The Devil in History

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  50. For the ideological foundations of the East German Communist regime, see Leslie Holmes, “The Significance of Marxist Dissent to the Emergence of Postcommunism in the GDR,” in The Road to Disillusion: From Critical Marxism to Post-communism in Eastern Europe, ed. Raymond Taras (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), pp. 57-80; and Mary Fulbrook, The People's State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005).

  51. Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 3: The Breakdown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).

  52. English, Russia and the Idea of the West, p. 122.

  53. Georgy Arbatov quoted in ibid., p. 50.

  54. Alexandre Zinovyev, Nous et l'Occident (Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme, 1981), p. 13.

  55. Dick Howard, The Specter of Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. vii-xvii.

  56. Zubok, Zhivago's Children, p. 192.

  57. Ferenc Fehér, “The Language of Resistance: ‘Critical Marxism' versus ‘Marxism-Leninism' in Hungary,” in The Road to Disillusion, ed. Taras, pp. 41-56.

  58. Oskar Gruenwald, The Yugoslav Search for Man: Marxism Humanism in Contemporary Yugoslavia (South Hadley, Mass.: J. F. Bergin, 1983). One moment when critical thought in the West united with the revisionist spirit in the East to advocate humanist Marxism was the volume edited by Erich Fromm in 1965 and entitled Socialist Humanism (London: Allen Lane and Penguin Press, 1967). It included thirty-five contributions by Marxist and non-Marxist thinkers, which indicated the animus of the sixties to offer a humanist interpretation of Marx liberated from the hegemonic Soviet grip.

  59. Kołakowski, Main Currents, vol. 3; Tismaneanu, The Crisis of Marxist Ideology in Eastern Europe.

  60. Horvath, “'The Solzhenitsyn Effect,'” pp. 895-96. See Vladimir Tismaneanu, ed., The Promises of 1968: Crisis, Illusion, Utopia (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2010).

  61. Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958-c. 1974 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 10. Marwick defined this concept as “the belief that the society we inhabit is the bad bourgeois society, but that, fortunately, this society is in a state of crisis, so that the good society which lies just around the corner can be easily attained if only we work systematically to destroy the language, values, the culture, the ideology of bourgeois society.”

  62. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), p. 401.

  63. Agnes Heller, “The Year 1968 and Its Results: An East European Perspective,” in Promises of 1968, ed. Tismaneanu, pp. 155-63.

  64. V. Zubok's account about the generation of “Zhivago's children” shows how, by the end of the sixties, Russian intelligentsia began losing any hope of reforming Soviet-style Communism. The Sinyavski-Deniel trial and publication of Natalia Gorbanevskaya's Chronicle of Current Events (which Peter Reddaway called “the journal of an embryonic civil liberties union”) signaled the shift to searching for an alternative discourse about democracy among Soviet intellectuals. Another side effect of 1968 was the “the reinvention of Russia” (Y. Brudny). See Zubok, Zhivago's Children; Yitzhak M. Brudny, Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953-1991 (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Peter Reddaway, ed., Uncensored Russia: The Human Rights Movement in the Soviet Union, with a foreword by Julius Telesin (London : J. Cape, 1972).

  65. Zubok, Zhivago's Children, p. 296.

  66. V. Cerniayev quoted in Victor Zaslavsky, “The Prague Spring: Resistance and Surrender of the PCI,” in Promises of 1968, ed. Tismaneanu, p. 406.

  67. Judt, Postwar, p. 447.

  68. Paul Auster, “The Accidental Rebel,” New York Times, April 23, 2008; Jeffrey Herf, “1968 and the Terrorist Aftermath in West Germany,” in Promises of 1968, ed. Tismaneanu, p. 363.

  69. Judt, Postwar, p. 449. Wallerstein offered a different reading of 1968. Rather than seeing it as the beginning of the end of revolutionary or radical mass politics, Wallerstein understood it as the starting point of the globalization and generalization of antisystemic movements: the “rainbow coalition” applied to “trans-zonal cooperation”—the only way in which a “desirable transformation of the capitalist world-economy is possible.” However, his conviction that these movements were situated outside rather within (as in Judt's and other authors' analysis) was the real source of his frustration: “a fully coherent alternative strategy” did not appear. Wallerstein was correct in stating that “the real importance of the Revolution of 1968 is less its critique of the past than the questions it raised about the future.” But, as the upheavals of 1989 (the publication year of his article) demonstrated, the sixties affected the re-creation of the center rather than the re-enforcement and reinvention of the extremes. See Immanuel Wallerstein and Sharon Zukin, “1968, Revolution in the World-System: Theses and Queries,” Theory and Society 18, no. 4 (July 1989): 442-48. To paraphrase Marwick, the social movement that developed in the aftermath of the sixties did not confront their societies but rather permeated and transformed them.

  70. Edgar Morin, Claude Lefort, and Cornelius Castoriadis, La brèche: Premières réflexions sur les évènements (Paris: Fayard, 1968).

  71. Charles Maier, “Conclusion: 1968—Did It Matter?” in Promises of 1968, ed. Tismaneanu, p. 423.

  72. See Paul Berman's introduction in A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).

  73. See Vladimir Tismaneanu, Reinventing Politics; Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel (New York: Free Press, 1992; paperback with new afterword, 1993).

  74. English, Russia and the Idea of the West, p. 100.

  75. Ibid., pp. 108-9.

  76. Ibid., p. 114.

  77. I am rephrasing Alain Besançon's evaluation of Gorbachev's project of reform from his article “Breaking the Spell,” in Can the Soviet System Survive Reform? Seven Colloquies about the State of Soviet Socialism Seventy Years after the Bolshevik Revolution, ed. George R. Urban (London: Pinter, 1989). The journal Slavic Review reignited this discussion through the publication, in Autumn 2004, of Stephen F. Cohen's piece “Was the Soviet System Reformable?” along with replies from Archie Brown, Mark Kramer, Stephen Hanson, Karen Dawisha, and Georgi Derluguian.

  78. Quoted in Silvio Pons, “Western Communists, Gorbachev, and the 1989 Revolutions,” Journal of European History 18 (2009): 366.

  79. Vladimir Kontorovich, “The Economic Fallacy,” in National Interest 31 (Spring 1993):35-45.

  80. Stephen E. Hanson, “Gorbachev: The Last True Leninist Believer?” in The Crisis of Leninism and the Decline of the Left: The Revolutions of 1989, ed. Daniel Chirot (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), p. 54. See also Stephen E. Hanson, Post-Imperial Democracies: Ideology and Party Formation in Third Republic France, Weimar Germany, and Post-Soviet Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

  81. Zubok, Zhivago's Children, p. 335.

  82. Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 27. Mark Kramer, who develops Kotkin's point of view, strengthens his argument on Gorbachev's refusal to continue muddling through of the stagnation years by quoting a telling statement made by Islam Karimov during a Politburo meeting in January 1991: “Back in 1985, Mikhail Sergeevich, if I may say so, you didn't have to launch perestroika…. Everything would have continued as it was, and you would have thrived, and we would have thrived. And no catastrophes of any sort would have occurred.” Mark Kramer, “The Reform of the Soviet System and the Demise of the Soviet State,” Slavic Review 63, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 505-12.

  83. Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism (London: Bodley Head, 2009), p. 598.

  84. For a synthetic analysis of the various trends of thinking that were born in post-Stalinist USSR and which resulted by the end of 1980s in the collapse of Marxism-Leninism as state ideology, se
e Archie Brown, ed., The Demise of Marxism-Leninism in Russia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

  85. Robert English, “The Sociology of New Thinking: Elites, Identity Change, and the End of the Cold War,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 43-80.

  86. Archie Brown, Seven Years That Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective (London: Oxford University Press, 2007). See also his previous research on Gorbachev and the aftermath of perestroika: Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Archie Brown and Lilia Shevtsova, eds., Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin: Political Leadership in Russia's Transition (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2001).

  87. Zubok, Zhivago's Children, p. 120.

  88. For an analysis of the transformations within the Soviet leadership and higher ranks of the CPSU in the last decades of the USSR, see Jerry F. Hough, Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985-1991 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1997); and Soviet Leadership in Transition (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1980).

  89. See Georgii Arbatov, The System: An Insider's Life in Soviet Politics (New York: Times Books, 1992); and Aleksandr Yakovlev, The Fate of Marxism in Russia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993).

  90. English, “The Sociology of New Thinking,” p. 76. R. English's article is part of a thematic issue of the Journal of Cold War Studies 2 (Spring 2005) on the role of ideas in the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. See also Nina Tannenwald and William C. Wohlforth, “Introduction: The Role of Ideas and the End of the Cold War,” 3-12; Nina Tannenwald, “Ideas and Explanation: Advancing the Theoretical Agenda,” 13-42; Andrew Bennett, “The Guns That Didn't Smoke: Ideas and the Soviet Non-use of Force in 1989,” 81-109; Daniel C. Thomas, “Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End of the Cold War,” 110-41; and William C. Wohlforth, “The End of the Cold War as a Hard Case for Ideas,” 165-73.

  91. For an intellectual history of the ascendance of this group and of their ideas, see English, Russia and the Idea of the West.

  92. Robert C. Tucker, Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia: From Lenin to Gorbachev (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1987), p. 132.

  93. Pravda, February 6, 1990.

  94. See Gorbachev and Mlynář, Conversations with Gorbachev, pp. 56-58.

  95. See comments along these lines in Stephen F. Cohen, “Was the Soviet System Reformable?” Slavic Review 63, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 459-88; Archie Brown, “The Soviet Union: Reform of the System or Systemic Transformation?” Slavic Review 63, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 489-504; and Mark Kramer, “The Reform of the Soviet System,” p. 506.

  96. Anatoly S. Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev, trans. and ed. Robert D. English and Elizabeth Tucker (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), p. 105.

  97. Daniel C. Thomas, “Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End of the Cold War,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 129.

  98. Brown, Seven Years, p. 157.

  99. X. I. Ding, “Institutional Amphibiousness and the Transition from Communism: The Case of China,” British Journal of Political Science 24 (July 1994): 293-318.

  100. I am employing Frederick Corney's terminology. See Corney, “What Is to Be Done,” p. 267.

  101. Quoted in Jacques Levesque, The Enigma of 1989: The USSR and the Liberation of Eastern Europe (Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1997). See Aleksander Yakovlev, Ce que nous voulons faire de l'Union Sovietique: Entretiens avec Lilly Marcou (Paris: Le Seuil, 1991), p. 104.

  102. See Labor Focus on Eastern Europe 9, no. 3 (November 1987-February 1988): 5-6.

  103. Stephen Cohen, “Was the Soviet System Reformable?” pp. 487-88.

  104. Brown, “The Soviet Union,” pp. 494-95.

  105. Karen Dawisha, “The Question of Questions: Was the Soviet Union Worth Saving?” Slavic Review 63, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 513-26; and Stephen Hanson, “Reform and Revolution in the Late Soviet Context,” Slavic Review 63, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 527-34.

  106. Hanson, “Reform and Revolution,” p. 533. It is no surprise that Stephen Cohen, who throughout his scholarly work has sought to find the ever elusive solution from above (Bukharin, Gorbachev) to counter Stalin's Great Break, dismisses arguments in favor of an anti-Soviet revolution from below. For descriptions of the development of alternative politics from below before and during Gorbachev's reign, see Steven M. Fish, Democracy from Scratch: Opposition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995); Mark R. Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Edward W. Walker, Dissolution: Sovereignty and the Breakup of the Soviet Union (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); also Walter D. Connor, “Soviet Society, Public Attitudes, and the Perils of Gorbachev's Reforms: The Social Context of the End of the USSR,” Journal of Cold War Studies 5, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 43-80; Astrid S. Tuminez, “Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Break-up of the Soviet Union,” Journal of Cold War Studies 5, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 81-136; and Mark Kramer, “The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet Union: Part 1,” Journal of Cold War Studies 5, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 178-256; Kramer, “The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet Union: Part 2,” Journal of Cold War Studies 6, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 3-64; Kramer, “The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet Union: Part 3,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 3-96.

  107. Kramer, “The Collapse: Part 1,” p. 214.

  108. Gorbachev and Mlynář, Conversations, pp. 110-21.

  109. Levesque, The Enigma of 1989, pp. 3-5 and 252-58.

  110. Brown, “The Soviet Union,” p. 489.

  111. Václav Havel et al., The Power of the Powerless: Citizens against the State in Central-Eastern Europe (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1985), pp. 33-34.

  112. Ibid., p. 35.

  113. Kramer, “The Collapse: Part 3,” pp. 69 and 94. For his discussion of the “demonstration effects” for the Soviet Union, see “The Collapse: Part 2.”

  114. In making this statement, the historian invokes the authority of the founding fathers of the Soviet human rights movement, Raisa Orlova and Lev Kopelev. See Zubok, Zhivago's Children, p. 265.

  115. George Konrád, Antipolitics (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), p. 123.

  116. Falk, The Dilemmas of Dissidence, p. 313.

  117. Horvath, “'The Solzhenitsyn Effect,'” p. 907. Also see Jan Plamper, “Foucault's Gulag,” Kritika: Explorations in Russ ian and Eurasian History, n.s., 3, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 255-80.

  118. I am developing Neil Robinson's argument in “What Was Soviet Ideology? A Comment on Joseph Schull and an Alternative,” Political Studies 43 (1995): 325-32. See also Neil Robinson, Ideology and the Collapse of the Soviet System: A Critical History of Soviet Ideological Discourse (Aldershot and Hants: E. Elgar, 1995).

  119. “There's More to Politics than Human Rights,” an interview with G. M. Tamás, Uncaptive Minds 1, no. 1 (April-May 1988): 12.

  120. Miklós Haraszti, The Velvet Prison: Artists under State Socialism (New York: Basic Books, 1987).

  121. Jan Josef Lipski, KOR: A History of the Workers' Defense Committee 1976-1981 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

  122. Ferenc Fehér, Agnes Heller, and György Márkus, Dictatorship over Needs (London: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 137.

  123. Brown, Rise and Fall, p. 588.

  124. Johann P. Arnason, “Communism and Modernity,” in Multiple Modernities, special issue, Daedalus 129, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 61-90.

  5. IDEOLOGY, UTOPIA, AND TRUTH

  1. Goerge Lichtheim, Thoughts among the Ruins: Collected Essays on Europe and Beyond (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1973); Vladimir Tismaneanu, The Crisis of Marxist Ideology in Eastern Europe: The Poverty of U
topia (London and New York: Routledge, 1988); Agnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér, The Grandeur and Twilight of Radical Universalism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1991); Melvin J. Lasky, Utopia and Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).

  2. See the discussion of Jan Patočka's concept of supercivilization in Edward F. Findlay, Caring for the Soul in a Postmodern Age: Politics and Phenomenology in the Thought of Jan Patočka (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), pp. 126-27.

  3. Shlomo Avineri and Zeev Sternhell, Europe's Century of Discontent: The Legacies of Fascism, Nazism, and Communism (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2003); Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005); Bernard Wasserstein, Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

  4. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, “Introduction,” in Nietzsche and Soviet Culture: Ally and Adversary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 17. See also Rosenthal, New Myth, New World—from Nietzsche to Stalinism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002).

  5. See the discussion on totalitarian experiments and secular religions in Raymond Aron, The Dawn of Universal History: Selected Essays from a Witness to the Twentieth Century, intro. Tony Judt (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century (New York: Norton, 2000), pp. 5784; Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).