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.
38. Findlay, Caring for the Soul, pp. 141-42.
39. Tucker, Philosophy and Politics, p. 136.
40. Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 54-55.
41. Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, p. 1212.
42. 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), pp. 5-13. For an interesting comparison of Walicki's approach to other seminal attempts to evaluate the degree of influence of Marxism-Leninism in Soviet politics and systemic dynamics, see David Priestland, “Marx and the Kremlin: Writing on Marxism-Leninism and Soviet Politics after the Fall of Communism,” Journal of Political Ideologies 5, no. 3 (2000): 337-90. For example, Priestland stresses that Walicki noticed a tension between Marx's concern that man be free from subordination to others and his demand that man be free from dependence on nature. He then inscribes this observation, by comparison to other authors (including N. Robinson, S. Hanson, M. Malia, and M. Sandle), into a larger picture of the multiple dichotomies that characterized Bolshevism: “The conflict between participation and technocracy … the conflict between voluntarism and evolutionary determinism … t he tension between a position which one might call ‘populist radical' … and an ‘elitist radicalism.'” Antonio Gramsci wrote about the tension between fatalism and voluntarism as a permanent feature of revolutionary theory.
43. Claude Lefort, Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
44. Neil Robinson, “What Was Soviet Ideology? A Comment on Joseph Schull and an Alternative,” Political Studies 43 (1995): 325-32. For a detailed application of his approach (the telos of radical democratization and Communism vs. the vanguard party), see Neil Robinson, Ideology and the Collapse of the Soviet System (Aldershot: E. Elgar, 1995).
45. Rachel Walker, “Thinking about Ideology and Method: A Comment on Schull,” Political Studies 43 (1995):
333-42; and “Marxism-Leninism as Discourse: The Politics of the Empty Signifier and the Double Bind,” British Journal of Political Science 19 (1989): 161-89.
46. In the fifth chapter (“Melancholy, Utopia and Reconciliation”) of Another Country, Jan-Werner Müller provides an excellent example of the point I am making. The writer Jurek Becker (a former émigré from the GDR) stated that “somehow, across all experiences and beyond all insight, existed the hope that the socialist countries could find another path. That's over now.” In justifying his vote against reunification, he stated: “The most important thing about the socialist countries is nothing visible, but a possibility. There not everything has been decided like here.” Or Uwe Timm: “One has to remember that socialism in the GDR was an alternative to the FRG, admittedly an ugly, bureaucratically bloated alternative, but still an alternative, and that this ‘real socialism,' despite all ossification, would have been capable of self-transformation is not a mere assertion. That is demonstrated by the grassroots democratic movements” (my emphasis). Jan-Werner Müller, Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification, and National Identity (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 125; also see pp. 124-29.
47. Raymond Aron, Memoirs: Fifty Years of Political Reflection (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1990), p. 414; Vladimir Tismaneanu, Despre communism: Destinul unei religii politice (Nucjhares: Humanias, 2011).
48. Kołakowski, Main Currents, p. vi.
49. See Marx and Engels, Manifestul Partidului Comunist, ed. Cristian Preda (Bucureti: Ed. Nemira, 1998), p. 150. The volume includes the Manifesto as well as a number of post-1989 reactions to it.
50. For the Tamás-Pleșu exchange, see http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2009-06-16-tamas-ro.html. In my own exchange with G. M. Tamás, I argued that his espousal of Alain Badiou's extolment of the “communist hypothesis” amounted to a frivolous ignorance of historical realities and an implicit rejection of bourgeois-liberal modernity. See Vladimir Tismaneanu, “Marxism histrionic (G. M. Tamás & co.),” Revista 22, July 20, 2010, http://www.revista22.ro/articol-8603.html (accessed on February 27, 2010).
51. See Tismaneanu, “Marxism histrionic”; and G. M. Tamás, “Un delict de opinie,” in Revista 22 (Bucharest), July 2-26, 2010, pp. 5-9.
52. Review of The Structural Crisis of Capital by István Meszáros, Monthly Review Press, Feb. 7, 2012, http://www.monthlyreview.org/books/structuralcri-sisofcapital.php, accessed August 24, 2010.
53. For the famous slogan “Gray is beautiful,” see Adam Michnik, Letters from Freedom: Post-Cold War Realities and Perspectives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 317-27. On the relationship between radical ideas and totalitarian experiments, see H.-R. Patapievici, Politice (Bucharest: Humanitas, 1996).
54. I examine these trends in my Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism, and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998; paperback edition, 2009).
55. Olivier Mongin, Face au scepticisme: Les mutations du paysage intellectuel ou l'invention de l'intellectuel démocratique (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 1994); in the same vein, Jorge Castaneda emphasized the postutopian transfiguration of radical politics in Latin America.
56. For example, the Budapest School (from old Lukács to Agnes Heller, Ferenc Fehér, György Márkus, Mihaly Vajda, János Kis, Győrgy Bence), the experiences of Jacek Kuroń, Krzysztof Pomian, Leszek Kołakowski, and Zygmunt Bauman, Ernst Bloch's impact on East Germany's revisionists, and so on.
57. For example, Carlo Roselli, Norberto Bobbio, Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Edgar Morin, and Jean-François Lyotard.
58. See Tony Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), p. 133.
59. Raymond Taras, ed., The Road to Disillusion (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1992).
60. Milovan Djilas, Of Prisons and Ideas (San Diego, Calif., and New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984).
61. Walicki advocates a similar approach when he argues that because of the dilution, domestication and of emptying Marxism of its utopian revolutionary aspect, one is bound to aim at, nowadays, a “defamiliarization” of Marxism “by paying proper attention to its millenarian features.” 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), p. 2.
62. Findlay, Caring for the Soul, p. 132.
63. Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in The Power of the Powerless, ed. Václav Havel et al. (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1990), pp. 36-37.
64. Agnes Heller, “Toward Post-Totalitarianism,” in Debates on the Future of Communism, ed. Vladimir Tismaneanu and Judith Shapiro (London: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 50-55; see Agnes Heller, “Legitimation Deficit and Legitimation Crisis in East European Societies,” in Stalinism Revisited: The Establishment of Communist Regimes in East-Central Europe, ed. Vladimir Tismaneanu (Budapest and New York: CEU Press, 2009), pp. 143-60.
65. Leszek Kołakowski, “Totalitarianism and Lie,” Commentary (May 1983) p. 37.
66. In my Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism, and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), I defined, with reference to Eric Hoffer's analysis of political fanaticism, ideological hubris as “the firm belief that there is one and only one answer to the social questions, and that the ideologue is the one who holds it” (p. 28). Also see Eric Hofer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Time, 1963); Elie Halevy, a French thinker who, in the 1930s, wrote about the age of tyranny dominated by the “etatisation of thought” and the “organization of enthusiasm.” See Alberto Toscano, Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (London: Verso, 2010), p. 206. Political religions were also instruments for the organization of social resentment, envy, and hatred. See Gabriel Liiceanu, Despre ură (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2007).
67. Richard Shorten, “François Furet and Totalitarianism: A Recent Intervention in the Misuse of a Notion,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 3, no. 1 (Summer 2002): 10-11. For an extensive presentation of Lefort's analysis of ideology, see Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society (Oxford: Polity Press, 1986).
68. I am paraphrasing Ken Jowitt's conclusions on the neotraditionalism of the Soviet-type system. See Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 121-58. See also Ken Jowitt, “Stalinist Revolutionary Breakthroughs in Eastern Europe,” in Stalinism Revisited, ed. Tismaneanu, pp. 17-24.
69. Roger Griffin, “Ideology and Culture,” Journal of Political Ideologies 11, no. 1 (Feb. 2006): 77-99.
70. See for instance Stephen Kinzer, “In ‘East Germany,' Bad Ol' Days Now Look Good,” New York Times, August 27, 1994. This restorative theme was the gist of Russian leader Gennady Zyuganov's 1996 presidential campaign. He challenged Boris Yeltsin in the name of an idealized vision of the historical past, heroic value, ethnic solidarity, and opposition to corruptive Western influences. E.g., David Remnick, “Hammer, Sickle, and Book,” New York Review of Books 23 (May 1996): 44-51.
71. I am putting together here two of the essential statements Ken Jowitt made in his analysis of Leninism and its legacy. The first: “The political individuation of an articulated potential citizenry treated contemptuously by an inclusive (not democratic), neotraditional (not modernized) Leninist polity was the cause of Leninist breakdown” (Ken Jowitt, “Weber, Trotsky and Holmes on the Study of Leninist Regimes,” Journal of International Affairs [2001]: 3149). The second: “It should be equally clear that today [1992] the dominant and shared Eastern European reality is severe and multiple fragmentation” (Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder, pp. 299-300).
72. Findlay, Caring for the Soul, p. 133.
73. Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: Its Origins, Growth and Dissolution, vol. 3, The Breakdown (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 526-30.
&
nbsp; 74. 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.
75. George Konrád, The Melancholy of Rebirth, p. 23.
76. Literary critic Vladimir Potapov quoted in Horvath, The Legacy, p. 1. Horvath tellingly describes the nature of the experience associated with reading the Gulag Archipelago. He quotes Natalya Eksler's recollections about the peregrinations of a copy of volume 2 that Andrei Amalrik gave her in 1976: “It was borrowed by friends, then returned, then borrowed for the friends of friends, and the book left home for longer and longer intervals before reappearing. Then it somehow vanished for an extended period. And since some friends wanted their children, who had come of age, to read it, we tried to call it back. After a while we were told: ‘Wait a little, please. It's in the Urals: let it circulate, since it might be the only copy there.' We waited. After a year, we tried again, and were informed: ‘The book is in the Baltics, there is an enormous queue, which they call the queue for The Book.' We waited another few years, and learned that it was now in the Ukraine” (p. 25).
77. For example, the coming of age of the dissident was celebrated at the Theatre Récamier in June 1977, when André Glucksmann and Michel Foucault organized a reception for French intellectuals and East European dissident exiles to protest Brezhnev's visit to Paris. In an interview, Foucault explained that “we thought that on the evening when Mr. Brezhnev is received with grand pomp by Mr. Giscard d'Estaing, other French people could receive other Russians who are their friends.” This hospitality marked a vast reversal in attitudes since Brezhnev's arrival in 1971, when hardly a murmur of criticism had been elicited by the decision of the French authorities to welcome the Soviet leader with a police round-up of prominent East European émigré intellectuals, who were banished to a Corsican hotel for the duration of the visit.” See Horvath, “'The Solzhenitsyn Effect,'” p. 902.
78. Horvath, The Legacy, p. 22.
79. Ibid., p. 24.
80. Vadim Medvedev, Central Committee secretary for ideology, quoted in Horvath, The Legacy, p. 6.
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