Alexandra Stein
FORMER CULT MEMBER SPEAKS OUT!
An interview with Alexandra Stein, author of Inside Out: A Memoir of Entering and Breaking Out of a Minneapolis Political Cult
Che Guevara: "The Rudolph Valentino of Red Fascism."
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SEMI-CONSCIOUS LIBERATION ORGANIZATION
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For nearly a decade, Alexandra Stein was forbidden to communicate with friends and family. She was ordered to relocate to Minneapolis, forced to change careers, and told to enter into an arranged marriage with a man she barely knew.
In order to overcome her “bourgeois intellectual arrogance,” Stein was instructed to become a machinist. Later, she was trained as a computer programmer, and sent off to find work in the suburbs as a software engineer.
Alexandra Stein was a member of the "O." (short for “The Organization”) – a Marxist-Leninist cult whose members were sworn to absolute secrecy. So secret was the "O.," that its members were forbidden to contact each other, except for official business.
“For many years,” says Stein, “my family did not have an address or phone number for me. They had a P.O. box."
Under the guise of security, members of the "O." received a series of written instructions, whose anonymous author was identified only by the initials “P.S.” (Program Secretary) or “P.O.O.” (the acronym was never defined). The true identity of the group’s leader, a man named Theo Smith, remained a mystery until the very end.
“We all had code names,” Stein tells me, “…which were mostly used whenever we put anything in writing… That was all for security in case the State should intercept our communications. We also had code numbers. Mine was ‘NB-25.’ Everyone worked in a ‘program’ – I worked in the bakery – and so ‘NB’ stood for the name of the bakery (Nutritional Bakery) and the number 25 was kind of random."
Today, Alexandra Stein teaches in the department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota, where she’s enrolled in the doctoral program. “My thesis is called ‘Attachments, Networks, and Discourse in Extremist Political Organizations,’” she says, “i.e., political cults. I try not to use the ‘C’ word, it’s very controversial in academia." |
