Vladimir Tismaneanu - The Devil in History

In the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany, the abolition of the prerevolutionary state created “the institutional precondition for cumulative radicalization. Flexible, extra-legal; and extra-bureaucratic agencies institutionalized the terror against fictitious enemies; the fiction of a future civilization and a new moral sense that legitimized it.” 158The new order of the utopia in power opened the door to a sort of “institutional Darwinism” defined by “political activism occurring on its own, or at least without immediate direction” from the power center (the leader or party). 159This process can account for both the escalation of terror and the organizational corruption and ultimate demise of these totalitarian political movements. The fundamental difference with National Socialism (but not so much with Mussolini’s Fascism, considering that it did survive for at least two decades) was that Lenin and Stalin “achieved not only a social revolution but the conditions of a stable political order.” 160Bertrand Russell in The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism , written upon his return from the Soviet Union in 1920, diagnosed the murderous reality lying at the heart of Lenin’s political invention, the specter that contemporary prophets of irresponsibility such as Žižek choose to ignore: “I felt that everything I valued in human life was being destroyed in the interests of a glib and narrow philosophy, and that in the process untold misery was being inflicted upon many millions of people.” 161Once victorious in 1917, Lenin opened a Pandora’s box. By the end of the twentieth century, all we found was tyranny and bloodshed anywhere his world-historical exploit was emulated, from Shanghai to Rostock.

Communist regimes were partocratic ideocracies (as discussed by authors such as Leonard Schapiro, Alain Besançon, Martin Malia, Richard Pipes, Orlando Figes, and Stephen Kotkin). Their only claim to legitimacy was purely ideological, that is, derived from the organized belief system shared by the elites and inculcated into the masses that the party benefited by special access to historical truth. If this interpretation is correct, then deradicalization, the decline of self-generated energy, primarily in the field of ideological monopoly, leads to increased vulnerability. The demise of the supreme leader (Stalin, Mao, Enver Hoxha, or Tito) has always ushered in ideological anarchy and loss of self-confidence among the rulers. Kenneth Jowitt correctly pointed out that “there is a constant tendency in Leninism toward strong executive leaders.” 1Sometimes, though, Communist parties invoke also the leadership of a messiahlike prophet, a charismatic guide. 2The cases of Stalin and Mao are the most obvious, but Nicolae Ceaușescu, Enver Hoxha, Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il-sung, and others come to mind as well. Building upon Jowitt’s argument, we can observe the following trend: in an attempt to permanently confirm and sustain the “charismatic impersonalism” of the party under Communism (particularly in its Stalinism avatars), magic, miracle, and mysticism blended in totalitarian regimes that were apparently scientifically justified. In fact, they were chiliastic ideologies, redemptive doctrines shrouded in rationalistic disguise, political religions based on their own sense of original sin, the fall of mankind, historical torment, and final salvation. Attempts to restore the “betrayed values” of the original project (Nikita Khrushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev) resulted in ideological disarray, a change of mind among former supporters, desertion of critical intellectuals from the “fortress,” criticism of the old dogmas, awakening, a break with past, and eventually apostasy. If we compare the Leninist experiments with Fascist revolutionary utopias, the absence of a revisionist temptation within Fascism is striking. With very few exceptions, like the brothers Gregor and Otto Strasser (early Nazis who broke with Hitler’s regime soon after the takeover), there were no disenchanted Nazis. The plot against Hitler in 1944 was fomented by conservative aristocrats and military luminaries who wanted to avoid a crushing defeat by the Allies and a much feared occupation by the Red Army. 3

This chapter looks into the adventures of critical Marxism in Soviet-style regimes and its corrosive impact on the Moscow center during the 1970s and particularly the 1980s. Furthermore, I conceptualize the Gorbachev phenomenon as a culmination of the revisionist ethos in the socialist bloc, which implicitly turns the focus of my contribution on the inherent paradoxes and fallacies of perestroika. The latter is perceived to be inherent in the incompleteness of East European Marxist revisionism’s promise for change. Nevertheless, by no means do I deny the role of this fascinating period of intellectual and political history in providing a fundamental lesson about the role of ideas in the disintegration of authoritarian regimes of Leninist persuasion. Such a self-critical development would have been unthinkable under the Nazi regime, as already shown in previous chapters.

My point is that the impact of Marxist revisionism and critical intellectuals can hardly be overestimated and that this impact is one of the main distinctions between Communism and Fascism. The adventure of revisionism led these intellectuals beyond the once-worshipped paradigm, critical Marxism turned into post-Marxism and even, as in the case of Kołakowski, into liberal anti-Marxism. In his gripping book about the postwar Soviet intelligentsia, historian Vladislav Zubok concludes that the story of this group, which is crucial to understanding the fate of Leninism in the twentieth century, was about “the slow and painful disappearance of their revolutionary-romantic idealism and optimism, their faith in progress and in the enlightenment of people.” He emphasizes that “the children of Zhivago spent their lives on ‘a voyage from the coast of Utopia’ into the turbulent open sea of individual self-discovery.” 4

Among Soviet and Eastern European intelligentsia, Marxism was found wanting in its most powerful ambition, to respond in a positively engaging way to the challenges of democratic modernity, to restructure democratic imagination itself:

With one resolute gesture of contempt, therefore, Marx swept away all particularities: the interests of the peasants, of middle classes, of nations, and of colonialism. This absolute universalism made Marx particularly insensitive to political questions in general, and to democratic politics in particular. Democratic politics is one of the basic components of modernity, and, when Marx failed to cope with this problem, his pioneering theory of modernity was drastically curtailed. One could only speculate as to why a man of genius, who discovered and analyzed so many basic features of modernity, was not to the slightest degree superior to any of his socialist contemporaries whenever he embarked in discussing political problems. When it came to politics, his genius invariably failed him. The bombastic style of his political writings, the vagueness of his political ideas, the open bias of his judgments, and the mythologization of his favorite heroes shift Marx back to a period and its guises, the epoch of the French Revolution and Bonapartism, precisely that period the ideological customs of which Marx had so vigorously sought to debunk. 5