The Devil in History

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  Marx assigned great importance to social unity but failed to give instructions on its achievement. This discrepancy left the field open for Lenin's creative understanding of necessity, which led to the Bolshevik version of man's salvation of himself. The party became the slayer of alienation and therefore the true messiah of human freedom. The combination of Marxism and state power “set the Russian body politic onto a course of self-purification.”46 In the Soviet experiment, the Marxian principle of social unity was transformed into Lenin's “unity of will,” which, under Stalin, became what Erik van Ree called “the organic theory of the party.” If, in Lenin's case, unity was a solution to factionalism, for Stalin it was an instrument for “the Gleichschaltung of the member minds.” In the midst of the December 1923 struggle for supremacy, Stalin stated that “it was wrong to see the party only as ‘something like a complex of a whole series of institutions with lower and higher functionaries.’ Instead, it was a ‘self-acting [samodeiatel'nyi] organism.’ He described it as ‘actively thinking’ and ‘living a lively life.’” The vision of the revolutionary leading body combined with the imposition of the practice of repentance for one's past incorrect political views (at the Fifteenth Party Conference in 1927) opened the door to murderous campaigns to remove the sores from the party organism so that the latter wouldn't fall ill.47 The struggle to sustain and further the Bolshevik miracle turned into fighting the degeneration of the body politic. In this context, the unity of the party became the moral-political unity of the people. Society under Stalin transformed itself into an “organism engaged in a struggle for survival. [It] develops various instruments—such as productive technology, a class system of property, and language—attuned to the need of increasing its own viability.”48 Lenin's purposeful fashioning of all aspects of human existence in the context of a life-or-death class struggle grew, under Stalin, into what Erik van Ree called “Marxist Darwinism.”49

  LENIN'S UNBOUNDED RADICALISM

  As a political gnosis, Bolshevik philosophy proposed the opposite of the young Marx's emphasis on the relatively spontaneous revolutionary development of class consciousness. For Marx, as the young Lukács showed, the revolutionary class symbolized the viewpoint of totality, thereby creating the epistemic premises for acceding to historical truth. For Lenin, the party was the totality—and dialectical logic served to render this oxymoron palatable to committed militants.50 This was the origin of the major conflicts between Lenin and Luxemburg and one of the main distinctions between Soviet and Western Marxism. Rosa Luxemburg anticipated the path taken by the Bolsheviks toward the totalization of power when she wrote that the development of their revolution “moves naturally in an ascending line: from moderate beginnings to ever-greater radicalization of aims and, parallel with that, from a coalition of classes and parties to the sole rule of the radical party [my emphasis].”51 In the same criticism of the Russian Revolution, Luxemburg issued a strong warning concerning the methods of preserving power adopted by Lenin and his party. She cautioned that the elimination of democracy, with its institutions that though cumbersome did prevent abuses of power, would lead to the mortification of the first workers' state: “To be sure, every democratic institution has its limits and shortcomings, things which it doubtless shares with all other human institutions. But the remedy which Trotsky and Lenin have found, the elimination of democracy as such, is worse than the disease it is supposed to cure; for it stops up the very living source from which alone can come the correction of all the innate shortcomings of social institutions. That source is the active, untrammeled, energetic political life of the broadest masses of the people.”52 Luxemburg's words were echoed later by one of Lenin's closest collaborators, Nikolai Bukharin, who, in the aftermath of the Bolshevik victory in the civil war, concluded that the notion that “all tasks … can be solved by Communist decree” was “Communist conceit.”53 A few years later he added that “we do not carry out experiments, we are not vivisectionists, who … operate on a living organism with a knife; we are conscious of our historic responsibility.”54 This thinking, however, did not prevent Bukharin from purging individuals perceived as deviationists within the party. Despite moderation, his behavior essentially reflected the organizational ethos of Leninism: dictatorship over and uncompromising struggle against the the party's enemies and heretics. No wonder that in 1927 Bukharin was denounced by an old comrade as the “jailer of the best Communists.”55

  The Communist Manifesto foreshadowed this fundamental schism by advancing in two directions that would be further elaborated in mature Marxian theory: on one hand, it emphasized the self-development of class consciousness; on the other, it glorified violence. The bastardization of Marxism in Lenin's experiment cannot be dissociated from the attacks on bourgeois rights and the criminalization of private property in the founding fathers' writings. This was of course legitimized by high historical necessity, the ultimate end that would somehow justify the cruelty of the means: “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”56 Moreover, one need go no further than the famous opening lines of part 1 of the Manifesto for evidence of this monism: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles…. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other—Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.”57

  From the outset, the Manifesto announced what the influential Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov called a “monist view of history,” according to which all historical conflict is reducible to class conflict and all political debate is reducible to the question of which class you represent or support.58 In History and Class Consciousness Georg Lukács reads the thought of Marx as an “expression” of ‘the standpoint of the proletariat.’ Lukács offers an ingenious interpretation of Marxism as the unfolding ‘truth’ of the class struggle. And in reducing questions of truth or falsity and right or wrong to questions of “class standpoint,” he is simply following the lead of the Manifesto. For it was Marx himself who declared, “The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer…. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes.”59 The intellectual distance separating this formulation from the Bolshevik idea that the Communists are in possession of “politically correct” insight into the movement and the meaning of history is not far. Moreover, Marx himself consistently showed an obvious unwillingness to tolerate those socialists who did not agree with him or questioned his authority. The energy he spent denouncing such “heretics” indicates the presence of an authoritarian personality.

  In the passionately incandescent lines of the Communist Manifesto, one can decipher the whole tragedy that was to follow: Lenin's forcing of the pace of history, the genesis of Bolshevism as a matrix for generalized terror, the Stalinist horrors, and the universe of the concentration camp. Nations were murdered to carry out Lenin's utopian desiderata. Social classes were victimized in the name of his abstract speculations and moral revolt. The question, therefore, is what connection exists between the Leninist exterminist project and the original Marxian salvationist fantasy. In retrospect, one can argue that Marx's oracular monism, defined by his hyperdeterministic approach, scientism, and positivism, took revenge on the ethical-libertarian dimension and laid the foundation for intolerance and repression. To elaborate on a dichotomy proposed by Karl Popper, it can be said that the moral radicalism of Marxism survived in contemporary varieties of democratic socialism. Political radicalism, with its mixture of historicism and positivism, culminated in Leninist conspiracy and dictatorship.60 Essentially, the Bol
sheviks' revolutionary subjectivism was defined by the conception of parties as “oligarchies of scholars and organizers, assemblies of people who change the world through their wills, while constantly obeying the laws of history.”61

  REDEMPTIVE MYTHOLOGIES

  Is this all over? Far from it—and this applies not only to the countries once ruled by Leninist parties, but also to nationalist-socialist parties like Baath and charismatic fundamentalist, neototalitarian movements, including Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda.62 The Leninist (Bolshevik) mental matrix was rooted in a political culture suspicious of open dialogue and democratic procedures, and hostile to spontaneous developments from below. Leninism was not only an ideology but also a set of precepts and techniques meant to inspire revolutionary global activism and militantism opposed to bourgeois liberalism and democratic socialism. Both Leninism and Fascism were discourses of domination that achieved effectiveness by functioning as “closed rhetorical systems that determined content as well as limits of political consciousness.”63 This is precisely the similarity but also the main distinction between these two onslaughts on liberal individualism: Fascism was a pathology of romantic irrationalism, and Bolshevism was a pathology of Enlightenment-inspired hyperrationalism. I don't want to be misunderstood: as an offspring of nineteenth-century antibourgeois, often antimodern, ideologies of resentment, Fascism did not need Bolshevism in order to emerge and mature (as demonstrated in Isaiah Berlin's fascinating essay on Joseph de Maistre and the origins of Fascism).64 The cult of race, the blending of pseudo-scientism (social Darwinism) with the neopagan worship of blood and soil, and the resentful rejection of liberal values as “soulless arithmetic” predated Leninism. On the other hand, it is hard to deny that the triumph of Bolshevism and the intensity and scope of the Red Terror, together with the traumatic effects of World War I and the widespread sentiment that “the world of yesterday” (to quote Stefan Zweig) had irretrievably come to an end, mobilized the Fascist offensive against the universalistic traditions of the Enlightenment.

  Fascism was no less a fantasy of salvation than was Bolshevism: both promised to rescue humanity from the bondage of capitalist mercantilism and to ensure the advent of the total community. Fascism was a type of hysteria rooted in pseudopoetic heroic nostalgias, in militant collectivism, and above all, in the programmatic abhorrence of the fundamental values of liberal democracy. Its potential for emotional identification originated in myth, in the obsessive invocation of supposedly pristine origins, in the excessive cult for what Sigmund Freud once called “the narcissism of small differences.”65 Fascism aimed at homogenization through the sublimation of the body politic to the common denominator of its imagined genetic bedrock. Its fundamental nature is expressed in the principle that “in order for the national phoenix to arise, everything and everyone that stands in its way first has to be brunt to ashes, literally if necessary.”66 In the aftermath of the First World War, Italo Balbo, one of the main ideologues of Italian Fascism, expressed the ethos of this new political movement by contrasting it to the old order, which he deemed effete, corrupt, degenerate, and decaying. Rather than helping to restore prewar society, Balbo emphatically declared, “No, better to deny all, destroy all, renew all, from the base.”67 Contempt for the old bourgeois order and fascination with the utopian new one were attitudes shared by Communists and Fascists.

  Both Leninism and Fascism were creative forms of nihilism, extremely utilitarian and contemptuous of universal rights. The essential element of their modus vivendi was the “sanctification of violence.”68 They envisioned society as a community of “bearers of beliefs,” and every aspect of their private life and behavior was expected to conform with these beliefs. Upon coming into power and implementing their vision of the perfect society, the two political movements established dictatorships of purity in which “people were rewarded or punished according to politically defined criteria of virtue.”69 Dario Lupi, an undersecretary of the Ministry of Education in Fascist Italy, warned menacingly that “he who joins us either becomes one of us in body and soul, in mind and flesh, or he will inexorably be cut off. For we know and feel ourselves in possession of the truth…. [W]e know and feel ourselves to be part of the only movement in marvelous harmony with the history time…. For ours is the only movement that faithfully reflects the innermost layers of the souls and feelings of our own kind.”70 Similarly, Hitler considered that the movement he led was a necessary creative destruction generated by the imperative of reestablishing the chosen community on the right track of history. On July 1934, Hitler stated that “when a deathly check is violently imposed upon the natural development of a people, an act of violence may serve to release the artificially interrupted flow of evolution to allow it once again the freedom of natural development.”71

  Both Leninism and Fascism presented themselves as revolutionary breakthroughs to a new life. Their novelty lay in the shrill ideological sacralization of revolutionary power. They preconditioned reconstruction by unleashing destruction. Oblivious to any independent moral dimension, both stressed “force and guile in shaping history,” exposing “hypocrisy, the absurdity of human condition,” while simultaneously preaching a political zeal that was supposed to “construct meaning, and sought, through political organization and action, to bring it into being.” Each of them was, as A. E. Rees showed, forms of a “revolutionary Machiavellian conception of politics…. More precisely, Nazism and Bolshevism might be defined as the Machiavellianism of parties which claimed to rule in the name of the masses.”72 To paraphrase Eugen Weber, in the case of both Leninism and Fascism, the locomotives that dragged them across history were their tactics. Leninism was therefore based on a “goal rationality,” which implied “the validity of its demands.” In this mental framework, “compliance is claimed to be based on a rational relationship between the ultimate goal of communism and the specific tasks assigned to social units, and individuals' rationality relates to the appropriateness of the means used … to the goals set.”73

  Such a radically utilitarian, transformist conception of politics ultimately materialized in the divinization of a mythical state holding the right of life and death over its subjects. Or as the Catholic intellectual Adolf Keller wrote, “A superhuman giant, claiming not only obedience, but confidence and faith such as only a personality has the right to expect.”74 In this conception, the state was beyond moral limitations, for it was the only producer of morality. However, as sociologist Michael Mann underlines, Fascism and Communism, despite the presence of party or leader despotism, “ruled more as a fluid, continuing revolutionary movement than as an institutionalized state.” They were, according to Mann, “regimes of continuous revolution.”75 These political movements were fueled by their projected heroic perpetual dynamism. In the case of Communism, stagnation and ultimately demise developed as its “shrill confidence in the history-making mode of action dissipated … in light of what experience had revealed.”76

  The leader, of course, played an essential role in such movements.77 As Leszek Kołakowski puts it, “Party mindedness, the political principle revered by all Leninists, resulted in the infallible image bestowed on the general secretary.”78 Paul Berman explains: “Lenin was the original model of such a Leader—Lenin, who wrote pamphlets and philosophical tracts with the confidence of a man who believes the secrets of the universe to be at his fingertips, and who established a weird new religion with Karl Marx as god, and who, after his death, was embalmed like a pharaoh and worshipped by the masses. But il Duce was no less a superhuman. Stalin was a colossus. About Hitler, Heidegger, bug-eyed, said: ‘But look at his hands.’”79 Peter Ehlen makes the insightful observation that Lenin “redefined the ground upon which the Communist renewal would be based. Henceforth, it would be the will of the leader.” In this context, power would become “absolute power and knows to lend itself a quasi-numinous appearance.”80 In other words, Leninism was also vitally premised on the apotheosis of the leader. An amusing but telltale example of the weight
of this founding element of Leninism is Comrade Lazurkina's intervention at the Twenty-second Party Congress in Moscow. In October 1961, during discussions about the expulsion of Stalin from the Lenin Mausoleum, an Old Bolshevik, Comrade Lazurkina, “who had spent 17 years in prisons and camps, reported that Lenin had appeared to her repeatedly in a dream. Lenin had demanded that his successor be removed from his mausoleum. And so it came to pass.”81 The ghost of one leader could not bear that of his successor anymore. The pantheon of Bolshevism had only one master—Lenin. Another matter related to the insertion of the will of the leader into the practice of Leninism was the “continuing inability of the party's leading legislative organs—the congress, CC [Central Committee] and Politburo—to develop a strong sense of institutional integrity and coherence,” according to Graeme Gill. Gill shows how the organizational basis of Stalin's power in the aftermath of Lenin's death, and even earlier, was “the absence of a major commitment of leading political figures to strengthen the organizational norms and identity of these bodies, inertia and the methods of action adopted by the party leadership.”82 For Gill, the weaknesses of Leninism evident in the 1920s set the stage for Stalin's autocratic rule over the party and over the Soviet Union.

  Spontaneity (stikhiinost’) has always been the Leninists' nemesis (think of Lenin's polemics on the relationship between class and party, first with Rosa Luxemburg, then with the left-wing Communists). Its counterpart was the obsession with partiinost' (partisanship), the unbounded acceptance of the party line (philosophy, sociology, and aesthetics had to be subordinated to party-defined “proletarian interests,” hence the dichotomy between “bourgeois” and “proletarian” social science). However, in the context of the Russian proletariat's underdeveloped class consciousness, Lenin, on the occasion of the 1905 revolution, revealed, according to Ana Krylova, “the ‘true nature’ of the working class … not through workers' conscious revolutionary initiative, as had been expected, but through an ‘instinctive urge’ that the workers ‘felt’ for open revolutionary action.” His discovery lay in the fact that the workers had the ability to “sense history and act in accordance with its objective needs without necessarily understanding them.”83 To close the circle, this reading of the December uprising reinforced Lenin's belief that behind the party, under proper leadership, the workers would fulfill their class mission despite an insufficient understanding of their historical role. This allowed him to justify both the voluntarism of Bolsheviks' takeover of power and the Enlightenment mission the party embarked on once in power.