THE UTOPIAN IMPULSE
Stalin's projection of his own ideas as natural law was, however, the result of the structural challenges of utopia in power (adoption, fulfillment of ideals, and adaptation to the world). To follow Klaus-Georg Riegel, under Stalin Soviet rule became the “hierocratic domination of the church-dispensed grace.” In the physical absence of Lenin, the numinous leader incarnating the absolute power of the party, “the imagined community of Leninist disciples”10 had to reinvent itself by founding its charisma in the scriptures of the founding fathers. The invented tradition of Marxism-Leninism was then thrust upon the party ranks as a means of purification or, rather, to stabilize the unquestionable normative identity of the party. However, Stalin's obsession with strengthening the party was not far from Lenin's dictum that “a party becomes stronger by purging itself.”11 Indeed, to prevent diffuseness of dogma and weakness among the cadre, Stalin pronounced that “the more drastic the purge, the more likelihood is there of a strong and influential Party arising.”12
The climax of this mode of operation, its most glaring and outrageous consequence, involved the “dialectical confessions” during the Stalinist show trials, those abject self-flagellations meant to give the totalitarian political order moral legitimacy: if all opponents (real or invented) were nothing but scoundrels, loathsome agents of the West, despicable traitors, and infamous saboteurs, then the Stalinist leadership, benefiting from a perfect political purity, was entitled to invoke the alibi of an “objective” historical rationality.13 These “poetics of purge” regulated ideological space within the body social and politics of the Soviet-type polity, redefining the “elect” within the community and reemphasizing their messianic role. Accordingly, the sacred history of the movement was heroically rewritten by blood and exclusion. Conceived by its founding fathers as an antistatist philosophy, Marxism culminated in the Soviet apotheosis of the party and state machine (partolatry and statolatry). The legitimacy of the Bolshevik elite derived primarily from its relationship to Marxist doctrine. Arcane as they sounded to external observers, the squabbles of the 1920s touched on the most sensitive points of what Czesław Miłosz has called the New Faith, an ideology “based on the principle that good and evil are definable solely in terms of service or harm to the interests of the Revolution.”14 The revolution was hyperbolized as a cathartic event, the advent of a new age of social justice. Marxism's claims of scientific infallibility were added into the mix. The result was a gnostic vision that explained history and society in almost geometric formulas whose deep secrets were accessible only to a select group of ideological guardians. All these factors revealed the process of intellectuals being seduced by allegedly ironclad determinism in an age of political extremes. In other words, to quote from a highly influential book of the 1930s, The ABC of Communism, “what Marx prophesized is being fulfilled under our very eyes.”15
The social promises and regenerative spirit of Bolshevism were invoked as arguments against those who deplored violence by dictatorial power. Many intellectuals, including some famous names like Maxim Gorky, André Gide, Arthur Koestler, Manès Sperber, Romain Rolland, André Malraux, and Ignazio Silone, were fascinated by what seemed to be a heroic historical adventure. The Bolshevik revolution was, to use the words crafted by the socialist politician Jean Jaurès for the French one, “a monstrous cannon, which had to be maneuvered on its carriage with confidence, swiftness and decisiveness.”16 Moreover, the Soviet Union was, for them, clearly a model for ideas and institutions, the source of a new socialist ethos, of a novel humanism, at the time when liberal, representative democracy was perceived as having failed to rise to the challenges posed by modern societies. Some of them grew disappointed with the cynicism of the Communist commissars and left the Leninist chapels; others, like Pablo Neruda and Louis Aragon, refused to abjure their faith and remained attached to hackneyed Communist tenets. Moreover, upon the Sovietization of Eastern Europe, Leninism became an alternative for national rebirth. For example, Communist doctrinaire Václav Kopecký argued in January 1948 that “the ideology of the new Czechoslovakia will be the ideology of the new People's Democratic Republic and the ideology of transition on the road from capitalism to socialism.”17 Many such examples can be found in the newspapers of those years in each of the countries in the region.18 The Communist “moral elite” claimed an exclusive mandate of salvation and historical truth in fulfilling its world mission.19 Or, in the words of Jean-Paul Sartre in 1961, “Nothing is clearer; whatever its crimes, the USSR has over the bourgeois democracies this redoubtable privilege: the revolutionary objective…. [The Soviet Union was] incomparable with other nations; it is only possible to judge it if one accepts its cause and in the name of that cause.”20
STALINISM AS A POLITICAL MYTH
The Short Course of History of the CPSU, published in 1938, represented the paradigm of Bolshevik intellectual debasement: “It not only established a whole pattern of Bolshevik mythology linked to the cult of Lenin and Stalin, but prescribed a detailed ritual and liturgy…. The Short Course was not merely a work of falsified history but a powerful social institution—one of the party's most important instruments of mind control, a device for the destruction both of critical thought and of society's recollections of its own past.”21 Turned into a gospel for the international Communist movement, this parody of Marxism was extolled as the pinnacle of human wisdom. Stalinist ideology brought to fruition the pauperization of Marxist theoretical practice and actually functioned as an effective counterdoctrine to emasculate the originally emancipatory momentum of negative dialectics and to substitute for it an opportunist-positivistic sociology deliberately situated beyond traditional moral borders. Through the Short Course, Leninism became a “true book religion” (in the words of Riegel). This “Stalinist revolution of belief” provided unitary guidance and unity of will among the cadres involved in building socialism in one country, in the Soviet modernization project. It was the literary reflection of the “monopoly of the legitimate use of hierocratic coercion” (as Max Weber put it) exercised by Stalin in the show trials. To paraphrase Souvarine, the Short Course paradigm officially transformed Leninism into a religion d'état.22 The human being that Stalinism envisaged was supposed to repudiate the classical distinctions between good and evil, scornfully discredited as obsolete through exposure to another moral code, in many points suggestive of the Nazi Übermensch. Its ideology was rooted in hatred and resentment and developed into a logic of manipulation, domination, and survival. The main task of propaganda was to purify the mind; it was like an exorcising ritual through which the regime attempted to eliminate all the vestiges of Western culture and to create the human instrument of perfect social reproduction. Its content consisted in a few mechanically reiterated themes; its method was symbolic aggression, ideological violence. In 1929, Stalin had proclaimed the “year of the great break” (god velikogo pereloma), which, according to Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, connoted “the Marxist leap from ‘necessity’ to ‘freedom’ … a complete rupture with the accursed old world…. Under Stalin's leadership, the masses were building an earthly paradise.”23 What was really happening at the time was an annihilation of free will, total intoxication, moral dereliction, and thereby absolute identification with the system. It was the Soviet version of an individual Gleichschaltung.
Stalinism's modus operandi was excess in matters such as bureaucratization, police terror, absence of democracy, and censorship: “Not, for example, merely coercive peasant policies, but a virtual civil war against the peasantry; not merely police repression, or even civil war–style terror, but a holocaust by terror that victimized tens of millions of people for twenty-five years; not merely a Thermidorean revival of nationalist tradition, but an almost fascist-like chauvinism; not merely a leader cult, but deification of a despot.”24 After the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, the same form of Leninism—ihey never dared call it Stalinism—was decreed the unique interpretation of Marxism. Stalin's death was “a nec
essary prerequisite of post-Stalin change and, indeed, as the essential first act of ‘de-Stalinization.’”25 After Nikita Khrushchev's fulminating attack on Stalinism at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in February 1956, certain changes became inevitable within the rigid structure of Soviet dogma. In addition to institutional innovations, de-Stalinization meant dedogmatization, the end of the boundless worship of sacred texts written by or attributed to Stalin. As one author remarked, with de-Stalinization, “the relations between the party-state and society underwent significant changes, with a new emphasis on mediation through soft controls, inducements and strategies of incorporation. But the monolithic structure of the party-state rule and of economic management remained fundamentally unchanged.”26
THE BROKEN MONOLITH
The post-1953 political relaxation, often referred to as the “Thaw,” ushered in an era of doubt and criticism. Gone were the times of absolute certainties dictated by a presumably infallible supreme leader. Totalitarian imagery that had functioned for decades through “tremendum et fascinosum (the alternation of fear and hope, terror and salvation)”27 found its spell radically questioned. In spite of its limitations, Khrushchev's Secret Speech, one of the most important political documents of the twentieth century, revealed, to a limited extent, the crimes against the party. But its significance lay in the fact that it “stretched the limits of unbelief in postwar Soviet Russia.”28 Most importantly, the first wave of de-Stalinization put an end to terror as an instrument of governance: “The reforms to criminal justice, especially the amnesties, and the debunking of the Stalin cult in the Secret Speech stand as lasting achievements of the period, for they ensured that full re-Stalinization—of the Gulag, and of the Stalin cult—would never again be possible.”29 As early as March 1953, K. P. Gorshenin, the minister of justice, argued in Pravda that the amnesty decree, which released a total of 1,201,738 people, was evidence of “Soviet humanity.” He advocated for “socialist legality” as the correct way to ensure the country's “transition from socialism to communism.”30
However, de-Stalinization advanced reforms that “threw up more questions than they answered.”31 In the realm of culture and public life, de-Stalinization generated a panoply of initiatives aimed at moving away from the petrified doctrine toward the origins of Marxism as a philosophy, toward the so-called young Marx as the archetype of a pure, non-adulterated socialist impetus. In the Soviet Union, but also Eastern Europe, “de-Stalinization did not mean the end of the communist ideal. To the contrary, it meant a rejuvenation of the idealism and the intellectual identity of the pre-Stalin period.” Or, in the words of acclaimed Soviet poetess Bella Akhmadulina, “The Revolution isn't dead; the Revolution is sick, and we must help it.”32 Consequently, the political emancipation (de-Bolshevization) of Soviet and East European intellectuals coincided with—and was catalyzed by—the wave of liberalization touched off by Nikita Khrushchev's historical revelations.33 While the campaigns that followed the Soviet leader's Secret Speech “set out to emancipate the popular consciousness from the Stalin cult, it also inadvertently risked the ‘de-Sovietization’ of public opinion, as swathes of the Soviet population reacted in violent, unpredictable and ‘anti-Soviet’ ways to de-Stalinization.”34 All the Stalinist theoretical and political constructions had been denounced as a horrible hoax: the illusions could no longer cover the squalid reality. The dogmas had proved their total inanity. Yearning for moral reform of Communism was the basic motivation for the neo-Marxist revival in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Indeed, “it was a Marxism that led back to a European tradition of social-democratic reformism.”35 The intellectuals' rebellion against totalitarian controls threatened the endurance of Soviet-type regimes. The terrortainted legitimacy of Sovietism was questioned by critics who could not be accused of belonging to the defeated social classes. With their outspoken advocacy of humanism and democracy, they contributed to eroding the apparently monolithic consensus.
In a certain way this movement had been anticipated by Yugoslav theorists (Moša Pjade, Milovan Djilas, the Praxis group) who felt compelled, by the very logic of the political conflict with the Soviet Stalinist elite, to rediscover the initial impulses of Marxist anthropology, sociology, and philosophy.36 Those most active, however, in the struggle against Stalinist obscurantism were Hungarian and Polish intellectuals, the exponents of a radical political outlook that inflamed the masses throughout the hectic months after the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This fact has to be related to the traditions of the Left in those countries, but also to the existence of a confusion within the Communist nomenklatura heightened by the growing antibureaucratic radicalism of the working class. We have to take into consideration, in this respect, the evolution of the class consciousness of both the working class and the intellectuals and the existence of a certain psycho-emotional communication, even osmosis, between these two social groups. I stress these facts in order to suggest an explanation—beyond the sheer force of the political police—for the relative political passivity of the working class in other Communist countries (such as Romania and Bulgaria) and for the astonishing neutrality of the Czech and Slovakian intellectuals during the Hungarian and Polish revolts in 1956.
THE SAGA OF REVISIONISM
More than a decade after Stalin's death, the East European and Soviet intelligentsia was experiencing a period of ethical reconstruction, an invitation to rehabilitate the whole historical evolution of Western Marxism and to a critical approach to “institutional dialectics.” Georg Lukács, an “enigmatic heretic inside his Church” (to quote Ferenc Feher) invited to participate in the debates of the Petöfi Circle in Budapest, was perceived as the representative of another Marxism than the ossified Diamat preached by the Stalinist doctrinaires; Marxist intellectual Geza Losonczy was the soul of the discussions concerning freedom of the press; Leszek Kołakowski was launching his long fight for the humanization of the “State-socialist” Polish society, appealing to the potential of a presumed Socialist New Left. In his 1957 manifesto, “Permanent vs. Transitory Aspects of Marxism,” Kołakowski made the seminal distinction between institutional Marxism and intellectual Marxism. While the first was mere religious dogma manipulated by those in power, the second was characterized by “radical rationalism in thinking; steadfast resistance to any invasion of myth in science; an entirely secular view of the world; criticism pushed to its ultimate limits; distrust of all closed doctrines and systems … a readiness to revise accepted theses, theories and methods.”37 Freedom had again become the highest good for human beings released from the asphyxiating dependence on the party's definition of truth. In the Soviet Union, the shestidesiatniki, “the people of the sixties,” formed a community that “had ‘the ability and desire to think, to reflect about life and its complexities.’ They sought to understand the reality ‘behind every word.’”38 A “spirit of revisionism” came about in the Soviet bloc that would fundamentally mark the political and cultural dynamics of the region in the late 1950s and 1960s. In this context, revisionism, a term coined by neo-Stalinist orthodoxies to stigmatize critical currents of thought and the main adversary encountered by ruling bureaucrats since the factional struggles of the mid- and late 1920s, became the main foe of the neo-Stalinist ideological construct.39 One should note, however, that revisionism was not a social movement; rather, it was “a diffuse ideological current that articulated itself in equal parts in official and unofficial fora and which was of a highly various character in different countries.”40
The favorite theme in the discourses of East European philosophers, sociologists, and men of letters in general was the return to an idealized Marx: the attempt to detect those elements in Marx's original design that could justify the politically liberating changes within the system. Moreover, that endeavor was conceived as a rediscovery and reinterpretation of Marx's early works, of the whole Marxian philosophical legacy detested by the Stalinist ideologues. The concept of alienation became the basis of th
e most impassioned philosophical controversies, fostered the case for liberalization, and provided the theoretical basis for political criticism. In fact, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” was felt as exactly the opposite of the “bright future” promised by the founders of Marxism. It was viewed as a caricature of the project of emancipation announced by the Communist Manifesto.
The immediate effect of the general intellectual unrest was the configuration of a fundamentally radical answer to the obvious structural crisis of the East European Soviet-type societies. One of the most interesting expressions of this phenomenon was the 1964 Open Letter of the Basic Party Organization of PZPR (Polish United Workers' Party) and to Members of the University Cell of the Union of Socialist Youth at Warsaw University written by two left-wing antibureaucratic intellectuals, Jacek Kuroń, an assistant professor of pedagogy, and Karol Modzelewski, a member the History Department at the University of Warsaw, son of Zygmunt Modzelewski, a Communist old-timer and the first foreign minister of Communist Poland. The document, a striking example of critique of the party from the antitotalitarian Left, claimed to uphold the true principles of Marxism-Leninism against the fictitious party democracy, to defend workers' rights against top-down decision-making.41 The same year, Czech legal scholar Zdeněk Mlynář drafted The State and the Individual (an anticipation of his 1968 “Towards a Democratic Political Organization of Society”), in which he tried to reconcile democracy and socialism. In this document, the author (a former roommate of Mikhail Gorbachev during their student years at Moscow State University in the early 1950s who became the main ideologue of the Prague Spring in 1968) reasserted the role of social organizations in the process of democratization. Moreover, he emphasized workers' self-management bodies in the factories in order “to overcome the system of planning by decree and to establish the socialist enterprise as an autonomous agent that would be able to enter the market in that capacity.” Moreover, the leading role of the party could be maintained, according to Mlynář, only if it was made up of a “conscious vanguard” in service to the “overall interests and socialist goals of the entire society,” and it didn't take for granted its leadership but led by “tireless persuasion.”42
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