The Devil in History

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  The mind of the Stalinist elites in Eastern Europe was impressively revealed by the Polish journalist Teresa Toránska in a series of interviews conducted in the early 1980s with some former leaders of the Polish Communist Party. The most illuminating of these interviews is with the former Politburo member and Central Committee secretary Jakub Berman, who tried to defend the actions of his political generation. According to Berman, Polish Communists were right in championing Stalin’ policies in Poland because the Soviets guaranteed his country's social and national liberation. The leaders of the Soviet-bloc Communist parties were convinced, like Lenin at the moment he founded the Bolshevik party, that the people needed an external force to enlighten them, that without such a vanguard party there was no hope of true emancipation. Berman was convinced that a day would come when mankind would do justice to this chiliastic dream of global revolution, and all the atrocities and crimes of Stalinism would be remembered only as passing incidents: “I am nonetheless convinced that the sum of our actions, skillfully and consistently carried out, will finally produce results and create a new Polish consciousness; because all the advantages flowing from our new path will be borne out, must be borne out, and … there will finally be a breakthrough in mentality which will give it an entirely new content and quality.”94

  In his absolute belief that history was on his and his comrades’ side, Berman was not alone. His was a mindset characteristic of the Communist elites in all Soviet satellite countries. Such (il)logic explains the frenzy of submission syndrome: the readiness to engage in any form of self-debasement and self-deprecation as long as such gestures were required by the party. The East European Communist leaders were seasoned militants for whom Stalin's personality was an example of correct revolutionary conduct. They admired the Soviet leader's intransigence and his uncompromising struggle against oppositional factions, and they shared his hostility to the West. They believed in the theory of permanent intensification of the class struggle and did their best to create a repressive system where critical tendencies could be immediately weeded out. Their minds were Manichean: Socialism was right, capitalism was wrong, and there was no middle road. During their Communist underground service, the Soviet-bloc Communists had learned to see Stalin's catechistic formulations as the best formulations of their own thoughts and beliefs. They fully internalized a diabolical pedagogy based upon a belief in being ordained as both juror and executioner, for their legitimacy drew from a fanatical obedience to the vozhd. When Stalin died, his East European disciples were orphaned: more than their parties’ supporter, they lost their protector, the embodiment of their highest dreams, the hero they had come to revere, the symbol of their vigor, passion, and boundless enthusiasm.

  The logic of Stalinism excluded vacillation and hesitation, numbed critical reasoning and intelligence, and instituted Soviet-style Marxism as a system of universal truth inimical to any form of doubt. The permanent purge, the basic technique of Stalinist demonology, was the modern equivalent of the medieval witch hunt. It was eagerly adopted by Stalin's East European apprentices and adapted to their own purposes. Echoing Stalin's fervid cult, East European leaders engineered similar campaigns of praise and idolatry in their own countries. The party was identified with the supreme leader, whose chief merit consisted in having correctly applied the Stalinist line. The solutions to all disturbing questions could be found in Stalin's writings, and those who failed to discover the answers were branded “enemies of the people.” Members of the traditional political elites, members of the clergy, and representatives of the nationalist intelligentsia who had refused to collaborate with the new regimes were sentenced to long prison terms following dramatic show trials or cursory camera trials. That was the first stage of the purge in Eastern Europe. After 1949 the purges fed upon the Communist elites themselves, and through them many faithful Stalinists experienced firsthand the effects of the unstoppable terrorist machine they had helped set in motion.

  Societies under Stalinism were restructured by a reimagining of class community, which in itself reflected these regimes’ visions of all-out conspiracies both internally and externally. As Sheila Fitzpatrick judiciously notes, it took only one step and “the imagined class basis of the conspiracy would fall away.”95 Class guilt frequently overlapped with national profiling during Stalin's reign. Erik van Ree explains that for Stalin “national characters were shared by all members of the nation; they formed a ‘mentality [dukhovnyi oblik] of the people who come together in a nation.’ This ‘stable’ mentality was furthermore transmitted over time, as a ‘psychological makeup [psikhicheskii sklad] that was formed among them from generation to generation as a result of identical conditions of existence.’”96 Such an approach to the nationalities problem allowed Stalin to indulge in national stereotypes, which he superimposed upon Bolshevism's ultrarationalistic vision of social engineering. In this worldview, Russians and other nationalities became the heroes storming any fortress, while those who were perceived as unwilling to dedicate themselves to Stalin's “heroic modernity” were stigmatized as a decadent species spoiled by a profit-seeking mentality. This form of political romanticism played upon existing stereotypes in the population at large. No wonder that in the letters sent to Pravda in early 1953, most speakers agreed that “it was high time to purge Jews from the Party and from leading positions in state service and the professions.” The solution to the perceived treacherousness of the Jews was their “education through labor.”97

  Thus a central aspect of post-1945 purges both in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was Stalinist anti-Semitism. This phenomenon was rooted in Stalin's own mentality, in the immediate aftermath of the war, and in the prejudices of majority populations in these countries. Even if some of its origins lay in the 1930s (after all, many of the Old Bolsheviks who were eliminated by Stalin were of Jewish origin), Stalinist anti-Semitism was a direct product of the Soviet leader's post-1945 world-view. It may not have had the same murderous results as the Great Terror, but “it confused the European past”: “Stalinist anti-Semitism haunted Eastern Europe long after the death of Stalin. It was rarely a major tool of governance, but it was always available in moments of political stress. Anti-Semitism allowed leaders to revise the history of wartime suffering (recalled as the suffering only of Slavs) and also the history of Stalinism itself (which was portrayed as the deformed, Jewish form of communism).”98 Indeed, anti-Semitism resurfaced often during the existence of the Soviet bloc. In some cases, it was part and parcel of the building of socialist nations. As I discussed elsewhere, national Stalinism in Romania or in Poland or East Germany was characterized, among other things, by reaffirmation of the Jew among the archetypical Others of the dominant ethnic group.99 But the most destructive legacy of Stalinist anti-Semitism is its obfuscation of the Holocaust. Timothy Snyder excellently formulates this paradox: “So long as communists governed most of Europe, the Holocaust could never be seen for what it was.”100 In other words, Stalin's mystification of the mass murder of the Jews set up the competitive regimes of memory in post-1989 East and Central Europe. On the one hand, for decades the Holocaust had not been remembered and the truth about the genocide of the Jews had remained hidden. On the other hand, the dimensions of the crimes of Stalinism and of the various Communist regimes were only surfacing to their true extent. Taking Snyder's point a bit further, the silence about both the gulag and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe ensured that these radically traumatic historical experiences are yet to fully be a part of the common history of Europe.101

  To return to the more general problem of Stalinism's exterminism, I agree with Leszek Kołakowski, who believed the purges had an integrative function, contributing to the destruction of the last vestiges of subjective autonomy and creating a social climate where no one would even dream of criticism. According to the great Polish philosopher, “The object of a totalitarian system is to destroy all forms of communal life that are not imposed by the state and closely controlled by it, so that individua
ls are isolated from one another and become mere instruments in the hands of the state. The citizen belongs to the state and must have no other loyalty, not even to the state ideology.”102 Communist victims belonged to a category described by Stalinist legal theory as “objective enemies.” They were people who once in their lives might have expressed reservations about the sagacity of Soviet policies or, even worse, might have criticized Stalin personally. Stalinism functioned on the basis of an exhaustively repressive strategy displaying pedagogical ambitions and vaunting itself as the triumph of ethical spirit and egalitarian collectivism. Nicolas Werth enunciates, along these lines, the following diagnosis: “Throughout Stalin's dictatorship of a quarter of a century, repressive phenomena varied, evolved, and took on different forms and scope. They reflected transformations of the regime itself in a changing world. This adaptable violence was characterized by various levels of intensity, continual displacements, shifting targets, often unpredictable sequences, and excesses that blurred the line between the legal and extralegal.”103 Maniacal purging consummate with self-devouring was both the praxis and the theoretical legitimation of this extremist and exterminist system. To paraphrase the title of a famous novel of Stalin's era, this is How the Steel Was Tempered.

  CHAPTER 3

  Lenin's Century

  Bolshevism, Marxism, and the Russian Tradition

  The use of inhumane methods to achieve impossible ends is the essence of revolutionary utopianism.

  —John Gray, Black Mass

  Created by Lenin and refined by Stalin, the one-party dictatorship and command economy would be Russian's most consequential bequest to twentieth-century history.

  —Steven G. Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World

  Marxism was, as Leszek Kołakowski once said, the greatest philosophical fantasy of modern times. It was a gigantic Manichean political myth, a major script of political modernity that contrasted the forces of reaction, barbarism, and decay to those of historical progress, reason, and human liberation. It promised salvation via the destruction of a system based on domination, exploitation, and alienation. The proletariat, in this soteriological vision, was the universal redeemer or, as young Marx put it, the messiah-class of history.1 Feverishly appealing to what historian Norman Cohn called highly emotional mass movements, both Leninism and Fascism created millenarian sociological and psychological constellations. Both were militant chiliasms that energized extraordinary ardor among unconditionally committed followers. Focusing on revolutionary messianism in medieval and Reformation Europe and its reverberations in modern totalitarian experiences, Cohn pointed out that there was no call “to distinguish overmuch between what so far had been the two major forms of totalitarianism, Communism on the one hand and German National Socialism on the other.” He continues: “Admittedly it seems a far cry from the atavism, the crude tribalism, the vulgar irrationalism and open sadism of the Nazis to the ostensibly humanitarian and universalistic, scientific, and rational outlook of the Communist—and still it is true that both these movements shared certain features so extraordinary as to suggest the emergence of a form of politics vastly different from any known in the past.”2

  VIOLENCE AND THE QUEST FOR THE PERFECT COMMUNITY

  National Socialism never achieved a level of theoretical coherence and conceptual sophistication comparable to the Marxian paradigm and its offshoots. It would be impossible to speak seriously about Nazi philosophy. Even Stalin's thought was more intellectually structured that Hitler's nebulous vagaries. Yet the inner core of deep anticapitalist, antiliberal, and antidemocratic obsessions could be found in both of these otherwise inimical doctrines.3 Leninism and National Socialism (or more generically, Fascism) were founded upon programs of total societal mobilization intended to achieve a radical transformation of the body politic. The first step in the revolutions promoted by Leninism and Fascism (German and Italian) was the takeover of power. The mode of takeover was fundamentally exclusionary in relation to all other political formations or adversaries. For Lenin, once imposed via the Bolshevik insurrection, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” was irreversible and unrestrained by any law. In March 1933, Hitler announced, “The government will embark upon a systematic campaign to restore the nation's moral and material health. The whole educational system, theatre, film, literature, the press, and broadcasting—all these will be used as means to this end.”4 Indeed, during the trial of the army officers imprisoned for their involvement with National Socialism in Leipzig in 1930, Hitler had declared that he aimed at a “legal revolution,” which meant entering “the legal agencies and in that way [making] our Party the determining factor.” However, like the Bolsheviks' stance in 1917, this method only opened the gates for the Nazi Party's absolute dictatorship. In Hitler's words, “Once we possess the constitutional power, we will mould the state into the shape we hold suitable.”5

  This approach was disturbingly reminiscent of the Bolshevik precedent. Lenin believed that any wavering in taking power was a criminal act. Political historian Stephen Cohen gave an excellent characterization of the path to government of Lenin's party: “A minority party to the end (they received about 25 percent of the votes for the Constituent Assembly in November), the Bolsheviks neither inspired nor led the revolution from below; but they alone perceived its direction and survived it.”6 Just like the Nazis and Italian Fascists, Bolsheviks knew that they wanted to rule because each believed in a perceived historical, transformative, and redemptive mission. And to attain this end, all means were justified. To quote Lazar Kaganovich, one of Stalin's henchmen, “Comrades, it has long been known that for us Bolsheviks democracy is no fetish.”7 Fascists and Communists alike believed in the imperative of creative destruction of the old world in order to create new civilizations based upon new men, new social systems that in their turn would generate a new international order. To paraphrase Roger Griffin, these two political movements were utterly consumed with palingenetic, revivalist fervor.

  Leninism's belief in the purifying effect of shattering the world was founded upon the writings of the founding fathers—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. According to Marx, what was unique about “the Revolution was not just that no further event was to follow it, but that no other event need follow it, because in the Revolution the whole purpose of History was to be fulfilled.”8 Marxism was first and foremost a Promethean attempt to get rid of an abhorred bourgeois order based on market relations (private property), transcend reified social relations, and organize revolutionary social forces for the ultimate confrontation, which would result in a “leap from the kingdom of necessity into the kingdom of freedom.”9 Marx's strong demarcation of his revolutionary thought in contrast to other versions of socialism (Christian, reactionary-feudal, petty-bourgeois, critical-utopian) is intimately linked to his firm belief, especially after 1845, that he was in the know (the postulate of epistemic infallibility), and that his Weltanschauung was essentially scientific, that is, nonutopian. For Marx, the conviction that history was governed by laws, a Hegelian viewpoint that he consistently promoted, meant that once these laws were grasped, reason (thought) and revolution (action) would coincide in the global proletarian liberation.10 The understanding of social and natural forces allowed for the full realization of the transformative ethos: “Once we do understand them [social and natural forces], once we grasp their action, their direction, their effects, it depends only on ourselves to subject them more and more to our own will, and by means of them to reach our own ends.”11 Subsequently, in the name of proletarian (authentic) democracy, formal liberties could be suspended, even suppressed. To achieve a higher version of morality, emancipated from the bondage of bourgeois hypocrisy, traditional morality could be abrogated.12 Marxism perceived itself as science rather than ethics, and therefore the revolution it preached was “part of a historical mechanism: hence, purged of values.”13 As Raymond Aron points out:

  Marxism is a Christian heresy. As a modern form of millenarianism, it places the kingd
om of God on Earth following the apocalyptic revolution in which the Old World will be swallowed up. The contradictions of capitalist societies will inevitably bring about this fruitful catastrophe. The victims of today will be the victors of tomorrow. Salvation will come through the proletariat, that witness to present inhumanity. It is the proletariat that, at a time fixed by the evolution of productive forces and by the courage of the combatants, will turn itself into a class that is universal and will take charge of the fate of mankind.14

  It was indeed the fate of Marxism to pretend to be in charge of the destiny of humanity by impersonating, in a simultaneously tragic and optimistic way, the solution to mankind's millennia-long agonies, fears, and terrors. Never was a political doctrine so ambitious, never a revolutionary project so much imbued with a sense of prophetic mission and charismatically heroic predestination.