The Devil in History

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  The subject, the human being—totally ignored at the level of philosophical discourse—was eventually abolished as a physical entity in the vortex of the “great purges.” Historian Jochen Hellbeck accurately remarked in his analysis of diaries during Stalinism that “an individual living under the Bolshevik system could not conceivably formulate a notion of himself independently of the program promulgated by the Bolshevik state. An individual and the political system in which he lived cannot be viewed as two separate entities.”32 These images were more than metaphors, since metaphor suggests an ineffable face of reality, whereas what happened under Stalin was awfully visible and immediate. Even those diarists who were targets of political campaigns or whose close relatives were victims of the purges tried to align their thought with the official line:

  Stalin-era diarists’ desire for a purposeful and significant life reflected a widespread urge to ideologize one's life, to turn it into the expression of a firm, internally consistent, totalizing Weltanschauung. … The regime was thus able to channel strivings for self-validation and transcendence that emerged outside the ideological boundaries of Bolshevism. In this light, the Soviet project emerges as a variant of a larger European phenomenon of the inter-war period that can be described as a two-fold obligation for a personal world view and for the individuals’ integration into a community…. The power of the Communist appeal, which promised that those who had been slaves in the past could remold themselves into exemplary members of humanity, cannot be overestimated.33

  Under Stalin, the process of establishing one's identity was fundamentally conditioned by the party-state's project of radical transformism.

  It can be hardly denied that Fascist and Communist regimes were the antithesis of the Western humanist legacy. In the words of Hungarian critical Marxist philosopher Ferenc Fehér, the all-embracing telos of Nazism was “universal conquest which can only conclude either in a collective of the ‘race’ or in the irrelevance of the objective itself when the conquest becomes truly universal.” As for the characteristics of the Communist bestiarum, Fehér listed the following: the everyday drabness of the gulag, the moblike rudeness of its personnel, rudeness as a general atmosphere, a false kind of atheism, and the Jacobin element. Writes Fehér:

  It is a strange dialectic that many refined aspects of the Jacobin project serve as a foundation of the outright animal indifference of the bestiarum. The first of them is the legitimation of all inhuman acts in the name of the “future generations,” whose happiness is allegedly at sake. This is a good antidote against the vestiges of a personal conscience. The second is the collective moral slandering of the enemy: belonging to a non-accepted group becomes here a sin which also has the useful side-effect of eliminating the remnants of Christian compassion…. The extension of the bestiarum in “real socialism” cannot be reasonably reduced to the scope of the Gulag proper. The culture created by Stalin, attenuated but left fundamentally unaltered by his heirs and successors, is barbaric precisely in the sense that in it there is no line of demarcation between the bestial and the non-bestial…. Therefore it is not accidental that the only cultural creation in this society has been coming for decades now only from dissidents who are writing about the bestiarum and whose outraged question is precisely this: what have you done to our people?34

  At the same time, François Furet and Pierre Hassner were right to emphasize the nature of Leninism/Stalinism as pathology of universalism, a derailed (devoyé) offspring of the Enlightenment. Naturally, it would be preposterous to restrict ourselves to mere ethical condemnation. But it would not be by any means commendable to gloss over the moral implications of Stalinism or, echoing a famous essay by the young Georg Lukács, the dilemmas of “Bolshevism as a moral problem.” It is important, when pondering the fate of Marxism in the twentieth century, to grasp the split of personalities, the clash between lofty ideals and palpable practices, the methods of the Stalinist terrorist pedagogy in its endeavor to produce a new type of human being whose loyalties and beliefs would be decreed by the party. The revenge of history on its worshippers—thus could be depicted the terrorist psychosis of the Stalinist massacres. To quote sociologist Alvin W. Gouldner's perceptive interpretation, “The central strategy of the Marxist project, its concern with seeking a remedy to unnecessary suffering, was thus in the end susceptible to a misuse that betrayed its own highest avowals. The root of the trouble was that this conception of its own project redefined pity…. The human condition was rejected on behalf of the historical condition.”35

  As Koestler once pointed out (in his 1938 letter of resignation from the exiled German Communist Writers’ Union), for Lenin it was not enough to smash his enemy—he wanted to make him look contemptible. László Rajk, Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu, Rudolf Slánský, Ana Pauker, Vladimir Clementis, Traicho Kostov, Bedřich Geminder, Artur London, Rudolf Margolius—all of them had to be portrayed as despicable scoundrels and scurrilous vermin. Yesterday's heroes had become today's scum.36 To a certain extent, Robert C. Tucker is right to point out that “the show trials of 1936-1938 … for Stalin were a dramatization of his conspiracy view of the Soviet and contemporary world…. The Stalinist terror was in large part an expression of the needs of the dictatorial personality of Stalin, and these needs continued to generate the terror as long as he lived.”37 However, at the core of Lenin's vision of a new society lay an exterminist ethos. Bukharin, whom Cohen labeled the “last Bolshevik” and who considered himself the true heir of Lenin, emphasized in his volume Economics of the Transition Period, published in 1920, that “proletarian coercion in all of its forms, beginning with shooting and ending with labor conscription, is … a method of creating communist mankind out of the human materials of the capitalist epoch.” By the beginning of the 1930s, Bukharin had shifted to a theory of “growing into socialism.” However, as he had wisely been warned by Trotsky, “The system of apparatus terror cannot come to a stop only at the so-called ideological deviations, real or imagined, but must inevitably spread throughout the entire life and activities of the organization.”38 The Great Terror might have been Stalin's doing and might have reflected his “warfare personality” (as Tucker argues), but the principle of widespread excisionary violence against those opposed or alien to dictatorship of the proletariat was encoded at the heart of Leninism.

  Especially after 1951, Stalinist anti-Western, anti-intellectual, and anti-Titoist obsessions merged with an increasingly rabid anti-Semitism:

  Stalin feared that other peace champ countries would follow the independent Yugoslav model and break away from the influential sphere of the Soviet Union. He instigated the terror of political trials to uncover “enemies” within each Communist Party in order to discourage dissent. Victims were sought out and accused of connection with Tito's opposition attitudes and treachery. In later cases, the Soviets turned to Zionism and its supposed link with Western imperialism as the cause of the Communist betrayal. The show trial was a propaganda arm of political terror. Its aim was to personalize an abstract political enemy, to place it in the dock in flesh and blood and, with the aid of a perverted system of justice, to transform abstract political-ideological differences into easily intelligible common crimes. It both incited the masses against the evil embodied by defendants and frightened them away from supporting any potential opposition.39

  Among the East European Stalinist legal frame-ups, the Slánský trial in Prague, in the fall of 1952, symbolized the ultimate conversion of Bolshevism into an emerging version of Communist-Fascism. The selection of the defense (eleven of the fourteen were prominent Communists of Jewish descent); the vicious brutality of the interrogations, which included crude anti-Semitic slurs; the hysterical anti-Zionist media campaigns in Czechoslovakia and the other Communist countries; the rabidly racist indictment uttered by the chief prosecutor, Josef Urválek; the direct involvement of Stalin's envoys in the concoction of this mega-provocation—all these elements conjured up an unprecedented chain of broken illusions, bitter vendettas, a
nd betrayed loyalties. In the words of Artur London, one of three survivors of the trial and a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and the French anti-Nazi maquis, who was at the moment of his arrest in 1951 deputy foreign minister of Czechoslovakia: “Every physical and moral torture was carried to an extreme. I had been forced to walk on continuously…. [I]t went on for months, and was made all the worse by my having to keep my arms to my sides. My feet and legs became swelled. The skin round my toenail burst, and the blisters became suppurating wounds.”40 The son of Margolius, one of the defendants, imagines his father's thoughts the night before the trial opened at the High Court in Pankrác on November 20, 1952:

  Rudolf recalled reading Søren Kierkegaard's The Concept of Anxiety written in 1844, where the great philosopher stated: “The individual becomes guilty not because he is guilty but because of his anxiety about being thought guilty.” Rudolf felt it was his duty to perform as demanded; he was not guilty but the Party asked him to support it in its hour of need … ironically it was exactly like Koestler's Darkness at Noon, which [Pavel] Tigrid [a major figure of the Czech democratic exile] had lent him. [Karol] Bacilek [the Stalinist minister of state security, 1952-53] sounded like Gletkin, who told Rubashov: “Your testimony at the trial will be the last service you can do to the party.” The Party denied the free will of the individual—and at the same time, exacted his will in sacrifice. Except all that had been fiction: Rudolf was in the real world.41

  On the second day of the Slánský trial, Bedřich Geminder, a former Comintern official and chief of the International Department of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, was subjected to unspeakable deprecations linked to his German-Jewish origin:

  Judge Novák: “What nationality are you?”

  Defendant Geminder: “Czech”

  Judge Novák: “Can you speak Czech well?”

  Defendent Geminder: “Yes.”

  Judge Novák: “Do you want an interpreter?”

  Defendant Geminder: “No.”

  …

  Prosecutor Urválek: “… you never really learned to speak Czech well, not even in 1946 when you came back to Czechoslovakia and occupied important posts in the Communist Party?”

  Defendent Geminder: “No, I didn't learn to speak Czech properly.”

  …

  Prosecutor Urválek: “You cannot really speak any language properly, can you? You are a typical cosmopolitan. As such you sneaked into the Communist Party.”42

  “Rootless cosmopolitanism” was a Stalinist code word, a counterpart to Julius Streicher's vicious anti-Semitic propaganda. The vilified Geminder, born into a German-Jewish family in Moravia in 1901, had joined a Zionist youth group before he became a member of the Communist Party in 1921. In 1928, he was elected to the Executive Committee of the Communist International of Youth (KAM). Following the Munich Pact of 1938, Geminder moved to the Soviet Union, where he joined the Comintern as head of its Press and Information Service under the nom de guerre G. Friedrich.43 For his revolutionary services he was given the Order of Lenin. He was married to Irene Falcon, a Spanish Communist and personal secretary to the general secretary of the Spanish Communist Party, the legendary Dolores Ibarruri, la Passionaria.44 Sentenced to death on November 27, 1952, Geminder was shot on December 3. On March 6, 1953, Stalin passed away.45

  The magic impact of power in classical Stalinism would have been unthinkable in the absence of ideology. They feed each other; power derives its mesmerizing force from the seductive potential of ideology. Man is proclaimed omnipotent, and ideology supervises the identification of abstract man with concrete power. Veneration of power is rooted in contempt for traditional values, including those associated with the survival of reason. It is important, therefore, to resist the temptation of critical thought, since reason is the enemy of total regimentation. To quote one of Stalin's most important (and vicious) accomplices, Lazar Kaganovich, “Treachery in politics always begins with the revision of theory.”46 In one of his late aphorisms, Max Horkheimer hinted at the philosophical revolution provoked by Marxism. Defending the dignity of the individual subject becomes a seditious undertaking, a challenge to the prevailing myth of homogeneity: “However socially conditioned the individual's thinking may be, however necessarily it may relate to social questions, to political action, it remains the thought of the individual which is not just the effect of collective processes but can also take them as its object.”47 Political shamanism, practiced by alleged adversaries of mysticism, thwarts attempts to resist the continual assault on the mind. Marxism-Leninism, which was the code name for the ideology of the nomenklatura, aimed to dominate both the public and private spheres of social life. Man, both as an individual and as a citoyen, had to be massified. The cult of violence and the sacralization of the infallible party line created totally submissive subjects for whom any crime ordered by the upper echelons was justified in the name of “glowing tomorrows.” Like the ideologically driven Eichmann, Stalin's “willing executioners” acted on the base of what Hannah Arendt called “thoughtlessness.” 48

  A climate of fear is needed to preserve monolithic unity. To cement this frail cohesion, the Stalinist “warfare personality” contrived the diabolical figure of the traitor: “The characteristically paranoid perception of the world as an arena of deadly hostilities being conducted conspiratorially by an insidious and implacable enemy against the self finds highly systematized expression in terms of political and ideological symbols that are widely understood and accepted in the given social milieu. Through a special and radical form of displacement of private affects upon public objects, this world-image is politicized. In the resulting vision of reality, both attacker and intended victim are projected on the scale of large human collectivities.”49 In René Girard's sense, scapegoating50 fed a utopia freed of exploitation, antagonism, and the imperative of necessity. The origin of this exclusionary logic is of course Lenin's combatant, intransigent Manichaeism, us versus them, who will get rid of whom (kto kogo).51 Or, to return to Bukharin's 1920 volume, Economics of the Transition Period, revolutionary force is “midwife” to the transition from the ancien régime to the new order: “[It] must destroy the fetters on the development of society, i.e., on one side, the old forms of ‘concentrated force,’ which have become a counterrevolutionary factor—the old state and the old type of production relations. This revolutionary force, on the other side, must actively help in the formation of production relations, being a new form of ‘concentrated force,’ the state of the new class, which acts as the lever of economic revolution, altering the economic structure of society.”52 For Bukharin, as for Lenin or Stalin, “the dismantled social layers” of the old were recombined by a proletarian state through the etatization, militarization, and mobilization of the production forces. Subsequently, the author of The ABC of Communism concluded that “the process of socialization in all of its forms [my emphasis]” was “the function of the proletarian state.”53 As already shown, in the process of eliminating the ambivalences of the Soviet society, the Bolsheviks introduced indiscriminate state violence in the functions of the proletarian state. Terror was a central mechanism of ordering the new polity.

  Who are the enemies? Where do they come from? What are their purposes? Providing answers to these questions was the main function of the show trials. Maintaining vigilance, stigmatizing the presumed villains, and preserving the psychology of universal anguish were the tasks Stalin assigned to the masterminds of successive purges. No fissures were admitted in the Bolshevik shield, no doubt could arise that did not conceal mischievous ploys aimed at undermining the system. Time and again the refrain was repeated by spineless sycophants: we are surrounded by sworn enemies, we are invincible only inasmuch as we stay united. Expressing dissenting views necessarily meant weakening the revolutionary avant-garde. Breaking ranks was considered a mortal sin, and suspiciousness was the ultimate revolutionary virtue. In fact, when acquiescence is the golden rule, it takes great moral courage to rebel. In the homogenous space of total
itarian domination, opposition amounted to crime and opponents were treated as mere criminals. They incarnated difference and were therefore seen as outcasts. Ostracism led ultimately to mental emancipation, the autonomy of the mind acquired by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's zeks, the population of Stalin's gulag. The barbed wire was thus the symbol of a new kind of boundary between absolute victims and relative accomplices of evil. The whole tragedy of Communism lies in this hallucinating statement: the vision of a superior elite whose utopian goals sanctify the most barbaric methods; the denial of the right to life to those who are defined as “degenerate parasites and predators,” the deliberate dehumanization of victims.