and endorsing its confiscation of church valuables), but also to implement fundamental reforms in Russian Orthodoxy.

When the bolsheviks took power in November 1917, they openly proclaimed their commitment to a secularized Russia. This meant, above all, combatting both the Russian Orthodox Church as an institution and popular Orthodox beliefs and practices.

Russia is embarking upon a new path of historical development. Today, as the country gradually liberates itself from the vestiges of a nondemocratic society, it seems especially propitious to trace the subordination in the 1920s and 1930s of Russia's most important social institutions to a nascent totalitarian regime. The Russian Orthodox Church belongs on the list of such institutions. During its long history it frequently exerted a stabilizing, consolidating effect on the nation, especially during times of national crisis; even during the civil war it maintained a neutral position.

In the aftermath of the anti-communist revolutions of 1989-1991, the new governments in eastern Europe faced the herculean task of attempting simultaneously to build market economies and democratic political institutions. Though capitalism and democracy are often considered to be natural allies, in the cases of these new states they sometimes pull against each other. The costs of the economic transition, in terms of growing unemployment, inequality and inflation, may erode support for the new governments and lead to calls for a "strong" government or leadership to cope with economic dislocations.