The Devil in History

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  Going back to the ambivalence of Leninism, I think that what we need to stress, beyond the debates about its Marxist, Russian, or reified core (by Stalin), is that “its goal is to transcend any particular politics … and to realize a philosophical project over the heads (or behind the backs) of the participants. Its justification lies in its claim to transcend their (alienated) self-consciousness in the name of the really real truth. It is politics as antipolitics.”116 From this point of view, regardless of distinctions between party persuasion and coercion (in Tucker's formulation) or the language of reason versus that of magic, it is undeniable that Lenin was the one who created the possibility for the culmination of “Marx's hypothesis that the working class has a privileged knowledge of the final purpose of history in the assertion that Comrade Stalin is always right.”117 Lenin produced and implemented a charismatic doctrine of universal human regeneration, a New Faith (as Czesław Miłosz called Bolshevism) based on “the archetypal human faculty for imbuing the home and the community, and hence the new home and the new community, with suprahuman, ritual significance.”118 In the final analysis, Leninism was the child of three mothers: the Enlightenment with its focus on reason and progress; Marx's social theory and project of world historical transformation; and the Russian revolutionary tradition with its utilitarian nihilism and a quasi-religious socialist vision of the transformation of mankind.

  With this intellectual pedigree in mind, one needs to be very cautious in writing Leninism's definitive obituary. Yes, as a Russian model of socialism it is exhausted, but there is something in Leninism—if you want, its antidemocratic, collectivist pathos associated with the invention of the party as a mystical body transcending individual fears, anguishes, despair, loneliness, and so on—that remains with us. All political figures in post-Soviet Russia—all parties, movements, and associations—define themselves, and must do so, in relationship to Lenin's legacies. In this respect, as an organizational principle but not as a worldview, Leninism is alive, if not well. Ideologically it is extinct, of course, but its repudiation of democratic deliberation and contempt for “sentimental bourgeois values” has not vanished. This is because the cult of the organization and the contempt for individual rights is part and parcel of one direction within the “Russian tradition.” Russian memory includes a plurality of trends, and one should avoid any kind of Manichean taxonomy. It is doubtless that, as Christian existentialist philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev noticed, there is something deeply Russian in the love for the ultimate, universally cathartic, redeeming revolution, which explains why Lenin and his followers (including the highly sophisticated philosophers Georg Lukács and Ernst Bloch) embraced a certain cataclysmic, messianic, absolutist direction within the Marxist tradition.119 The Bolshevik revolution was indeed the expression of Russ ian intellectuals' obsession with “a version of a thirst for the sacred with a concomitant revulsion against the profane, a contest of values that can be seen in an early paradigm, the story of Christ's throwing the money changers out of the temple.”120 In his revolutionary praxis, Lenin, as famously formulated by Robert C. Tucker, “married the old image of two warring Russias with Marxism.”121 Leninism was “not solely a revolutionary response to the inequities of the Tsarist state and the social injustice endemic to capitalist liberalism, but also a response to the crisis of modernity.”122

  At the same time, one should place Leninism in contradistinction to other versions of Marxism, which were at least as legitimate if not more legitimate than the Bolshevik doctrine. It is not at all self-evident that one can derive the genocidal logic of the gulags from Marx's universalistic postulates, whereas it is quite clear that much of the Stalinist system existed in embryo in Lenin's Russia. Together with Robert C. Tucker, we should admit the heterogeneous nature of the Bolshevik tradition itself and avoid the temptation of “retrospective determinism.” Thus Stalin's Lenin was only one of the possibilities implied in the Leninist project.

  Now, in dealing with the impact of Russian ideas and practices on the West, there is always a problem: what Russian tradition do we refer to?123 The Decembrist or the czarist-autocratic one? Cernyshevsky or Herzen? Chaadaev or Gogol? Turgenev or Dostoyevski? The humanists who opposed the pogroms and the blood libel or the Black Hundreds? The liberal writer Vladimir Korolenko or the czarist reactionary Konstantin Pobedonostsev? The Bolshevik apocalyptical scenario or the Menshevik evolutionary socialism? The Nechaev-style terrorist rejection of the status quo, the intelligentsia's perpetual self-flagellation and outrage, or the dissident vision of a tolerant polis? Even within the dissident culture, there has always been a tension between the liberals and the nationalists, between the supporters of Andrei Sakharov and those of Igor Shafarevich, between Solzhenitsyn's Slavophile inclinations and Sergey Kovalev's democratic universalism.124 All these questions remain as troubling now as they were one hundred years ago. Once again, Russia is confronted with the eternal questions “What is to be done?” and “Who are to be blamed?” And whether they admit it or not, all participants in the debate are haunted by Lenin's inescapable presence. Lenin was the most influential Russian political personality of the twentieth century, and for Eastern Europeans, Lenin's influence resulted in the complete transformation of their life worlds. It would be easy to simply say that Leninism succumbed to the events of 1989–91, but the truth is that residual Bolshevism continues to be a major component of the hybrid transitional culture of post-Soviet Russia (and East Central Europe).

  To return to our initial dilemma about the proper interpretation of the Soviet experiment, one needs to draw one final line and ask, What was Lenin's unique, extraordinary innovation? What was the substance of his transformative action? Here I think that Jowitt rather than Žižek gave the accurate answer. The charismatic vanguard party, made up of professional revolutionaries, was invented by Lenin over one hundred years ago, in 1902, when he wrote his most influential text, What Is to Be Done? Lars Lih disagrees with the “textbook interpretation” of Leninism (the predestined-pedagogical role of the revolutionary vanguard, i.e., the Communist Party) and insists that many, if not most, Social Democrats at the beginning of the twentieth century were convinced of the need to bring consciousness to the class from “without.”125 According to Lih, the thrust of the criticism from other socialists was aimed not at What Is to Be Done, but rather at his “Letter to a Comrade,” written in September 1902, and especially One Step Forward Two Steps Backwards, published in the spring of 1904. But this “injection approach” (bringing consciousness from the outside, awakening a dormant proletariat) was not the thrust of Lenin's main revision of classical Marxism: it was not educational action per se, but rather the nature of the pedagogical agent that mattered in the story. This “party of a new type” symbolized what Antonio Gramsci later called the “New Prince”: a new figure of the political that absorbs and incorporates the independent life of society up to the point of definitive osmosis or asphyxiation.

  BOLSHEVISM AS POLITICAL MESSIANISM

  Lenin created a mystique of the party as the ultimate repository of strategic wisdom, a “community of saints” dedicated to bringing about the cataclysmic millenium: it was the historical agent, for it encompassed the professional revolutionaries, those who, by reuniting their acting and thinking faculties, regained “the grace of the harmonious original being.”126 One statement speaks volumes about the totemic entity he wished to create: “We believe in the party, we see in her the reason, the honor and the conscience of our epoch … the only guarantee for the liberation movement of the working class.”127 For the Bolsheviks, “like Christ, the party was, at one and the same time, a real institution and an incarnated idea. The formation of the Party was the First Coming; not fully appreciated by an immature working class, it heralded a Second Coming and the apotheosis of workers' consciousness at which point all workers would join the Party, thereby rendering it superfluous. The eschatological significance of the Party explained the zeal with which the Marxists guarded its purity.”128 Le
nin developed an exclusivist vision of party unity founded on unflinching adherence to the established doctrinal line and not on a consensual agreement about the main ideological tenets. For him, it was “the unity of Marxists, not the unity of Marxists with the enemies and distorters of Marxism.”129 As I have shown, this unwillingness to compromise over the interpretation of history is one of the fundamental features of the sacralization of politics.

  Leninism was a form of modern messianism intolerant of realities escaping its ideological panorama. It was a production recipe for The Communist Manifesto's “scenario for the drama of millenarian redemption.”130 The professional revolutionaries who made up “the party of a new type” were, according to Yury Piatakov, “men of miracles” bringing into life “that which is considered impossible, not realizable and inadmissible…. [W]e are people of special temper, without any equivalents in history precisely because we make impossible possible.”131 Therefore, the party was the embodiment of historical reason and militants were expected to carry out its orders without hesitation or reservation. Discipline, secrecy, and rigid hierarchy were essential to such a party, especially during clandestine activities (like those in Russia). The main role of the party was to awaken proletarian self-consciousness and instill revolutionary doctrine (faith) into the dormant proletariat. This was the party's salvific mission, and because of it the party was the embodiment of freedom. Instead of relying on the spontaneous development of consciousness among the industrial working class, Leninism saw the party as a catalytic agent bringing revolutionary knowledge, will, and organization to the exploited masses.132 Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was right when he said:

  When we say Lenin

  We mean the Party

  And when we say Party

  We mean Lenin.133

  First Leninism, then Stalinism, codified the total commitment to an apocalyptic scenario dedicated to bringing about not only a new type of society but also a new type of human being.134 With its ambition to initiate an anthropological revolution, Marxism can be regarded as a form of utopian radicalism—utopian because it is basically future oriented and overlooks the perennial features of the human condition, radical inasmuch as it aims to transform the body politic and establish a form of social organization totally different form all previous ones. Moreover, in its Bolshevik application, this utopian radicalism turned into “a set of values and beliefs, a culture, a language, new forms of speech, more modern customs and new ways of behaving in public and in private.” And the name under which all this came together was Stalinism—a self-identified separate and superior civilization.135 Marxism-Leninism as mythology therefore relied on two mutually conditioning myths: a sustaining one (the first workers' state with its corollary the Great October Revolution) and an eschatological one (the realization of Communism).136 According to these myths, Marx's collectivity of self-determined, quasi-divine beings undergoing “perpetual becoming that knows no limits and continually striving forwards anew” entered its kairos, accomplishing the ultimate destiny prefigured by history. This triumphant tale of humanity's renewal was provisioned only by surrender and self-sacrifice to the will of the leader (unqualified yet).137 It was the “scientific” answer to the paradox of theodicy intrinsic to Marxism: the eschatological subject was identified, but its coming of age needed leadership—the Kautskyan intervention from without, Lenin's party of a new type and, why not, ultimately Stalin's revolution from above. Marxism-Leninism was the formula used to reconcile the ever-expanding rational mastery of the world with the aspiration for individual liberation.

  The Leninist party is dead (it is quite ironic that the Gennady Zyuganov-style epigones of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation combine Slavophile orthodoxy, xenophobia, imperialism, and Bolshevik nostalgia in a baroque nationalist-cum-egalitarian collectivistic blending).138 But the cult of the party as a sacred institution, the sectarian vision of a community of virtuous, ascetic, righteous individuals selflessly committed to improving the life of humanity and erecting Nikolai Chernyshevky's “Crystal Palace” here and now is not extinct.139 It explains the nature of the post-Communist transitions where initiatives from below are still marginal and the center of power remains, in many cases, as conspiratorial, secretive, and nondemocratic as it was in pre-Leninist and Leninist times. Is this bound to stay the same? My answer is tentatively negative; after all, the monolith is broken, the dream of Communism as the secular kingdom of God has failed. The challenge remains, however, of coming to terms with Lenin's legacies and admitting that Sovietism was not imposed by extraterrestrial aliens on an innocent intelligentsia but rather found its causes, origins, and most propitious ground in the radical segments of Russian political culture.140 To put it simply, the Third International and the major schism within the world Marxist movement were the consequences of Lenin's defiant gesture, his seizure of power in the fall of 1917. His determination to force socialist revolution upon the czarist empire, and implicitly upon the world, triggered the beginning of the epoch of totalitarian politics. And his single-mindedness would be emulated by others. Rosa Luxemburg again anticipated the significance of the Bolshevik push for state power: “Their October uprising was not only the actual salvation of the Russian Revolution: it was also the salvation of the honor of international socialism.”141 Indeed, until 1989, the October Revolution remained the central symbolic pillar of the world Communist movement.

  The two letters Lenin sent to the Bolshevik Central Committee on September 15, 1917 (The Bolsheviks Must Assume Power and Marxism and Insurrection), sum up the voluntaristic pathology of the political that was to plague the rest of the century: “History will never forgive us if we do not assume power now…. We shall win absolutely and unquestionably…. Our victory is assured for the people are close to desperation and we are showing the entire people a way out…. The majority of the people are on our side…. It would be naive to wait for a ‘formal’ majority; no revolution ever waits for that.”142 Hitler shared this self-entitlement, for he too was convinced that mundane politics were to be sacrificed on the altar of the total revolution: “We are avid for power, and we take it wherever we can get it…. Wherever we see a possibility to move in, we go! … Whoever has us clinging to his coattails can never get rid of us again.”143 To paraphrase Claude Lefort, both Leninism and Fascism identified with the revolution as an irreversible moment breaking with the past and creating a totally new world. In this sense they are cosmic mutations of symbolic structure.

  The Bolshevik takeover of power in October 1917 inaugurated a period of global ideological warfare that may have come to an end only with the collapse of the USSR in 1991 (the “age of extremes,” as Eric Hobsbawm calls this epoch or, to use George Lichtheim's term, later adopted by Ernst Nolte, “the European civil war”). Because of Lenin, a new type of politics was born in the twentieth century, one founded upon fanaticism, elitism, unflinching commitment to a sacred cause, and total submission of critical reason by means of faith to a self-appointed “vanguard” of militant illuminati.144 Clara Zetkin's exalted proclamation at the Third Party Congress of the KPD (the German Communist Party) in 1923 reflected the ethos of a new political religion being born: “Take off your shoes! The ground on which you stand is holy ground. It is ground sanctified through the revolutionary struggle [and] the revolutionary sacrifices of the Russian proletarian.”145 With Lenin, the activist turned into a professional revolutionary (regardless of background, intellectual or proletarian—Heinz Neumann or Ernst Thälmann in the KPD; Gheorghiu-Dej, Ana Pauker, David Fabian, or Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu in the RCP). Henceforth, the revolutionary fanatic sought deliverance in the elevation of mass movements.146 S/he was a soldier acting out a newly acquired, virtuous identity validated by the righteousness of the world mission.147

  In an important book, Claude Lefort, the distinguished French political philosopher,148 proposes a deliberatively controversial thesis. Engaging in a polemic with François Furet and Martin Malia, Lefort maintains that Bolsh
evism (or, in general, twentieth-century Communism) was not simply an ideological mirage.149 Ideology mattered enormously, as demonstrated by Solzhenitsyn, about whom Lefort wrote extensively. But ideological passion alone or the will to impose a utopian blueprint cannot explain the longevity and intensity of the Communist phenomenon. In the spirit of French sociology (Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss), Lefort contended that it would be fruitful to regard Communism as a “total social fact.” The totalitarian system can be seen not only as an emotional-intellectual superstructure but also as an institutional ensemble inspired by these passions. In other words, it is not the original Marxism constituted in the Western revolutionary tradition that explains the Soviet tragedy but rather the mutation introduced by Lenin.

  There is, undoubtedly, an authoritarian temptation at the heart of the Marxian project, but the idea of the ultracentralized, sectarian, extremely militarized party, composed of a minority of knowledgeable “chosen ones” who possess the gnosis while preaching egalitarian rhetoric to the masses, is directly linked to Lenin's intervention in the evolution of Russian and European social democracy. Lenin's revolutionary novelty consists in the cult of the dogma and the elevation of the party as the uniquely legitimate interpreter of the revealed truth (a trait of right-wing revolutionary totalitarian movements): “Even when it was still neither a monolithic party nor a single party, it potentially combined these two characteristics because it represented the Party-as-One, not one party among others (the strongest, most daring among them), but that party whose aim was to act under the impulse of a single will and to leave nothing outside its orbit, in other words, to merge with the state and society.”150 Moreover, Lefort emphasized the prescriptive role of the supposedly revealed Word as a defining characteristic of left totalitarianism: “The Text [Écrit] was supposed to answer all questions emerging in the course of things. Presenting itself at once as the origin and the end of knowledge, the Text required a certain kind of reader: the Communist Party member.”151 Indeed, Lenin carried to an extreme the idea of a privileged relation between “revolutionary theory” and “practice.” The latter constitutes (substantiates) itself in the figure of the presumably infallible party, custodian of an omniscience (“epistemic infallibility,” to use Giuseppe di Palma's term) that defines and exorcises any doubt as a form of treason. The party was invested with demiurgic characteristics practically substituting for the revolutionary class—an elite invested by history with the mission of the salvation of humanity via revolution. Robert C. Tucker correctly diagnosed Lenin's invention: “Revolutions do not simply come, he was contending, they have to be made, and the making requires a properly constituted and functioning organization of revolutionaries. Marx proclaimed the inevitable and imminent coming of the world proletarian socialist revolution. Lenin saw that the coming was neither inevitable nor necessarily imminent. For him—and this was a basic idea underlying the charter document of his Bolshevism, although nowhere did he formulate it in just these words—there was no revolution outside the party. Nulla salus extra ecclesiam.”152