The Devil in History

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  Once Stalin's close friend and supporter, ousted under charges of “right-wing deviation” in 1929 and reinstated into the Central Committee in 1934, Bukharin had been described by Lenin in his “Testament” as the party's “favorite child.”10 He had bowed to Stalin's supremacy and was in fact one of the authors of the 1936 Stalinist Constitution. The same year, Bukharin traveled to Paris to retrieve the Marx-Engels Archive from the exiled German social democrats. In spite of old friends’ warnings (among them veteran Mensheviks Fyodor Dan and Boris Nikolaevsky) that back in Moscow he would be arrested, Bukharin refused to remain abroad. He was imprisoned after the notorious February 1937 Central Committee Plenum when Stalin spelled out his theory of the sharpening of class struggle as the USSR advanced toward socialism. Bukharin was forced to publicly confess to surreal charges. However, he refused to acknowledge having participated in a plot to arrest Lenin in 1918. Stalin's outstanding biographer, Robert C. Tucker, best describes Bukharin's contradictory stance: “He pleaded guilty to ‘the sum total of the crimes committed by this counter-revolutionary organization,’ but thereupon suggested that not only did he not take part in but he even lacked knowledge of ‘any particular act’ involved.”11

  During the last days of his trial, Bukharin wrote a letter to Stalin. In it he claimed “personal intimacy” with the Soviet leader, actually reaffirming his unswerving faith in the party's vision of social utopia and the Bolshevik revolutionary cause. Furthermore, this love for the party translated into an almost neurotic desire to reassure Stalin of his unbending dedication to the infallible leader himself. This document (which Stalin kept in his personal drawer until his death in March 1953) bears testimony to the mystical underpinnings of the Bolshevik belief system and its reverberations in the interpersonal relations within the top party elite. It is therefore worth quoting extensively from Bukharin's letter:

  This is perhaps the last letter I shall write to you before my death. That is why, though I am in prison, I ask you to permit me to write this letter without resorting to officialese [ofitsial'shchina], all the more so since I am writing this letter to you alone: the very fact of its existence or nonexistence will remain entirely in your hands. I have come to the last page of my drama and perhaps of my very life. I agonize over whether I should pick up pen and paper—as I write this, I am shuddering all over from this quiet and from a thousand emotions stirring within me and I can hardly control myself. But precisely because I have so little time left, I want to take my leave of you in advance, before it's too late, before my hand ceases to write, before my eyes close, while my brain somehow still functions…. Standing on the edge of a precipice, from which there is no return, I tell you on my word of honor, as I await my death, that I am innocent of those crimes which I admitted to at the investigation…. So at the Plenum I spoke the truth and nothing but the truth but no one believed me. And here now I speak the absolute truth: all these past years, I have been honestly and sincerely carrying out the party line and have learnt to cherish and love you wisely…. There is something great and bold about the political idea of a general purge. It is a) connected to the pre-war situation and b) connected with the transition to democracy. This purge encompassed 1) the guilty; 2) persons under suspicion; and 3) persons under potential suspicion. This business could not have been managed without you. Some are neutralized one way, others in another way, and the third group yet another way…. For God's sake, don't think that I am engaged here in reproaches, even in my inner thoughts. I wasn't born yesterday. I know all too well that great plans, great ideas, and great interests take precedence over everything, and I know that it would be petty to place the question of my own person on a par with the universal-historical tasks resting, first and foremost, on your shoulders. But it is here that I feel my deepest agony and find myself facing my chief, agonizing paradox…. My head is giddy with confusion, and I feel like yelling at the top of my voice. I feel like pounding my head against the wall: for, in that case, I have become a cause for the death of others. What am I to do? What am I to do? Oh, Lord, if only there were some device which would have made it possible for you to see my soul flayed and reaped open! If only you could see how I am attached to you, body and soul…. Well, so much for “psychology”—forgive me. No angel will appear now to snatch Abraham's sword from his hand. My fatal destiny shall be fulfilled … Iosif Vissarionovich! In me you have lost one of your most capable generals, one who is genuinely devoted to you … but I am preparing myself mentally to depart from this vale of tears, and there is nothing in me toward all of you, toward the party and the cause, but a great and boundless love. I am doing everything that is humanly possible and impossible…. I have written to you about all this. I have crossed all the t's and dotted all the i's. I have done all this in advance, since I have no idea at all what condition I shall be in tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, etc…. Being a neurasthenic I shall perhaps feel such universal apathy that I won't be able even so much as to move my finger. But now, in spite of a headache and with tears in my eyes, I am writing. My conscience is clear before you now, Koba. I ask you one final time for your forgiveness (only in your heart, not otherwise). For that reason I embrace you in mind. Farewell forever and remember kindly your wretched. N. Bukharin12

  Bukharin's letter can be taken at face value or with a grain of salt. He obviously was trying to save his young wife and child; the letter was a last desperate attempt in this sense. Such an argument does not, however, explain the exaltation in the letter. Bukharin died as a true believer committed to achieving Bolshevik utopia. Furthermore, it is still questionable if he perceived his death as a last service made to the party, as suggested by Koestler's Darkness at Noon. Stephen E. Cohen, Bukharin's quite empathetic biographer, considered that he wanted to protect “Bolshevism's historical legacy by refuting the criminal indictment” rather than accepting it.13 Robert C. Tucker argued for a more nuanced reading of Bukharin's transcript: “Bukharin thus had a twofold objective in the trial—to comply with Stalin by confessing and at the same time to turn the tables on him. He wants to make two trials in one.” According to Tucker, “there was an active effort on Bukharin's part to transform the trial into an anti-trial. The fight he put up against Vyshinsky was entirely dedicated to this purpose.”14 Undoubtedly Bukharin, in his final public appearance, was trying to make a last political statement against Stalin and the system the latter had created. One should not forget that during a fateful meeting of the Central Committee on February 23, 1937, Bukharin warned Stalin that “I am not Zinoviev or Kamenev, and I will not tell lies about myself.” After this event, he wrote a letter entitled “To a Future Generation of Party Leaders,” which he asked his wife to memorize, in which he ominously noted, “I feel my helplessness before a hellish machine, which … has acquired gigantic power, fabricates organized slander, acts boldly and confidently.” He then accused Stalin: “By political terrorism, and by acts of torture on a scale hitherto unheard of, you have forced old Party members to make ‘depositions.’”15

  All things considered, the case of Bukharin cannot be read solely as the heroic tale told by Cohen or as Koestler's self-immolation only in service of the party. What remains is a paradox: on the hand, Bukharin was committed to the Bolshevik cause while knowing full well Stalin's “theory of sweet revenge”;16 on the other hand, his letter to Stalin reveals that he preserved an uncanny attachment to his former ally and friend. Upon being devoured by the utopia that he had helped build, his last moments were a mixture of obedience, opportunism, fear, and most important, faith. Last but not least, Cohen's and Tucker's interpretations of his last stand at the trial were formulated without any knowledge of Bukharin's letter to Stalin.

  Bukharin, however, was not the only case of faith in the party and the Communist cause in the face of an impending exterminatory purge. In June 2010, I delivered a lecture in Bucharest on secular religions and totalitarian movements, focusing on the meanings of purges and show trials. I quoted extensively from Bukharin's lett
er. Immediately after I finished my presentation, a Romanian historian approached me and mentioned the existence in the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives of a strikingly similar letter addressed to the party by veteran communist Mirel Costea (Nathan Zaider), head of the Party Cadres Department, before he committed suicide during the heyday of Stalinist terror in Romania (June 1951). Costea's brother-in-law, engineer Emil Calmanovici, had been one of the Romanian Communist Party's main financial backers during the underground years. Closely associated with people involved in the Lucrețiu Pătraășcanu affair, he was arrested and charged with treason. Having to choose between the “objective” logic of his unflinching devotion to the party and his subjective understanding of Calmanovici's innocence, Costea decided to take his own life. In his last massage to his comrades, Costea wrote:

  A communist must maintain faith in the Party and must be the happiest person in the world when he feels that a Party trusts him. I was happy, I enjoyed the Party's trust and I say that I deserved it because I did not mislead the Party. Since 1939, I had no other life than for the Party. I hated and I hate the enemies of the working class, its traitors…. I cannot bear the thought that the Party lost its trust in me. For this reason I kiss my Party card which I have never sullied before I had it in this form of hereafter. I give in to the Party. I thank the Party for the trust showed to me up to a certain moment. This [committing suicide] is not the gesture of the communist, I have not learned these gestures from the Party, it is a leftover of bourgeois education and morality. I would have been able to bear tortures in the cells of the Siguranta [interwar Romanian political police], but I cannot bear the agony that I have lost the trust of my Party. My last thought goes to comrade Stalin, to the Central Committee of the Romanian Workers’ Party, to comrade Gheorghiu-Dej.

  I also found in the Securitate archives Mirel Costea's last letter to his daughters, Rodica and Dana, written a few minutes before he shot himself:

  Your daddy, whom you have loved and who has loved you apologizes that he needs to leave. When you grow older you will understand that the most precious good for an honest human being is to enjoy the trust of the Party. Until recently I have enjoyed this trust; until recently, and this is something I cannot bear. My life has been for the Party, without its trust it has no meaning. I beg you to live well and to love each other as we have loved you, me and your mother. Keep in mind that your father was an honest man, faithful to the Party. However, if you ever find out that the Party thinks differently about me, then you should believe what the Party says. Your mother will take care of you and will educate you in the spirit of love for comrade Stalin, for the USSR, for our Party, for the beloved leaders of our Party, as I have educated you.17

  The symbolic vehicle for this moral and political regimentation was the Stalinist definition of internationalism as unbounded allegiance to the USSR (the “touchstone theory”). To keep strict control over all mechanisms that guaranteed social reproduction and preserved the matrix of domination in such a system, the party had to play the central role. Based on my research in the Romanian Communist Party's archives, it appears that no segment of the body social, economic, or cultural, as well as no repressive institution, escaped continuous and systematic party intervention. Even during the climactic terrorist period (1948-53), the secret police served as the party's obedient instrument and not the other way around. Indeed, as one scholar stated, “The USSR, in other words, did not keep two sets of books, at least on ideological questions.”18 Ideological purity and revolutionary vigilance were imposed as main political imperatives. political police, cast in the Soviet mold and controlled by Soviet advisers, took care to fulfill the ideological desiderata. The political content of that ideological dictatorship in its radical incarnation (the first five years) was sheer terror and permanent propaganda warfare waged within a personalized dictatorship embodied by local “little Stalins.”

  What these countries experienced was not merely an institutional import or imperial expansion. They went through what one could label, using Stephen Kotkin's formulation, a “civilizational”19 transfer that transplanted a secular eschatology (Marxism-Leninism), a radical vision of the world (capitalist encirclement and the touchstone theory of proletarian internationalism20 spelled out by Stalin in the 1920s), and ultimately, an alternative idea of modernity (based upon anticapitalism and state-managed collectivism) self-identified as infallibly righteous—in other words, Stalinism. Kotkin's characterization of Stalinism as civilization comes very close to the comparison by Anthony Stevens, a Jungian analyst, to National Socialism. According to Stevens, “Nazism had its Messiah (Hitler), its Holy Book (Mein Kampf), its cross (the Swastika), its religious processions (the Nuremberg Rally), its ritual (the Beer Hall Putsch Remembrance Parade), its anointed elite (the SS), its hymns (the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’), excommunication for heretics (the concentration camps), its devils (the Jews), its millennial promise (the Thousand Year Reich), and its Promised Land (the East).”21 Both Stalinism and Nazis were radical, revolutionary civilizations that aimed at establishing an alternative, illiberal modernity by instrumentalizing the political religion that lay at their core.

  Stalinism was a self-sufficient, pre-established plan to restructure society, in the name of which the movement dispensed with as many human lives as needed while frantically engineering radical transformation.22 The personality cult (and the growing Russianization of the Stalinist system during and after World War II) combined with the intrinsic and increasingly orthodox outlook of Communism (as “a lived system”)23 exacerbated the exclusionary logic in the “people's democracies.” As in the Soviet Union, in Eastern Europe Stalinism itself was the revolution:24 it broke through the already frail structures of the ancien régime and laid the groundwork of state socialism in each of the region's countries. It created an all-pervasive party-state that tried and in most cases succeeded in extending its tentacles into all walks of life.25 In the words of the director of the French Institute in Tallinn, Jean Cathala, in 1940 the process of Sovietization meant “the incorporation into another world: into a world of institutions, of practices and ways of thinking, that had to be accepted as a bloc, because the spiritual and the temporal, doctrine and the state, the regime and methods of government, the homeland and the party in power were all mixed together in it.”26

  At the same time, Sovietization was “part of an imperialist conception, whereby a system of domination and subjugation was effected and rationalized, and whereby a subaltern identity was ascribed to the subjected peoples.”27 The main weakness of this system, however, was its chronic deficit of legitimacy. Under mature Stalinism, both in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, autocratic despotism ruined the functioning of the party as an autonomous institution, its potential for “charismatic impersonalism” inherent in Leninism as an organizational model. This phenomenon explains the neotraditionalist features of Stalinism. If one follows Ken Jowitt's argument, the mutation of the definition of revolutionary heroism (initially belonging to the party, but now the prerogative of one) cancelled the fundamental characteristic of novelty in Leninism as an ideo-political form of aggregation.28 In this monolithic structure dominated by the revolutionary phalanx, plans to reshape man, nature, and society were frantically pursued. Stalinism as a political religion overturned traditional morality: good and evil, vice and virtue, truth and lie were drastically revalued. The goal was to create a system that unified victim and torturer, that abolished traditional moral taboos and established a different code, with different prescriptions and prohibitions. The dramaturgy of show trials with their “infernal pedagogy” (Annie Kriegel) was the main component of a system based on universal fear, duplicity, and suspicion.

  The “oceanic feeling,” the ecstasy of solidarity, the desire to dissolve one's autonomy into the mystical supra-individual entity of the party, aptly described by Arthur Koestler, was the emotional ground for a chiliastic type of revolutionary commitment.29 In his conversations with Czesław
Miłosz, Polish poet Aleksander Wat formulated a memorable evaluation of the phenomenon: “Communism is the enemy of interiorization, of the inner man…. But today we know what exteriorization leads to: the killing of the inner man, and that is the essence of Stalinism. The essence of Stalinism is the poisoning of the inner man so that it becomes shrunken the way headhunters shrink heads—those shriveled little heads—and then disappears entirely…. The inner man must be killed for the communist Decalogue to be lodged in the soul.”30 Community, defined in terms of class, was the antipode of the execrated petty egotism of the bourgeois individual. The self had to be denied in order to achieve real fraternité. Generations of Marxist intellectuals hastened to annihilate their dignity in this apocalyptical race for ultimate certitudes. The whole heritage of Western skeptical rationalism was easily dismissed in the name of the revealed light emanating from the Kremlin. The age of reason was thus to culminate in the frozen universe of quasi-rational terror. Paradoxically, in the aftermath of World War II, Georg Lukács, a paragon of Marxist philosophy and staunch supporter of Bolshevism, wrote a whole treatise accusing Western philosophy of having abandoned humanist traditions in favor of an overall attempt to destroy Reason.31