The article is devoted to the problem of studying the activities of revolutionary and ideological virtuosi of the XX century by means of the historical sociology of modernity. It attempts both to identify the main trends in the participation of intellectually active strata of modern societies in the radical transformation of social reality, and to clarify the reasons that pushed them to do so. It is noted that the ideological background of such forms of socio-political radicalism were the symbolic means of challenging the old forms of social reality and constructing new forms through secular ideologies of various types (socialism, communism, anarcho-syndicalism, fascism, national socialism, etc.). The role of conductors of the ideological message of these secular religions of salvation to the masses was usually performed by radical-minded intellectuals and students, for whom the worship of new idols and symbols of faith became the true meaning of life and struggle. In the XX century, it was the intellectuals who acted as the main creators and operators of collective salvation religions, and the social communities created on their basis. Moreover, they not only tried to save themselves with their help, but at the same time laid claim to the legitimate monopoly of determining who would be saved, and who would not. Thus, radical intellectuals acted as both the creators of the new norm and as agents of the policy of rationalization. The article pays special attention to the characteristics of the creators and social carriers of radical ideological views — and the worldviews based on them — as well as the refraction of these utopian visions in the socio-political practice of the last century. In conclusion, it is suggested that Max Weber’s historical sociology and Emile Durkheim’s symbolic theory of the “sacred”, supplemented by modern developments in the field of political sociology and socio-historical anthropology, can serve as a relevant system of theoretical coordinates for the study of ideological and revolutionary virtuosi of the XX century.

   The article focuses on the heritage of Alexey Alexeevich Borovoy, a Russian anarchist of the early 20th century. Today there is a growing interest to the works of this thinker. Particularly, researchers concede the breadth of his contribution to anarchist theory, and engage his project of personalistic anarchism, with its key concepts of personality and vital impulse. However, the author believes that there is another aspect of Borovoy’s creativity which has not been evaluated — his political theology, the reconstruction of which is undertaken in this work. The analysis begins with an examination of Borovoy’s ethics of anarchism. Nietzsche was a key influence, with the concepts of the ethics of love for the near, and the ethics of love for the far. Borovoy highlighted the latter as the basis of revolutionary morality. Its main feature is the aspiration to the future — the revolutionaries are guided by an anarchist ideal, sacrificing the present for it. The main principles of this anarchist ideal are as follows: Firstly, the anarchist ideal involves the ongoing improvement of human nature and society. Secondly, anarchism believes in the freedom of the individual, which is the center of doctrine. Thirdly, the embodiment of anarchism into reality is possible through a radical break with the past, that is, a catastrophic revolution, as well as through the renewal of human nature. Finally, anarchism promises a secularized salvation — deliverance from violence. In this regard, Borovoy notes that anarchism is a faith that has replaced Christian religion. This allows us to assert that, at the implicit level, the main features of Borovoy’s anarchist project are a secularized form of Christianity.

   The discourse of political theology developed by Schmitt makes it possible to identify a secular religion in Marxism. Marxism is aimed at achieving an “earthly paradise”. In the Soviet project, based on the “dictatorship of the worldview” (Berdyaev), its own political theology is being formed, including apophatic and cataphatic elements. The apophatic content is connected with the totalization of the denial of the ideals, laws, and order of the old world. Hobbes sees in the state a Leviathan — a powerful mortal god, whom God is able to catch and tame at any moment. Taking the side of the Behemoth in the fight against Leviathan, the revolutionary forces are focused on the negative ontological connection that arises during the collapse of the state between Leviathan and God, whose place in the revolutionary consciousness is occupied by the laws of history. The apophatic theology of the Soviet project is built in the logic of increased attention to revolutionary upheavals, punishing Leviathan for unworthy behavior. As a result, the Soviet revolutionary project is deconstructing and destructive in nature. Revolutionary forces, personifying righteous anger, radicalize the fight against the discovered “social evil”, entering an area of the escalation of violence. A necessary condition for building a “new world” is the consistent destruction of the old one “to the foundations”. However, at the moment of gaining power, the revolutionary forces abandon the apophatic and enter the cataphatic path. The main dogma for social construction is the position of communism as the inevitable future of human history. Blind faith in the inevitability of communism is ill-suited to see what God, or the laws of history, allows Leviathan to do. The struggle against the dehumanizing essence of capitalism gradually contributes to the construction of an equally dehumanizing society (Berdyaev) — an ideological, bureaucratic, planned-distributive total state. Rampant communal forces (Zinoviev) create new hierarchies and a new social division. Ideology takes frozen “hypernormal” forms that do not correspond to reality. In the end, the mismatch of social and ideological projects during the “performative shift” (Yurchak) entails the collapse of the USSR, illustrating the new revelation of the divine pacification of Leviathan.

   Politics and religion have always been very closely intertwined in all the writings of Dostoevsky, but in his “Legend of Grand inquisitor” this connection is explored in a more fundamental manner for the first time. Apart from the idea of a direct causal relationship between religious and political concepts, quite prominent in the writings of Dostoevsky, The Legend of Grand inquisitor contains a more complex inquiry concerning the nature of political power in general. The researchers of Dostoevsky who have spotted this line of inquiry could not formulate it explicitly, and the political theologists who gave it an explicit formulation did not fully explain or develop it further. As such, a detailed and explicit politico-theological interpretation of Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor have not yet been formulated. The Grand inquisitor urges the people to submit to him voluntarily; thus, the three temptations — which form the foundation of his power — can be interpreted not only as certain instruments of enslavement, but also as elements of a social contract that would allow the sovereign-inquisitor to take responsibility for the salvation of people who relinquished their freedom to him. This interpretation also implies that the temptation of the Grand inquisitor is prominent in any earthly authority. Dostoevsky’s own proclamation of personal freedom would consequently also lead him to claim that any earthly power — any institution that exchanges earthly goods for human freedom — is wrong and unnecessary. Nicolai Berdyaev further develops these politico-theological intuitions of Dostoevsky as a critique of the Soviet government, which he claims to be the closest representation of the Grand Inquisitor in human history. Berdyaev points to the central role of the inquisitor’s three temptations in the formation of a “religion of socialism” and also draws an association between the tragedy of the Grand inquisitor — whose utopian intentions only lead to the further enslavement of people — with the failure of the Soviet enlightenment project.

   The article discusses the place of Plato in the ideology and political practice of the Bolsheviks in the first five years after the seizure of power. The conception of Plato as a forerunner of socialism dates back to Germany in the 1890^s (in the works of von Pöhlmann, Kautsky and Adler etc.) and was quickly picked up in Russia. This is supported both by numerous Russian translations of these works and the development of the thesis about Plato’s “socialism” by Novgorodtsev, Bulgakov, Trubetskoy, and others. The October Revolution enhanced interest in Plato’s ideal state, as evidenced by the increased number of publications on this topic. Despite the fact that the theoreticians of Bolshevism themselves treated Plato either indifferently or negatively, for a certain part of the Russian intelligentsia, Platonic “socialism” became a kind of explanatory model for the processes occurring in Russia. In the works of authors like Pertsev, Novitsky, and Vyshinsky, Plato’s political utopia was considered as a paradigm to the leveling and state-compulsory communism of the Bolsheviks. Since the mid- 1920^s, recourse to Plato for an explanation of the Bolshevik socialist project has become less common. The policy of war communism, which prompted the closest analogies with Platonic egalitarianism, had concluded; the canonization of Lenin’s works, in which the assessment of Plato was generally negative, made a “Platonic” interpretation of Bolshevism ideologically unacceptable.

   Revolutions are started by ardent supporters of radical ideas, often of an almost religious nature, and they are opposed by carriers of opposite, but equally fervent convictions. But for the majority, radical ideas and global transformations are usually of little interest. As soon as the Civil War ended, this majority of the population of Soviet Russia faced the task of adapting to the new peaceful reality of the NEP. One of the actively used terms in the rhetoric of Soviet Russia in the 1920s for such adaptation is “philistinism”. In pre-revolutionary Russia, this was the name of one of the categories of the urban population, and after the change of system, the only actual meaning of this word was the designation of a seeker of well-being and personal happiness of any gender and age, avoiding following the new communist quasireligion and morality. Oftentimes, sincere “believers” in communism and “philistine” opportunists were forced to either clash or find a compromise within the same family. On the basis of a wide range of media, narrative and sanitary-educational sources, using visual material, we trace the formation of the caricatured image of the “philistine” with its characteristic life adaptation strategies. Among them is mimicry of the carrier of the current ideology (joining the Party, following hybrid quasi-religious cultural practices) in order to build a career or organize one's personal life. The phenomenon of “philistine” adaptation to the state communist ideology will be characterized up to the “Great Break”, when the NEP was abolished, and the political, economic and cultural situation in the country changed dramatically.

   The article is devoted to the criticism of the revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx by the great political thinker of the 20^th century, Eric Voegelin (1901-1985). The article shows that Voegelin’s criticism of the Marxist doctrine consists of several successive stages. In his works of the late 1930s, he develops the idea of Marxism and communism, which grew up on its ideological basis, as one of the main “political religions” of the XX century. In the 1940s, when Voegelin was living in exile in the United States, he continued to criticize the Marxism of Marx, but on a new theoretical basis, at the center of which was the concept of “gnosticism” as the essence of Western modernity. Since the 1950^s, Voegelin’s interest in the Marxism of Marx gradually faded away, and the Marxist doctrine itself is mostly mentioned as an example of one of the variants of “gnosticism” of the 20th-century politics. As a theoretical horizon of Voegelin’s criticism of the Marxian revolutionary idea, a brief reconstruction of the main propositions of his political theory as an experimental and critical science of the correct order of the soul and society is presented. Voegelin’s thesis that the rise of “gnosticism” is the essence of Western modernity is also analyzed in detail, since it serves as the central point of his interpretation of modern intellectual history. The article shows that the spiritual basis on which the development of the Marxian revolutionary idea took place was the revolt of the young Marx against God and his desire to eliminate the higher, transcendent and creative divine principle from the picture of the world of modern man. Voegelin's final conclusion, proposed by him in the framework of criticism of the Marxian revolutionary idea, is that the political success of Marxism in the XX century is one of the most significant symptoms of the spiritual decline of Western civilization.