9. See Andrzej Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995).
10. See chapter 3 of the Communist Manifesto, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 3d ed. (New York: Norton, 1972), pp. 491-99.
11. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1959), pp. 385-86.
12. See Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 2, The Golden Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 934-62.
13. Eugen Weber, “Revolution? Counterrevolution? What Revolution?” Journal of Contemporary History 9, no. 2 (April 1974): 23. Weber applies a memorable formula for this project of modern revolution: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death.”
14. Raymond Aron, The Dawn of Universal History: Selected Essays from a Witness to the Twentieth Century, intro. Tony Judt (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 203.
15. For ongoing efforts to return to an alleged pristine Leninism, see Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, Slavoj Žižek, eds., Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2007).
16. Waldemar Gurian, quoted in Michael Burleigh, “Political Religion and Social Evil,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 3, no. 2 (2002): 3.
17. See Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (London: Verso, 2001), p. 116.
18. See, in this respect, Bertram Wolfe, “Leninism,” in Marxism in the Modern World, ed. Milorad M. Drachkovitch (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1965), pp. 47-89.
19. See Michael Charlton, Footsteps from the Finland Station: Five Landmarks in the Collapse of Communism (New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Transaction Publishers, 1992); Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994); David Priestland, The Red Flag: A History of Communism (New York: Grove Press, 2009).
20. See Walicki, Marxism, pp. 269-397.
21. Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr M. Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present (New York: Summit Books, 1986).
22. Lefort quoted in Bernard Flynn, The Philosophy of Claude Lefort: Interpreting the Political (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2005), p. 293.
23. See my Fantasies of Salvation: Nationalism, Democracy, and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).
24. Harry Kreisler, “The Individual, Charisma, and the Leninist Extinction,” in A Conversation with Ken Jowitt (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, 2000).
25. Kenneth Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), p. 49.
26. See the quotations on Lenin and terror in Kostas Papaioannou's excellent anthology Marx et les marxistes (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 314.
27. See Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, 1st ed., trans. Daphne Hardy (New York: Bantam Books, 1968 (1941]); John V. Fleming, The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books That Shaped the Cold War (New York: Norton, 2009), pp. 21-96; Michael Scammell, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic (New York: Random House, 2009).
28. Darkness at Noon came out in French, to huge public success, during the early Cold War years, under the title Le zero et l'infini.
29. Sergey Nechaev, The Revolutionary Catechism, in The Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia, by Franco Venturi, intro. Isaiah Berlin (New York: Knopf, 1960), pp. 365-66. See also James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (New York: Basic Books, 1980); and Semen (Semyon) Frank, “The Ethic of Nihilism: A Characterization of the Russian Intelligentsia's Moral Outlook,” in Nikolai Berdyaev et al., Vekhi (Lanmdmarks) (Armonk, N.J.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), pp. 131-55.
30. Quoted in Michael Burleigh, Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics from the Great War to the War on Terror (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), p. 82.
31. Piatakov quoted in Walicki, Marxism, 461.
32. Steven Lukes, “On the Moral Blindness of Communism,” Human Rights Review 2, no. 2 (January-March 2001): 120.
33. Ibid., 121.
34. Ibid., 123.
35. Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (New York: Hyperion, 2002), 90.
36. Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2007), p. 171.
37. Mikhail Gorbachev and Zdeněk Mlynář, Conversations with Gorbachev: On Perestroika, the Prague Spring, ed. George Shriver, foreword by Archie Brown and Mikhail Gorbachev (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
38. Jowitt, New World Disorder, 10.
39. A. J. Polan, Lenin and the End of Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 73.
40. Elena Bonner, “The Remains of Totalitarianism” New York Review of Books, March 8, 2001, 4.
41. Ibid., p. 5.
42. Alain Besançon, The Rise of the Gulag: The Intellectual Origins of Leninism (New York: Continnum, 1981); Jacob L. Talmon, Myth of the Nation and Vision of the Revolution: Ideological Polarization in the Twentieth Century (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1991); Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and French Revolution (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006).
43. John Maynard Keynes quoted in Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 155.
44. Burleigh, Sacred Causes, p. 76.
45. Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, the Golden Age, the Breakdown, trans. P. S. Falla (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), pp. 343-44 (subsequent references to Main Currents refer to this edition.
46. Halfin, From Darkness to Light, p. 37.
47. For the whole argument, see Erik van Ree, “Stalin's Organic Theory of the Party,” Russian Review 52, no. 1 (January 1993): 43-57.
48. Erik van Ree, “Stalin as a Marxist Philosopher,” Studies in East European Thought 52 (2000): 294.
49. Ibid., p. 271. I am also paraphrasing Isaak Steinberg's description of the atmosphere in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution: “All aspects of existence—social, economic, political, spiritual, moral, familial—were opened to purposeful fashioning by human hands.” Steinberg was a left Socialist revolutionary, who for a brief period was the first Soviet commissar for justice but resigned in protest against Bolshevik extremist violence and in 1923 fled to Germany. After the coming to power of the Nazis, he left for London. During the war he was a central figure in the plans for relocation of the Jewish refugees. See Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 39.
50. For the mindset of Bolshevik-style illuminated militants, see Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Harper & Row, 1966); Arthur Koestler's contribution in Richard H. Crossman, ed., The God That Failed (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 15-75.
51. Rosa Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, ed. Mary-Alice Waters (New York and London: Pathfinder, 1997), p. 370.
52. Ibid., p. 387.
53. Cohen, Bukharin, p. 133.
54. Ibid., p. 172.
55. Ibid., p. 269.
56. Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 491.
57. Ibid., pp. 473-74.
58. Kołakowski, Main Currents, pp. 620-39.
59. See “Proletarians and Communists,” The Manifesto, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Tucker, pp. 483-91.
60. See Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 2, The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 211.
61. François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, trans. Deborah Furet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 143.
62. Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: Norton, 2003).
63. Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princet on, N.J., and Oxford: Princet on University Press, 2003), p. 165.
64. Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (New York: Knopf, 1991), pp. 91-174.
65. George Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism (New York: H. Fertig, 1999).
66. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 235.
67. R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini's Italy: Life under the Fascist Dictatorship 1915-1945 (London: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 130.
68. Emilio Gentile and Robert Mallett, “The Sacralisation of Politics: Definitions, Interpretations and Reflections on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 1, no. 1 (2000): 36.
69. Alberto Toscano, Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (London and New York: Verso, 2010). I am extending here Priestland's analysis of what he coins as “revivalist Bolshevism.” See David Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization: Ideas, Power, and Terror in Inter-War Russia (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 39.
70. Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics, p. 55.
71. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, p. 460.
72. E. A. Rees, Political Thought from Machiavelli to Stalin: Revolutionary Machiavellism (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), pp. 74 and 235-36.
73. T. H. Rigby, “Introduction: Political Legitimacy, Weber and Communist Mono-organisational Systems,” in Political Legitimation in Communist States, ed. T. H. Rigby and F. Feher (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1982), p. 5.
74. Gentile and Mallett, “The Sacralisation of Politics,” p. 46.
75. Mann takes his point further by identifying two subtypes within this political category: “One driven by revolutionary class ideology, exemplified by the Stalinist regime” and “the other driven by what I shall call a revolutionary ‘nation-statist' ideology, exemplified by Nazism.” Michael Mann, “Contradictions of Continuous Revolution,” in Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, ed. Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 136. See his Fascists (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
76. David D. Roberts, The Totalitarian Experiment in Twentieth-Century Europe: Understanding the Poverty of Great Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), p. 270.
77. See Boris Souvarine, Staline: Aperçu historique de bolshévisme (Paris: Éditions Champ Libre, 1977); Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936-45: Nemesis (New York: Norton, 2000); Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2004); and Yuri Felschtinsky, Lenin and His Comrades (New York: Enigma Books, 2010).
78. Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 3, The Breakdown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 90.
79. Berman, Terror and Liberalism, p. 50.
80. Peter Ehlen, “Communist Faith and World-Explanatory Doctrine: A Philosophical analysis,” in Totalitarianism and Political Religions, vol. 2, Concepts for the Comparison of Dictatorships, ed. Hans Maier and Michael Schäfer (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 134.
81. Hans Maier, “Political Religions and Their Images: Soviet Communism, Italian Fascism and German National Socialism,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 7, no. 3 (September 2006): 269.
82. Graeme Gill, The Origins of the Stalinist Political System (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 242.
83. Ana Krylova, “Beyond the Spontaneity-Consciousness Paradigm: ‘Class Instinct' as a Promising Category of Historical Analysis,” Slavic Review 62, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 18-19. David Priestland makes a similar point as he identifies two versions of understanding “class” by the Bolsheviks: a neotraditionalist one, “as class origin,” which allows for the entrenchment of the bureaucracy produced by mass vydvizhenie; and a revivalist one, “as class mentality and culture,” which emphasizes the notion of vospetanie, which can be turned against the “new class.” See Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization, p. 415.
84. Quoted by David McLellan, Marxism after Marx, 4th ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 98.
85. Jowitt, New World Disorder, pp. 25-27.
86. Rees, Political Thought from Machiavelli to Stalin, p. 115.
87. Rees lists N. A. Speshnev, N. P. Ogarev, P. G. Zaichnevskii, M. Bakunin, P. N. Tkachev, and S. G. Nechaev as the founding fathers of “revolutionary Machiavellism.” On the relationship between the Russian tradition of radical political thought and Lenin, see also Tibor Szamuely, The Russian Tradition, ed. Robert Conquest (London: Fontana, 1974); and Adam Ulam, In the Name of the People: Prophets and Conspirators in Prerevolutionary Russia (New York: Viking Press, 1977).
88. Robert Mayer, “Lenin and the Jacobin Identity in Russia,” Studies in East European Thought 51 (1999): 127-54. Also see Mayer, “Lenin, the Proletariat, and the Legitimation of Dictatorship,” Journal of Political Ideologies 2 (February 1997): 99-115; and “Plekhanov, Lenin and Working-Class Consciousness,” Studies in East European Thought 49 (September 1997): 159-85.
89. See Maximilien Robespierre, Virtue and Terror, ed. Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 2007).
90. On Lenin's concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, see Kołakowski, Main Currents, pp. 744-49.
91. Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” p. 391.
92. Hannah Arendt, “Nightmare and Flight,” in Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954, ed. Jerome Kern (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich), p. 134.
93. Daniel Chirot, “What Was Communism All About?” (review essay on The Black Book of Communism), East European Politics and Societies 14, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 665-75.
94. Polan, Lenin and the End of Politics.
95. Peter Holquist, “'Information is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work': Bolshevik Surveillance in its Pan-European Perspective,” Journal of Modern History 69, no. 3 (1997): 415-50.
96. I am paraphrasing Roberts, The Totalitarian Experiment, p. 415.
97. Klaus-Georg Riegel, “Marxism-Leninism as a Political Religion” in Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 6, no. 1 (June 2005): 98.
98. Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy (New York: Free Press, 1994); Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1990).
99. Quoted by John Patrick Diggins, Max Weber: Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy (New York: Basic Books, 1996), p. 239.
100. Ibid., p. 230.
101. Slavoj Žižek, “Introduction between the Two Revolutions,” in Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917 (London: Verso, 2002), 6.
102. Alexander Yakovlev, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002); see also my review of Yakovlev's book, “Apostate Apparatchik,” Times Literary Supplement, February 21, 2003, p. 26; and Paul Hollander, The End of Commitment: Intellectuals, Revolutionaries, and Political Morality (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006).
103. Isaac Deutscher, “Marxism and Primitive Magic,” in The Stalinist Legacy: Its Impact on Twentieth Century World Politics, ed. Tariq Ali (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), 11-14.
104. See Robert C. Tucker's interview with George Urban in G. R. Urban, ed., Stalinism—Its Impact on Russia and the World (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1982), pp. 151 and 170.
105. Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 341.
106. Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russia,” in Stalinism—New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 20-47.
107. Priestland, Stalinism and the Po
litics of Mobilization, p. 249.
108. Erik van Ree, “Stalin as Marxist: The Western Roots of Stalin's Russification of Marxism,” in Stalin: A New History, ed. Sarah Davies and James Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 172.
109. Roberts, The Totalitarian Experiment, p. 231.
110. In Mussolini's Italy, Carta de Lavoro, the 1927 charter that encoded the regime's program of modernization, used a strikingly similar characterization of the community on the path to constructing the revolutionary state: “The Italian nation is an organism having a purpose, life and means of action superior to those of any individual or groups who are part of it. It is a moral, political and economic unit which integrally achieves the Fascist State.” This charter was designed mainly by Italo Balbo. See Bosworth, Mussolini's Italy, p. 227.
111. David Brandenberger, “Stalin as Symbol: A Case Study of the Personality Cult and Its Construction,” in Stalin, ed. Davies and Harris, p. 250. For his discussion of National Bolshevism, see David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956 (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2002).
112. Gill, The Origins, pp. 242-45.
113. Both quotations from Stalin are from Ethan Pollock, “Stalin as the Coryphaeus of Science: Ideology and Knowledge in the Post-War Years,” in Stalin, ed. Davies and Harris, pp. 283 and 280.
114. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin Press, 1971), p. 51.
115. Lenin and the Twentieth Century: A Bertram D. Wolfe Retrospective, compiled and with an introduction by Lennard D. Gerson, foreword by Alain Besançon (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1984), p. 86.
116. Dick Howard, The Specter of Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 19.
117. See Leszek Kołakowski interview in Urban, ed., Stalinism, p. 250.
118. Roger Griffin, “Introduction: God's Counterfeiters? Investigating the Triad of Fascism, Totalitarianism and (Political) Religion,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 5, no. 3 (Winter 2004): 291-325.
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