Vladimir Tismaneanu - The Devil in History

23. See my Fantasies of Salvation: Nationalism, Democracy, and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).

24. Harry Kreisler, “The Individual, Charisma, and the Leninist Extinction,” in A Conversation with Ken Jowitt (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, 2000).

25. Kenneth Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), p. 49.

26. See the quotations on Lenin and terror in Kostas Papaioannou’s excellent anthology Marx et les marxistes (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 314.

27. See Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon , 1st ed., trans. Daphne Hardy (New York: Bantam Books, 1968 (1941]); John V. Fleming, The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books That Shaped the Cold War (New York: Norton, 2009), pp. 21-96; Michael Scammell, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic (New York: Random House, 2009).

28. Darkness at Noon came out in French, to huge public success, during the early Cold War years, under the title Le zero et l’infini.

29. Sergey Nechaev, The Revolutionary Catechism , in The Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia , by Franco Venturi, intro. Isaiah Berlin (New York: Knopf, 1960), pp. 365-66. See also James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (New York: Basic Books, 1980); and Semen (Semyon) Frank, “The Ethic of Nihilism: A Characterization of the Russian Intelligentsia’s Moral Outlook,” in Nikolai Berdyaev et al., Vekhi (Lanmdmarks) (Armonk, N.J.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), pp. 131-55.

30. Quoted in Michael Burleigh, Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics from the Great War to the War on Terror (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), p. 82.

31. Piatakov quoted in Walicki, Marxism , 461.

32. Steven Lukes, “On the Moral Blindness of Communism,” Human Rights Review 2, no. 2 (January-March 2001): 120.

33. Ibid., 121.

34. Ibid., 123.

35. Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (New York: Hyperion, 2002), 90.

36. Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2007), p. 171.

37. Mikhail Gorbachev and Zdeněk Mlynář, Conversations with Gorbachev: On Perestroika, the Prague Spring , ed. George Shriver, foreword by Archie Brown and Mikhail Gorbachev (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

38. Jowitt, New World Disorder , 10.

39. A. J. Polan, Lenin and the End of Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 73.

40. Elena Bonner, “The Remains of Totalitarianism” New York Review of Books , March 8, 2001, 4.

41. Ibid., p. 5.

42. Alain Besançon, The Rise of the Gulag: The Intellectual Origins of Leninism (New York: Continnum, 1981); Jacob L. Talmon, Myth of the Nation and Vision of the Revolution: Ideological Polarization in the Twentieth Century (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1991); Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and French Revolution (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006).

43. John Maynard Keynes quoted in Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 155.

44. Burleigh, Sacred Causes , p. 76.

45. Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, the Golden Age, the Breakdown , trans. P. S. Falla (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), pp. 343-44 (subsequent references to Main Currents refer to this edition.

46. Halfin, From Darkness to Light , p. 37.

47. For the whole argument, see Erik van Ree, “Stalin’s Organic Theory of the Party,” Russian Review 52, no. 1 (January 1993): 43-57.

48. Erik van Ree, “Stalin as a Marxist Philosopher,” Studies in East European Thought 52 (2000): 294.

49. Ibid., p. 271. I am also paraphrasing Isaak Steinberg’s description of the atmosphere in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution: “All aspects of existence—social, economic, political, spiritual, moral, familial—were opened to purposeful fashioning by human hands.” Steinberg was a left Socialist revolutionary, who for a brief period was the first Soviet commissar for justice but resigned in protest against Bolshevik extremist violence and in 1923 fled to Germany. After the coming to power of the Nazis, he left for London. During the war he was a central figure in the plans for relocation of the Jewish refugees. See Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 39.

50. For the mindset of Bolshevik-style illuminated militants, see Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Harper & Row, 1966); Arthur Koestler’s contribution in Richard H. Crossman, ed., The God That Failed (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 15-75.

51. Rosa Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks , ed. Mary-Alice Waters (New York and London: Pathfinder, 1997), p. 370.

52. Ibid., p. 387.

53. Cohen, Bukharin , p. 133.

54. Ibid., p. 172.

55. Ibid., p. 269.

56. Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader , p. 491.

57. Ibid., pp. 473-74.

58. Kołakowski, Main Currents , pp. 620-39.

59. See “Proletarians and Communists,” The Manifesto , in The Marx-Engels Reader , ed. Tucker, pp. 483-91.

60. See Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies , vol. 2, The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 211.

61. François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century , trans. Deborah Furet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 143.

62. Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: Norton, 2003).

63. Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princet on, N.J., and Oxford: Princet on University Press, 2003), p. 165.

64. Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (New York: Knopf, 1991), pp. 91-174.

65. George Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism (New York: H. Fertig, 1999).

66. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 235.

67. R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy: Life under the Fascist Dictatorship 1915-1945 (London: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 130.

68. Emilio Gentile and Robert Mallett, “The Sacralisation of Politics: Definitions, Interpretations and Reflections on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 1, no. 1 (2000): 36.

69. Alberto Toscano, Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (London and New York: Verso, 2010). I am extending here Priestland’s analysis of what he coins as “revivalist Bolshevism.” See David Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization: Ideas, Power, and Terror in Inter-War Russia (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 39.

70. Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics , p. 55.

71. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich , p. 460.

72. E. A. Rees, Political Thought from Machiavelli to Stalin: Revolutionary Machiavellism (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), pp. 74 and 235-36.