Nazi infiltration of interest groups and also the creation of parallel organizations, which gave the impression of a party listening attentively to p… - Michael Burleigh

On the eve of the Bolshevik coup d'état, the Orthodox Church claimed a hundred million adherents, two hundred thousand priests and monks, seventy-five thousand churches and chapels, over eleven hundred monasteries, thirty-seven thousand primary schools, fifty-seven seminaries and four university-level academies, not to speak of thousands of hospitals, old people’s homes and orphanages. Within a few years, the intuitional structures were swept away, the churches were desolated, vandalized or put to secular use. Many of the clergy were imprisoned or shot; appropriately enough the first concentration camp of the gulag was opened in a monastery in Artic regions.

Workers were encouraged to overcome a trades union mentality – Ley’s Germany Labor Front (DAF) rapidly ceased to describe itself as such – and to think in terms of a ‘socialism’ transcending mere bread and butter issues. In a departure from labourist economism, the Nazis recognized the workers’ need for respect, and the pride they took at their work, their skill, their tools, and the products of their labour, attitudes already evident in the modern technological sectors, such as aircraft or optical manufacturing. This lends plausibility to the idea that they were embarked on a revolution in consciousness, changing the way people perceived the world, rather than its material circumstances.

In 1920 the British philosopher Bertrand Russell spent five weeks in Bolshevik Russia as a member of a Labour Party delegation. The group hoped to discover a promised land, breaking into spontaneous choruses of the Internationale and Red Flag on spying the first Red banners across the border. After twenty-four hours Russell realized that there was not much to sing about.