• DOI:10.1007/S10767-011-9116-X
• Corpus ID: 145251624

The Power of Symbols—Communism and Beyond

@article{Wydra2012ThePO,
  title={The Power of Symbols—Communism and Beyond},
  author={Harald Wydra},
  journal={International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society},
  year={2012},
  volume={25},
  pages={49-69}
}

• H. Wydra
• Published 1 September 2012
• Sociology
• International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society

Examining the revolutionary origins of Soviet communism this paper argues that symbolic structures were crucial in the making of Soviet communism as a political force. It conceptualizes symbolizations as contingent interpretive acts that capture people in extraordinary situations of dissolutions of political order. In the first part, I identify the dramatic and imaginative sources of the Bolshevik Revolution, which created a schismogenetic system, in which symbolic structures of time, representation, and leadership would become disintegrative forces in Soviet society. In the second part, I elaborate on the creativity of political symbolism by understanding symbolizations as rites of passage, constructions of origins and ends, as well as reality-creating self-fulfilling prophecies. Rather than to know the origins of symbols, the proposition here is to understand how symbolic meanings contributed to the creation not only of the empirical-objective world of Soviet communism but also of dominant social science interpretations.