Much of Europe’s twentieth-century political misery came from a contemporary, secular effort to arrive at a political absolute. Indeed, one of the things that made Marxism so close to a religion was not just its reliance on sacred texts and a linear progression of prophets, but the habit of schism and intra-religious warfare. The fight to be the holder of the true flame and the truest interpreter of the faith was one of its attractions as well as one of its eventual weaknesses. But the dream of Marx and from Marx the dreams of communism and socialism were the sincerest attempts of their day to come up with and put into practice a theory of everything. The endless writings and pamphlets and evangelism in every country of Europe were one more attempt to dream a meaningful dream, capable of solving everything and addressing the problems of everyone. It was, as T. S. Eliot memorably described it, an effort at ‘dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good’.9

As always the process of the faith’s dissolution came in stages. The heresy of Leon Trotsky, the famines in the Ukraine, and the gradual realisation by many communists during the 1930s that not only were the model societies not models, they were barely societies. Efforts to purge the dissidents and other forces allegedly holding back the forces of truth were successful for a time not only in energising some of the believers but in pretending to people that there remained a pure heart to return to. By the time of the show trials masterminded by Genrikh Yagoda and others in the late 1930s the pretence that there was anything left but a will to power evaporated and persuaded the sensible communists to leave.