Gramsci had a better way. A subtler blueprint for Marxist victory. After all, was not Lenin’s geopolitical structure already a more brilliant creation by far for fomenting a stealthy revolution in the way people think, than it would ever be for fomenting bloody uprisings that never materialized anyway?
Use Lenin’s geopolitical structure not to conquer streets and cities, argued Gramsci. Use it to conquer the mind of civil society. Use it to acquire a Marxist hegemony over the minds of the populations that must be won.
Clearly, if Gramsci was to change the common cultural outlook, the first order of business had to be to change the outward face of the Communist Party.
For starters, Marxists would have to drop all Leninist shibboleths. It wouldn’t do to rant about “revolution” and “dictatorship of the proletariat” and the “Workers’ Paradise.” Instead, according to Gramsci, Marxists would have to exalt such ideas as “national consensus” and “national unity” and “national pacification.”
Further, advised Gramsci, Marxists around the world would have to behave as the CP in Italy was already behaving. They would have to engage in the practical and normally accepted democratic processes, in lobbying and voting and the full gamut of parliamentary participation. They would have to behave in every respect the way Western democrats behave—not only accepting the existence of many political parties but forging alliances with some and friendships with others. They would have to defend pluralism, in fact.
And—heresy of all Leninist heresies—Marxists would even have to defend different types of Communist parties in different countries. The Central Committee of the CPSU would still be the operational center of world Marxism—would still direct this new style of world revolution by penetration and corruption. But no Communist Party in any country outside the Soviet Union would be a forced clone of the CPSU.
On top of all that, Marxists must imitate, perfect and expand the roles already invented by Lenin and his “intelligence expert,” Feliks Dzerzhinsky, for the foreign arms of CHEKA and its successor organizations. In other words, they must join in whatever liberating causes might come to the fore in different countries and cultures as popular movements, however dissimilar those movements might initially be from Marxism or from one another. Marxists must join with women, with the poor, with those who find certain civil laws oppressive. They must adopt different tactics for different cultures and subcultures. They must never show an inappropriate face. And, in this manner, they must enter into every civil, cultural and political activity in every nation, patiently leavening them all as thoroughly as yeast leavens bread.
Even such a pervasive blueprint as that would not work in the end, however, unless Gramsci could successfully target Marxism’s greatest enemy. If there was any true superstructure that had to be eliminated, it was the Christianity that had created and still pervaded Western culture in all its forms, activities and expressions. This attack must be strong everywhere, of course, but particularly in Southern Europe and Latin America, where Roman Catholicism most deeply guided the thinking and the actions of the generality of populations.
For this purpose, Gramsci felt the timing was rather good. For though Christianity appeared on the surface to be strong, it had for some time been debilitated by unceasing attacks against its teachings and its structural unity.
True to his general blueprint for action, therefore, Gramsci’s idea was that Marxist action must be unitary against what he saw to be the failing remnant of Christianity. And by a unitary attack, Gramsci meant that Marxists must change the residually Christian mind. He needed to alter that mind—to turn it into its opposite in all its details—so that it would become not merely a non-Christian mind but an anti-Christian mind.
In the most practical terms, he needed to get individuals and groups in every class and station of life to think about life’s problems without reference to the Christian transcendent, without reference to God and the laws of God. He needed to get them to react with antipathy and positive opposition to any introduction of Christian ideals or the Christian transcendent into the treatment and solution of the problems of modern life.
That had to be accomplished; no question about it. For Gramsci was a Marxist through and through. And the bedrock essence of Marxism—the cornerstone of the Marxist ideal of a this-worldly Paradise as the summit of human existence—is that there is nothing beyond the matter of this universe. There is nothing in existence that transcends man—his material organism within his material surroundings.
It was a fact pure and simple, therefore, that the residue of Christian transcendentalism in the world had to be replaced with genuinely Marxist immanentism.
It was also obvious that such goals, like most of Gramsci’s blueprint, had to be pursued by means of a quiet and anonymous revolution. No armed and bloody uprisings would do it. No bellicose confrontations would win the day. Rather, everything must be done in the name of man’s dignity and rights, and in the name of his autonomy and freedom from outside constraint. From the claims and constraints of Christianity, above all.
Accomplish that, said Gramsci, and you will have established a true and freely adopted hegemony over the civil and political thinking of every formerly Christian country. Do that, he promised, and in essence you will have Marxized the West. The final step—the Marxization of the politics of life itself—will then follow. All classes will be one class. All minds will be proletarian minds. The earthly Paradise will be achieved.
The actual implementation of Gramsci’s formula for Marxist success went by fits and starts. Predictably, it seemed to Stalin—and to Stalinists everywhere—that such a program as Gramsci had laid out for his Italian socialist brothers and argued so persuasively in his writings was a threat to the most fundamental tenets of Leninism. There was only one principal Communist Party: the CPSU. And the function of all other Communist parties was to march behind the CPSU in fomenting violent proletarian revolution around the world.
Furthermore, Gramsci’s formula for allowing varying forms of Communism to be conditioned by the situation in each country and, therefore, to be different from Soviet Communism ran head-on against Stalin’s insistence on total personal control and preeminence.
Nevertheless, while Gramsci’s basic ideas were repudiated by Moscow, they did begin to find their way into practical field operations around the world. Over time, there was a gradual, if unspoken, rapprochement between the “official” Leninist process and the process set in motion with the spread of Gramsci’s ideas. Even as early as the late 1940s and early 1950s, it began to dawn on some that the stealthier process of revolution by infiltration that the dead Sardinian had bequeathed to them was exactly the means of spreading Leninist Marxism throughout the world.
Gramsci’s tactical wisdom became increasingly evident in its success. The principles he had set out—especially his principle of Communism tailored to fit conditions and situations that varied from country to country—gave birth by the early fifties to what came to be called Eurocommunism.
Indeed, as his process took hold in an increasing number of countries in Western Europe, the Gramsci bug bit such Eastern satellite countries as Albania and Yugoslavia, as well; for they found in Gramsci added justification and fuel for their continuing refusal to move in lockstep in the Stalinist orbit.
Not surprisingly, Stalin’s opposition to Gramsci’s ghost only grew greater during those years. But, in his very opposition, Stalin proved his dead Marxist adversary correct in another of his prophecies. For Gramsci had accurately predicted the reaction of the West to any overt advance of Leninism, even as he had known it in the thirties.
The West’s response to Stalin’s strident official post-World War II policies of the forties was to reach for the defense of military arms and economic provision. The Marshall Plan was proposed and carried out to revive Western Europe. NATO and SEATO were created. Western nations patrolled the strategic choke points in the trade lanes of the world’s oceans; and they elaborated extensively on thei
r own counterintelligence operations. Within their own borders, meanwhile, the several Western nations began their own far-reaching welfare structures as an answer to the economic needs of their various populations.
But time ran out for Stalin at last. Despite his decades of rampaging in blood and gore—and thanks to the first beginnings of success for Gramsci’s policies—by the time Stalin died, at 9:50 P.M. on March 5, 1953, Eurocommunism was an irreversible fact of life.
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In important ways, the history of East and West during the tenures of the four general secretaries who followed Stalin in the USSR—Nikita Khrushchev (1953-64), Leonid Brezhnev (1964-82), Yuri Andropov (1982-84) and Konstantin Chernenko (1984-85)—is the story of the successful haunting of both sides of the Cold War by the ghost of Antonio Gramsci.
With Stalin gone, the professional counterintelligence experts in the Party-State of the Soviet Union were the first officially to recognize the truth of Gramsci’s prediction that following the Leninist and Stalinist policy of fomenting violent revolution abroad, they could not create the proletarian revolution in the minds and lives of capitalist populations. And they were the first to understand that, in Gramsci’s blueprint, they had stumbled onto the counterintelligence formula par excellence. They knew he had provided the Soviets of the Kremlin with what could be described—in appropriate KGB parlance—as the most far-reaching exercise of deception ever executed by the Party-State, an exercise already perfectly fitted to the international structure Lenin had created.
Professional intelligence experts have detailed the various phases of that Soviet counterintelligence operation over the years following Stalin’s death. As John Dziak sets it out, a whole new intelligence vocabulary had to be developed to cover the intricate activity inspired by Gramsci’s mandate. It was, as Dziak phrases it, a stylized “Russian and Soviet operational vocabulary used in the integration of varied state security operational activities.”
Even a partial lexicon of that new vocabulary is instructive: “active measures” (aktivnyye meropriyatiya), “disinformation” (dezinformatsiya) and “military deception” (maskirovka) were brilliantly “combined” (kombinatsiya) to elicit from the West precisely the desired reactions.
Trained and field-hardened Soviet agents made sport of the West with their calculated gambles designed to elicit consent to their own deception on the part of leading political, educational, bureaucratic and editorial targets. The entire field of play was webbed with the intricacies of “provocation” (provokatsiya), “penetration” (proniknoveniye), “fabrication” (fabrikatsiya), “diversion” (diversiya), “clandestine work” (konspiratsiya), deadly “wet affairs” (mokrye dela), “direct action” (aktivnyye akty), and by a “combination” of all those tactics and more.
Though he had predicted it all, it might have boggled even Gramsci’s mind to see the degree to which governments and individuals in the Christian, capitalist West responded to his anonymous revolution with their willing consent and their downright cooperation with the Soviet purpose regarding them.
Things were helped along a good deal when, in time-honored Soviet style, Nikita Khrushchev placed the blame for the problems the world had experienced with the Soviet Party-State squarely on Stalin’s head. Having come to the General Secretary’s chair in 1953, Khrushchev had consolidated his power by 1956. At the Moscow Party Congress that year, he made a scathing speech in which he denounced Stalin for his unspeakable crimes, repudiated Stalin’s personality cult and sent the “Miraculous Georgian” tumbling posthumously into thorough disgrace.
Within perhaps three years more, by about 1959, strategic military deception (maskirovka) and all the various forms of strategic political deception inspired by Gramsci’s brilliantly underhanded formula were organizationally centralized in the bureaucratic processes of the Soviet Party-State.
By that time, the twenty-eight-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev, already a veteran of Komsomol, had graduated from university and come to the attention of the doctrinal guardian of the CPSU, the then all-powerful Mikhail Suslov.
Both Gorbachev and Suslov understood and valued the new Soviet preoccupation with what John Dziak calls “complex operations analogous to chess moves.” The acme of counterintelligence was now seen to be—Dziak’s words again—“various operational undertakings in different times and places to enhance overall operational results.”
Such language may not sound romantic. But it was Gramsci’s dream coming true. The unbloody penetration of the West by means of his clandestine and nonviolent Marxist revolution was on its way.
Not that it was all smooth sailing, even then. It turned out that Nikita Khrushchev was not entirely firm in his choice of Gramsci’s policies over those of Stalin. It seemed to take the 1962 Cuban missile crisis to convince him once and for all that the capitalists—the Americans in this case—when pushed to the wall in open confrontation, would fight, even if to do that meant a nuclear war. Score another point for Gramsci’s judgment.
While the Cuban crisis made clear that the military and economic resistance of the West to Leninist Marxism was serious and well concentrated, it was still true that the whole field of Western culture, and all the places where culture is elaborated and diffused, could not be protected. Gramsci’s targets of first choice—educational facilities from grade school to university, for example, the media, political parties and structures, even the family unit—were all fat, happy and wide open to systematic and professional Marxist penetration.
By the end of the Khrushchev era, therefore, the Gramscian process had been fully integrated into the official Leninist process. Gramsci’s ghost had won the political war in Moscow that Gramsci the man had lost in 1923. Next to his accurate analysis and predictions, the expectations of Lenin and Stalin appeared bumbling, and their policies seemed elephantine.
Under Leonid Brezhnev, who succeeded Khrushchev as General Secretary of the CPSU in 1964, the official thrust of modified Leninism was concentrated in two main policies. The first—total penetration of Western intelligence—presented no great difficulty for the Soviets. The second—insistence that the USSR be accepted, “warts and all” in the expression of the time, as a legally constituted and fully legitimate world power—took a little while to get under way.
The first policy was steadily advanced by the KGB in its stunningly professional counterintelligence operation, which successfully penetrated the military, scientific and industrial fields throughout the West. Western experts are only now coming to count the number of “deep” contacts—the network of dormant “moles” devised forty years before by Lenin as part and parcel of his global structure—who were activated during the 1960s. And then there were all those others who were not exactly “moles” but who had been so cleverly and deeply compromised one way or another by the KGB that their cooperation could be called in at will, like so many outstanding IOUs.
This facet of Brezhnev’s intelligence policy enabled the USSR to keep pace with the West in military, scientific and space breakthroughs. But it left the masses of peoples in the West largely untouched. The second part of Brezhnev’s policy—his thrust at full acceptance of the USSR by the capitalist West—addressed that problem like a steamroller. And it owed its success to the process Gramsci had authored.
That policy was given a name. The “Brezhnev doctrine,” it was called. And its meaning could not have been more clear as it developed during the presidencies of Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford. The peoples and territories the USSR had acquired—whether by military conquest; or by political sabotage and subterfuge; or by reneging on its word to its World War II allies against Hitler—all of them now “belonged” to the Soviet Union. Moreover, the Soviet Union could resort to arms and invasion, if necessary, to enforce its claim to those territories. The meaning of what was politely called “détente” between East and West during the terms of Nixon and Ford was summed up precisely and accurately in that so-called Brezhnev doctrine.
In 1975, the West
fully and officially acquiesced in the Soviet policy of détente. At the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, thirty-five nations signed the Final Act of the Helsinki Agreements, by which the West agreed to pretend that the USSR had a legal right to all those territories and peoples it had acquired.
Not only had détente worked; it had worked on Gramsci’s terms. Despite its lies, its excesses, its terrorist methods, its genocidal policies and its continuing existence as the world’s only counterintelligence state, the Soviet Unon was a respectable member of the comity of nations. It was right there in black and white: As a nation that respected and observed the rights of men outlined in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and specified in the Helsinki pacts, the Soviets had reached the summit of international acceptability.
Following the Gramsci blueprint, however, that was hardly the end of the matter. Rather, it was more in the nature of a new beginning. For the USSR was now in a position to posture in all seriousness as a normally regulated world power, while the counterintelligence activity of the Party-State—that first arm of Brezhnev’s dual policy—redoubled its operational efforts.
Clearly, the time had come to get on in deadly earnest with the Marxization of the mind of Western culture. For, following Gramsci’s lead, long use of Lenin’s labyrinthine geopolitical machine by the KGB had finally paid off. At Helsinki, the West had shown itself to be leavened to the point of willing cooperation in its own final conversion.
It had not been forgotten during all those years that the oldest and most formidable enemy of cultural and political Marxism was the worldwide Roman Catholic Church. Neither the Brezhnev doctrine nor détente nor Helsinki changed that.
The first opening by which the Roman Catholic Church did in fact become the most useful tool of all for the Gramscian penetration of Western culture presented itself out of the blue while Nikita Khrushchev was still running things in the Soviet Union.
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