“They Will Fall in the Unearthly Grandeur”: The Early Soviet Cult of Martyrs of the Revolution

Abstract

The secular cult of the fallen heroes - martyrs of the revolution became the most important component of the Bolshevik historical mythology of the early Soviet period (1917-1920S). This cult clearly showed a religious origin and a number of differences from the cult of heroes of the later Soviet era. The early revolutionary martyrdom, from February 1917 and the first months after October 1917, developed as a collective and largely anonymous, symbolic phenomenon. These features were also evident in the early martyriums, the mass graves on the Field of Mars in Petrograd and near the Kremlin Wall in Moscow. However, the Bolsheviks’ creation of their own, revolutionary secular pantheon based on religious models later individualized martyrdom and developed its special criteria. A sign of individualization was the compilation of martyrologies and the formation of practices of veneration of martyrs’ burial places. The cult of martyrs acquired an international character through inclusion in the pantheon of the victims of revolutionary events in Europe. The discursive tropes formed to describe heroic martyrdom initially normalized only violent death at the hands of the enemy. After the end of the Civil War, however, the emerging linguistic ritualization allowed for the heroization of the circumstances of death: those who died of illness, accidents, even suicides were counted as martyrs. Gradually the number of heroes was reduced while the range of their types was, on the contrary, expanded. The martyr hero took an increasingly modest place in the hierarchy of heroes, the tropes of describing martyrdom were simplified and standardized, and their biographies were straightened and taken on a symbolic rather than an individual form.