The Devil in History

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  Having begun as a largely unidirectional phenomenon in 1986–1988, the spillover became bidirectional in 1989 but then shifted back to a unidirectional pattern in 1990–1991. Unlike in 1986–1988, however, the direction of the spillover in 1990–1991 was mainly from Eastern Europe into the Soviet Union…. The paradox of the changes that occurred under Gorbachev is that, from 1989 on, this same structure facilitated rather than impeded the spread of political unrest and democratizing influences from Eastern Europe into the USSR—the very sorts of influences that eventually undermined the Soviet regime and the Soviet state.113

  Revisionist intellectuals who have done so much to subvert the ideological façade of Communist regimes ultimately abandoned their illusions about the reformability of the system from within the ruling party. Given the density of the Soviet-East European environment, their apostasy created the premises for seeing democracy beyond any arrangement that a revolution from above could bring. They turned instead toward rediscovering the virtues of dialogue and the advantages of civil discourse. According to Zubok, the formation of the human rights movement in the Soviet Union was a breakthrough caused by a shift of consciousness “from the idealization of the ‘golden age of Bolshevism’ and praise of ‘Leninist norms’ to the embrace of ‘universal moral principles.’”114 Members of the newborn democratic opposition advocated the need to create an alternative politics. Hungarian writer George Konrad spoke of the emergence of antipolitics as a challenge to the apocryphal version of politics embodied by the system: “The ideology of the democratic opposition shares with religion the belief that the dignity of the individual personality (in both oneself and the other person) is a fundamental value not requiring any further demonstration. The autonomy and solidarity of human beings are the two basic and mutually complementary values to which democratic movement relates other values.”115

  Bitter experiences in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia convinced these critics that the crux of the matter was to go beyond the logic of the system. Revisionism's crucial contribution to putting an end to Marxist-Leninist self-satisfaction was undeniable, but its main weakness was submission to the rules dictated by officialdom. The new radical opponents of totalitarianism saw revisionism as a half-hearted plea for change, though it was heretical to the regimes' ideological zealots. These writings were esoteric, especially if contrasted with dissident literature, and they held little appeal to the large public. However, the most important fallacy of revisionism was that it generated a criticism that was still encoded in the language of power and the logic of Soviet-type dictatorships. There was no doubt, however, that the revisionist ideas of the 1960s catalyzed the emergence of the counterculture of dissent. Disenchantment with Marxism was an opportunity to rethink the radical legacy and reassess Jacobin ideals of total community.

  In the struggle between the state and civil society, it was the latter's task to invent a new principle of power that would respect the rights and aspirations of the individual. This counterprinciple was rooted in the independent life of society, in what Václav Havel aptly called the power of the powerless. A new epoch came of age. It was the inception of the all-out debunking of the duplicitous infrastructure of Communist power. First Solzhenitsyn, then East and Central European dissidents announced their decision to restore the normative value of truth. Refusing official lies and reinstating truth in its own right has turned out to be a more successful strategy than revisionist criticism from within. Dissent in East Central Europe subverted Leninism using two trajectories: “the self-conscious creation of a site of resistance,” also called “parallel polis,” “second society,” “antipolitics,” and so on, and “the twin strategies of new evolutionism and non-violence” (such as Jacek Kuroń's “self-limitation” or János Kis's “radical reformism”).116 For the first time in the twentieth century, dissidents rejected emergency revolutionary status (privilege) as a justification for (state) violence in societal transformation. In the process, they also forced Western intellectuals to face their own illusions rooted in the totalitarian fascination with armed utopia. Furthermore, the dissident movement irreversibly destroyed the self-constructed, self-blinding, and utterly obsolete veil of ignorance concerning the human cost of revolution. In the case of France, the land of seemingly unending engagement with revolutionary privilege, “in overwhelming, searing detail, Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago was the indictment that, in the words of Georges Nivat, ‘broke us.’”117

  The ultimate goal of Communism, overcoming politics in a fully unified body social—the celebrated “leap into the kingdom of freedom”—was challenged by a moral imperative of political responsibility. Concepts such as central planning, the leading role of the party, the principle of class struggle on the world stage, and the pyramid of soviets were legitimated in historical terms, “a process that was greater than what they, as temporal forms of organization, represented.”118

  In a sense, Gorbachev hoped the party would recapture its soul in the struggle for the modernization of Soviet political culture but found that the times made such endeavors futile. Only when it was too late, in July 1991, at a moment of devastating ideological disarray within the CPSU, did he urge “a decisive break with outmoded ideological dogmas and stereotypes.” He failed to look for solutions outside the party. He refused to adopt the roundtable strategy—the symbol of the 1989 Central European peaceful revolutions. He envisaged transition to democracy by means of socialism (yet incoherently articulated), but in a pluralistic society his vision was not the only one competing in the public square. It is now obvious that the main strength of Communist regimes was their ability to maintain a climate of fear and hopelessness; their main weakness was a failure to muzzle the human mind. I do not underestimate the intrinsic economic problems of these regimes, but their main vulnerability was the failure to generate confidence. Glasnost was an attempt to solve the insoluble, a desperate effort to create a less suffocating environment without changing the principle of party domination. The upheavals of 1989 and 1991 showed that the fabric was perhaps softer, but the straitjacket had remained unchanged, generating the ultimate stand—complete popular systemic rebuke.

  The Hungarian dissident philosopher G. M. Tamás expressed a widespread feeling among East European independents when he refused to consider Gorbachevism as heaven-sent: “I don't agree … with the complacency of most Western observers, especially now with the advent of Gorbachev, who would confine us within the limits of a mildly reformed communist system where power still lies with the Party, but where some other people can also shout a bit. If people don't have to suffer for their views but nevertheless have no real influence over what happens, the longer such a situation continues the greater the difference develops between words and deeds. We cannot develop a normal life for the future on such a basis.”119 Or, as political thinker and dissident Miklós Haraszti put it in the afterword to the American edition of his book on artists under socialism: “For decades Hungary has been a textbook model of a pacified post-Stalinist neo-colony. This fact has not been lost on Mr. Gorbachev as he attempts to wrap more velvet on the bars of his prison in order to create a less primitive and more manageable order in the heart of his empire.”120

  The disruptive effects of this ideological relaxation were felt not only in the Soviet Union but also in East Central Europe. It did allow for a redistribution of the constellation of power as a consequence of social self-organization. The experience of the Workers' Defense Committee (KOR) in Poland demonstrated that a tiny nucleus of committed intellectuals could fundamentally change the post-totalitarian political equation.121 KOR contributed to the climate of cooperation between the radical core of the intelligentsia and the militant activists of the working class. Neither a political party nor a traditional trade union, Solidarnosc prefigured a synthesis of nonutopian language for a rational polis and an emancipated community. The pace of reform in the Soviet Union held a vital importance for the fate of East European nations. The intensification of dissent ac
tivities in 1987–89 in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the GDR anticipated the daring, all-out challenge to the Communist regimes in these countries. The October 1986 statement signed by dissidents from Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the GDR inaugurated a new chapter in the history of antitotalitarian struggles. It showed that international actions could and should be undertaken to emphasize the values and the goals of the opposition. It was the historical calling of critical intellectuals to counter the strategy of cooptation and assert the primacy of those values the system stifles.

  At the moment when genuine independent social movements coalesced, intellectuals did provide an articulate program for political change, the exact alternative that revisionism failed to create. In their seminal volume Dictatorship over Needs, Heller, Feher, and Markus offer a thoughtful explanation of the demise of Marxism-Leninism: “A social order is legitimated if at least one part of the population acknowledges it as exemplary and biding and the other part does not confront the existing social order with the image of an alternative one as equally exemplary. Thus the relative number of those legitimating a system may be irrelevant if the non-legitimating masses are merely dissatisfied.”122 In his turn, Archie Brown, rather than advocating a vantage point from above, argues that the collapse of Communism can be explained by a combination of “new ideas, institutional power (the commanding heights of the political system having fallen into the hands of radical reformers), and political choices (when other options could have been chosen).”123

  So, why did Communist regimes collapse? The answer is multicausal and requires grasping the many origins and implications of the world-shattering events of 1989–91. If I were to start the list of causes, however, I would say that Communist regimes disappeared because they lost their ideological self-confidence, their hierocratic credentials. Their ritualized hegemony was successfully challenged by the reinvention of politics brought about by dissent. The existence of an alternative in a space previously imbued with myth and ideology triggered a process of individual and collective self-determination. The logic of consent, of emancipation within “ideocratic” limits, was replaced by the grammar of revolt, self-affirmation, and freedom. The Communist project of modernity oriented toward “an integrated accumulation of wealth, power, and knowledge” while relying on the “embedded phantasm of a shortcut to affluence through total social mobilization”124 was rejected on moral grounds. The crystallization of a critical theory focusing on subjectivity and negativity reasserted the central position of the human being in the symbolic economy of Central and East European politics. Ironically, the Soviet warning, “Either we destroy revisionism or it will destroy us!” seems now stunningly prescient. Thanks to critical intellectuals relying upon the tradition and grounds established by revisionist Marxism, revolts ultimately morphed into revolutions.

  CHAPTER 5

  Ideology, Utopia, and Truth

  Lessons from Eastern Europe

  Any social Utopia which purports to offer a technical blueprint for the perfect society now strikes me as pregnant with the most terrible dangers. I am not saying that the idea of human fraternity is ignoble, naïve, or futile; and I don't think that it would be desirable to discard it as belonging to an age of innocence. But to go to the lengths of imagining that we can design some plan for the whole society whereby harmony, justice and plenty are attained for human engineering is an invitation for despotism. I would, then, retain Utopia as an imaginative incentive … and confine it to that. The point where despotism differs from totalitarianism is the destruction of civil society. But civil society cannot be destroyed until and unless private property, including the private ownership of all the means of production, is abolished.

  —Leszek Kołakowski (in George Urban ed., Stalinism)

  More than in any other period of human history, individuals in the twentieth century were tempted by the promises of revolutionary messianism rooted in grandiose teleological fantasies imagined by prophets who mostly wrote their manifestos during the previous century.1 Or to use the formulation of Czech philosopher and dissident Jan Patočka, the last century experienced the rise of “radical super-civilizations” that sought forms analogous to that of a “universal church.” According to him, they were “geared toward the totalizing of life by means of rationalism; we deal with a yearning for a new center, ‘from which it is possible to gradually control all layers all the way to the periphery.’”2 From both extreme left and right, the quest for an absolute reshaping of the human condition inspired frantic endeavors to transcend what appeared to be the philistine carcass of liberal institutions and values.3 Many Bolsheviks, including Aleksandr Bogdanov, Anatoly Lunacharsky, and quite likely even Lenin found Nietzsche's proclamation regarding the advent of the Übermensch (superman) exhilarating or at least intriguing. This type of influence “touched a deep chord in the Russian psyche that continued to reverberate long after his [Nietzsche's] initial reception…. Ideas and images derived from his writings were fused, in various ways, with compatible elements in the Russian religious, intellectual, and cultural heritage, and with Marxism.”4

  In Communism and Fascism, ideology was there to justify violence, sacralize it, and to discard all opposite views as effete, sterile, dangerous, and fundamentally false. In the ideological binary logic (Lenin's kto-kogo, who-whom principle) there was no room for a middle road: the enemy—always defined by class (or race) criteria—lost all humanity, being reduced to the despicable condition of vermin. Stalinists and Nazis proudly avowed their partisanship and abolished human autonomy through loyalty to the party/leader/dogma. The main purpose of revolutionary ideological commitment was to organize the mental colonization (heteronomy) of individuals, to turn them into enthusiastic builders of the totalitarian utopia. In brief, totalitarianism as a project aiming at complete domination over man, society, economy, and nature, is inextricably linked to ideology.5 The ideologies of Communism and Fascism held in common a belief in the plasticity of human nature and the possibility of transforming it in accordance with a utopian blueprint: “What totalitarian ideologies therefore aim at is not the transformation of the outside world or the revolutionizing transmutation of society, but the transformation of human nature itself.”6 Ideology cut across all regime dynamics, “grounding and projecting action, without which governance, violent action, and socialization were impossible.”7 Both Leninism and Fascism have inspired unflinching loyalties, a fascination with the figure of the perfect society, and romantic immersion in collective movements promising the advent of the millennium.8

  THE ENDURING MAGNETISM OF UTOPIA

  Despite Leninism's decline, the utopian reservoir of humanity has not been completely exhausted: refurbished ideologies have resurfaced, among them populism, chauvinism, and fundamentalism of different shades. The ghost of the future conjured up by young Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto has been replaced with revamped specters of the past, summoned into the present by disconcerted political actors unable to come to terms with the hardships of the democratic project and the challenges of (post)modernity. To the soulless “Europe of butter” lambasted and decried by various neoromantics, they often contrast the myth of the original communal democracy of the agrarian societies. In short, the end of Communism, the revolutions of 1989, and the disturbing Leninist legacies have created a world full of dangers, in which traditional lines of demarcation have completely disintegrated and new forms of radicalism simmer under the carapace of pseudostability. With the breakdown of Leninism a crucial threshold was crossed, but the readiness to indulge in ideological fallacies is not totally extinct. This is the reason for Kołakowski's wry conclusion to the new epilogue of his masterful trilogy: “No one can be certain whether our civilization will be able to cope with the ecological, demographic, and spiritual dangers it has caused or whether it will fall victim to catastrophe. So we cannot tell whether the present ‘anti-capitalist,’ ‘anti-globalist,’ and related obscurantist movements and ideas will quietly fade away and one day
come to seem as pathetic as the legendary Luddites at the beginning of nineteenth century, or whether they will maintain their strength and fortify their trenches.”9

  Marxism was a protean political movement, but what distinguished it as a movement were its grandiose and ideologically driven political ambitions.10 According to Jan Patočka, the systematization of man and history, culminating in Marx, made evident “that, in a full working out of the spirit of metaphysics that means man, as historical and as social, placing himself in the position once reserved for the gods and for God, myth, dogma, and theology were reabsorbed into history and flowed into a philosophy that discarded its time-honored name of a simple love of wisdom in order to become a scientific system.”11 Once this scientific pretense ceased to inspire genuine commitment, the spell of Marxism as a promise of earthly salvation started to dissipate. The eclipse of Marxism as a strategy for social transformation ended an age of radicalism and justified a number of reflections regarding the destiny of utopian thought in this century. One can agree with Ferenc Fehér's masterful obituary of “Marxism as politics,” but we still need to discuss Marxism's utopian component, which Marxism has never acknowledged.12 On the contrary, Marx and his followers were convinced that they possessed access to the hidden laws of historical development and that their historical waver was meant to result in an immanent kingdom of freedom.