Vladimir Tismaneanu - The Devil in History

The dominant ideological apparatus in the East European Communist Parties tried to maintain control over, and eventually to paralyze, all these potentially dangerous spiritual developments. From the beginning, de-Stalinization raised the crucial dilemma of “the prerogative to direct and control social and cultural change…. Even in its most populist, radical moments, however, the party continued to believe in the party’s unimpeachable authority over the people.” 44Ideological hacks viciously attacked the very idea of the reforms from below that would go beyond the party-approved struggle against bureaucratization and for increased productivity. The “revisionist” claim for a profound, inclement analysis of the Stalinist system and of the whole tragic texture of events and situations euphemistically designated by the Communist parties as the “cult of personality” provoked ambivalent reactions. In October 1961, at the Twenty-second Congress of the Communist Party, Khrushchev unleashed a second onslaught on the memory of the defunct tyrant. Stalin’s embalmed body was removed from Lenin’s mausoleum, the sanctum sanctorum of Bolshevism. This new thaw, indeed a short-lived and inconclusive liberalization, stopped short of in-depth political and economic reforms: “As the party grew more confident in publicizing its iconoclastic narratives about the Stalinist past, it also, paradoxically (although perhaps necessarily) reduced its commitment to de-Stalinizing the Soviet public sphere.” 45The party leaders rapidly became aware of the subversive implications of the Marxist “return to the source” and discovered the negative-libertarian appeal of such concepts as alienation, humanism, self-managed democracy, human rights, and freedom of the subject. They also grew increasingly weary of “the potential new forms of interaction between state and society, and between individual citizens.” 46

Subsequently, revisionism became an obsessive projection of Stalinist ideologues, the embodiment of their secret anguish. To paraphrase Leszek Kołakowski, the jester could not avoid the confrontation with the intolerant reaction of the wrathful priests; he had to radicalize his “attitude of negative vigilance in the face of any absolute.” 47The nervousness of the Kremlin leadership regarding the increasingly daring behavior of young Soviet intellectuals radicalized by the new wave of de-Stalinization is best exemplified by Nikita Khrushchev’s furious reprimand of Soviet poet Andrei Voznesensky. In March 1963, at the amphitheater of the House of the Unions during a meeting with the Soviet cultural elite, Khrushchev, upon hearing Voznesensky praise Vladimir Mayakovsky despite the fact that the latter had not been a party member, exploded:

Why are you so proud that you are not a Party member? We will sweep you off clean! Do you represent our people or slander our people?… I cannot listen calmly to those who lick the feet of our enemies. I cannot listen to the agents. Look at him. He would like to create a party of noncommunists. Well, you are a member of the party, but it is not the same one I am in…. The Thaw is over. This is not even a light morning frost. For you and your likes it will be the arctic frost [long applause]. We are not those who belonged to the Petöfi Club. We are those who helped smash the Hungarians [applause]. …They think that Stalin is dead and anything is allowed… No, you are slaves! Slaves! Your behavior shows it. 48

By the end of Khrushchev’s rule in the fall of 1964, it was quite clear, both in the USSR and Eastern Europe, that systemic reform from within by a free-thinking intelligentsia operating within the party-defined boundaries of the permissible had ceased to be a viable option. At the same time, the epistemological priority of revisionism in the Soviet bloc consisted in focusing Marxist historical methodology on Marxism itself. In other words, the historicity of Marxism, the moment of the Marxist self-consciousness was central to reinventing the true value of negativity as a new space for the affirmation of particularity against the spurious universality glorified by the system. The Hegelian-Marxist direction seemed the most appropriate for assuming a metaphysical legitimacy, that spiritual source which expressed and symbolized the same ambitions, obsessions, anxieties, and hopes. During the sharp polemics of the 1930s, Karl Korsch postulated clearly the significance and seditious content of Marxist dialectics, and East European critical Marxists did not hesitate to adopt his stance, even to go beyond the positions crystallized in Marxismus und Philosophie: the Marxist thinker had the obligation to emphasize the philosophical dimension of Marxism, the negative nerve of dialectics, “in contrast with the contempt previously manifested, in different forms but with the same result, by the various currents of Marxism, toward the revolutionary philosophical elements of the doctrine created by Marx and Engels.” 49

The champions of the neodogmatic theology were, of course, the Soviet and East German official philosophers who specialized in hunting down the slightest sign of heterodoxy: in the GDR, from the party’s chief theoretician, Kurt Hager, to people like Manfred Buhr or Wilhem-Raymund Bayer, the East German ideologues missed no opportunity to combat and eradicate the revisionist heresy. 50From this point of view, I believe it would be inaccurate to consider, with Kołakowski, that the traditional exclusive-dogmatic mentality was almost completely replaced by a cynical, strictly pragmatic approach specific to the new type of Communist bureaucrat. Certainly, the most intolerant generation of ideological clerks vanished after 1960, but one should not suspect the subsequent cohorts of apparatchiks of liberal or humanistic leanings. Morally and psychologically, they belonged to a generation different from the “priests” once evoked by Kołakowski. They had not been personally involved in the Stalinist crimes and had no reason to look for historical rationalizations, but politically they must have shared the same values as their forerunners. They were “objectively” prisoners of the same fallacious logic. 51The indifferent, amoebic ideological apparatchiks, with their simulated axiological aloofness, were actually an efficient element of the smoothly functioning authoritarian-bureaucratic superstructure: they had nothing in common with Marxist philosophy or Socialist ethics; they superbly ignored embarrassing problems of historical responsibility. To paraphrase Engels, their main task was to correct the logic of conflicting facts, to fashion and expound upon history, against all hope, as immutably marching toward Communism. They had only one faith, one absolute credo; they paid tribute only to one God; they honored but one political value: their own bureaucratic survival, their enduring access to power, their right to dominate, to dictate, and to terrorize. They abandoned all pretense of credible, trustworthy communication of faith, thereby undermining the sustaining and eschatological myths of Marxism-Leninism. Nevertheless, for instance among the Soviet leaders grouped around Leonid Brezhnev, “the enduring influence of Marxism-Leninism as the source of legitimacy and language of politics, together with an ingrained Stalinist outlook, produced a deep distrust of the West and a lasting susceptibility to ‘revolutionary’ appeals and expansionist policies.” 52The neo-Stalinist nomenklatura preserved deep loyalty to a radically simplified version of Marxist-Leninist holy writ: “[Brezhnev] thought that to do something ‘un-Marxist’ now was impermissible—the entire party, the whole world, was watching him. Leonid Ilyich was very weak in [matters of] theory and felt this keenly.” 53