Cults as a form of government
Was the USSR and the DDR a cult where the Communist Party managed to take over a government? Like how the mafia took over the modern day Russian government.
Government and business exists as separate entities, that can be defined with strict definitions. Even the average person on the street has a feeling for what is a government and what is a business.
However governments can be motivated and staffed by different types of people with different politics and different ideas. There are countries where Communist parties exist in a democracy like Cyprus and Portugal where they have been in power as part of a collation. However those countries can hardly be defined as cults. Take this in contrast to the DDR. It had a few narrow ideological lines, it had a few narrow people to be worshiped, with the statue and propaganda selection being very one dimensional.
The people who animated that government had a narrow set of ideas and punished people who stepped out of line. The Stasi was there to fight ideological crimes and common crimes, but it was so obsessed with ideological criminals that it often neglected real crime like rape or robbery.
The people who led the DDR were also convinced that they were there to save the German people from themselves through an eternal friendship with Russia.
A lot of the DDR behaviour matches up with a cult as defined by The Cult Information Center: https://cultinformation.org.uk/question_what-is-a-cult.html
It uses psychological coercion to recruit, indoctrinate and retain its members
It forms an elitist totalitarian society.
Its founder leader is self-appointed, dogmatic, messianic, not accountable and has charisma.
It believes the end justifies the means in order to solicit funds and recruit people.
Its wealth does not benefit its members or society.
Cult education also has a good exploration of what is a cult and what are the different types of cults: https://culteducation.com/faq.html
A charismatic leader, who increasingly becomes an object of worship as the general principles that may have originally sustained the group lose power.
A process [is in use] call[ed] coercive persuasion or thought reform.
Economic, sexual, and other exploitation of group members by the leader and the ruling coterie.
I think that the key evidence for the USSR and the DDR being a cult is the Lenin statues. They were everywhere to a point of it being ridiculous. Where a lot of other work of arts got crowded out.
One of the few parts of the USSR that was not cultish, quite ironically, was the space program and the propaganda related to the space program. It had not a single hero to worship and the art was quite diverse.
Take this in contrast to political propaganda. It can be defined the same as what cults produce.
There is a thin line between religion and cults, so Dima Vorobiev defines original Communism as religion, coming out of the death of God in the 18th and 19th centuries as explained by Nietzsche.
‘Marxism is a secular grandkid of Christianity. It inherited the Christian approach to error management. Whenever something goes terribly wrong on the watch of Marxists, it’s not the idea of radical justice —it’s the servants you need to blame.
Marxism as an ideology is infallible, just like Jesus. It’s totally impossible to ever get disillusioned about the idea a of society where everyone is equal, no one is exploited, and the economy is an endless cornucopia in the service of human self-improvement.
Just like Christianity itself cannot fail—because God is firmly on its side and you can’t defeat God—Communism can be defeated only in three cases:
Unintended deviation from the true Communist path. This is an exact parallel to the Christian notion of “falling into sin”. In Soviet propaganda, our list of sins was long and included such things as “self-satisfaction”, “short-sightedness”, “loss of vigilance”, “tolerance of bourgeois views”, “errors”, “arbitrariness in decisions”, “loss of Party control” etc.
Wilful deviation from the true Communist path. In Christian terms, apostasy. True Communists here on Quora will tell you tons about how the USSR deviated from genuine Marxism, so I won’t torment you with this. The Chinese “Communists” have created a huge corpus of “Marxist” works on where exactly the Soviet “revisionists” knowingly abandoned the Communist cause and persisted in their wrongful ways until the bitter end.
Treason. Same as the Devil’s work for Christians. This is what Stalinists in Russia and abroad especially mention as the main cause. In their book, Gorbachev with a small clique of sellouts at the top of Party wreaked havoc on the Soviet Union on CIA’s money. Usually they also attach “drunk Yeltsin” to the list of traitors, since he belonged to the hard core of Perestroika champions in the Kremlin until he fell out with Gorbachev.’
Or this definition of Dima:
https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-errors-of-Marxism/answer/Dima-Vorobiev
Marxism is a secular grandkid of Christianity. It inherited the Christian approach to error management. Whenever something goes terribly wrong on the watch of Marxists, it’s not the idea of radical justice —it’s the servants you need to blame.
Marxism as an ideology is infallible, just like Jesus. It’s totally impossible to ever get disillusioned in the idea of society where everyone is equal, no one is exploited and the economy is an endless cornucopia in the service of human self-perfection.
Since the concept of universal salvation is unassailable, the only weakness of Marxism is it’s too prone to abuse on the part of individuals whose mind is corrupted with bourgeois ideologies. In order to avoid that, true Marxists must double down in the study of Marx’ theory. They also need to be extra careful watching each other. Chasing deviations and uprooting apostasy is an everyday job in Marxist parties and clubs: one bad apple may spoil everything, and grave consequences will grow unimaginable.
I would say that Communism, or whatever controlled the DDR and the USSR was religion devolving into a cult.
It had all the characteristics of one.