The Devil in History

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  62. See the commentary by Vladimir Tismaneanu and Paul-Dragoș Aligică, “Romania's Parliamentary Putsch,” Wall Street Journal (Europe), April 20, 2007. On May 19, 2007, Băsescu overwhelmingly won in a national referendum (74.5 percent voted against his impeachment).

  63. This “synchronization” was the thrust of interwar Romanian liberal theorist Eugen Lovinescu's approach to the country's modernization.

  64. Karen Dawisha, “Communism as a Lived System of Ideas in Contemporary Russia,” East European Politics and Societies 19, no. 3 (2005): 46393. Directly related to Dawisha's insight is the problem of nostalgia for the Communist past. For example, Alexei Yurchak details the mechanisms of socialization in the late years of the Soviet Union, emphasizing the depth of integration in the socialist milieu despite the latter's outwardly seemingly incremental nature. See Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006).

  65. See Michael McFaul, Nikolai Petrov, and Andrei Ryabov, Between Dictatorship and Democracy: Russian Post-Communist Reform (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2004); Peter Reddaway, “Russia on the Brink,” New York Review of Books, January 28, 1993, pp. 30-35. Reddaway notices a multilayered feeling of moral and spiritual injury related to loss of empire and damaged identity: “Emotional wounds as deep as these tend to breed anger, hatred, self-disgust and aggressiveness. Such emotions can only improve the political prospects for the nationalists and neo-communists, at any rate for a time.” Recently Reddaway has become even more pessimistic: Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 2001).

  66. Grigore Pop-Eleches, “Transition to What? Legacies and Reform Trajectories after Communism,” in World Order after Leninism, ed. Tismaneanu, Howard, and Sil.

  67. Kołakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial, p. 41. A few years ago I discussed the role of eclectism in the ideological milieu of Central and Eastern Europe: Vladimir Tismaneanu, “In Praise of Eclectism,” The Good Society 11, no. 1 (2002).

  68. Stephen E. Hanson and Jeffrey S. Kopstein, “The Weimar/Russia Comparison,” Post-Soviet Affairs 13, no. 3 (July-September 1997): 252-81. On the failed democratization process in Russia, see M. Steven Fish, Democracy Derailed in Russia: The Failure of Open Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

  69. See Martin Krygier, “Conservative-Liberal-Socialism Revisited” The Good Society, 11, no. 1 (2002): 6-15.

  70. Judt, Postwar, p. 692.

  71. Martin Palouš, “Post-Totalitarian Politics and European Philosophy,” Public Affairs Quarterly 7, no. 2 (April 1993): 162-63.

  72. Ralf Dahrendorf, After 1989: Morals, Revolution, and Civil Society (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997). For an update on Dahrendorfs predictions and evaluation about Europe after the revolution, see his new introduction and postscript in the second edition of his Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (New York: Transaction Books, 2005).

  73. Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society (Oxford: Polity Press, 1986), p. 84.

  74. Joachim Gauck, “Dealing with the STASI Past,” in “Germany in Transition,” special issue, Daedalus (Winter 1994): 277-284.

  75. Charles Villa-Vicencio and Erik Doxtader, eds., Pieces of the Puzzle: Keywords on Reconciliation and Transitional Justice (Cape Town: Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, 2005), pp. 34-38.

  76. Jan-Werner Müller, Constitutional Patrotism (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 97-119.

  77. Gesine Schwan, Politics and Guilt: The Destructive Power of Silence, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), pp. 54-134.

  78. Herman Lübbe argued in 1983 that this communicative silence has allowed federal Germany to make a successful transition to democracy after 1945. See Hermann Lübbe, “Der Nationalsozialismus im politischen Bewusstsein der Gegenwart,” in Deutschlands Weg in die Diktatur: Internationale Konferenz zur nationalsozialistischen Machtübernahme im Reichstagsgebäude zu Berlin: Referate und Diskussionen. Ein Protokoll, ed. Martin Broszat et al. (Berlin: Siedler, 1983), p. 329-49.

  79. Judt, Postwar, p. 830.

  80. Jürgen Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians' Debate (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), p. 234.

  81. The full English version of the speech by Romania's president Traian Băsescu before the joint session of the Romanian parliament on December 18, 2006, can be found on www.presidency.ro (section “Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania”—CPADCR). The most vocal critics of this condemnation have been Vadim Tudor's Greater Romania Party (and its viciously anti-Semitic and anti-Western weekly) and the Social Democratic Party chaired by Mircea Geoană, former ambassador to Washington and foreign minister (2001-2004). Iliescu is the honorary chairman of this party.

  82. Leon Aron analyzed the manner in which the Putin administration is sponsoring and imposing the creation of a “new Russian history” that relativizes or altogether ignores the exterminist experience of Sovietism. See Leon Aron, “The Problematic Pages: To Understand Putin, We Must Understand His View of Russian History,” New Republic, September 24, 2008. Also see Orlando Figes, “Putin vs. the Truth,” New York Review of Books 56, no. 7 (April, 30, 2009); and Masha Lipman, “Russia, Again Evading History,” Washington Post, June 20, 2009. Also see David Brandenberger, “A New Short Course? A. V. Filippov and the Russian State's Search for a ‘Usable Past,'” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10, no. 4 (2009): 825-33. See also the responses to this essay in the same journal: Vladimir Solonari, “Normalizing Russia, Legitimizing Putin,” pp. 83546; Boris N. Mironov, “The Fruits of a Bourgeois Education,” pp. 847-60; and Elena Zubkova, “The Filippov Syndrome,” pp. 861-68.

  83. Frederick C. Corney, “What Is to Be Done with Soviet Russia? The Politics of Proscription and Possibility,” Journal of Policy History 21, no. 3 (2009): 276.

  84. Dominick LaCapra called this phenomenon “fetishized anti-Semitism, that is, anti-Semitism in the absence of minimal presence of Jews.” See Dominick LaCapra, “Revisiting the Historians' Debate—Mourning and Genocide,” History and Memory 9, nos. 1-2 (Spring-Winter 1997): 80-112.

  85. Charles Simic, “The Spider's Web,” New Republic, October 25, 1993, p. 19.

  86. Joseph Rothschild, Ethnopolitics: A Conceptual Framework (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 14.

  87. Yael Tamir, The Enigma of Nationalism: Essays in the Psychological (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 430.

  88. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 133.

  89. Tony Judt, “The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe,” in Memory and Power, ed. Müller, p. 172.

  90. Judt, Postwar, p. 768

  91. Amos Funkenstein, “History, Counterhistory and Narrative,” in Probing the Limits of Representation—Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 66-81.

  92. I refer here to Georges Mink's distinction among “partis consensuelists, tribunitiens et querelleurs” in “Les partis politiques de l'Europe centrale postcommuniste: Etat des lieux et essai de typologie,” L'Europe Centrale et Orientale en 1992, Documentation française, pp. 21-23.

  93. In his seminal Postwar, Tony Judt assessed that “seventy years of energetic claims to the contrary notwithstanding—that there was indeed no Communist society as such: only a wilting state and its anxious citizens” (p. 658).

  94. For Jowitt's first statement, see New World Disorder. The last were made during his keynote address, “Stalinist Revolutionary Breakthroughs in Eastern Europe,” at the conference “Stalinism Revisited: The Establishment of Communist Regimes in East-Centra
l Europe and the Dynamics of the Soviet Bloc” (November 29-30, 2007, Washington, D.C.), included in Stalinism Revisited, ed. Vladimir Tismaneanu.

  95. Kotkin, Uncivil Society, p. xvii.

  CONCLUSIONS

  1. Sigmund Neumann, Permanent Revolution: Totalitarianism in the Age of International Civil War (New York: Praeger, 1965 [1942]); Franz Neumann, The Democratic and the Authoritarian State: Essays in Political and Legal Theory, edited and with a preface by Herbert Marcuse (London: Free Press, 1957); André Liebich, From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy after 1921 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).

  2. See Eugen Weber, Varieties of Fascism: Doctrines of Revolution in the Twentieth Century (Malabar, Fl.: Robert E. Krieger, 1982).

  3. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1st ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951), pp. 431-32.

  4. See Carl Cohen, ed., Communism, Fascism, and Democracy: The Theoretical Foundations (New York: Random House, 1972).

  5. See Walter Laqueur, Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations (New York: Scribner's, 1990), p. 135.

  6. Zeev Sternhell with Mario Sznajder and Maya Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994); Roger Griffin, ed., International Fascism: Theories, Causes, and the New Consensus (London: Arnold, 1998); Aristotle Kallis, ed., The Fascism Reader (London: Routledge, 2003); Michael Mann, Fascists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Constantin Iordachi, ed., Comparative Fascist Studies (London: Routledge, 2010).

  7. Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, intro. Harvey C. Mansfield (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2001).

  8. Milorad M. Drachkovitch, ed., Marxism in the Modern World (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1965), especially the contributions of Raymond Aron, Bertram Wolfe, and Boris Souvarine; Melvin J. Lasky, Utopia and Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Isaac Deutscher, Marxism, Wars and Revolutions: Essays from Four Decades (London: Verso, 1984).

  9. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin Press, 1971); Georg Lukács, A Defense of “History and Class Consciousness”: Tailism and the Dialectic, with a introduction by John Rees and a postface by Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2000).

  10. Robert C. Tucker, ed.) The Marx-Engels Reader, 2d ed. (New York and London: W. W. Norton), p. 145.

  11. See “Reflections on the Changing Role of the Party in the Totalitarian Polity,” the epilogue to Leonard Shapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 2d ed., revised and enlarged (New York: Vintage Books, 1971). It is worth mentioning that Shapiro chose as a motto for his masterpiece Alexis de Tocqueville's words: “He who seeks in liberty anything other than Liberty itself is destined for servitude.”

  12. Cohen, ed., Communism, Fascism, and Democracy, p. 317.

  13. Benito Mussolini, “The Doctrine of Fascism,” in ibid., pp. 328-39.

  14. Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007); Alexander N. Yakovlev, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000); Richard Pipes, Communism: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2003).

  15. Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, p. 84.

  16. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), p. 831.

  17. Anne Applebaum, “The Worst of the Madness,” New York Review of Books, October 28, 2010.

  18. Robert C. Tucker, “Stalin, Bukharin, and History as Conspiracy,” in The Soviet Political Mind: Stalinism and Post-Stalin Change, rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), pp. 49-86.

  19. Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954, ed. Jerome Kern (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich), pp. 203-5.

  Index

  The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

  The ABC of Communism (Bukharin and Preobrazhensky)

  Academy of Science, Soviet

  Ackerman, Bruce

  Adorno, Theodore W.

  Aganbegyan, Abel

  Akhmadulina, Bella

  Akhmatova, Anna

  Albania: “High Stalinism,”; mass murder; political parties

  Aleksandrov, Georgi, History of West European Philosophy

  Alexeyeva, Ludmila

  Alexopoulos, Golfo

  alienation: Communist Party transcending; revisionist concept of

  aliens: Communist regimes as victims of. See also ethnocentricity; Jew

  Al Qaeda

  Althusser, Louis

  Amis, Martin

  amnesia: about criminality; institutionalized; mismemory; politics of; “voluntary amnesia,” See also falsification; memory

  amnesties, de-Stalinization

  anomy: Communism and Fascism as reactions to; Communist

  antipolitics. See also reinvention of politics

  anti-Semitism. See Jew

  Antonescu, Ion

  Applebaum, Anne

  Aragon, Louis

  Arbatov, Alexei

  Arendt, Hannah; conflict between power and reality; conscience breakdown; Essays on Understanding; “From humanity, through nationality, to barbarity,”; “little varieties of fact,”; Origins of Totalitarianism; replacement of “the suspected offense by the possible crime,”; “superfluous populations,”; terror; “thoughtlessness,”

  Aron, Raymond, Démocratie et totalitarisme; Memoirs

  Attali, Jacques

  Auster, Paul

  authoritarianism: bureaucracies; “competitive authoritarianism,”; democratic (liberal) socialism vs.; East and Central Europe; Leninism; Marxist components; Marx's personality; neo-authoritarianism; post-Communism; pre-Leninist; Putinist; radical-authoritarian trends; Russian traditions; salvationist; Stalinist; Western post-Marxism vs., See also totalitarianism

  Azerbaijan

  Bacilek, Karol

  Badiou, Alain

  Bahro, Rudolf

  Bakunin, Mikhail

  Balbo, Italo

  Balkans: Stalinist agenda; Western, See also Albania; Croatia; Serbia

  Baltic states: Gorbachev and use of force in; impersonal democratic procedures; Nazi and Soviet mass killings; Soviet/Russian occupation. See also Latvia; Lithuania

  Banac, Ivo

  Bartov, Omer

  Băsescu, Traian

  Bauman, Zygmunt

  Baumler, Alfred

  Bayer, Wilhem-Raymund

  Belarus: “competitive authoritarianism,”; Holocaust impacts; human rights

  Belgrade, April student protests

  Beniuc, Mihai

  Benjamin, Walter

  Berdyaev, Nikolai

  Bergelson, David

  Berlin, Isaiah

  Berlin Wall, fall of

  Berman, Jakub

  Berman, Paul

  Bernstein, Eduard

  Bernstein, Leonard

  Besançon, Alain

  Big Lie: Communist; post-Soviet. See also amnesia; falsification; truth

  bin Laden, Osama, Al Qaeda

  biological distinctions: Nazi. See also ethnocentricity

  The Black Book of Communism

  Blanquism

  Bloch, Ernst

  Blomberg-Frisch affair

  Blum, Léon

  Bogdanov, Aleksandr

  Bohemia: Communist Party; and patrimonial legacy

  Bolshevism; Communist Manifesto and; conversion of; converting into an emerging version of Communist-Fascism; critics; cult of the party; cult of totality; de-Bolshevization; Declaration of the Rights of Toiling and Exploited People (1918); vs. democracy; dream of total revolution; Fascism vs.; Gorbachev and; humanism; ideology; Judeo-Bolsheviks; justice subordinated to party interests; “language of magic,”; Menshevik split with; messianism; mission; “modern agenda of subjectivization,”
; and morality; New Faith; norms of culture of; October Revolution (1917); Old; party charisma; political “sins,”; post-Soviet Russia; revolutionary passion; Stalinistnationalist traditions of; “substitutionism,”; takeover of power; terror; victory in the civil war. See also Communist Party; Communist utopia; Leninism; Stalinism; vanguard party

  Bonapartism

  Bonner, Elena

  Borkenau, Franz

  Bormann, Martin

  Bosworth, R. J. B.

  Botez, Mihai

  Bourdieu, Pierre

  bourgeoisie; both Communism and Fascism vs.; Communism vs.; Fascism vs.; Jewish

  Bracher, Karl Dietrich

  Brandenberger, David

  Brandt, Willy

  Brașov workers' protest movement

  Brezhnev, Leonid

  Brown, Archie

  Browning, Christopher

  Brzezinski, Zbigniew

  Budapest, neo-Marxist School/Petöfi Circle

  Buhr, Manfred

  Bukharin, Nikolai; The ABC of Communism (with Preobrazhensky); Economics of the Transition Period; “To a Future Generation of Party Leaders,”

  Bukovsky, Vladimir

  Bulgaria: Danubian confederation; extermination camps and mass executions; “High Stalinism,”; Mladenov; post-Communism; working class passivity

  Burlatsky, Fyodor

  Burrin, Philippe

  Calmanovici, Emil

  camps: Communist; extermination; Hell on earth; labor; Nazi. See also gulag

  Camus, Albert

  capitalism: Communism vs./“capitalist encirclement,”; Eastern Europeans vs.; liberal; Nazism vs.; Westerners vs., See also market economies

  care of the soul

  Castoriadis, Cornelius

  Castro, Fidel

  Cathala, Jean

  Ceaușescu, Nicolae: charismatic leadership; civil society; “Great Helmsman,”; Manea persecution; post-Communism and; Răutu and; singing International while dying; Stalinism; Tudor as court poet

  CEMA (Council for Economic Mutual Assistance)

  Central Committee: Luxemburg on; Romanian Workers' Party; Socialist Unity Party (SED)

  Central Committee of the CPSU; Jakub Berman; Bukharin; Cultural Department; Frolov; Gorbachev and; Lenin letters (September 1917); notorious resolutions; Piatakov; Plenum (1937); republican elections (1990)