The Devil in History

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  MARXIST DREAMS, LENINIST EXPERIMENTS

  All its radical hubris notwithstanding, Marxism would have remained a mere chapter in the history of revolutionary ideas had Vladimir Lenin not turned it into a most potent political weapon of ideological transformation of the world. The twentieth century was Lenin's century. In fact, Leninism was a self-styled synthesis between Marxian revolutionary doctrine and the Russian tradition of nihilistic repudiation of the status quo. Yet one should not forget that Lenin was a committed Marxist, who intensely believed that he was fulfilling the founding fathers' revolutionary vision.15 For Lenin, Marxism was “a revelation to be received with unquestioning faith, which admits of no doubt or radical criticism.”16 This is the meaning of Antonio Gramsci's comparison between Lenin and Saint Paul: Lenin transformed the Marxian salvationist Weltanschauung into a global political praxis. The Bolshevik revolution was applied eschatological dialectics, and the Third International symbolized the universalization of the new revolutionary matrix. Lenin's crucial institutional invention (the Bolshevik party) and his audacious intervention in the praxis of the world socialist movement enthused Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács, one of Max Weber's favorite disciples, who never abandoned his deep admiration for the founder of Bolshevism. Referring to Lukács's enduring attachment to Lenin's vision of politics, Slovene political theorist Slavoj Žižek writes, “His Lenin was the one who, à propos of the split in Russian Social Democracy into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, when the two factions fought over a precise formulation of who can be a Party member as defined in the Party program, wrote: ‘Sometimes, the fate of the entire working class movement for long years to come can be decided by a word or two in the party program.’”17

  We need to remember that Leninism, as an allegedly coherent, monolithic, homogenous, self-sufficient ideological construct, was a post-1924 creation. It was actually the result of Grigory Zinoviev and Joseph Stalin's efforts to delegitimize Leon Trotsky by devising something called “Leninism” as opposed to the heresy branded as “Trotskyism.” At the same time, Bolshevism was an intellectual and political reality, a total and totalizing philosophical, ethical, and practical-political direction within the world revolutionary movement.18 It was thanks to Lenin that a new type of politics emerged in the twentieth century, one based on elitism, fanaticism, unflinching commitment to the sacred cause, and the substitution of critical reason for faith for the self-appointed “vanguards” of illuminated zealots (the professional revolutionaries). Leninism, initially a Russian and then a world-historical cultural and political phenomenon, was the foundation of the system that came to an end with the revolutions of 1989 and the demise of the USSR in December 1991.19

  Whatever one thinks of Lenin's antibureaucratic struggle during his last years, or about his initiation of the New Economic Policy (NEP), the thrust of his action was essentially opposed to political pluralism. The nature of the Bolshevik “intraparty democracy” was inimical to free debate and competition of rival political views and platforms (as Lenin himself insisted, the party was not a “discussion club”). The March 1921 “ban on factions” resolution, directly related to the crushing of the Kronstadt sailors' uprising, indicated the persistent dictatorial propensity of Bolshevism. The persecution of such foes as the left-wing Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks confirms that for Lenin and his associates, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” meant continuous strengthening of their absolute control over the body politic. Tolerance for cultural diversity and temporary acceptance of market relations were not meant to disturb the fundamental power relationship—the party's monopolistic domination and the stifling of any ideological alternative to Bolshevism.20 In this respect, there were no serious differences among the members of Lenin's Politburo—Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Bukharin included. To put it briefly, if there had been no Lenin, there would have been no totalitarianism—at least not in its Stalinist version.

  The October 1917 Bolshevik putsch (later elevated to the status of revolution) was the event that irreversibly changed the course of Western civilization and world history. In claiming to unify humanity under the banner of a collectivist and egalitarian ideal, Bolshevism actually ignited the insurrection of the masses in politics. It annihilated the mechanisms of limited government, as envisaged by the liberal tradition, and it founded a despotic system defined by an unprecedented disregard for the individual and the rule of law. It was a gigantic historical adventure meant to bring about heaven on earth, to materialize utopia.21 According to Claude Lefort, Lenin renounced the principle of consensus juris as a precondition for the regime's cultivation of lawlessness. Instead, Leninism “promises to release the fulfillment of law from all action and the will of man; and it promises justice on earth because it claims to make mankind itself the embodiment of the law.”22

  Therefore, post-Communism means a continuous struggle to overcome the “remains of Leninism” or “the Leninist debris,” a term I proposed as an elaboration of Ken Jowitt's illuminating concept of the Leninist legacy as a civilizational constellation that includes deep emotions, nostalgias, sentiments, resentments, phobias, collectivist yearnings, and attraction to paternalism and even corporatism.23 Jowitt is among the few political scientists who accurately understood the deep appeals of Leninism as directly related to the emergence of the vanguard party as a substitute for traditional charismatic, religious-type reference frameworks in times of deep moral and cultural crisis: “Leninism and Nazism were each, in different ways, perverse attempts to sustain and restore a heroic ethos and life in opposition to a liberal bourgeois individualistic system …. [T]he defining principle of Leninism is to do what is illogical, and that is to make the impersonal charismatic. Charisma is typically associated with a saint or a knight, some personal attribution, and what Lenin did was remarkable. He did exactly what he claimed to do: he created a party of a new type. He made the party charismatic. People died for the party.”24 Thus Jowitt's definition of Leninism links ideological, emotional, and organizational components in a comprehensive dynamic constellation: “Leninism is best seen as a historical as well as organizational syndrome, based on charismatic impersonalism; a strategy based on an ‘ingenious error’ leading to collectivization/industrialization; and an international bloc led by a dominant regime, with the same definition as its constituent parts, acting as leader, model and support.”25

  Leninism as a political and cultural regime, or as an international system, is undoubtedly extinct. On the other hand, the Leninist-Stalinist model of the highly disciplined, messianic sect-type organization based on the rejection of pluralism and the demonization of the Other has not lost its appeal—suffice it to remember Lenin's diatribes against the Mensheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries, the kulaks, the aristocrats, the “bourgeois intellectuals,” and so on. In his view, their place, even when they disguised themselves as individuals unaffiliated with the party, was in jail or, if they were lucky, in exile.26 This quasi-rational, in fact almost mystical, identification with the party (conceived as a beleaguered fortress surrounded by vicious enemies) was a main psychological feature of Bolshevism before what Robert C. Tucker defines as its deradicalization (what Jowitt would call the rise of the Aquinas temptation, in the figure of “modern revisionism,” as Mao Zedong quite accurately defined Titoism and Khrushchevism). To be a Leninist meant to accept the party's claim to scientific knowledge (grasping the “laws of historical evolution”) as well as its oracular pretense. Doubting the party's omniscience and omnipotence was the cardinal sin (as finally admitted by the Old Bolshevik Nikolai Rubashov, Arthur Koestler's hero in Darkness at Noon).27 For Lenin, the party member was dispensable human capital in the revolutionary struggle. The individual was a simple particle, a zero compared to the infinity of the cause.28 On this point, he closely followed—although he would have never admitted it—Russian terrorist Sergey Nechaev's ruthless fanaticism, as formulated in the Revolutionary Catechism:

  Paragraph 1. The revolutionary is a lost man he has no i
nterests of his own, no cause of his own, no feelings, no habits, no belongings; he does not even have a name. Everything in him is absorbed by a single, exclusive interest, a single thought, a single passion—the revolution

  Paragraph 2. In the very depths of his being, not just in words but in deed, he has broken every tie with the civil order, with the educated world and all laws, conventions and generally accepted conditions, and with the ethics of this world. He will be an implacable enemy of this world, and if he continues to live in it, that will only be so as to destroy it more effectively….

  Paragraph 4. He despises public opinion: he despises and hates the existing social ethic in all its demands and expression; for him, everything that allows the triumph of the revolution is moral, and everything that stands in its way is immoral.

  Paragraph 5. The revolutionary is the lost man; with no pity for the state and for the privileged and educated world in general, he must himself expect no pity. Everyday he must be prepared for death. He must be prepared to bear torture.

  Paragraph 6. Hard with himself, he must be hard towards others. All the tender feelings of family life, of friendship, love, gratitude and even honor must be stifled in him by a single cold passion for the revolutionary cause. For him there is only one pleasure, one consolation, one reward, and one satisfaction—the success of the revolution. Day and night he must have one single thought, one single purpose: merciless destruction. With this aim in view, tirelessly and in cold blood, he must always be prepared to die and to kill with his own hands anyone who stands in the way of achieving it.

  Paragraph 7. The character of the true revolutionary has no place for any romanticism, sentimentality, enthusiasm or seduction. Nor has it any place for private hatred and revenge. This revolutionary passion which in him becomes a daily, hourly passion, must be combined with cold calculation. Always and everywhere he must become not what his own personal inclination would have him become, but what the general interest of the revolution demands.29

  THE MYSTICISM OF THE PARTY

  Bolshevik humanism was by definition concrete, hinging upon the success of the cause. The individual's existence maintained its weight in the world insofar as it contributed to the construction of the revered social utopia. In this ideologically defined universe, the only agent capable of fulfilling and thereby ending history by bringing humanity to the promised land of classless society was the party. Two pronouncements by Yury Piatakov, one of Lenin's favorites in the younger generation of the Bolshevik Old Guard, spelled out this cosmic, or mystical, identification with the party in the most dramatic terms: “In order to become one with this great Party he would fuse himself with it, abandon his own personality, so that there was no particle left inside him which was not at one with the Party, did not belong to it.”30 The former Central Committee secretary (in 1918) added, “Yes I shall consider black something that I felt and considered to be white since outside of the party, outside accord with it, there is no life for me.”31 Or, in Marxian lingo, the party was the medium through which the individual erased the duality between self and the reified social being. The Bolsheviks were harbingers of the beginning of true history.

  Ideological absolutism, worship of the ultimate goal, voluntary suspension of critical faculties, and the cult of the party line as the perfect expression of the general will were imbedded in the original Bolshevik project. The subordination of conventional moral criteria to the ultimate end of achieving a class society was the main problem with Leninism. It shared with Marxism what Steven Lukes calls “the emancipated vision of a world in which the principles that protect human beings from one another would no longer be needed.”32 One of the best descriptions of the Communist mind can be found in the testimony of Lev Kopelev, the model for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's character Rubin in The First Circle: “With the rest of my generation I firmly believed that the ends justify the means. Our great goal was the universal triumph of Communism, and for the sake of that goal everything was permissible—to lie, to steal, to destroy hundreds of thousands and even millions of people, all those who were hindering our work or could hinder it, everyone who stood in the way. And to hesitate or doubt about all this was to give in to ‘intellectual squeamishness’ and ‘stupid liberalism,’ the attributes of people who “could not see the forest for the trees.’”33 Political philosopher Steven Lukes was therefore correct in emphasizing the structural-generative ideological and emotional matrix of Communism that made its crimes against humanity possible: “The defect in question causing moral blindness at a heroic scale was congenital.”34 This same point is emphasized by novelist Martin Amis, for whom Lenin “was a moral aphasiac, a moral autist.”35 Lenin, once in power, “set about placing History on a large gauge railway track altogether, where it would be pulled by the locomotives of a revolutionary design.”36

  The magic evaporated once the historically anointed leader ceased to be the custodian of absolute truth. This makes Khrushchev's onslaughts on Stalin at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) on February 25, 1956, crucially important (as admitted by Mikhail Gorbachev in his conversation with former Prague Spring chief ideologue Zdeněk Mlynář.37) At the same time, it was precisely charismatic impersonalism, as Jowitt argues, that provided the antidote to desperation at the moment when Khrushchev exposed Stalin's crimes. This feature, indeed, crucially distinguished Bolshevism from Nazism: “The leader is charismatic in Nazism; the program and (possibly) the leader are charismatic in Leninism.”38 Lenin's ultimate goal was the elimination (extinction) of politics through the triumph of the party as the embodiment of an exclusionary, even exterminist general will.39

  In the context of monastic certitude, recognition of fallibility was the beginning of the end for any ideological fundamentalism. During “heroic” times, though, such as War Communism and the “building of socialism,” the unity between party and vozhd (leader) was, no less than terror, key to the system's survival. Homo sovieticus was more than a propaganda concoction. In her acceptance speech for the Hannah Arendt Award of 2000, given jointly by the city of Bremen, the Heinrich Boll Foundation, and the Hannah Arendt Association, Elena Bonner stated, “One of Hannah Arendt's key conclusions was ‘The totality of terror is guaranteed by mass support.’ It is consonant with a later comment by Sakharov: ‘The slogan “The people and the Party are one,” painted on every fifth building, are not just empty words.’”40 This is precisely the point: the internalization of Leninist forms of thinking by millions of denizens of the Sovietized world, and their readiness to accept paternalistic collectivism as a form of life preferable to risk-driven, freedom-oriented experiences. In my view, the major cleavage in today's Russian political culture is between the Leninist heritage and the democratic aspirations and practices associated with Andrei Sakharov and Russia's human rights movement. To quote Elena Bonner again, “In the preamble to his draft of a Soviet Constitution, Sakharov wrote: ‘The goal of the people of USSR and its government is a happy life full of meaning, material and spiritual freedom, well-being and peace.’ But in the decades after Sakharov, Russia's people have not increased their happiness, even though he did everything humanly possible to put the country on the path leading to the goal. And he himself lived a worthy and happy life.”41

  As a political doctrine (or perhaps as a political faith), Bolshevism was a synthesis between radical Jacobinism or Blanquism (elitism, minority rule distinguished as “dictatorship of the proletariat,” exaltation of the heroic vanguard), unavowed Russian “Nechaevism” (a radical-conspiratorial mentality), and the authoritarian-voluntaristic components of Marxism.42 Bolshevism emphasized the omnipotence of the revolutionary organization and nourished contempt for what Hannah Arendt once called “the little varieties of fact”—such as Lenin and Trotsky's fierce attacks on the “renegade” Social Democrat theorist Karl Kautsky, who had dared to question the Bolshevik repudiation of all “formal” liberties in the name of protecting the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” never
mind that Lenin borrowed from Kautsky his “injection of consciousness” theory.

  Lenin, in contrast to Marx, emphasized the organizational element as fundamental to the success of revolutionary action. For Marx, class consciousness was an organic result of the political and ideological development of the proletariat. I am thinking here, for example, of Engels's thesis on “the German proletariat as the heir of classical German philosophy,” or the statement of young Marx regarding the dialectical relationship, which was therefore mutually binding, between “the critic of weapons” and “the weapon of the critique” during the process of overcoming/abolishing/conserving philosophy—Aufhebung). The revolutionary intellectuals were those who developed the doctrine, but the proletarians were not perceived as an amorphous mass toward which a self-appointed group of “teachers” had the duty of injecting consciousness of “historical truth.” Marx did not put forth the thesis of the party as a total institution and did not consider fanatical activism to be the sine qua non of political efficacy. Marx did not conceptualize a revolutionary sect deriving its power “not from the multitudes but from a small number of enthusiastic converts whose zeal and intolerance make each one of them the equal in strength of a hundred indifferentists.”43 Rather, Lenin created an organization in which “deracinated intellectuals and the occasional worker would be baptized into the proletarian vanguard.”44 Marx's emphasis on human emancipation as the conscious absorption of society by the individual and his equation of social antagonisms with class conflict led him to advocate the elimination of intermediaries (laws, institutions, etc.) regulating the relationship between civil society and the state. Therefore, as Kołakowski brilliantly argued, “If freedom equals social unity, then the more unity there is, the more freedom…. The concept of negative freedom presupposes a society of conflict. If this is the same as a class society, and if a class society means a society based on private property, then there is nothing reprehensible in the idea that the act of violence which abolishes private property at the same time does away with the need for negative freedom, or freedom tout court. And thus Prometheus awakens from his dream of power.”45