The Devil in History

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  HUMANISM AND REVOLT

  From France to Czechoslovakia, from Germany to Poland, from Spain to Italy, from the United States to the Soviet Union, the second half of the sixties was defined by the challenges of redefining oppositional politics, with varying degrees of participation and representation in efforts to assert the awakening of society as a response to a perceived crisis of the state. The fundamental difference among these movements was their attitude toward utopia, with crucial consequences for the reconceptualization of the political in all these countries. Some were anti-ideological, others were against established structures of authority, but all were variants of an activism advocating the new societal differentiations developed in the aftermath of the Second World War. The circumstances of bipolarism imposed, nevertheless, a significant difference in rationale: in the West, the logic of 1968 was of politically emancipating spaces previously exempt from public scrutiny; in the East, it was about humanizing Leninism, breaking its ideologically driven monopolistic grip on society.59 Or, to invoke Milan Kundera, the Parisian May was “an explosion of revolutionary lyricism,” while the Prague Spring was “an explosion of post-revolutionary skepticism.”60

  In the Soviet bloc, the crushing of the Prague Spring, the March events in Poland, and the turmoil in Yugoslavia brought about the “death of revisionism” (as Adam Michnik put it). In the West, the inability to articulate a coherent vision of an alternative order and the incapacity to sustain revolutionary action generated a departure from what Arthur Marwick called the “Great Marxisant Fallacy.”61 Tony Judt accurately notes that despite its claims of novelty and radical change, the sixties were still very much dominated by one grand master narrative “offering to make sense of everything while leaving open a place for human initiative: the political project of Marxism itself.”62 The movement of 1968 was a blessing in disguise because through its failures it revitalized liberalism. Agnes Heller perceptively summarized the essential impact of these momentous events: they strengthened the center.63 For the first time in the twentieth century, the hegemony of radical thought among European intellectuals was in retreat.

  The year 1968, in the Soviet bloc, signaled the retreat from revisionism and the inception of the dissident movement, a large-scale, cross-regional “goodbye to Marx.” With historical hindsight, one can also identify it as the threshold for the gradual decomposition of the Communist regimes. The system had lost its initial totalizing drive; stagnation and immobility were its main characteristics. The increasingly routinized mechanization of ideology laid open the cracks in the system's edifice for easier exploitation by the opposition (e.g., “new evolutionism” or the Charter '77 movement). The Prague Spring of January through August, the Polish March student upheaval, the April student protests in Belgrade (and the later Croatian Spring of 1970–71, an all-out contestation of this country on national bases), and the Soviet intellectuals' reaction to the Sinyavski-Daniel trial all represented a fundamental challenge to the Stalinist foundations of the Soviet bloc.64 The failure of these movements left an enduring disenchantment with state socialism and the loss of any hope of reforming these regimes. In other words, “it underscored the political and moral sterility … of the attempt to marry the Soviet project to freedom without a return to private property and capitalism.”65 Moreover, as one of Gorbachev's future advisors remarked, one side effect of the Soviet Union's reassertion of hegemony was that the Western Communist parties “without confessing it, came to understand the irrelevance of the Communist movement either for the majority of the countries where it was formally present or, even more important, for the Soviet Union itself.”66 The reaffirmation of the status quo and the systemic stagnation in the Soviet bloc signaled an irreversible “disenchantment with the (Communist) world.” Despite the fact that the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989, “the soul of Communism had died twenty years before: in Prague, in August 1968.”67

  The West, on the other hand, experienced an upsurge of “romantic anticapitalism,” a rebirth of radicalism fed by the reenchantment with utopia. In the context of the shock produced by the Tet offensive in Vietnam and the identity crisis of the former colonial powers, 1968 “began [for the New Left] with the scent of victory in the air” (in the words of Jeffrey Herf), for, as Paul Auster reminisced, “the world seemed headed for an apocalyptic breakdown.”68 The second half of the 1960s marked both a return to Marx and a rejection of the existing practices of democracy (with the notable exception of Spain and Portugal, where, between 1966 and 1968, civil unrest targeted the right-wing dictatorships of Salazar and Franco). The influence of the New Left, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Vietnam War, the Latin American guerilleros, and the decolonization movements combined, in a amorphous blend, with the generational clash, an institutional crisis (the occupation of the Sorbonne, the nearly two-year-long paralysis of Italian universities), and a wave of recession (signaled by workers' strikes and autogestion projects). This mix produced what some authors later called les années 1968. The sixty-eighters claimed to have developed a critique of the ideological bases of the West in the context of the Cold War (also against older self-representations of the Left) and a spontaneous “direct action” against the “hidden oppression” of the liberal-capitalist establishment. The “anti-politics” of 1968 were, to a certain extent, a topsy-turvy expression of the attempt to reconcile theory with praxis (Theoriewut). The extreme radicalization of certain sectors within the student movement and the cultivation of violence as a cathartic instrument led to a divorce between left-wing post-Marxist thinkers such as Adorno, Horkheimer, and Habermas, and those whom they suspected of “Red Fascist” inclinations. In France, Raymond Aron proposed a scathing critique of the new search for redemptive revolutionary paradigms.

  Ultimately, 1968 effected, both in the West and the East, an anti-ideological reaction that was the premise of “the project of a global civil society.” Or, as Tony Judt put it, “a 180-year cycle of ideological politics in Europe was drawing to a close.”69 The 1968 movement was indeed one of the world-historical events of our age, la brèche, the cleavage that set up a course of events that seem to have yet to run their course.70 Charles Maier eminently summarized the transformation: “1968 closed an epoch as surely as it opened one.”71 To paraphrase Paul Berman, the imaginary panoramas deployed across the world by the rebellious youth of the West gradually gave way to the new realities of reformed democratic societies.72 In the East, decade-long futile attempts to find ways of reforming Communism from within were replaced by an emphasis on human dignity and the inviolability of human rights.73 As Communist regimes declined under the burden of their own ineffectiveness and the elites lost their sense of historical predestination, it became possible for the long-silent civil society to reorganize itself and to launch a battle for the reconstitution of the public sphere. The upheavals of the late sixties and their aftermath had a formative effect on the Soviet intelligentsia, and particularly on the new cohort of experts, the so called mezhdunarodniki, “those policy analysts, journalists, scholars, and others mainly concerned with foreign affairs.”74 According to Fyodor Burlatsky, “Analyzing [East European] reforms … we concluded that many of them could be … adopted in our country. We studied the rapid integration of Western Europe, deeply envious of the Common Market and its contrast with the slow, bureaucratic functioning of CEMA [Council for Economic Mutual Assistance]. We thought about acquiring … modern technology and joining in the greatest achievements of world culture. In other words, we dreamed of reforming Russia.”75 In other words, if for some revisionist intellectuals in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union the conclusion of the events of 1968 led them toward liberal opposition, for others, especially in the Moscow center, the lesson was a different one. Those who would later lay the foundation of the perestroika reforms came to believe that “reforms were possible, but only under an enlightened leader that many ‘awaited as if for the coming of the Messiah.’” Robert English accurately commented on this position: “Their n
aïveté—if only leaders had the will, then reforms would ‘work without a hitch’—would be a severe handicap to a later leader's search for ‘socialism with a human face.’”76

  THE REVISIONIST CZAR

  Under these circumstances, the antinomies of the East European Marxist project were most obvious in the last decade of the Soviet Union, when the tribulations of the “Gorbachev phenomenon” were perfect examples of the failure of ideological reform. The fundamental question here, identical in its nature with the one that kick-started revisionist thinking, was, could the Soviet system reform itself into something really different without ceasing to be the Soviet system?'77 On the one hand, by the late 1980s, Gorbachev and his followers had a clear idea of what they were trying to reform: “a system that suffocated individuals, a totalitarian regime, a State monopoly over everything,” one not merely imposed by the Cold War, because “there was also, within it, a dominant group that sought embitterment, pursued utopia, yearned for War Communism, and thought it could govern with continued repressions.”78 However, the revitalization of the USSR's status on the world stage and the relegitimization of socialism (both domestically and internationally) were dependent, in Gorbachev's view, on a successful systemic transformation of the Soviet state. In other words, the Soviet leader rejected “the option of muddling through” characteristic of his predecessors.79 Ultimately, his staunch belief in the possibility of simultaneously dismantling “Stalinist socialism” (a formula used by the weekly Literaturnaya gazeta in May 1988) and refounding the Soviet polity lies at the heart of the paradoxes that brought about the collapse of the Moscow center. Retrospectively, this approach, which proved fatally contradictory, leaves us with a historical image of Gorbachev best described by political scientist Stephen Hanson in 1989: “A pure revolutionary romantic, believing absolutely in the creative power of the masses, unable to countenance in principle any concrete institutionalization of revolutionary politics that might stifle this creativity, and therefore doomed to be defeated by others who had no such scruples.”80

  One can therefore safely say, as Archie Brown did throughout his work, that Gorbachev was in fact a genuine Marxist revisionist, who, while paying lip service to Lenin's iconic figure, moved away from Bolshevism as a political culture based on fanaticism, sectarianism, and voluntarism toward a self-styled version of Marxist revisionism. In the Russian tradition of reforms from above, Gorbachev's attempt to restore the moral impetus of Communism was based, however, on a miscalculation: the gradual elimination of the party's control over society opened the door to autonomous alternatives. The Russian literary critic Igor Dedkov spelled out in his diary the new horizons brought forth by Gorbachev's ascendance in the Kremlin: “A man of our generation has come to power. A new cycle of Russian illusions is about to begin.”81 The politics of glasnost unleashed pluralism, with its own dynamics that would transgress the focus of Gorbachev's reform project.

  When trying to understand the complex picture of perestroika, its context and consequences, one must not overlook the role that ideas played in the course of events. In itself, the prehistory of East European revisionism was, along with the mythical “original Leninist moment” (the 1917 Soviets or the NEP period), a stepping stone for the Soviet 1980s. Moreover, the successes of the dissent movement in the region (greatly aided by Gorbachev's commitment to “non-intervention”) heightened the sense of revolutionary transformation among the actors involved in the process of change. I mentioned earlier in this chapter the three layers of the intellectual establishment in a Soviet-type system (ideological apparatchiks, party technocrats/intellectuals, and dissidents). In the 1980s, these three groups influenced each other to the extent of provoking a wholesale alteration of the discursive horizon, the conceptual pool employed, and the expectations both at the level of policy-making and of the public space. It could be argued that by the last decade of Leninism, there was a general consensus within Soviet intellectual milieus regarding the imperative of rethinking the possible solutions to the USSR's problems. Here lies the oddity of the situation: the Soviet polity was indeed on the decline (especially as a leader of the world Communist movement), but it was far from being in turmoil. According to Stephen Kotkin, “Nationalist separatism existed, but it did not remotely threaten the Soviet order. The KGB crushed the small dissident movement. The enormous intelligentsia griped incessantly, but it enjoyed massive state subsidies [that were] manipulated to promote overall loyalty.”82 Gorbachev's biographer, political scientist Archie Brown, formulated this argument in an even more straightforward fashion: “In the Soviet Union reform produced crisis more than crisis forced reform. The fate of the Soviet system and of the Soviet state did not hang in the balance in 1985. By 1989 the fate of both did.”83

  The mixture of a fading and compromised international status (the U.S. challenge, the post-Helsinki embarrassments, the Third World adventures, the Afghan quagmire, or even Euro-Communism), the obvious lack of legitimacy of the East European Communist regimes (and their glaring inability to counter dissident movements without widespread violence), and the almost unanimous belief among large sections of the party elite in the necessity of proposing reform (in the aftermath of the Brezhnevite “stagnation” and of the Konstantin Chernenko debacle) produced an environment where Gorbachev and his followers' ideas could turn into a political program. In other words, it was time for revisionism to come to power at the very center of the empire. Herein lies the difference between the 1980s in the USSR and 1956 or 1968 in Central Europe. In 1968 Europe, critical Marxism officialized into policy was a response to chronic delegitimation of and turmoil within the respective regimes; in the former, it functioned rather as a preemptive measure and as a perceived need for systemic revival.84 In the Soviet Union, the “new thinking,” as the epitome of the leadership ranks' mindset, “did not merely signal a reconsideration of policy efficacy or recalculation of ends and means, but reflected instead a long-term and wholesale revision of beliefs, values, and identity.”85

  The group of party intellectuals who rallied around the CPSU general secretary informed and influenced his political thought and major choices. These advisors and associates not only shared Gorbachev's reformist drive but also contributed to its radicalization.86 They were the “children of the Twentieth Party Congress,” individuals who benefited from the opening of possibilities, both domestically and internationally, facilitated by de-Stalinization: “Inadvertently, Khrushchev's policies of peaceful coexistence [and later Brezhnev's détente] and cultural competition, as well as his rhetoric, helped resurrect a major phenomenon familiar to the older Russian intelligentsia: the idea of the outside world, above all the West, as a measuring stick for Russia's progress or backwardness…. The discovery of other worlds was still linked in the minds of many intellectuals to the future of the Soviet communist experiment, its progress or failure.”87

  The glasnost campaign notwithstanding, some things never changed in the structure of the Soviet propaganda rituals. The general secretary was still the dominant voice authorized to express the revealed truth. The limits of the discussion and the scope and objectives of openness were prescribed by the ideological nomenklatura. Even important figures such as Alexander Yakovlev were confronted with vilification by hard-core Communists, KGB top brass, and Great Russian xenophobes for being Gorbachev's “evil spirit” and archtraitors to socialism. Other such representatives of the reformers' group who got into the crosshairs of those threatened by the “Gorbachev phenomenon” were philosopher Ivan Frolov (for a while CPSU Central Committee secretary); political scientist Georgiy Shakhnazarov (president of the Political Sciences Academy); Gorbachev's foreign policy advisor Anatoly Chernyaev; Otto Latsis, deputy editor-in-chief of the CPSU theoretical journal Kommunist; Georgii Smirnov, the director of the CPSU Institute of Marxism-Leninism; Ivan Voronov, the head of the Central Committee's Cultural Department; and many others.88 Some of them had worked in Prague in the 1970s as editors of the monthly World Marxist Review and were
attracted to ideas that within the general atmosphere of zastoi were unorthodox, if not altogether heretical.89 What remains crucial regarding the “young policy-academic elite” surrounding Gorbachev was that the bond which brought it together was a common experience of acculturation in reform. Robert English identified two levels in the process of learning a new identity: “Comparative-interactive learning, whereby foreign ties facilitate a shift in intellectuals' essential ‘self-categorization’ of the nation among allies and adversaries; and social learning, in which growing numbers of intellectuals from diverse professions are drawn into an informal domestic community.”90 People such as Yakovlev, Alexei Arbatov (department head of the Institute of the World Economy and International Relations of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR), Abel Aganbegyan, Evgeny Velikhov, Chernyaev, Shakhnazarov, and others became the proponents of a “new thinking” in international politics that rejected the Soviet tradition of capitalist encirclement or permanent revolution in favor of integration with “the common stream of world civilization.” They brought about what conservatives called the “conspiracy of academicians,” which engineered the volte-face that brought an end to the Cold War.91 They were also among the first to attack the reality of Brezhnevschina—political paralysis accompanied by moral disarray, intellectual despair, and a continuous erosion of the ruling ideology. Robert C. Tucker rightly described pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union as a profoundly troubled society: “People en masse have stopped believing in the transcendent importance of a future collective condition called ‘communism.’ They have stopped believing in the likelihood of the society arriving at that condition and the desirability of trying to achieve it through the leading role of the Communist party, or through themselves as ‘builders of communism,’ which is how the official party program defines Soviet citizens. In a society with an official culture founded on just those beliefs, this spells a deep crisis.”92