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      The Sacralization of Violence: Bolshevik Justifications for Violence and Terror during the Civil War

      Slavic Review
      Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

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          Abstract

          This article explores some of the principal themes in the intellectual history of early Soviet state violence. I argue that political religions theory, as applied principally to understanding fascism, is especially useful for understanding Leninism and Bolshevik justifications of violence during the civil war. In addition to its principal focus on the relationship between violence and the Bolshevik conception of the sacred, the article examines the significance of Bolshevik punitive discourse more generally and the alternative currents in the approaches to violence and repression. In comparing the approaches of the Chekas and the Soviet Justice Commissariat to repression, it becomes apparent that distinctly more reformatory and more repressive strands of thought coexisted in the early Soviet state. Yet these distinctions were fluid, and the overtly medicalized nature of Bolshevik punitive discourse ensured a certain harmonization of these strands.

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          Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts

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            Thank you, Comrade Stalin!: Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War

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              Politics as Religion

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Slavic Review
                Slavic rev.
                Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
                0037-6779
                2325-7784
                2015
                January 20 2017
                2015
                : 74
                : 4
                : 808-831
                Article
                10.5612/slavicreview.74.4.808
                42f33c69-29cf-4cac-b83b-291c9c15f972
                © 2015

                https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms

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