The Devil in History

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  Moreover, this insertion of “class instinct” in the equation of stikhiinost'-partiinost' explains to a large extent Lenin's theory of the common struggle (alliance) between the workers and the peasants (smychka). Its fundamental presupposition was that the Bolsheviks could awaken the peasants' class instincts, thus winning them over to the side of the revolution. According to Lenin, “The more enlightened the peasantry becomes the more consistently and resolutely will it stand for a thoroughgoing democratic revolution.”84 This is what Ken Jowitt called “the ingenious error of Leninism”—lransplanting class struggle to the countryside: “The ideological-conceptual map with which Leninists work leads them to see economic differences as evidence of social polarization and the existence of ‘class allies’ in the villages, and it enables them to do politically what nationalists can do only analytically—that is, distinguish and oppose competing social bases and conceptions of the nation-state. Working with such a paradigm, Leninists attack the institutional bases, not simply the elite organization of peasant society.”85 And if Bukharin's model of the gradual growth of private property in socialist agriculture does not happen (and it did not during the New Economic Policy), then Leninism's vision of a spontaneous class “transformist” commitment and interests opened the door to collectivization. This amounted to an all-out attack on the foundation of the peasants' institutional and private lives, the rural counterpart to the urban socialist revolution. In their pursuit of this goal, the Bolsheviks had no limits, no pangs of conscience, no scruples. The result was genocide.

  Much of Leninism's dogmatism stemmed from Russian authoritarian traditions and the lack of a culture of public debate. Remember Antonio Gramsci's reflections on Russia's “gelatinous” civil society and the omnipotence of the bureaucratic state? Wasn't Lenin himself, by the end of his life, terrified by the resurgence of the time-honored traditions of rudeness, violence, brutality, and hypocrisy that he had lambasted and against which the revolution was presumably directed? As one author remarked, “Lenin was a direct heir to the tradition of revolutionary Machiavellianism in Russian history and to the Jacobin tradition in the European revolutionary movement.”86 On the one hand, as we have already discussed, Lenin believed that revolution was essential and inevitable, and that it would, of necessity, be violent; he considered any other approach to be conciliatory and doomed to failure.87 On the other hand, his Jacobinism was “a metaphor for revolutionary energy, incorruptibility and a willingness to push forward as far as possible in the interests of the working masses.” It was founded on his dedication to plebeian politics, “and the twentieth century plebeians were of course the class of wage-laborers. Hence consistent proletarian socialists had to be Jacobins.”88 Or, to use Lenin's formula, the Bolsheviks were Jacobins working for the proletariat.89

  Lenin was conscious that his most difficult trial was the transition from revolutionary action to governance and the preservation of state power. The success of the October Revolution seemed to confirm that he had successfully merged “the elemental destructive force of the masses” and “the conscious destructive force of the organization of revolutionaries.” But how was the newly won power to be consolidated? The initial drive toward democracy from below and self-empowerment of the masses, was replaced in 1917 by emphasis on the reconstructed state machine that according to Lenin was indispensable for defending the revolution and pursuing its main goals. In form, Lenin said, this was a dictatorship, but in substance, because it represented the interests and aspirations of the large majority of the population, it was the true, substantive democracy. The main problem with Lenin's concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat was his contempt for the rule of law. For him, the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat “is power won and maintained by the violence of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, power that is unrestricted by any laws.”90 This was the central point of Rosa Luxemburg's criticism of the Russian Revolution. She argued that “[Lenin] is completely mistaken in the means he employs. Decree, dictatorial force of the factory overseer, Draconic penalties, rule by terror—all these things are but palliatives. The only way to a rebirth is the school of public life itself, the most unlimited, the broadest democracy and public opinion. It is rule by terror which demoralizes.” With great foresight, Luxemburg warned that the path taken by the Bolsheviks would lead to “the brutalization of public life.”91

  The restoration of state prerogatives was for Lenin a “necessary evil,” and he tried to justify the notion of a proletarian dictatorship by defining it as the dictatorship of the majority of the population (poor peasants included), and therefore not exactly a dictatorship. Lenin was convinced, however, that these exceptional measures, including the persecution of dissidents and banning of all political parties but the Bolsheviks, were needed for the survival of the revolution in Russia. In the long run, however, he hoped that the revolution would triumph in the West and a certain political and economic relaxation would become possible. Lenin saw this as a temporary stage; he never accepted the idea that the Russian Revolution would be the sole proletarian revolution for decades to come. At the end of the day, though, Lenin imposed two fundamental elements on the Bolshevik conception of politics: law as an epiphenomenon of revolutionary morals and the heteronomy of individual action. In this sense, Lenin opened the door to the realization of radical evil, for the latter, if one is to follow Hannah Arendt, means “making human beings as human beings superfluous…. This happens as soon as all unpredictability—which, in human beings, is the equivalent of spontaneity—is eliminated.”92 Here lies the essential ambivalence in interpreting Leninism: was it a form of Russian Sonderweg (special road) on the path to implementing modernity or was it a Marxist Sonderweg in the accomplishment of socialist revolution?

  Whatever one thinks of the final disintegration of Leninism, it was a quite successful experiment in reshaping political community according to a certain interpretation of Marxist socialism.93 How does one make sense of the fact that, unlike all other Eastern European societies, Russia is the only one that seems unable to restore pro-Communist traditions and parties? Where are the Socialist Revolutionaries, Kadets, or Mensheviks? The answer is that Lenin produced “the end of politics” via the ultimate triumph of political will.94 In fact, this meant that a sect of self-appointed revolutionary pedagogues managed to coerce a large population to accept their obsessions as the inexorable imperative of history. Using the example of the implementation of surveillance (considered one of the practices of “institutionalizing modernity”), Peter Holquist shows that its enforcement was not “a specifically Bolshevik, Marxist, or even totalitarian practice—it was a modern one.” In his opinion, what gave the Soviet regime its singularity was “the intersection of a particular ideology with the simultaneous implementation of a particular modern understanding of politics—put succinctly, an understanding that views populations as both the means and the goal of some emancipatory project.” With its specific Marxist conception of politics, society, and history in the background, Leninism developed “a closed, rather than open, model of historical progress.”95

  Communism and Fascism were sustained by the historical-political sense of historical urgency and their willingness to act in a radical mode. The vanguards that brought these political movements to power and kept them there were mobilized and vindicated by the ethical-political change that they considered themselves uniquely prepared to spearhead because of their postliberal consciousness, as well as their spirit, will, discipline, self-sacrifice, and willingness to act.96 Imposing the dictatorship of the Communist Party as the sole instrument for history-making action, the Bolsheviks successfully exhausted the political sphere, eliminating all alternative visions of the body politic. Lenin, and later Stalin, transformed the political system into “the central and sacralized arena for the self-salvation and self-sacrifice of revolutionaries striving to implement the utopian designs which have to be realized in the present and on earth.”97 Considering that the Soviet Union s
urvived for over seventy years, the operation of making sense of the pre-Communist past logically faces a historical hiatus. The various trajectories of Russian political thought must overcome either an utter lack of domestic continuity or the thorny issue of synthetic reinterpretation. In the final analysis, it is difficult to recuperate tradition into the twenty-first century, when the country's only version of mature modernity was Leninism.

  This statement, however, takes us to another ramification of the dilemma of the Sonderwegs. The major theme of the Richard Pipes-Martin Malia controversy is important not only for our interpretation of Russian modern history but also for the discussion of the nature and future of left-wing, socialist politics in the twentieth century: was it Russia that destroyed (compromised) socialism, as Pipes and, earlier, Max Weber put it, or rather was it revolutionary socialism that, because of its political, indeed metaphysical, hubris, imposed immense sufferings on Russia?98 Objecting to the young Georg Lukács's celebration of Lenin's takeover of power in Russia, Weber insisted on the impossibility of building the socialism Karl Marx had envisioned in the absence of genuine capitalist, bourgeois market developments: “It is with good reason,” he wrote, “that the Communist Manifesto emphasized the economically revolutionary character of the bourgeois capitalist entrepreneurs. No trade-unions, much less state-socialist officials, can perform this role for us in their place.”99 Earlier than many critics of Sovietism, Weber concluded that the Leninist experiment would discredit socialism for the entire twentieth century.100

  REENACTING LENIN?

  So, is there a reason to consider Lenin's political praxis a source of inspiration for those who look for a new political transcendence? Is it a blueprint for a resurrected radicalism, as suggested by Slavoj Žižek, who proposes the revival of the Leninist 1917 revolutionary leap into the kingdom of utopia? Reenacting Lenin's defiance of opportunistic or conformist submission to the logic of the status quo is for Žižek the voie royale for restoring a radical praxis:

  This is the Lenin from whom we still have something to learn. The greatness of Lenin was that in this catastrophe situation he wasn't afraid to succeed—in contrast to the negative pathos discernible in Rosa Luxemburg and Adorno, for whom the ultimate authentic act is the admission of the failure, which brings the truth of the situation to light. In 1917, instead of waiting until the time was ripe, Lenin organized a pre-emptive strike; in 1920, as the leader of the party of the working class with no working class (most of it being decimated in the civil war), he went on organizing a state, fully accepting the paradox of the party which was to organize—even recreate—its own base, its working class.101

  Compare this exalted vision of Lenin to that of a former Communist ideologue, the apostate Alexander Yakovlev's indictment of Lenin's essential role in the establishment of a dictatorial regime in which the working class was to suffer as much as other social strata the effects of utopian social engineering.102 Can Leninism be separated from the institution of the vanguard party and be conceived as a form of intellectual and moral resistance to the conformist debacle of the international Left at a moment of civilization collapse (World War I)? The debate on Leninism bears upon the possibility of radical-emancipatory practice and the need to reconstruct areas of autonomy in opposition to the logic of instrumental rationality. The burning question remains whether such efforts are predestined to end in new coercive undertakings, or whether Leninism was a peculiar, sui generis combination of Marxism and an underdeveloped political and economic structure. Indeed, as Trotsky insisted, the defeat of “world revolution”—after all, the main strategic postulate on which Lenin had built his whole revolutionary adventure—made the rise of Stalinism a sociological and political necessity. Here we may remember Isaac Deutscher's analysis: “Under Lenin, Bolshevism had been accustomed to appeal to reason, the self-interest, and the enlightened idealism of ‘class-conscious’ industrial workers. It spoke the language of reason even when it appealed to the muzhiks. But once Bolshevism had ceased to rely on revolution in the West, once it had become aware that it could only fall back on that environment and dig itself in, it began to descend to the level of primitive magic, and to appeal to the people in the language of that magic.”103

  At this point, the last element of our dilemma comes into play. If one is to even partially accept the validity of the Russian Sonderweg thesis, the next problem is how much this Russ ian distortion was Stalin's. What needs to be discussed is not only Deutscher's claim that Stalinism was “the language of magic,” but also Robert C. Tucker's theory of reversion. The latter consists of the claim that under Stalin one can identify “the revival of certain features which belonged to the past, especially the more distant past, and had receded or been abolished (like serfdom) in nineteenth century Russia, but resurfaced in the Stalin period.” Tucker takes this analysis even further as he labels Stalinism Russian National Bolshevism, a blend of Leninist Marxism and Russ ian nationalism.104 His thesis is consonant with more recent views advocated by authors such as Terry Martin and David Brandenberger, who emphasize a neotraditionalist turn in the process of building socialism in one country. During mature Stalinism, “Soviet patriotism” became an apology for national authenticity, pride, and loyalty. At the same time, the Soviet Union, “a state with no ambition to turn itself into a nation-state—indeed with the exact opposite ambition,” became a site of large-scale ethnic cleansing.105 Moreover, the society was a hierarchy on the basis of “Stalinist soslovnost.” According to Sheila Fitzpatrick, “soslovnost provides a framework within which it becomes immediately comprehensible that the ‘classes’ of the Stalinist society should have been defined, like sosloviia, in terms of their relationship to the state rather than, like Marxist classes, in terms of their relationship to each other.”106 This whole array of developments originated in Stalin's development of a new, non-class, “popular” form of mobilization. As David Priestland points out, “The unified narod, now no longer divided by class, embodied socialism, and was to achieve heroic feats in the struggle against largely external enemies.”107 Subsequently, the USSR itself became “the avant-garde of the international communist movement and the dynamic centre of world politics.”108 This phenomenon was symptomatic for the Soviet experiment, where “the sense of collectively creating socialism was more important than the use of class categories and the assumption of proletarian privilege.”109 In the context of building socialism in one country, for Stalin the body social was the chosen community bringing into state-reality Lenin's social utopia.110

  What this “mutation” of Marxist orthodoxy tells, though, is that the ultimate aim of Stalin's policies remained Communism. Even his cult of personality functioned as “a unifying mechanism,” “a personification of socialist state-building.”111 Graeme Gill simply states that “the Stalin cult grew upon the edifice of Leninist orthodoxy.” In his study of K. Popov's article “The Party and the Role of the Leader,” one of the pieces theoretically underpinning the cult, Gill pointed to “three main grounds for recognition of the vozhd”: the leader “armed with Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory, hardened by many years experience of the struggle for Leninism, hand in hand with Lenin”; the ability to endure “those difficulties which befell the narrow circles of selfless revolutionaries” by way of exceptional organizational talent; and “the will of an individual leader [that] could personify the will of the proletariat.”112 Indeed, Lenin was the embodiment of the theory, the struggle, and the party. This was his model of successful radical revolutionary transformation. In 1930, Stalin claimed to be the personification of this heritage of Lenin. He upheld this assertion of supremacy over his rivals by organizational power, thus creating an environment fundamentally inimical to any form of opposition. Like Lenin, but to an exaggerated degree, by the end of the 1930s, Stalin managed to become synonymous with the party itself.

  Stalin also emulated Lenin's creativity in his approach to the political thought of the founding fathers. In 1941, Stalin warned the authors of the c
ommissioned Short Course of Political Economy, “If you search for everything in Marx, you'll get off track …. In the USSR you have a laboratory … and you think Marx should know more than you about socialism.” By 1950, his attitude toward Marxism resembled Lenin's famous remark from the Philosophical Notebooks: “Half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx.” Stalin wrote in Pravda: “In the course of its development Marxism cannot help but be enriched by new experience, by new knowledge; consequently, its individual formulas and conclusions must change with the passing of time, must be replaced by new formulas and conclusions corresponding to new historical tasks. Marxism does not recognize immutable conclusions and formulas obligatory for all epochs and periods.”113 Ultimately, Stalin's rehashing of Marxism (and) Leninism could be read in a more general key. It should be placed in the original interpretative ethos of Bolshevik “substitutionism.” Georg Lukács justified Lenin's theory of the revolution based on the idea of “ascribed class consciousness,” that is, “the appropriate rational reactions ‘imputed’ to a particular typical position in the process of production.”114 Why would we not accept the same ascription for the building of state socialism? Both for Lenin and for Stalin, the state that seemed to stubbornly refuse to wither away remained the ultimate test for “the real understanding and recognition of Marxism.”115