Black Mass: How Religion Led the World into Crisis

by John Gray

  The methods of repression used by the Bolsheviks were not an inheritance from Tsarism. They were new, and they were adopted in the pursuit of utopian goals. The central role of the security apparatus in the new Soviet state was required by its project of remaking society – an aspiration no traditional tyranny has had, and which the Tsars certainly lacked. As has been correctly noted, ‘Prior to the appearance of the Soviet party-state, history offered few, if any, precedents of a millenarian, security-focused system.’26 To call the Soviet state a tyranny is to apply an antique typology to a system that was radically modern.

  Western opinion followed the Bolsheviks in seeing the Soviet regime as an attempt to realize the ideals of the French Revolution. It is a telling fact that Soviet communism was most popular in the West when terror was at its height. After visiting the Soviet Union in 1934 – when around five million people had perished in the Ukrainian famine – the British Labourite intellectual Harold Laski declared: ‘Never in history has man attained the same level of perfection as in the Soviet regime.’ In much the same vein, in 1935 the renowned Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb published a book entitled Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? (In later editions of the book the question mark was dropped.) For these western enthusiasts Stalinism was the highest point in human progress. The American literary critic Edmund Wilson went still further. In the Soviet Union, he wrote, ‘I felt as though I were in a moral sanctuary, where the light never stops shining.’27 Western progressive intellectuals were never in any doubt that the USSR was a regime dedicated to Enlightenment ideals. They would have been horrified at the suggestion that the Soviet state was no more than Tsarist despotism in a new guise. It was only when it was clear that the Soviet system had failed to achieve any of its goals that its use of terror was explained as a Tsarist inheritance.

  For the most part western opinion saw in the Stalinist Soviet Union an image of its utopian fantasies, and it projected the same image on to Maoist China, where the human cost of communism was even greater. Some thirty-eight million people perished between 1958 and 1961 in the Great Leap Forward. As Jung Chang and Jon Halliday have written: ‘This was the greatest famine of the twentieth century – and of all recorded human history. Mao knowingly starved and worked these millions of people to death.’28 As they did in the Soviet Union, the peasants suffered most from a policy – alien to Chinese traditions – that aimed to subjugate the natural environment to human ends. Around a hundred million were coerced into working on irrigation projects. Often without proper tools, they used doors and planks taken from their homes to construct dams, reservoirs and canals – most of which collapsed or were abandoned. In a spectacular display of the Promethean spirit sparrows were deemed pests fit only for extermination. The peasants were ordered to wave sticks and brooms so that the birds would fall exhausted from the sky and could be killed. The result was a plague of insects. A secret message had then to be sent to the Soviet embassy in Beijing requesting that hundreds of thousands of sparrows be sent as soon as possible from the Soviet Far East.29

  The cultural cost of the Maoist regime was evident in the Great Proletarian Revolution of 1966–7. Like the Bolsheviks, Mao saw the persistence of the past as the chief obstacle to building a new future. China’s ancient traditions had to be wiped from memory. In effect the Maoist regime declared war on Chinese civilization. Yet it was during the Cultural Revolution – a politically engineered mass frenzy that had an undeniable millenarian dimension – that the regime achieved its highest level of popularity in the west. As with Stalinism, western opinion saw Mao’s regime as dedicated to an Enlightenment ideal of universal emancipation: terror was a necessary phase in the conversion of an Asiatic tyranny to western ideals of freedom and progress. Again, it was only when its catastrophic results could no longer be denied that Chinese communism was condemned as a form of oriental despotism. Rather than being results of an attempt to apply a modern western ideology, the crimes of the Maoist regime could then safely be seen as vestiges of traditional barbarism. When Maoism was abandoned, western opinion interpreted its rejection as the beginning of a process of westernization, when in fact – as in the case of the collapse of the Soviet system – it was the opposite. Post-Mao China rejected a western ideology not in order to adopt another one, but in order to carve out a path of development that owed little to any western model. Given China’s worsening ecological problems and the social dislocation that has accompanied the phasing out of the ‘iron rice bowl’, which ensured lifetime employment and basic welfare for most of the population, the upshot remains in doubt; but the period in which China struggled to implement a western ideology is over.

  Wherever it has come to power communism has meant a radical break with the past. Late Tsarism had far more in common with fin de siècle Prussia than with the Soviet system.30 The late Tsarist period had dark blemishes – it witnessed many pogroms, for example – but in terms of its overall record it compares favourably with many countries in the world today and it was incomparably less repressive than the Soviet regime. In employing terror as an instrument of social engineering the Bolsheviks were self-consciously continuing the Jacobin tradition. Just as the Jacobins had liquidated the remnants of the old regime it was necessary to eliminate residues of reaction that could be found in all sections of Russian society. As Nekrich and Heller have written: ‘Lenin was obsessed with two historical precedents: first, the Jacobins, who were defeated because they did not guillotine enough people; and second, the Paris Commune, which was defeated because its leaders did not shoot enough people.’31

  The safety of the revolution required active measures against human remnants of the past. One of the first acts of the regime announced in January 1918 was to create a new category of ‘disenfranchised person’ whose members could be deprived of rights –including the right to food. Around five million people fell into this category and were subject to a class-based system of rationing created later that year. It was against this background of the disenfranchisement of whole categories of people that the Great Terror took place. As Kolakowski, author of the definitive study of the rise and collapse of Marxism, has put it, ‘Stalinism was the natural and obvious continuation of the system of government established by Lenin and Trotsky.’32 The millions of deaths that accompanied Stalin’s policies of agricultural collectivization were larger than anything contemplated by Lenin but they were a consequence of policies that Lenin began. In turn, Lenin’s policies were genuine attempts to realize Marxian communism.

  Despite Marx’s repudiation of utopian thinking, his vision of communism is itself thoroughly utopian. As I noted in the last chapter, no one can ever know enough to plan the course of an advanced economy. But the utopian quality of Marx’s ideal does not come only from the impossible demands it makes on the knowledge of the planners. It arises even more from the clash between the ideal of harmony and the diversity of human values. Central planning involves an enormous concentration of power, without – as Lenin made clear in his ‘scientific’ definition of proletarian dictatorship – any institutional checks. A system of arbitrary rule of this kind is bound to encounter resistance. The values of the regime will surely not be those of everyone or even the majority. Most people will continue to be attached to things – religion, nationality or family – the regime sees as atavistic. Others will cherish activities – such as aesthetic contemplation or romantic love – that make no contribution to social reconstruction. Whether they actively resist the new regime or – like Dr Zhivago in Boris Pasternak’s novel – simply insist on going their own way, there will be many who do not share the regime’s vision of the good life. While every Utopia claims to embody the best life for all of humankind, it is never more than one ideal among many. A society without private property or money may seem idyllic to some people but to others it looks like a vision of hell. For some it may seem obvious that a world ruled by altruism would be best, while for others it would be insufferably insipid. All societies contain divergent ideals o
f life. When a utopian regime collides with this fact the result can only be repression or defeat. Utopianism does not cause totalitarianism – for a totalitarian regime to come into being many other factors are necessary – but totalitarianism follows whenever the dream of a life without conflict is consistently pursued through the use of state power.

  The Bolsheviks were practitioners of what Karl Popper described as utopian social engineering, which aims to reconstruct society by altering it all at once.33 For the utopian social engineer it is not enough to reform institutions piecemeal. Society as it presently exists is beyond redemption. It must be destroyed in order to create a new way of life. One difficulty of utopian social engineering is that it contains no method for correcting mistakes. The theory that guides the construction of Utopia is taken to be infallible; any deviation from it is treated as error or treason. There may be tactical retreats and switches of direction – as when in 1921 Lenin abandoned War Communism and adopted the New Economic Policy allowing peasants to keep their own grain – but the utopian model remains beyond criticism. However, given the fact of human fallibility the model is sure to contain flaws, some of which may be fatal. The result of persisting in the attempt to realize it is bound to be a society very different from the one that was envisaged. This is not a process confined to the Soviet Union and other communist states. It is evident in Iraq, where a hardly less ambitious attempt at utopian engineering was made. Predictably, the failure of the project has been ascribed to deficiencies in its execution and the recalcitrance of the Iraqi people rather than any defects in the project itself.

  Destroying an existing social order for the sake of an ideal is irrational, as Popper argued. Where Popper went astray was in supposing that by demonstrating the irrationality of utopianism he had disposed of it. To dissect the errors in Marxian theory that underpinned Lenin’s State and Revolution may be useful, but the utopian mentality is not nurtured on falsifiable social theories. It feeds on myths, which cannot be refuted. For Lenin and Trotsky, terror was a way of remaking society and shaping a new type of human being. The goal of the new Soviet regime was a world where humanity would flourish as never before. In order to achieve this end it was ready to sacrifice millions of human lives. The Bolsheviks believed the new world could come into being only after the destruction of the old.

  Russia under Soviet rule did witness something like an apocalypse. While no aspect of life was untouched, the change was most complete in the camps. Varlam Shalamov, who spent seventeen years working in the mines of Kolyma – a section of the Gulag, finally covering a tenth of Soviet territory, in which around a third of the inmates died every year – described the events following the arrival in the camp of bulldozers donated under the American Lend-Lease programme. Meant to assist in the war against Nazism, the bulldozers were used to dispose of thousands of frozen bodies that emerged when mass graves dating from an earlier period of camp life were uncovered:

  These graves, enormous stone pits, were filled to the brim with corpses. The bodies had not decayed; they were just bare skeletons over which stretched dirty, scratched skin bitten all over by lice.

  The north resisted with all its strength this work of man, not accepting the corpses into its bowels. Defeated, humbled, retreating, stone promised to forget nothing, to wait and preserve its secret. The severe winters, the hot summers, the winds, the six years of rain had not wrenched the dead men from the stone. The earth opened, baring its subterranean storerooms, for they contained not only gold and lead, tungsten and uranium but also undecaying human bodies.

  These human bodies slid down the slope, perhaps attempting to rise …34

  While it had apocalyptic consequences the Bolshevik revolution failed to usher in the Millennium. Tens of millions died for nothing. Even now the number of deaths resulting from forced collectivization cannot be known with certainty, but Stalin boasted to Churchill that it reached ten million. Robert Conquest has estimated the overall number of deaths in the Great Terror at around twice that figure –an estimate that is likely to be fairly accurate.35 The toll in broken lives was incalculably larger. The land itself was scarred with man-made deserts and dead or dying lakes and rivers. The Stalinist Soviet Union became the site of the largest humanly induced ecological disasters – probably only surpassed by those in Maoist China.36

  The Soviet Union survived the Second World War, in which its people made a decisive contribution to defeating Nazism. In the period immediately after the war there were some who anticipated a thaw in the Stalinist system; but in fact millions who had fought heroically ended up in the Gulag. The Cold War years saw several attempts at liberalization, including Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin’s ‘cult of personality’ at the party congress in 1956; but when a systematic attempt was made to renew the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev it collapsed. By then the Soviet system was an empty shell held together by corruption and inertia, and though it maintained peace throughout its vast territories and supplied a kind of security to its citizens that they were later to lose, it had little popular legitimacy. Even the Soviet elite lacked the will to defend the system, and when Gorbachev’s naive effort at reform triggered its collapse a state founded on terror fell apart without violence in a débâcle unprecedented in history. In the chaos that followed, the new humanity that the Soviet regime had been founded to create was nowhere to be seen. Human life had been altered, but in a process that had more in common with the alteration described in Kafka’s Metamorphosis than with anything dreamt by Marx, Lenin or Trotsky.

  NAZISM AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT

  Hitler and the Third Reich were the gruesome and incongruous consummation of an age which, as none other, believed in progress and felt assured it was being achieved.

  Lewis Namier37

  Like Bolshevism, Nazism was a European phenomenon. This may seem obvious, but the implication – that the origins of Nazism are in western civilization – is still resisted. Yet the Nazis did not come from a faraway land. Developing in the chaos of the interwar years, they were driven by beliefs that had been circulating in Europe for many centuries. The crimes of Nazism cannot be explained (as some have tried to explain the crimes of communism) as products of backwardness. They emanated from some of Europe’s most cherished traditions and implemented some of its most advanced ideas.

  The Enlightenment played an indispensable role in the development of Nazism. Nazism is often presented as a movement that was opposed to the Enlightenment, and it is true that many Nazis thought of themselves as its enemies. They claimed to have learnt lessons from a body of thinkers belonging to a movement Isaiah Berlin called the Counter-Enlightenment – a diverse group that included reactionaries such as Joseph de Maistre and Romantics such as J. G. Herder.38 Nazi ideologues picked from these and other Counter-Enlightenment thinkers whatever they found useful – as they did with the thinkers of the Enlightenment. In both cases they were able to draw on powerful currents of anti-liberal thought. The argument advanced by some members of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School, which says that Nazism was a logical development of Enlightenment thinking, is much overstated; but there is more than a grain of truth in it.39

  An academic cliché has it that the Nazis were extreme Romantics who exalted emotion over reason. However, the idea that Nazism was a hyperbolic version of the Romantic Movement is at best an oversimplification. What the Nazis owed to the Romantics was a belief also shared by many Enlightenment thinkers – the idea that society had once been an organic whole and could be so again at some time in the future. Romantic thinkers had different ideas about where this organic society existed – some looked to medieval Christendom, others to ancient Greece, still others to faraway countries of which they knew nothing. Wherever they thought they had found it, their vision of society was a chimera. No society has ever been a harmonious whole, and with its suspicion of conflict and diversity the idea of organic community is always liable to be used against minorities. There is a clear link between integral nationalism of this
Romantic kind and Nazism. While the Nazis celebrated conflict, they believed that the Volk – the people – was a seamless whole that fell from unity only when corrupted by alien minorities. The peoples of the world were not equals, and the hierarchy that should exist among them could be secured only by force. But within the German Volk there would be a condition of perfect harmony.40

  The belief that society should be an organic whole is far from being only a Romantic idea, however. The fantasy of seamless community is as much a feature of Enlightenment thinking as of the Counter-Enlightenment. Like Fichte and other German thinkers of the nationalist Right, Marx condemned trade and disparaged individualism. Like the Romantics he condemned the division of labour as inhuman. Like them he looked to the remote past for a society in which humanity was not alienated or repressed. He found it in a prehistoric condition of ‘primitive communism’, which he believed had once been universal (but of which no trace has ever been found). No less than the thinkers of the Counter-Enlightenment, Marx promoted a myth of organic community.

  If Enlightenment thinkers shared some of the worst ideas of the Counter-Enlightenment, the Counter-Enlightenment contained much that was at odds with Nazi ideology. Consider Herder and de Maistre. Each rejected the Enlightenment project but neither was in any sense a proto-Nazi. Herder never accepted any kind of hierarchy among cultures or races (as some key Enlightenment thinkers did). On the contrary he affirmed that there are many cultures, each in some way unique, which cannot be ranked on a single scale of value. De Maistre would have been horrified by the Nazis’ atheism and by their doctrines of racial superiority. At the most important points, Nazi ideology and Counter-Enlightenment thought are opposed.

  A connection can be traced between Nazi ideology and Nietzsche, but it is with Nietzsche in his role as an Enlightenment thinker. The genealogy that traces Nazism back to Nietzsche is suspect, if only because it was promoted by his Nazi sister, Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche (1846–1935) – who looked after Nietzsche in his last years and whose funeral Hitler attended. Even so there are points of affinity, and they are found in the areas where Nietzsche is closest to the Enlightenment. Nietzsche was a lifelong admirer of Voltaire – the celebrated Enlightenment rationalist – and like Voltaire he despised Rousseau’s exaltation of emotion over reason. While Nietzsche appears as a Romantic in a popular stereotype, he was in fact a thinker who took a radical version of the Enlightenment project to its conclusion.41