Vladimir Tismaneanu - The Devil in History

153. One can point to a whole intellectual tradition, and I am thinking here of authors such as Cornelius Castoriadis and, much earlier, Georgi Plekhanov, Yuli Martov, Pavel Akselrod, Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky, Anton Pannekoek, Ruth Fischer, Boris Souvarine, Milovan Djilas, Agnes Heller, and Leszek Kołakowski.

154. Lefort, The Political Forms , p. 297.

155. Hitler quoted in Bracher, The German Dictatorship , p. 250.

156. Maier, “Political Religions and their Images,” p. 274.

157. Peter Holquist, “New Terrains and New Chronologies: The Interwar Period through the Lens of Population Politics,” Kirtika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 171-72.

158. Sigrid Meuschel, “The Institutional Frame: Totalitarianism, Extermination and the State,” in The Lesser Evil: Moral Approaches to Genocide Practices , ed. Helmut Dubiel and Gabriel Motzkin (Portland, Or.: Frank Cass, 2003), pp. 115-16.

159. Bosworth, Mussolini , p. 235.

160. Gorlizki and Mommsen, “The Political (Dis)Orders of Stalinism and National Socialism,” in Beyond Totalitarianism , ed. Geyer and Fitzpatrick, p. 86.

161. Michael Burleigh, “Political Religion and Social Evil,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 3, no. 2 (Autumn 2002): 1-2.

1. Kenneth Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), p. 10n17.

2. See Benito Mussolini, “The Doctrine of Fascism,” in Communism, Fascism, and Democracy , ed. Carl Cohen, 3d ed. (New York: Random House, 1972), pp. 328-39.

3. See Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis (New York and London: Norton, 2000), esp. “Luck of the Devil,” pp. 655-84. It is worth quoting here Kershaw’s remark about Hitler’s extraordinary luck in surviving the attempt on his life organized by Count Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators: “In fact, as so often in his life, it had not been Providence that had saved him, but luck: the luck of the devil” (p. 584, italics mine).

4. For Zubok, “Zhivago’s children” referred to a generation of intellectuals tested by the years of war, violence, and misery: “The educated cadres trained for Stalinist service turned out to be a vibrant and diverse tribe, with intellectual curiosity, artistic yearnings, and a passion for high culture. They identified not only with the Soviet collectivity, but also with humanist individualism.” Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 356, 361, and 21.

5. Agnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér, The Grandeur and Twilight of Radical Universalism (New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Transaction, 1991), p. 113.

6. See Vladimir Tismaneanu, “Critical Marxism and Eastern Europe,” Praxis International 3, no. 3 (October 1983): 235-47; The Crisis of Marxist Ideology in Eastern Europe: The Poverty of Utopia (London and New York: Routledge, 1988); “The Neo-Leninist Temptation: Gorbachevism and the Party Intelligentsia,” in Perestroika at the Crossroads , ed. Alfred J. Rieber and Alvin Z. Rubinstein (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1991), pp. 31-51; “From Arrogance to Irrelevance: Avatars of Marxism in Romania,” in The Road to Disillusion: From Critical Marxism to Postcommunism in Eastern Europe , ed. Raymond Taras (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), pp. 135-50.

7. Frederick C. Corney, “What Is to Be Done with Soviet Russia? The Politics of Proscription and Possibility” in Journal of Policy History 21, no 3 (2009): 271.

8. Philosopher Yuri Karyakin quoted in Zubok, Zhivago’s Children , p. 358.

9. Robert C. Tucker, The Soviet Political Mind: Stalinism and Post-Stalin Change , rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), pp. 148-49.

10. Klaus-Georg Riegel, “Marxism-Leninism as a Political Religion,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 6, no. 1 (June 2005): 97-126.

11. V. I. Lenin, What Is to be Done: Burning Questions of Our Movement (New York: International Publishers, 1969 [1902]), p. 5.

12. J. V. Stalin, Leninism (Moscow: International Publishers, 1928), p. 171.

13. For a most disturbing account of this nihilistic moment in the history of world Communism, see especially the last letters of Bukharin and Yezhov to Stalin in Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov, The Self-Destruction of the Bolshevik Old Guard (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999). See discussion in chapter 2.

14. Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), p. 75.

15. Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography 1888-1938 (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), pp. 84. For Soviet intellectuals under Stalin, see Isaiah Berlin, The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2011); Cristina Vatulescu, Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret Police in Soviet Times (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010); Frank Westerman, Engineers of the Soul: The Grandiose Propaganda of Stalin’s Russia (New York: Overlook Press, 2011).

16. Robert Horvath, “’The Solzhenitsyn Effect’: East European Dissidents and the Demise of the Revolutionary Privilege,” Human Rights Quarterly 29, no. 4 (November 2007): 885.

17. Bradley F. Abrams, The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation: Czech Culture and the Rise of Communism (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), p. 93.

18. See Carol S. Lilly, Power and Persuasion: Ideology and Rhetoric in Communist Yugoslavia, 1944-1953 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2001); Gareth Pritchard, The Making of the GDR, 1945-53: From Antifascism to Stalinism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); or Krystyna Kersten, The Establishment of Communist Rule in Poland, 1943-1948 , trans. John Micgiel and Michael H. Bernhard, foreword by Jan T. Gross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

19. Riegel, “Marxism-Leninism as a Political Religion,” pp. 97-126.

20. Horvath, “’The Solzhenitsyn Effect,’” p. 894.

21. Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, the Golden Age, the Breakdown , trans. P. S. Falla (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), p. 863.

22. On the features of the historical-ideological profile of the Short Course and the revision of its main tenets within the Soviet historical field in the 1960s and 1970s, see Roger D. Markwick, Rewriting History in Soviet Russia—the Politics of Revisionist Historiography, 1954-1974 , foreword by Donald J. Raleigh (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). Kenneth Jowitt employs the formulation by Max Weber in New World Disorder , p. 135.

23. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, New Myth, New World—from Nietzsche to Stalinism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), p. 238.

24. Stephen F. Cohen, “Bolshevism and Stalinism,” in Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation , ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), pp. 12-13.

25. Tucker, The Soviet Political Mind , p. xi.

26. E. A. Rees, “Introduction,” in The Sovietization of Eastern Europe: New Perspectives on the Postwar Period , ed. Balázs Apor, Péter Apor, and E. A. Rees (Washington, D.C.: New Academia Publishing, 2008), p. 21.

27. Hans Maier, “Political Religions and Their Images: Soviet Communism, Italian Fascism and German National Socialism,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 7, no. 3 (Sept. 2006): 267-81.