Vladimir Tismaneanu - The Devil in History

2. See the discussion of Jan Patočka’s concept of supercivilization in Edward F. Findlay, Caring for the Soul in a Postmodern Age: Politics and Phenomenology in the Thought of Jan Patočka (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), pp. 126-27.

3. Shlomo Avineri and Zeev Sternhell, Europe’s Century of Discontent: The Legacies of Fascism, Nazism, and Communism (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2003); Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005); Bernard Wasserstein, Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

4. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, “Introduction,” in Nietzsche and Soviet Culture: Ally and Adversary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 17. See also Rosenthal, New Myth, New World—from Nietzsche to Stalinism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002).

5. See the discussion on totalitarian experiments and secular religions in Raymond Aron, The Dawn of Universal History: Selected Essays from a Witness to the Twentieth Century , intro. Tony Judt (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century (New York: Norton, 2000), pp. 5784; Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

6. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), pp. 458 and 459.

7. Michael Geyer, “Introduction,” in Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared , ed. Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 28.

8. Jacob L. Talmon, Myth of the Nation and Vision of Revolution: Ideological Polarizations in the Twentieth Century (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1991); and George Lichtheim, The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1967).

9. Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, the Golden Age, the Breakdown , trans. P. S. Falla (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), p. 1214.

10. Bernard Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986).

11. Findlay, Caring for the Soul , p. 157.

12. Ferenc Fehér, “Marxism as Politics: An Obituary,” Problems of Communism 41, nos. 1-2 (January-April 1992): 11-17.

13. Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1972).

14. Lucien Goldmann, Marxisme et sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1970).

15. Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader , 2d ed. (New York and London: W. W. Norton), p. 488.

16. Ibid., p. 500. It is noteworthy that all Communist newspapers in the USSR, China, and other Soviet-style regimes, as well as Communist dailies in non-Marxist countries, carried the exhortatory last sentence of the Manifesto at the top of the front page, above their title. It is also significant that when Václav Havel described the “emptyfication” of ideological rituals in Leninist regimes, he resorted to the parable of a greengrocer who would discover his liberty and reinvent himself as a citizen by refusing to place in the window, on May i, the party-provided poster with the by now meaningless words “Workers of all countries unite!”

17. Ibid., pp. 482-83.

18. Ibid., pp. 483-84.

19. Rosa Luxemburg quoted in Lars T. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: “What Is to Be Done?” in Context (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008), p. 527.

20. Kołakowski, Main Currents , p. 770.

21. Anne Applebaum, “Dead Souls: Tallying the Victims of Communism,” Weekly Standard , December 13, 1999, http://www.anneapplebaum.com/, accessed on October 1, 2011.

22. See Slavoj Žižek, ed., Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917 (London: Verso, 2002), p. 113 (Lenin’s italics).

23. Robert Horvath, The Legacy of Soviet Dissent: Dissidents, Democratisation and Radical Nationalism in Russia (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 20.

24. For a perceptive approach to the main themes of Marxism and an evaluation of what is dead and alive in that doctrine, see Jon Elster, An Introduction to Karl Marx (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 186-200; Jeffrey C. Isaac, Power and Marxist Theory: A Realist View (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1987). Shlomo Avineri’s masterful book, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1968), which came out on the 150th anniversary of Marx’s birth (a year full of revolutionary pathos, illusions, and resurrected utopias), remains a most useful discussion of Marx’s concept of revolution. Avineri’s conclusion on the relationship between Marxism and Bolshevism is worth quoting: “One must concede that, with all the differences between Marx and Soviet, Leninist Communism, Leninism would have been inconceivable without Marxism” (p. 258).

25. See Richard H. Crossman, ed., The God That Failed , with a foreword by David C. Engerman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). For an insightful approach to the literature of antitotalitarian disenchantment, see John V. Fleming, The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books That Shaped the Cold War (New York: Norton, 2009). An outstanding contribution to the topic is Michael Scammell, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic (New York: Random House, 2009).

26. See Stanislao Pugliese’s superb biography, Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2009), p. 105. Unlike many fellow ex-Communists, Silone remained attached to the ideals of a democratic Left, defining himself as “a Christian without a Church, a socialist without a party” (p. 244).

27. See Ferenc Fehér and Agnes Heller, Eastern Left, Western Left: Totalitarianism, Freedom, and Democracy (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1987), especially “An Imaginary Preface to the 1984 Edition of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism” and “In the Bestiarium: A Contribution to the Cultural Anthropology of ‘Real Socialism,’” pp. 243-78.

28. Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965-1990 (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), p. 136.

29. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998).

30. Aviezer Tucker, Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patočka to Havel (Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), p. 191.

31. Ivars Ijabs, “’Politics of Authenticity’ and/or Civil Society,” in In Marx’s Shadow: Knowledge, Power, and Intellectuals in Eastern Europe and Russia , ed. Costica Bradatan and Serguei Alex. Oushakine (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010), p. 246.

32. Findlay, Caring for the Soul , p. 150.

33. Costica Bradatan, “Philosophy and Martyrdom: The Case of Jan Patočka,” in In Marx’s Shadow , ed. Bradatan and Oushakine, p. 120.

34. Ibid.

35. Ijabs, “’Politics of Authenticity’ and/or Civil Society,” p. 255.

36. Vàclav Havel, “The Post-Communist Nightmare,” New York Review of Books 27 (May 1993): 8.

37. George Konrád, The Melancholy of Rebirth: Essays from Post-Communist Central Europe, 1989-1994 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1995), p. 101.