The Devil in History

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  29. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements (New York: Harper and Row, 1961); Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Writing (London: Macmillan, 1969).

  30. Aleksander Wat, My Century, foreword by Czesław Miłosz (New York: New York Review of Books, 1988), p. 92.

  31. Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1981). On Lukács, see Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, the Golden Age, the Breakdown, trans. P. S. Falla (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), pp. 989-1032. It remains disturbing that Lukács's abdications between 1929 and 1953 have been leniently treated by authors who seem less inclined to forget Heidegger's no less outrageous idyll with National Socialism.

  32. Jochen Hellbeck, “Fashioning the Stalinist Soul,” in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 111. Also see “Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-Era Autobiographical Texts,” Russian Review, no. 60 (July 2001): 340-59.

  33. Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 13-14. See also Igal Halfin, “Good and Evil in Communism,” in Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003). This subjective identification of victims with the system was very different in Nazi Germany, where a diarist like Victor Klemperer maintained a wounded lucidity. See Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of Nazi Years, 1933-1941 (New York: Random House, 1998); and I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942-1945 (New York: Random House, 1999).

  34. Ferenc Fehér and Agnes Heller, Eastern Left, Western Left: Totalitarianism, Freedom, and Democracy (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1987), pp. 265-66.

  35. Alvin W. Gouldner, Against Fragmentation: The Origins of Marxism and the Sociology of Intellectuals (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 260-61.

  36. See the two volumes of Koestler's memoirs: Arthur Koestler, Arrow in the Blue (New York and London: Macmillan Collins, 1952); and The Invisible Writing: The Second Volume of an Autobiography: 1932-40 (New York: Macmillan, 1954).

  37. Tucker, The Soviet Political Mind, pp. 31 and 36.

  38. Cohen, Bukharin, p. 268.

  39. Ivan Margolius, Reflections of Prague: Journeys through the Twentieth Century (London: Wiley, 2006), p. 153.

  40. Ibid., p. 193.

  41. Ibid., pp. 220-21.

  42. Ibid., pp. 226-27. See also Eugen Loebl, My Mind on Trial (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanich, 1976).

  43. Branko Lazitch in collaboration with Milorad M. Drachkovitch, Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1986), p. 135.

  44. Jorge Semprun, Communsim in Spain in the Franco Era: The Autobiography of Federico Sánchez (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979), pp. 3-22.

  45. For reasons of space, I cannot dwell in this chapter as much as I would wish on other similar frame-ups in Eastern Europe. I want to emphasize that there were cases in which the defendants (Communists or non-Communists) resisted psychological and physical torture and refused to endorse the Stalinist scripts through their confessions. Zavis Kálándra, mentioned in one of the epigraphs of this chapter, was a Czech surrealist poet who condemned the Moscow show trials, engaged in anti-Fascist resistance, and spent the war years in concentration camps. In 1950, he was a codefendant, together with democratic politician Milada Horáková, in a spectacular trial. The trial was a failure because most of the defendants challenged the prosecution. In spite of international pressures, including appeals from Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and André Breton, Kálándra, Horáková, and the others were sentenced to death and hanged.

  46. Cohen, Bukharin, p. 227.

  47. Max Horkheimer, Dawn and Decline (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), p. 239.

  48. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (San Diego and New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 45.

  49. Tucker, The Soviet Political Mind, pp. 40-41.

  50. James G. Williams, ed., The Girard Reader (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1996), p. 97-141. The same type of mechanism can be identified in the process of imagining the categories “saboteur” and “kulak” after 1929 in the USSR.

  51. For the significance of this question in the Leninist mindset, see Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (New York: Hyperion, 2002); Service, Lenin.

  52. Cohen, Bukharin, p. 92.

  53. Ibid., p. 91.

  54. Riegel is paraphrasing here Yemelian Yaroslavsky, Bolshevik luminary and one of Stalin's most trusted party historians. See Klaus-Georg Riegel, “Confessions of Sins within Virtuosi Communities,” in Parler de soi sous Staline: La construction identitaire dans le communism des années trente, ed. Brigitte Studer, Berthold Unfried, and Irène Hermann (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 2002), p. 116.

  55. Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light; Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003); Intimate Enemies: Demonizing the Bolshevik Opposition, 1918-1928 (Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007). The mechanisms described by Halfin are “local” manifestations of a more general phenomenon that S. N. Eisenstadt defined as “the ideological sacralization of revolutionary terror” in his book Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and Revolution: The Jacobin Dimension of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

  56. Peter Haidu, “The Dialectics of Unspeakability: Language, Silence, and the Narratives of Desubjectification,” in Probing the Limits of Representation—Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 261.

  57. Tucker, The Soviet Political Mind, pp. 68-69.

  58. Philip Rahv, Essays on Literature and Politics, 1932-1972 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), p. 288.

  59. Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Pattern of Political Purges,” in “The Satellites in Eastern Europe,” special issue, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 317 (May 1958): 79-87.

  60. See, for instance, Stanislao G. Pugliese, Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2009).

  61. A. J. Polan, Lenin and the End of Politics (Berkeley: University of California, 1984).

  62. Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism (London: Bodley Head, 2009), p. 37.

  63. See Rees's comment on Russell in The Sovietization of Eastern Europe, ed. Apor, Apor, and Rees, pp. 9-10.

  64. Jowitt, New World Disorder, pp. 250-62.

  65. For a detailed description of the position of “party intellectuals” within the general Czechoslovak debates over national identity in the post-1945 period, under circumstances of a widespread perception among the elites of the interwar republic as a compromised state project, see Bradley F. Abrams, The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation: Czech Culture and the Rise of Communism (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).

  66. Catherine Epstein, The Last Revolutionaries: German Communists and Their Century (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003).

  67. Ivo Banac, With Stalin against Tito: Cominformist Splits in Yugoslav Communism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 29.

  68. During his trip to Moscow via Bucharest in January 1948, Georgi Dimitrov visited his old friend Petre Pandrea (Pătrășcanu's brother-in-law) and talked about issues related to the emerging conflict between Tito and Stalin. They knew each other from the early 1930s in Berlin, where Pandrea studied law and Dimitrov was active with the Comintern's Balkan Bureau. See Petre Pandrea, Memoriile mandarinului valah (București: Albatros, 2000).

  69. Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc, p. 65.

  70. Erica Wallach, Light at Midnight (New York: Doubleday, 1967), quoted in Margolius, Reflections of Prague, p. 193. A personal element: my mother
and Erica Wallach were friends during the Spanish Civil War, when my mother worked as a nurse under the supervision of Dr. Glaser, Erica's father. Inasmuch as I know, during the 1951-52 investigations at the Party Control Commission in Bucharest, my mother was questioned regarding her Glaser-Sláýnsky connections. During World War II, both my parents worked for Radio Moscow's Romanian service, which was part of the Balkan Department subordinated to the Central-East European Section headed by Rudolf Slánský. For show trials and the psychology of true believers, see Egon Balas, Will to Freedom: A Perilous Journey through Fascism and Communism (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000), p. 219.

  71. Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc, p. 52.

  72. George H. Hodos, Show Trials: Stalinist Purges in Eastern Europe, 1948-1954 (New York: Praeger, 1987), pp. 11-12.

  73. William Korey, “The Origins and Development of Soviet Anti-Semitism: An Analysis,” Slavic Review 31, no. 1 (Mar., 1972): 111-35. A year later, Korey developed his article into a book. William Korey, The Soviet Cage: Anti-Semitism in Russia (New York: Viking, 1973).

  74. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), p. 336.

  75. Ibid., p. 335.

  76. Ibid., p. 345.

  77. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 298.

  78. Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov, eds., Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2001); Snyder, Bloodlands, pp. 339-77.

  79. Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov, Stalin's Last Crime: The Plot against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 (New York: HarperCollins, 2003); and Louis Rapoport, Stalin's War against the Jews: The Doctor's Plot and the Soviet Solution (New York: Free Press, 1990).

  80. Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (New York: Basic Books, 1996).

  81. Elaine Mackinnon, “Writing History for Stalin: Isaak Izrailevich Mints and the Istoriia grazhdanskoi voiny,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 38-39.

  82. “Rootless cosmopolitanism” alternated with a hardly veiled anti-Semitic version, that is, “cosmopolitanism of kith and kin.” On the phases of state and public anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union and under Stalin, see in particular Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present (New York : Schocken Books, 1988); and Weiner, Making Sense of War.

  83. See François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, p. 558.

  84. Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 334-35.

  85. Merker himself was not of Jewish origin, but other high-profile people the Stasi (and NKVD) associated with his trial were Lex Ende, Leo Bauer, and Bruno Goldhammer. See Dorothy Miller, “The Death of a ‘Former Enemy of the Working Class'—Paul Merker,” Radio Free Europe Research/Communist Area, GDR/15, May 14, 1969.

  86. Paul Merker was in the Mexico City from 1942 until 1945 and through his articles in Freies Deutschland was the only member of the KPD's Politburo who insisted on the central role of antisemitism in Nazi Germany and on the special status of the Jews among Hitler's victims. This was in sharp contrast with Walter Ulbricht's writings and public stances on Fascism, Germany's war crimes, and collective responsibility. Moreover, after 1948, Merker sharply diverged from the Soviet policy of refusing special status and retribution to Jews among Hitler's victims. For the definitive work on Paul Merker's case, see Jeffrey Herf, “East German Communists and the Jewish Question: The Case of Paul Merker,” Journal of Contemporary History 29, no. 4 (Oct. 1994): 627-61; but also Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); and Jeffrey Herf, “The Emergence and Legacies of Divided Memory: Germany and the Holocaust after 1945,” in Memory and Power in Postwar Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past, ed. JanWerner Müller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 184-205.

  87. For a detailed explanation of power struggles in the 1930s and 1940s, see “A Messianic Sect: The Underground Romanian Communist Party, 1921-1944,” in my Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

  88. Franz Borkenau, World Communism: A History of the Communist International (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1962), p. 178.

  89. For a details on this interpretation of the events, see Robert Levy, Ana Pauker: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). For a critique, see Pavel Câmpeanu, Ceaușescu, Anii numărătorii inverse (București: Polirom, 2002).

  90. “Note Regarding the Conversation of I. V. Stalin with Gh. Gheorghiu-Dej and A. Pauker on the Situation within the RCP and the State of Affairs in Romania in Connection with the Peace Treaty,” no. 191, February 2, 1947, in Vostochnaia Evropa v dokumentakh arkhivov, 1944-1953, ed. Galin P. Muraschko, Albina F. Noskowa, and Tatiana V. Volokitina (Moscow, 1997), 1:564-65. See also “Stenogramaședintei Biroului Politic al CC al PMR din 29 noiembrie 1961,” pp. 14-16.

  91. For a detailed presentation of Leonte Răutu's role in the power politics of Romanian communism, see Vladimir Tismaneanu and Cristian Vasile, Perfectul Acrobat: Leonte Răutu, Măștile Răului (București: Humanitas, 2008).

  92. This article was published both in the Central Committee official journal Lupta de clasa, no. 4 (October 1949) and as a brochure at the R. W. P. Publishing House in 1949.

  93. Tismaneanu and Vasile, Perfectul Acrobat, p. 224.

  94. Teresa Toránska, “Them”: Stalin's Polish Puppets (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 354. In her writing, Marci Shore has provided excellent characterizations of Jakub Berman, detailing his career from his role during the murky history of interwar Polish Communism and its relationship with Moscow during the Great Purge and the Second World War to his involvement in Gomułka's purge trial in the early 1950s up until his resignation in 1957 from the Polish United Workers' Party and retirement in 1969. Another issue that requires clarification is whether Berman's prominent role in the Stalinist purges prevented the duplication of a Slánský-type trial in Poland. See Marci Shore, “Children of the Revolution: Communism, Zionism, and the Berman Brothers,” Jewish Social Studies, n.s., 10, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 2004): 23-86; and Marci Shore, Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006).

  95. Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks, p. 50.

  96. Erik van Ree, “Heroes and Merchants: Stalin's Understanding of National Character,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 57.

  97. Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks, p. 293.

  98. Snyder, Bloodlands, pp. 376 and 371.

  99. See Vladimir Tismaneanu: “The Ambiguity of Romanian Communism,” Telos, no. 60 (Summer 1984): 65-79; and “Ceausescu's Socialism,” Problems of Communism (January-February 1985): 50-66. Also see Vladimir Tismaneanu, Fantoma lui Gheorghiu-Dej (București: Humanitas, 2008). The volume contains several studies on the relationship between Communism and nationalism that I published at the end of the 1980s. For a definition of national Stalinism, see Tismaneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons, p. 33. For a comparative discussion about applicability of national Stalinism in the cases of Romania, Albania, Poland, Bulgaria, or the GDR, see Vladimir Tismaneanu, “What Was National Stalinism?” in The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History, ed. Dan Stone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)f.

  100. Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 376.

  101. I examine anti-Semitism as a political mythology in Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism, and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998, paperback 2009).

  102. Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 2, The Golden Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 85.

  103. Nicolas Werth, “Strategies of Vi
olence in the Stalinist USSR,” in Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared, ed. Henry Rousso (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), pp. 73-95.

  3. LENIN'S CENTURY

  1. Here we may remember the two epigraphs Raymond Aron chose for L'opium des intellectuels, his 1955 devastating demystification of Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist dialectics. He quoted Marx: “Religion is the sigh of the creature overwhelmed by misfortune, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” Then, as a counterpunctual response, he used a quote from Simone Weil: “Marxism is undoubtedly a religion, in the lowest sense of the word. Like every inferior form of the religious life it has been continually used, to borrow the apt phrase of Marx himself, as an opiate for the people.” See Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, intro. Harvey C. Mansfield (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2001), p. vii. See also Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

  2. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), p. xv.

  3. See David Ingersoll, Richard Mathews, and Andrew Davison, The Philosophical Roots of Modern Ideology: Liberalism, Conservatism, Marxism, Fascism, Nazism, Islamism (Cornwall-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Sloan/Prentice Hall, 2010).

  4. Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (London: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 397.

  5. Ibid., p. 455.

  6. Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938 (New York and Wildwood House: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 46.

  7. Ibid., p. 301. Leon Trotsky uttered similar statements during and after the October Revolution. See Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism, A Reply to Karl Kautsky, with a foreword by Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2007).

  8. Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), p. 48.