Vladimir Tismaneanu - The Devil in History

Going back to the ambivalence of Leninism, I think that what we need to stress, beyond the debates about its Marxist, Russian, or reified core (by Stalin), is that “its goal is to transcend any particular politics… and to realize a philosophical project over the heads (or behind the backs) of the participants. Its justification lies in its claim to transcend their (alienated) self-consciousness in the name of the really real truth. It is politics as antipolitics.” 116From this point of view, regardless of distinctions between party persuasion and coercion (in Tucker’s formulation) or the language of reason versus that of magic, it is undeniable that Lenin was the one who created the possibility for the culmination of “Marx’s hypothesis that the working class has a privileged knowledge of the final purpose of history in the assertion that Comrade Stalin is always right.” 117Lenin produced and implemented a charismatic doctrine of universal human regeneration, a New Faith (as Czesław Miłosz called Bolshevism) based on “the archetypal human faculty for imbuing the home and the community, and hence the new home and the new community, with suprahuman, ritual significance.” 118In the final analysis, Leninism was the child of three mothers: the Enlightenment with its focus on reason and progress; Marx’s social theory and project of world historical transformation; and the Russian revolutionary tradition with its utilitarian nihilism and a quasi-religious socialist vision of the transformation of mankind.

With this intellectual pedigree in mind, one needs to be very cautious in writing Leninism’s definitive obituary. Yes, as a Russian model of socialism it is exhausted, but there is something in Leninism—if you want, its antidemocratic, collectivist pathos associated with the invention of the party as a mystical body transcending individual fears, anguishes, despair, loneliness, and so on—that remains with us. All political figures in post-Soviet Russia—all parties, movements, and associations—define themselves, and must do so, in relationship to Lenin’s legacies. In this respect, as an organizational principle but not as a worldview, Leninism is alive, if not well. Ideologically it is extinct, of course, but its repudiation of democratic deliberation and contempt for “sentimental bourgeois values” has not vanished. This is because the cult of the organization and the contempt for individual rights is part and parcel of one direction within the “Russian tradition.” Russian memory includes a plurality of trends, and one should avoid any kind of Manichean taxonomy. It is doubtless that, as Christian existentialist philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev noticed, there is something deeply Russian in the love for the ultimate, universally cathartic, redeeming revolution, which explains why Lenin and his followers (including the highly sophisticated philosophers Georg Lukács and Ernst Bloch) embraced a certain cataclysmic, messianic, absolutist direction within the Marxist tradition. 119The Bolshevik revolution was indeed the expression of Russ ian intellectuals’ obsession with “a version of a thirst for the sacred with a concomitant revulsion against the profane, a contest of values that can be seen in an early paradigm, the story of Christ’s throwing the money changers out of the temple.” 120In his revolutionary praxis, Lenin, as famously formulated by Robert C. Tucker, “married the old image of two warring Russias with Marxism.” 121Leninism was “not solely a revolutionary response to the inequities of the Tsarist state and the social injustice endemic to capitalist liberalism, but also a response to the crisis of modernity.” 122

At the same time, one should place Leninism in contradistinction to other versions of Marxism, which were at least as legitimate if not more legitimate than the Bolshevik doctrine. It is not at all self-evident that one can derive the genocidal logic of the gulags from Marx’s universalistic postulates, whereas it is quite clear that much of the Stalinist system existed in embryo in Lenin’s Russia. Together with Robert C. Tucker, we should admit the heterogeneous nature of the Bolshevik tradition itself and avoid the temptation of “retrospective determinism.” Thus Stalin’s Lenin was only one of the possibilities implied in the Leninist project.

Now, in dealing with the impact of Russian ideas and practices on the West, there is always a problem: what Russian tradition do we refer to? 123The Decembrist or the czarist-autocratic one? Cernyshevsky or Herzen? Chaadaev or Gogol? Turgenev or Dostoyevski? The humanists who opposed the pogroms and the blood libel or the Black Hundreds? The liberal writer Vladimir Korolenko or the czarist reactionary Konstantin Pobedonostsev? The Bolshevik apocalyptical scenario or the Menshevik evolutionary socialism? The Nechaev-style terrorist rejection of the status quo, the intelligentsia’s perpetual self-flagellation and outrage, or the dissident vision of a tolerant polis? Even within the dissident culture, there has always been a tension between the liberals and the nationalists, between the supporters of Andrei Sakharov and those of Igor Shafarevich, between Solzhenitsyn’s Slavophile inclinations and Sergey Kovalev’s democratic universalism. 124All these questions remain as troubling now as they were one hundred years ago. Once again, Russia is confronted with the eternal questions “What is to be done?” and “Who are to be blamed?” And whether they admit it or not, all participants in the debate are haunted by Lenin’s inescapable presence. Lenin was the most influential Russian political personality of the twentieth century, and for Eastern Europeans, Lenin’s influence resulted in the complete transformation of their life worlds. It would be easy to simply say that Leninism succumbed to the events of 1989–91, but the truth is that residual Bolshevism continues to be a major component of the hybrid transitional culture of post-Soviet Russia (and East Central Europe).

To return to our initial dilemma about the proper interpretation of the Soviet experiment, one needs to draw one final line and ask, What was Lenin’s unique, extraordinary innovation? What was the substance of his transformative action? Here I think that Jowitt rather than Žižek gave the accurate answer. The charismatic vanguard party, made up of professional revolutionaries, was invented by Lenin over one hundred years ago, in 1902, when he wrote his most influential text, What Is to Be Done? Lars Lih disagrees with the “textbook interpretation” of Leninism (the predestined-pedagogical role of the revolutionary vanguard, i.e., the Communist Party) and insists that many, if not most, Social Democrats at the beginning of the twentieth century were convinced of the need to bring consciousness to the class from “without.” 125According to Lih, the thrust of the criticism from other socialists was aimed not at What Is to Be Done , but rather at his “Letter to a Comrade,” written in September 1902, and especially One Step Forward Two Steps Backwards , published in the spring of 1904. But this “injection approach” (bringing consciousness from the outside, awakening a dormant proletariat) was not the thrust of Lenin’s main revision of classical Marxism: it was not educational action per se, but rather the nature of the pedagogical agent that mattered in the story. This “party of a new type” symbolized what Antonio Gramsci later called the “New Prince”: a new figure of the political that absorbs and incorporates the independent life of society up to the point of definitive osmosis or asphyxiation.

Lenin created a mystique of the party as the ultimate repository of strategic wisdom, a “community of saints” dedicated to bringing about the cataclysmic millenium: it was the historical agent, for it encompassed the professional revolutionaries, those who, by reuniting their acting and thinking faculties, regained “the grace of the harmonious original being.” 126One statement speaks volumes about the totemic entity he wished to create: “We believe in the party, we see in her the reason, the honor and the conscience of our epoch… the only guarantee for the liberation movement of the working class.” 127For the Bolsheviks, “like Christ, the party was, at one and the same time, a real institution and an incarnated idea. The formation of the Party was the First Coming; not fully appreciated by an immature working class, it heralded a Second Coming and the apotheosis of workers’ consciousness at which point all workers would join the Party, thereby rendering it superfluous. The eschatological significance of the Party explained the zeal with which the Marxists guarded its purity.” 128Lenin developed an exclusivist vision of party unity founded on unflinching adherence to the established doctrinal line and not on a consensual agreement about the main ideological tenets. For him, it was “the unity of Marxists, not the unity of Marxists with the enemies and distorters of Marxism.” 129As I have shown, this unwillingness to compromise over the interpretation of history is one of the fundamental features of the sacralization of politics.