The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Ahmanson Foundation Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.
The Devil in History
Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century
Vladimir Tismaneanu
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley • Los Angeles • London
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University of California Press
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University of California Press, Ltd.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tismaneanu, Vladimir.
The devil in history : communism, fascism, and some lessons of the twentieth century / Vladimir Tismaneanu.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-520-23972-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Communist state—History. 2. Communism—History—20th century. 3. Fascism—History—20th century. 4. Totalitarianism—History—20th century. I. Title.
JC474.T497 2012
335.43—dc23
2012012796
Manufactured in the United States of America
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100 percent postconsumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.
In memory of Tony Judt, Leszek Kołakowski, and Robert C. Tucker, great scholars and noble intellectuals, whose writings inspired many reflections in this book.
Contents
Foreword
Prologue: Totalitarian Dictators and Ideological Hubris
1. Utopian Radicalism and Dehumanization
2. Diabolical Pedagogy and the (Il)logic of Stalinism
3. Lenin's Century: Bolshevism, Marxism, and the Russian Tradition
4. Dialectics of Disenchantment: Marxism and Ideological Decay in Leninist Regimes
5. Ideology, Utopia, and Truth: Lessons from Eastern Europe
6. Malaise and Resentment: Threats to Democracy in Post-Communist Societies
Conclusions
Notes
Index
Foreword
This is a book about political passions, radicalism, utopian ideals, and their catastrophic consequences in the twentieth century's experiments in massive social engineering. More precisely, it is an attempt to map and explain what Hannah Arendt called “the ideological storms” of a century second to none in violence, hubris, ruthlessness, and human sacrifices. I began thinking about these issues as a teenager in Communist Romania, when I had the chance to read a clandestinely circulated copy of Arthur Koestler's novel Darkness at Noon. I was born after World War II to revolutionary parents who had embraced anti-Fascist Communist values before the war. They had fought with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, where my father lost his right arm at the age of twenty-four at the battle of river Ebro; my mother—a medical school student—worked as a nurse. I grew up listening to countless conversations about major figures of world Communism, as well as the Stalinist atrocities. Names like Palmiro Togliatti, Rudolf Slánský, Maurice Thorez, Josip Broz Tito, Ana Pauker, or Dolores Ibarruri were frequently whispered during dinner table conversations.
Later, as a sociology student at the University of Bucharest, I ignored the official calls to distrust “bourgeois ideology” and did my utmost to get hold of forbidden books by Milovan Djilas, Karl Jaspers, Hannah Arendt, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Leszek Kołakowski, and other antitotalitarian thinkers. Confronted with the grotesque follies of Nicolae Ceausescu's dynastic Communism, I realized that I was living in a totalitarian regime run by a delusional leader who exerted absolute control over the population via the Communist Party and the secret police. It was for this reason that I became intensely interested in the occulted traditions of Western Marxism and the Frankfurt School theorists’ attempt to rehabilitate subjectivity. My PhD dissertation, defended in 1980, was entitled Revolution and Critical Reason: The Political Theory of the Frankfurt School and Contemporary Left-Wing Radicalism. From the writings of Theodore W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, I learned about the tribulations of negativity in the age of total administration and inescapable alienation. I read Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, and Antonio Gramsci, and I found in their ideas (especially their early writings) an antidote to the mindless optimism of Marxism-Leninism.
Although Romania was a socialist state committed to Marxist tenets and thus ostensibly left-wing, especially after 1960, the ruling party started to embrace themes, motifs, and obsessions of the interwar Far Right. When Nicolae Ceaușescu came to power in 1965, he exacerbated this trend, and the ideology came to blend residual Leninism with an unavowed yet unmistakable Fascism. This was only an apparent paradox. Years later, when I read Robert C. Tucker's masterful biography of Stalin, I was struck by his brilliant analysis of “Bolshevism of the Extreme Right.” As in the case of the Soviet Union after 1945, or of Poland during the last years of Władisław Gomułka's rule with the rise to power of the ultranationalist faction of the Partisans, headed by minister of the interior, General Mieczysław Moczar, the Romanian Communist regime was becoming increasingly idiosyncratic, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic. When I published my history of Romanian Communism in 2003, I coined a term for this hybridization: national-Stalinism. During all these years I thought about the deep affinities between apparently irreconcilable movements and ideologies. I reached the conclusion that, in times of moral and cultural disarray, Communism and Fascism can merge into a baroque synthesis. Communism is not Fascism, and Fascism is not Communism. Each totalitarian experiment had its own irreducible attributes, but they shared a number of phobias, obsessions, and resentments that could generate toxic alliances, like the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939. Furthermore, their geographical proximity allowed the unfolding of genocidal practices between 1930 and 1945 in what Timothy Snyder called the “Bloodlands,” which took a toll of approximately 14 million people. This disaster started with Stalin's war on peasants, especially in Ukraine, and culminated in the absolute horror of the Holocaust.
This is a book about the incarnation of diabolically nihilistic principles of human subjugation and conditioning in the name of presumably pure and purifying goals. It is not a historical treatise (although history is present on every page), but rather a political-philosophical interpretation of how maximalist utopian aspirations can lead to the nightmares of Soviet and Nazi camps epitomized by Kolyma and Auschwitz. I discuss the major similarities, the saliently irreducible distinctions, and the contemporary reverberations of these totalitarian tyrannies. I also examine the deradicalization of Soviet-style regimes, the exhaustion of ideological fervor, and the rise of alternative, civic-oriented expressions of democratic sensibilities. The purpose of this book is to provide readers (students, journalists, historians, political scientists, philosophers, and a general audience) with some conclusions about a cataclysmic time that no words could capture as accurately and as disturbingly
as the paintings of the German artist Anselm Kiefer. Like those canvases, the twentieth century has left behind a devastated landscape full of corpses, dashed illusions, failed myths, betrayed promises, and unprocessed memories.
Many of this book's ideas were discussed with my late friend, the great historian Tony Judt. I also had the privilege to engage in many conversations with one of the wisest analysts of Marxism and Soviet Communism, Robert C. Tucker. Both Judt and Tucker emphasized the immense role of ideas in history and warned against any kind of positivistic determinism. They taught about the frailty of liberal values, and about the obligation to not give up but rather to continue fighting for them against all odds. The Polish thinker Leszek Kołakowski, often and accurately described as the philosopher of Solidarity, also had a major influence in shaping my ideas. I was the first to translate an essay by Kołakowski into Romanian in the late 1980s, in the alternative cultural journal Agora, which was published in the United States, edited by dissident poet Dorin Tudoran, and distributed illegally in Romania. I sent a copy to Leszek Kołakowski, who responded with a wonderful letter saying that, although he did not read Romanian, he could make sense, using his Latin and French, of my short introduction. One of the major projects I undertook in post-Communist Romania was to coordinate the publication of a translation of his masterful trilogy on the main currents of Marxism. Nobody grasped better than Kołakowski the appalling presence of the devil in the totalitarian experiments of the twentieth century. All three hoped that mankind would internalize a few lessons from these catastrophes. I dedicate this book to the memory of these three major scholars.
Such a synthesis cannot be achieved in a few years. Overly optimistic, I signed a contract with the University of California Press in 2004, convinced that I would finish the book by the end of 2005. Then I realized that there were still too many issues I needed to think about. In the following years, I got involved in the institutional effort to analyze the Communist dictatorship in Romania. I learned terrifying details about the Stalinist technologies of destructiveness employed by Romanian communists. The work for this book started in 2001, when Tony Judt offered me the possibility to spend a month at the Remarque Institute at the New York University, where I presented a lecture on topics directly related to this volume, focusing on the French polemics around the Livre Noir du communisme. I continued my research in June 2002 as a one-month fellow at the Institute for the Sciences of Man (IWM) in Vienna. In January 2003, I was a fellow at Indiana University's Institute for the Humanities, where I gave a lecture on the totalitarian temptation and benefited from Jeffrey C. Isaac's insightful comments. In 2008-2009, as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, I conducted research on twentieth-century utopian radicalism as well as moral justice in post-Communist Romania. I benefited from the exceptional research skills of my two assistants, Eliza Gheorghe and Mark Moll. Books continued to come out that inspired me to rethink some of the early hypotheses, including Robert Gellately's path-breaking work Lenin, Stalin, Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (2007), which I reviewed in the outstanding journal Kritika. Another important volume was Beyond Totalitarianism (2009), edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Michael Geyer. In April 2009, Timothy Snyder invited me to participate in the seminar “Hitler and Stalin: Comparisons Renewed” at Yale University, where I exchanged views with several distinguished scholars, including Saul Friedländer, Norman Naimark, Lynne Viola, and Amir Weiner. Throughout these years, in his gently encouraging way, Stanley Holwitz, who had superbly edited my Stalinism for All Seasons at the University of California Press (2003), continued to inquire about the status of the manuscript. I kept reassuring him that I had not forgotten it. In fact, I had continued to think only about this, and in March 2010 I gave a lecture at the University of California at Berkeley titled “The Devil in History,” which presented the ideas published here in the prologue. Following that presentation, I had long discussions with historians John Connelly and Yuri Slezkine, who provided me with provocative suggestions.
Finally, in February 2011, the manuscript was completed. I sent it to Niels Hooper at the University of California Press, who expressed interest in the project. I received two immensely insightful peer reviews and followed many of the reviewers’ suggestions, especially in emphasizing the peculiar nature of the Bolshevik worshipping of the party, the connections between Marx and Lenin, and the still amazing infatuation of important intellectuals with the Communist utopia. I have developed many ideas included in this book in articles published since 2005 in the pages of Times Literary Supplement as well as essays for the excellent Romanian monthly Idei in dialog, edited by the brilliant philosopher Horia-Roman Patapievici.
This achievement would not have been possible without the enthusiastic commitment and creative research offered by Bogdan Cristian Iacob, a graduate student at the Central European University (he defended his dissertation in June 2011) who became my closest collaborator in 2007. I wish to express cordial thanks to all those who, throughout these years, have generously been my engaging partners in this endeavor. First and foremost, I express my gratitude to my wife, Mary Sladek, and my son, Adam Volo Tismaneanu, with whom I had endless discussions about the totalitarian monsters and their legacies. Mary read various drafts of this book and offered insightful suggestions. On various occasions, Adam asked me to explain the similarities and differences between Hitler and Stalin. Like so many of us, he still wonders who was worse. Intellectual friends and colleagues whose ideas and suggestions have helped me shape my own interpretations and who undoubtedly deserve mention, including some who have passed away, include Bradley Abrams, Dragos Paul Aligică, Cătălin Avramescu, Matei Călinescu, Daniel Chirot, Aurelian Craiutu, John Connelly, Michael David-Fox, Karen Dawisha, Ferenc Fehér, Dan Gallin, Pierre Hassner, Agnes Heller, Jeffrey Herf, Paul Hollander, Dick Howard, Charles Gati, Irena Grudzinska-Gross, Jan T. Gross, Jeffrey C. Isaac, Constantin Iordachi, Ken Jowitt, Tony Judt, Bart Kaminski, Gail Kligman, Mark Kramer, Claude Lefort, Gabriel Liiceanu, Mark Lichbach, Monica Lovinescu, Steven Lukes, Daniel Mahoney, Adam Michnik, Mircea Mihăieș, Iulia Motoc, Vlad Mureșan, Mihail Neamțu, Virgil Nemoianu, Martin Palouš, Horia-Roman Patapievici, Marta Petreu, Andrei Pleșu, Cristian Preda, Ilya Prizel, Saskia Sassen, Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder, Vladimir Solonari, Ioan Stanomir, Radu Stern, Valeriu Stoica, Mihai Șora, Gale Stokes, Robert C. Tucker, Cristian Vasile, Christina Zarifopol-Illias, Viktor Zaslavsky, Vladislav Zubok, Annette Wieworka. Special thanks to my graduate students at the University of Maryland, who have been remarkable partners of dialogue during the seminars on Marxism, Bolshevism, Fascism, Nazism, and the meanings of political radicalism.
October 10, 2011
Prologue
Totalitarian Dictators and Ideological Hubris
When I used the image of Hell, I did not mean this allegorically, but literally: it seems rather obvious that men who have lost their faith in Paradise will not be able to establish it on earth; but it is not so certain that those who have lost their belief in Hell as a place of the hereafter may not be willing and able to establish on earth exact imitations of what people used to believe about Hell. In this sense I think that a description of the camps as Hell on earth is more “objective,” that is, more adequate to their essence than statements of a purely sociological or psychological nature.
—Hannah Arendt, Essays on Understanding
No century witnessed and documented so much atrocious suffering, organized hatred, and devastating violence as the twentieth. The concentration camps represented the ultimate humiliation of human beings, the destruction of their identity, their inescapable dehumanization, and their mass annihilation. Neither Communism nor Nazism can be understood without taking into account the centrality of what Albert Camus once called l'univers concentrationnaire. In his book If This Is a Man, the Italian writer and Auschwitz survivor, Primo Levi, wrote:
Perhaps it is not possible to comprehend, indeed perhaps one should not even try, since to comprehend is al
most to excuse. Let me explain: to “comprehend” a human intention and action means (even etymologically) to contain it, to contain its perpetrator, by putting oneself in his place, identifying with him. Now, no normal person could ever identify with Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Eichmann, and countless others. While this appalls us it is also relief since it is probably just as well that their words (and also, alas their deeds) should remain beyond our comprehension. Those words and deeds are inhuman, indeed anti-human, without historical precedent and barely comparable to the cruelest manifestations of the biological struggle for existence.1
In Stalinized Romania between 1949 and 1951, a diabolical experiment took place, meant to transform the six hundred inmates of the Pitești penitentiary (all students arrested for real or imagined antiregime activities) into “new men.” The method, apparently inspired by Soviet pedagogue Anton Makarenko's teachings as adopted by the secret police in the Soviet Union and its satellites, was supposed to make the victims their own tormentors and thereby “educators.” A phalanx of regime collaborators, headed by a former Fascist arrested in 1948 on charges of having lied about his past, engaged in unspeakable, barbaric brutalities against their fellow prisoners, who experienced two levels of transformation: the external re-education and the inner one, when the victim turned into a tormentor. There were only two possibilities for the inmates: to become accomplices or to die under horrifying conditions. In fact, as one of the very few survivors of this lurid experiment said, there was a third possibility: to go insane.
What happened in Nazi and Communist camps (Pitești was for all practical purposes such an institution) was bound to destroy basic features of humanity such as compassion, reason, and solidarity.2 Historian Timothy Snyder superbly concluded his essential work Bloodlands by stating that “the Nazi and Soviet regimes turned people into numbers…. It is for us as humanists to turn the numbers back into people.”3 The basis for these horrors was the conviction that human beings can become subjects for radical social engineering conducted by self-appointed custodians of universal happiness. To paraphrase a historian, the twentieth century became destructive once “the historically self-conscious presumption that contingency abounds and has to be managed, that chaos is about to take over and has to be negotiated, that society can be designed and revolution made”4 became the justification for sacralizing the political and converting it into a substitute for traditional religions. This book is a comprehensive, comparative essay on the intellectual origins, the crimes, and the failure of the radical totalitarian movements that ravaged the last century: Communism and Fascism. It therefore starts from the premise that in this “age of extremes” (Hobsbawm) the question of evil is the basic question.5
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