The image of man as a mechanism, put forward by French philosophes, found its strange echo in this all-pervading technology of socially oriented murder. This was the acme of radical utopianism, when nothing could resist the perpetual motion of foul play. Marxist eschatology was imposed through Stalinist demonology. The purge functioned as a panopticon where sinners and their secrets came into the open. It was a ritual of self-deprecation and ultimate submission to the party's sacrosanct will. Criticism and self-criticism were party rituals of certitudo salutis for the inner-worldly vocation of its members: “The party appeared as a panopticon which could discover at ‘open meetings of the nuclei’ the ‘moral corruption and discreditable conduct on the part of Party members. The required self-criticism and criticism of the party cadres was used as medium to reach their inner conscience, and therefore to convert and to convince them to show self-discipline and ‘self-sacrificing work for the benefit of communism.’”54 Within this construct, morality was defined in terms of loyalty to a sense of ultimate historical transcendence. Igal Halfin eminently presented the process by which, through cyclical purges in the Soviet Union (one can consider their embryonic stage as 1920-21), Marxist eschatology morphed into a demonology that reached its discursive, exacerbated, and criminal maturity with the Second Socialist Transformation triggered by the pyatiletka unleashed to build socialism in one country.55 Public discourse was saturated with frightening images of deviators, heretics, spies, agents, and other scoundrels. By the mid-1930s, one can see under Stalinism a process that bears a strong resemblance to terror practices under Nazism: “the desubjectification of the victim” became “a programmed precondition for his/her victimization, a precondition enabling the perpetrator's enactment of the narrative program of extermination.”56 A phenomenology of treason was devised to justify carnage, and there was no paucity of intellectuals to support this morbid scenario. In other words, perpetrators successfully defined victims in their own terms. A lingering sentiment that there was after all something moral in Bolshevik utopianism, plus the exploitation of anti-Fascist emotions, led to a persistent failure to acknowledge the basic fact that from its inception Sovietism was a criminal system.
In Stalin's mind the purges were means of political consolidation and authority-building, a springboard for newcomers and time-servers. They would secure the human basis for effective control over society. One of the foremost biographers of Stalin commented on the function and consequences of the Great Purge: “He wanted to achieve an unrestricted personal dictatorship with a totality of power that he did not yet possess…. Emerging from the events of 1936-38 as a personal dictator in what was now a truly totalitarian system of power, Stalin had achieved the international political purpose of the Great Purge.”57 In one of his most poignant essays, published before World War II in Partisan Review, Phillip Rahv put forward a thorough interpretation of the mechanism that led to the “great terror”: “These are trials of the mind and of the human spirit…. In the Soviet Union, for the first time in history, the individual has been deprived of every conceivable means of resistance. Authority is monolithic: property and politics are one. Under the circumstances it becomes impossible to defy the organization; to set one's will against it. One cannot escape it: not only does it absorb the whole of life but it also seeks to model the shapes of death.”58 Without the purges the system would have looked radically different. Both victims and beneficiaries of the murderous mechanism were lumped together by this sacrificial ritual. For some of the Bolshevik militants liquidated or deported during the great purge, the terrorist ordeal amounted to necessary self-deprecation and self-abasement. Moreover, it was an opportunity to attain the long-expected absolution for those moments of “derailment” when they had dared to oppose Stalin. Zbigniew Brzezinski synthetically listed long ago the main objectives of the purge: “The cleansing of the party, the restoration of its vigor and monolithic unity, the elimination of enemies, and the establishment of the correctness of its line and the primacy of the leadership.”59 An entire phenomenology of mystical servility came about in the process of massacring society, and it was irresponsibly (and enthusiastically) reproduced by many intellectuals who had accepted this emasculation of their critical faculties. Residual hopes for elusive crumbs of morality within the Communist utopia combined with a Machiavellian exploitation of anti-Fascist sentiment led to a tragic failure to acknowledge the criminal nature of the Soviet experiment. Still, one needs to mention those who saw the reality and refused to remain silent. Among these voices of lucidity, one should mention Panait Istrati, Boris Souvarine, Ignazio Silone, Carlo Roselli, George Orwell, and other intellectuals who challenged the Big Lie.60
The problem with Leninism was the sanctification of ultimate ends, and thus the creation of an amoral universe in which the most terrible crimes could be justified in the name of a radiant future. In practice, the elimination of politics seemed a logical terminus, for the party was the embodiment of an extremist collective will.61 This fixation on ends and the readiness to use the most atrocious means to attain them are features of many ideological utopias, but in the Leninist experience they reached grotesquely tragic limits. Lenin's ultradeterministic belief in the coming of the proletarian order functioned after 1917 as a nihilistic mechanism for bringing the world in line with such millennialism. The old order needed to be smashed, so its human embodiments were demonized and became targets for merciless persecution. In his manifesto against the Mensheviks, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904), Lenin proclaimed that “it would be the most criminal cowardice to doubt even for a moment the inevitable and complete triumph of the principles of revolutionary Social-Democracy, of proletarian organization and Party discipline [my emphasis].”62 Bertrand Russell noticed as early as 1920 that there was a central duality within Bolshevism that contained the movement's doom: there was, on the one hand, “its commitment to a certain conception of modernization,” and, on the other hand, “an ideological commitment to an ideological world view shaped by ideological zeal and intolerance of other world views, which was a denial of the Enlightenment to rational discourse.”63 In other words, Bolshevism was pregnant with its own Inquisition from the beginning.
No less important, the appeal of Communism was linked to the extraordinary power of its ideology (and the core myth of the party as the carrier of reason in history). No other revolutionary movement has been as successful as Leninism in turning a gnostic creed into a self-hypnotizing weapon. Leninist militants worldwide believed in the myth of the party with an ardor comparable only to the illuminates of religious millennial sects. It is important to insist on both the ideological and institutional foundations of Leninism when we try to fathom the mystery of Leninism's endurance in the twentieth century. The myth of the party as the repository of historical wisdom and rationality is the key to grasping the dynamics and finally the decay and extinction of Leninism. Leninism, in its various phases, was what Ken Jowitt described as a “Catholic moment” in history, when “a universal ‘word’ becomes institutional ‘flesh,’ an authoritatively standardized and centered institutional format dominates a highly diverse set of cultures.” The Althusserian interpretation remains valid only if one performs a phraseological inversion: Leninism was a new praxis of philosophy. The explanation of its longevity in the twentieth century can therefore be found in “the promise of the Great October Revolution … of the Soviet Union as socialist hierophany.”64
The biographies of the ideological elites in Soviet-type regimes were usually colorless and lacked any moment of real distinction. In Eastern Europe, the ideological watchdogs were recruited from the Muscovite factions of the ruling parties. In Hungary, József Révai, once one of Georg Lukács's promising disciples, became a scourge of intellectual life. Révai was a member of the Hungarian delegation to various Cominform meetings and enthusiastically implemented the Zhdanovist strategy. In Romania, the tandem of Iosif Chișinevschi and Leonte Răutu forced the national culture into a mortal impasse. Similar den
ials of genuine national traditions and an apocryphal sense of internationalism were promoted by ideological bureaucracies in Czechoslovakia (Vilem Kopecky, Jiři Hendrich)65 and East Germany (Gerhart Eisner, Albert Norden, Kurt Hager).66 All devices were convenient when it came to uprooting vicious deviationist temptations. “Bourgeois nationalism” was fused with “rootless cosmopolitanism” in the diabolical figure of the malignant enemy. In the meantime, socialist nationalism was thriving. The members of the ideological army were willingly officiating in the rites of the cult. Deprived of their own personality, they were glad to identify with and invest in Stalin's superpersonality. After the terrorist dissolution of the ego, it was normal for the apparatchiks to project themselves into Stalin's myth as an institutionalized superego.
The Cominform emerged in September 1947 as the first attempt to institutionalize the satellitization of Eastern Europe. It represented an initiative to contain and annihilate the centrifugal trends within world Communism (the “domesticist” temptation and the search for a “national path to socialism” championed by militants as different as Gottwald, Gomułka, and Pătraășcanu). It laid the foundation for future frameworks of supragovernmental domination and ideological hegemony from the Soviet Communist Party. Paradoxically, the Cominform brought about the first instance of dissent and revisionism from a partystate (the Titoist “heresy”). In Tito's case there was a significant level of ambivalence: he supported enthusiastically Stalin's new orientation (Zhdanov's “two camp theory”) but thought the moment was propitious for furthering his own hegemonic agenda in the Balkans. One could call such a strategic syndrome parallel hegemonism. The irony of the situation was that the break between the two leaders happened at a time when Soviet and Yugoslav visions of class struggle at the world level mirrored each other. In 1947-48, Tito underestimated the total monopoly of power achieved by the Kremlin tyrant, and he fancied himself the beneficiary of some leverage in regional decision-making. Historian Ivo Banac correctly diagnosed the paradox: “The dramatic denouement of 1948 was directly connected with Stalin's fears that Yugoslavia began to take on a role of regional communist center and the inherent potential provocations against the West that such a position entailed.”67 Indeed, the leader of the League of Communists in Yugoslavia (until 1952 the Yugoslav Communist Party) carried along unabated with his plans of creating a Communist Danubian confederation (which was to incorporate Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Romania)68 while simultaneously persevering in the assimilation of the Albanian Communist Party (which in 1948 became the Albanian Party of Labor).
The conflict with Yugoslavia and Tito's excommunication from the Cominform in June 1948 signaled the beginning of dramatic purges in Eastern Europe Communist parties. It also indicated that Moscow's hegemony could not completely suppress domestic tendencies even in the most pro-Soviet Communist factions. Nevertheless, in Stalin's view, at such a dangerous time, when the imperialists had decided to intensify their aggressive actions against the budding “people's democracies,” and the threat of a new world war loomed large, no country or leader could be allowed to engage in national Communist experiments. Those identified as nationalists could be charged with the most fantastic sins. After all, the sole principle of legitimation for the ruling Communist parties in the Soviet bloc was their unreserved attachment to the Soviet Union, their readiness to carry out unflinchingly all of Stalin's directives. The harshness of Stalin's reaction can be explained by the fact that the Soviet Communist Party leadership reactivated the geopolitical motif of “capitalist encirclement.” In this vein, the end of the Second World War triggered a new imperialist offensive against Communism that, according to Stalin, signaled an imminent world-scale armed conflict. Under the circumstances, any national Communism temptation had to be crushed in the bud. Therefore, within the countries of the Soviet bloc, party leaders would be allowed to enjoy the adoration of their subordinates, but their cults were only echoes of the true faith: unswerving love for Stalin. In the words of Władisław Gomułka, the cult of the local leaders “could be called only a reflected brilliance, a borrowed light. It shone as the moon does.”69
Links with Tito were used as arguments to demonstrate the political unreliability of certain East European leaders (e.g., László Rajk in Hungary, who fought in the Spanish Civil War and had maintained friendly relations with members of Tito's entourage). It is worth discussing in this context the analysis of forced confessions proposed by Erica Glaser Wallach, Noel Field's foster daughter, whose parents were members of the medical units associated with the International Brigades in Spain:
That depends on you, confess your crimes, cooperate with us, and we shall do anything in our power to help you. We might even consider letting you go free if we are satisfied that you have left the enemy camp and have honestly contributed to the cause of justice and progress. We are no man-eaters, and we are not interested in revenge. Besides you are not the real enemy; we are not interested in you but in the criminals behind you, the sinister forces of imperialism and war. You do not have to defend them; they will fight their own losing battle. People like you we want to help—and we do frequently—to find their way back to a normal life and a decent place in society…. You want to know what a capitalist snake looks like? Take a look at her, at that bag of filth standing over there. You will never see such a low and abominable creature…. Take that dirty smile off your face, you American stooge…. You are a prostitute! That's what you are. Worse than that: prostitutes sell only their bodies: you sold your soul. For American dollars, stinking American dollars.70
Domesticism, according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, was an exaggerated if frequently unconscious “preoccupation with local, domestic communist objectives, at the expense of broader, international Soviet goals.”71 It was not an elaborated philosophy of opposition to Soviet hegemony, but a conviction on the part of some East European leaders, like Gomułka in Poland, Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu in Romania, and Traicho Kostov in Bulgaria, that national interests were not necessarily incompatible with the Soviet agenda and that such purposes could therefore be pursued with impunity. Henceforth, the Cominform's main task—if not its only task—was to suppress such domestic ambitions. The fulfillment of the Stalinist design for Eastern Europe included the pursuit of a singular strategy that could eventually transform the various national political cultures into carbon copies of the “advanced” Soviet experience. Local Communist parties, engaged in frantic attempts to imitate the Stalinist model, transplanted and sometimes enhanced the most repulsive characteristics of the Soviet totalitarian system. The purpose of the show trials that took place in the people's democracies was to create a national consensus surrounding the top Communist elite and to maintain a state of panic in the population. According to George H. Hodos, a survivor of the 1949 László Rajk trial in Hungary, those frame-ups were signals addressed to all potential freethinkers and heretics in the satellite countries. The trials also “attempted to brand anyone who displayed differences of opinion as common criminals and/or agents of imperialism, to distort tactical differences as betrayal, sabotage, and espionage.”72 However, one needs to emphasize that these trials were not a simple repetition of the bloody purges that had devastated the Soviet body politic in the 1930s. Between 1949 and 1951 the main victims of the trials were members of the “national Communist elites,” or “home Communists,” as opposed to doctrinaire Stalin loyalists. Koçi Xoxe, Traicho Kostov, Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu, Wladysław Gomułka, and László Rajk had all spent the war years in their own countries participating in the anti-Nazi resistance movement. Unlike their Moscow-t rained colleagues, they could invoke legitimacy from direct involvement in the partisan movement. Some of these “home-grown” Communists may have even resented the condescending attitudes of the “Muscovites,” who traded on their better connections with Moscow and treated the home Communists like junior partners. Stalin was aware of those factional rivalries and used them to initiate the permanent purges in the satellite countries.
In the ea
rly 1950s, Stalin became increasingly concerned with the role of the Jews as carriers of a “cosmopolitan worldview” and as “objective” supporters of the West. For the Communists, it did not matter whether an individual was “subjectively” against the system; what mattered was what he or she might have thought and done by virtue of his or her “objective” status (for instance, coming from a bourgeois family, having studied in the West, or belonging to a certain minority). While there is a growing and impressive literature dealing with Stalin's anti-Semitism during the later years of his reign, there is a regrettable scarcity of analysis of anti-Semitism as a defining feature of post-1948 political culture in the East European satellites. In a assessment from 1972 of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, William Korey made an interesting observation:
Anti-Jewish discrimination had become an integral part of Soviet state policy ever since the late thirties. What it lacked then was an official ideology rationalizing the exclusion of Jews from certain positions or justifying the suspicion focused upon them. First during 1949-1953, and then more fully elaborated since 1967, the “corporate Jew,” whether “cosmopolitan” or “Zionist,” became identified as the enemy. Popular anti-Semitic stereotyping had been absorbed into official channels, generated by chauvinist needs and totalitarian requirements…. The ideology of the “corporate Jew” was not and is not fully integrated into Soviet thought. It functions on a purely pragmatic level—t o fulfill limited, though clearly defined, domestic purposes. This suggests the possibility that it may be set aside when those purposes need no longer be served.73
In Stalin's mental universe, Jews were associated with the Mensheviks, but even more seditiously with the intraparty opposition headed in the 1920s by Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinoviev. While Stalin championed the interests of the Communist apparatus, the oppositionists were portrayed as reckless adventurers deprived of commitment to the building of “socialism in one country.” In the 1930s, in a famous interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Stalin defined anti-Semitism as a latter-day form of cannibalism. It may well have been that strong anti-Semitic feelings developed in his mind, especially after World War II, during the campaigns to assert Russian priorities in culture and science and restore complete ideological regimentation.
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