119. Kołakowski, Main Currents, pp. 989-1032, 1124-1147; Gorbachev's former chief ideologue, Alexander Yakovlev, writes about this in his somewhat vehement contribution to Stéphane Courtois et al., eds., Du passé nous faisons table rase! Histoire et mémoire du communisme en Europe (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2002), pp. 173-210.
120. Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 2.
121. Tucker argues that “the Russian revolutionary mentality found no difficulty in adjusting itself to Marxism, or Marxism to itself. Part of the explanation is that this mentality was, even in pre-Marxist days, hostile to capitalism …. But the chief facilitating circumstance was … that the war between class and class had to be decided in the final analysis by overthrowing the existing state. Further, his doctrine appealed to the anarchist streak in the Russian revolutionary mentality, for it visualized the withering away of government after the proletarian revolution. Hence it was entirely possible for a Russian revolutionary whose mind was obsessed with the image of a dual Russia to become a Marxist and continue in that capacity the indigenous revolutionary tradition of warfare against official Russia…. He could talk as a Marxist while thinking and feeling as a Russian revolutionary.” Robert C. Tucker, The Soviet Political Mind: Stalinism and Post-Stalin Change, rev. ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971), p. 130-31.
122. Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, p. 172.
123. Steven G. Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003).
124. Alexander Solzhenitsyn et al., From Under the Rubble, intro. Max Hayward (Washington D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1981).
125. Lars T. Lih, “How a Founding Document Was Found, or One Hundred Years of Lenin's What Is to Be Done?” Kriitika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 5-49.
126. Halfin, From Darkness to Light, p. 14.
127. Klaus-Georg Riegel, “Communities of Virtuosi: An Interpretation of the Stalinist Criticism and Self-Criticism in the Perspective of Max Weber's Sociology of Religion,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 1, no. 3 (Winter 2000): 16-42.
128. Halfin, From Darkness to Light, pp. 156-57.
129. Ibid., p. 84.
130. Earnest Tuveson quoted in ibid., p. 47.
131. Ibid., p. 115.
132. There was a crucial distinction between Marx and Lenin on this issue. For Marx, the liberation of the proletariat had to be “the work of the proletarians themselves.” Two lines of thought collided on this issue, leading to some of the fiercest debates in twentieth-century left-wing radical parties and movements.
133. Maykovsky wrote these verses in his poem “Vlaadimir Ilyich Lenin” in Vladimir Mayakovsky, Moia revolutsia (Moscow: Sovremennik Publishers, 1974).
134. Bolshevism and National Socialism shared the fascination with an anthropological revolution. Mussolini was also committed to creating a new Fascist Man, and so was the Captain of Romania's Iron Guard, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu.
135. Astrid Hadin, “Stalinism as a Civilization: New Perspectives on Communist Regimes,” Political Studies Review 2 (2004): 166-84.
136. For a discussion of myth versus ideology in relation to Marxism-Leninism, see Carol Barner-Barry and Cynthia Hody, “Soviet Marxism-Leninism as Mythology,” Political Psychology 15, no. 4 (December 1994): 609-30.
137. Ehlen, “Communist Faith and World-Explanatory Doctrine,” in Totalitarianism, ed. Maier and Schäfer, p. 129.
138. See A. James Gregor's discussion of the nationalist, mystical writings of Serghei Kurginian and Alexandr Prohanov and their influence over Zyuganov, particularly manifested in the “Declaration to the People,” the manifesto of Russian Stalino-Fascism. See A. James Gregor, The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 144-55; and Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism: Chapters in the Intellectual History of Radicalism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009).
139. Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done? (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1989).
140. In addition to Jowitt's contributions, see Tucker, The Soviet Political Mind; and Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century (New York: Norton, 2000).
141. Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” p. 375.
142. Beryl Williams, Lenin (Harlow: Logman Publishing Group, 1999), p. 73.
143. Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure, and Effects of National Socialism, trans. Jean Steinberg with an introduction by Peter Gay (New York and Washington: Praeger Publishers, 1970), p. 152.
144. Gabriel Almond, The Appeals of Communism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954); Burleigh, Sacred Causes, esp. “The Totalitarian Political Religions,” pp. 38-122.
145. Bert Hoppe, “Iron Revolutionaries and Salon Socialists: Bolsheviks and German Communists in the 1920s and 1930s,” in “Fascination and Enmity: Russia and Germany as Entangled Histories, 1914-1945,” special issue, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10, no. 3 (Summer 2009): 509.
146. Hoffer, The True Believer.
147. Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (New York: Atheneum, 1976), p. 315.
148. For an excellent analysis of Lefort's writings, see Howard, The Specter, 71-82.
149. Claude Lefort, La complication: Retour sur le communisme (Paris: Fayard, 1999).
150. Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), p. 285-86.
151. Lefort, La complication, p. 47.
152. Robert C. Tucker, “Lenin's Bolshevism as a Culture in the Making,” in Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Bolshevik Revolution, ed. Abbott Gleason, Peter Kenez, and Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 26-27.
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.
4. DIALECTICS OF DISENCHANTMENT
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.
28. Corney, “What Is to Be Done,” p. 273.
29. Polly Jones, “Introduction: The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization,” in The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 12.
30. Miriam Dobson, “'Show the Bandit-Enemies No Mercy!': Amnesty, Criminality and Public Response in 1953,” in The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization, ed. Jones, p. 22.
31. Jones, The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization, p. 13.
32. Zubok, Zhivago's Children, pp. 71 and 58.
33. For Khrushchev, the definitive biography is William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002).
34. Polly Jones, “From the Secret Speech to the Burial of Stalin: Real and Ideal Responses to De-Stalinization,” in The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization, p. 41.
35. Robert D. English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 109.
36. One of the best books on this topic remains Wolfgang Leonhard, Three Faces of Marxism: The Political Concepts of Soviet Marxism, Maoism, and Humanist Marxism (New York: Paragon Books, 1979), especially the part dealing with the challenge of humanist Marxism, pp. 258-352. For a comprehensive approach to the role of Marxist revisionism, see Kołakowski, Main Currents; and Andrzej Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995).
37. Kołakowski quoted in Stanley Pierson, Leaving Marxism: Studies in the Dissolution of an Ideology (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 134-35.
38. Stanislav Rassadin, the creator of the concept shestidesiatniki, quoted in Zubok, Zhivago's Children, p. 162.
39. Two classics on Marxist revisionism in Eastern Europe are Leopold Labedz, ed., Revisionism: Essays on the History of Marxist Ideas (New York: Praeger 1962); and Leonhard, Three Faces of Marxism.
40. Jan Weilgohs and Detlef Pollack, “Comparative Perspectives on Dissent and Opposition to Communist Rule,” in Dissent and Opposition in Communist Eastern Europe: Origins of Civil Society and Democratic Transition (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 231-64.
41. Jacek Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski were arrested for their involvement in the distribution of this document. See Barbara Falk, The Dilemmas of Dissidence in East-Central Europe: Citizen Intellectuals and Philosopher Kings (Budapest: Central European University, 2003), p. 17; Jacek Kuroń, La foi et la faute: A la rencontre et hors du communisme (Paris: Fayard, 1991).
42. Mikhail Gorbachev and Zdeněk Mlynář, Conversations with Gorbachev: On Perestroika, the Prague Spring, foreword by Archie Brown and Mikhail Gorbachev (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 56-58.
&nbs
p; 43. See Adam Michnik, Letters from Prison and Other Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 135.
44. Jones, “Introduction,” in The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization, p. 5.
45. Jones, “From the Secret Speech,” in ibid., p. 41.
46. Jones, “Introduction,” in ibid. For example, during the first years after Stalin's death, there was in Moscow a proliferation of “kompany—circles of friends, informal groups consisting mostly of educated people in their twenties and thirties…. The large groups of friends became a substitute for ‘publishing houses, salons, billboards, confession booths, concert halls, libraries, museums, counseling groups, sewing circles, knitting clubs, chambers of commerce, bars, clubs, restaurants, coffeehouses, dating agencies, and seminars in literature, history, philosophy, linguistics, economics, genetics, physics, music, and the arts.'” These informal groups represented one source of the rebirth of civil society in the Soviet Union. See Zubok, Zhivago's Children, pp. 47-48.
47. See Stanley Pierson's chapter on Leszek Kołakowski's intellectual journey from revisionism to dissent in Leaving Marxism, pp. 128-74; Robert A. Gorman, Biographical Dictionary of Neo-Marxism (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), pp. 232-34.
48. Zubok, Zhivago's Children, pp. 214-15.
49. Karl Korsch, Marxisme et philosophie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1964), p. 39. For what concerns Korsch's philosophical-political outlook and the contemporary meaning of the Hegelian-Marxist radicalism, see: Karl Korsch, Marxisme et contre-révolution (Paris: Seuil, 1975); Karl Korsch, L'anti-Kautsky (La conception matérialiste de l'histoire) (Paris: Champ Libre, 1973); Paul Breines, “Korsch's Road to Marx,” Telos, no. 26; and Furio Cerutti, “Lukács ad Korsch: On the Emancipatory Significance of the Dialectics in Critical Marxism,” Telos, no. 26, originally published in Oskar Negt, ed., Aktualität und Folgen der Philosophie Hegels (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970). Generally, regarding critical Marxism, see Perry Andreson, Sur le marxisme occidental (Paris: Maspero, 1977); Predrag Vranicki, Storia del marxismo, vols. 1-2 (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1972); M Löwy, Pour une sociologie des intellectuals révolutionnaires—L'évolution politique de Lukács, 1909-1929 (Paris: Maspero, 1976); Neil McInnes, The Western Marxists (Newport, N.Y.: Free Press, 1972). We have to mention here the relevant contributions of such authors as Andrew Arato, Dick Howard, Jean-Michel Palmier, Paul Piccone, Jean-Marie Vincent, Pierre V. Zima, Richard J. Bernstein, Aldo Zanardo, Albercht Wellmer, N. Tertulian, and Agnes Heller. I published in Romania several studies on Western Marxism in the Journal of Philosophy and a book on The New Left and the Frankfurt School (Bucharest: Editura Politică, 1976).
The Devil in History Page 39
