When a hardened Soviet thief broke down in tears after a four-hour ideological persuasion session, historian Sheila Fitzpatrick described it as a moment of personal “conversion.”
For some observers, such episodes reveal Marxism’s deeper character—not just a political system, but a totalising worldview that seeks to supplant Christianity and reshape the human soul itself.
“During the Soviet Union, [the process] where people come to believe in the Marxist’s ideology was described not as a change in economic thinking, but in terms of a ’religious conversion,'” said Paul Barnes, lecturer at Emmanuel College Sydney
“Discovering the power of ‘work’ as part of the proletariat was seen as life changing,” he said during a lecture called, “The Tenets of Marxism,” in West Ryde, Sydney in late January on the 31st.
Transforming or ‘Coming Out’
Barnes said that the ultimate aim of Karl Marx and his ideology Marxism is to provide a “transformative worldview” that competes directly with Christianity.
The ideology tries to explain history (through the lens of class warfare), current political and social challenges, and the purpose of life.
He quoted an example given by Fitzpatrick, a Soviet and communist historian at the University of Melbourne, in her book, “Everyday Stalinism:”
“Anna Iankovskaia, a former professional thief with a long arrest record … was sent to the White Sea Canal camp in 1932. As Anna related, she was initially skeptical of the NKVD [People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs’s] promise that the prisoners would be re-educated, not punished. She found the physical work intolerably hard and initially refused to work.
