Dima Vorobiev wrote this on Quora. As an ex-communist myself who worked for the propaganda unit of the communist party of Belgium I can confirm that Dima is absolutely right. The prevalent feeling was that all of us were sinners, except for a few high up in the hierarchy. Much like the Pope, the cardinals and the bishops are also ‘purer’ than common church goers or parish priests.

Here is Dima:

‘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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.’