Some Lessons From the Russian Revolution

How an alluring radical nihilism seduces believers into forms of extremism 

By Anna Geifman March 8, 2021

For a revolutionary, the world is worthless and merits annihilation. Someone who thinks so must loathe life. “There is no greater joy, there is no better music than a crushing sound of smashed bones and lives,” a Bolshevik poet echoed in a hymn to obliteration. The Nazis “were destroyers,” argued psychologist Erich Fromm. “They hated not only their enemies, they hated life itself.” A zeal for annihilation is at the core of extremism, no matter what the orientation. Remarkably, emotional rejection of the world almost always precedes the destroyers’ ideological justification of a plan for its ruin.

Nihilists at the turn of the 20th century in Russia held sanity, love, and kindness to be archaic and banal. Conversely, destructiveness was a token of urbanity. Writer Andrei Bely described his disparaging contemporaries who applauded everything “abnormal,” “odd,” “sick,” and antisocial. Miserable, they saw around them only despair and a profound gloom. The nihilists were desperate for a “higher principle” yet insisted there was none, the inner conflict turning into a source and a trigger for rage, which often took a political form..........To Read More....