Vladimir Tismaneanu - The Devil in History

Leninism as a political and cultural regime, or as an international system, is undoubtedly extinct. On the other hand, the Leninist-Stalinist model of the highly disciplined, messianic sect-type organization based on the rejection of pluralism and the demonization of the Other has not lost its appeal—suffice it to remember Lenin’s diatribes against the Mensheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries, the kulaks, the aristocrats, the “bourgeois intellectuals,” and so on. In his view, their place, even when they disguised themselves as individuals unaffiliated with the party, was in jail or, if they were lucky, in exile. 26This quasi-rational, in fact almost mystical, identification with the party (conceived as a beleaguered fortress surrounded by vicious enemies) was a main psychological feature of Bolshevism before what Robert C. Tucker defines as its deradicalization (what Jowitt would call the rise of the Aquinas temptation, in the figure of “modern revisionism,” as Mao Zedong quite accurately defined Titoism and Khrushchevism). To be a Leninist meant to accept the party’s claim to scientific knowledge (grasping the “laws of historical evolution”) as well as its oracular pretense. Doubting the party’s omniscience and omnipotence was the cardinal sin (as finally admitted by the Old Bolshevik Nikolai Rubashov, Arthur Koestler’s hero in Darkness at Noon ). 27For Lenin, the party member was dispensable human capital in the revolutionary struggle. The individual was a simple particle, a zero compared to the infinity of the cause. 28On this point, he closely followed—although he would have never admitted it—Russian terrorist Sergey Nechaev’s ruthless fanaticism, as formulated in the Revolutionary Catechism:

Paragraph 1. The revolutionary is a lost man he has no interests of his own, no cause of his own, no feelings, no habits, no belongings; he does not even have a name. Everything in him is absorbed by a single, exclusive interest, a single thought, a single passion—the revolution

Paragraph 2. In the very depths of his being, not just in words but in deed, he has broken every tie with the civil order, with the educated world and all laws, conventions and generally accepted conditions, and with the ethics of this world. He will be an implacable enemy of this world, and if he continues to live in it, that will only be so as to destroy it more effectively….

Paragraph 4. He despises public opinion: he despises and hates the existing social ethic in all its demands and expression; for him, everything that allows the triumph of the revolution is moral, and everything that stands in its way is immoral.

Paragraph 5. The revolutionary is the lost man; with no pity for the state and for the privileged and educated world in general, he must himself expect no pity. Everyday he must be prepared for death. He must be prepared to bear torture.

Paragraph 6. Hard with himself, he must be hard towards others. All the tender feelings of family life, of friendship, love, gratitude and even honor must be stifled in him by a single cold passion for the revolutionary cause. For him there is only one pleasure, one consolation, one reward, and one satisfaction—the success of the revolution. Day and night he must have one single thought, one single purpose: merciless destruction. With this aim in view, tirelessly and in cold blood, he must always be prepared to die and to kill with his own hands anyone who stands in the way of achieving it.

Paragraph 7. The character of the true revolutionary has no place for any romanticism, sentimentality, enthusiasm or seduction. Nor has it any place for private hatred and revenge. This revolutionary passion which in him becomes a daily, hourly passion, must be combined with cold calculation. Always and everywhere he must become not what his own personal inclination would have him become, but what the general interest of the revolution demands. 29

Bolshevik humanism was by definition concrete, hinging upon the success of the cause. The individual’s existence maintained its weight in the world insofar as it contributed to the construction of the revered social utopia. In this ideologically defined universe, the only agent capable of fulfilling and thereby ending history by bringing humanity to the promised land of classless society was the party. Two pronouncements by Yury Piatakov, one of Lenin’s favorites in the younger generation of the Bolshevik Old Guard, spelled out this cosmic, or mystical, identification with the party in the most dramatic terms: “In order to become one with this great Party he would fuse himself with it, abandon his own personality, so that there was no particle left inside him which was not at one with the Party, did not belong to it.” 30The former Central Committee secretary (in 1918) added, “Yes I shall consider black something that I felt and considered to be white since outside of the party, outside accord with it, there is no life for me.” 31Or, in Marxian lingo, the party was the medium through which the individual erased the duality between self and the reified social being. The Bolsheviks were harbingers of the beginning of true history.

Ideological absolutism, worship of the ultimate goal, voluntary suspension of critical faculties, and the cult of the party line as the perfect expression of the general will were imbedded in the original Bolshevik project. The subordination of conventional moral criteria to the ultimate end of achieving a class society was the main problem with Leninism. It shared with Marxism what Steven Lukes calls “the emancipated vision of a world in which the principles that protect human beings from one another would no longer be needed.” 32One of the best descriptions of the Communist mind can be found in the testimony of Lev Kopelev, the model for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s character Rubin in The First Circle: “With the rest of my generation I firmly believed that the ends justify the means. Our great goal was the universal triumph of Communism, and for the sake of that goal everything was permissible—to lie, to steal, to destroy hundreds of thousands and even millions of people, all those who were hindering our work or could hinder it, everyone who stood in the way. And to hesitate or doubt about all this was to give in to ‘intellectual squeamishness’ and ‘stupid liberalism,’ the attributes of people who “could not see the forest for the trees.’” 33Political philosopher Steven Lukes was therefore correct in emphasizing the structural-generative ideological and emotional matrix of Communism that made its crimes against humanity possible: “The defect in question causing moral blindness at a heroic scale was congenital.” 34This same point is emphasized by novelist Martin Amis, for whom Lenin “was a moral aphasiac, a moral autist.” 35Lenin, once in power, “set about placing History on a large gauge railway track altogether, where it would be pulled by the locomotives of a revolutionary design.” 36

The magic evaporated once the historically anointed leader ceased to be the custodian of absolute truth. This makes Khrushchev’s onslaughts on Stalin at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) on February 25, 1956, crucially important (as admitted by Mikhail Gorbachev in his conversation with former Prague Spring chief ideologue Zdeněk Mlynář. 37) At the same time, it was precisely charismatic impersonalism, as Jowitt argues, that provided the antidote to desperation at the moment when Khrushchev exposed Stalin’s crimes. This feature, indeed, crucially distinguished Bolshevism from Nazism: “The leader is charismatic in Nazism; the program and (possibly) the leader are charismatic in Leninism.” 38Lenin’s ultimate goal was the elimination (extinction) of politics through the triumph of the party as the embodiment of an exclusionary, even exterminist general will. 39