The Devil in History

This is why Furet, in his closing remarks to Passing of an Illusion, states that upon the moral and political collapse of Leninism we “are condemned to live in the world as it is” (p. 502). With a significantly stronger brush, Martin Malia argued that “any realistic account of communist crimes would effectively shut the door on Utopia; and too many good souls in this unjust world cannot abandon hope for an absolute end to inequality (and some less good souls will always offer them ‘rational’ curative nostrums). And so, all comrade- questers after historical truth should gird their loins for a very Long March indeed before Communism is accorded its fair share of absolute evil.”¹³² And, indeed, two important registers of criticism directed toward the process of revealing and remembering the crimes of Communist regimes were that of anti-anti-utopianism and anticapitalism. I will not dwell on the validity of counterpoising Communism with capitalism; it is a dead end. It just reproduces the original Manichean Marxist revolutionary ethos of the Communist Manifesto. It is endearing to a certain extent, for one’s beliefs should be respected, but it is irrelevant if we seek to understand the tragedy of the twentieth century. The employment of anti-anti-utopianism in the discussion of left-wing totalitarianism is just another way of avoiding the truth. To reject the legitimacy of the comparison between National Socialism and Bolshevism on the basis of their distinct aims is utterly indecent and logically flawed. Ian Kershaw criticizes arguments based on the

different aims and intentions of Nazism and Bolshevism—aims which were wholly inhumane and negative in the former case and ultimately humane and positive in the latter case. The argument is based upon a deduction from the future (neither verifiable nor feasible) to the present, a procedure which in strict logic is not permissible…. The purely functional point that communist terror was “positive” because it was “directed towards a complete and radical change in society” whereas “fascist (i.e., Nazi) terror reached its highest point with the destruction of the Jews” and “made no attempt to alter human behavior or build a genuinely new society” is, apart from the debatable assertion in the last phrase, a cynical value judgment on the horrors of the Stalinist terror [my emphasis].¹³³

Recognizing Communism as hope soaked in revolutionary utopia is truly a specter to turn away from. This hope materialized as radical evil can only lead to massacre, because “il cherche a s’incarner, et ce faisant, il ne peut faire autrement qu’eliminer ceux qui n’appartiennent pas a la bonne classe sociale, ceux qui resistent a ce projet d’espoir [it looks to take flesh, and doing this, it can only eliminate those who do not belong to the right social class, those who resist this project of hope].”¹³⁴ Ronald Suny was right in emphasizing that we should not forget that the original aspirations of socialism “were the emancipatory impulses of the Russian Revolution as well.”¹³⁵ It is difficult to see how this affects the “duty of remembrance” regarding Leninism’s crimes. Not to mention that, as early as 1918, with the Declaration of the Rights of Toiling and Exploited People, the Bolsheviks detailed their ideal of social justice into categories of disenfranchised people (lishentsy), the prototype taxonomy for the terror that was to follow in the later years.¹³⁶ Tony Judt puts it bluntly: “The road to Communist hell was undoubtedly paved with good (Marxist) intentions. But so what?… From the point of view of the exiled, humiliated, tortured, maimed or murdered victims, of course, it’s all the same.”¹³⁷ Furthermore, such shameful commonalities between socialism and Bolshevism should actually be an incentive to call things by their real name when it comes to the radical evil that Communism in power was throughout the twentieth century. The hope that Bolshevism brought to so many was a lie. The full impact of the lie can only be measured by the nightmare of the millions it murdered. The moral and political bankruptcy of the “pure” original ideals cannot remain hidden just for the sake of safeguarding their pristine state. The uproar provoked by the Black Book indicated a “continuing reluctance to take at face value the overwhelming evidence of crimes committed by communist regimes.”¹³⁸ So many years after the book’s publication, some things have changed, but much more remains to be done. To return to Kolakowski’s metaphor, the devil not only incarnated itself in history, it also wrecked our memory of it.

Beyond debates about how to remember, compare, and analyze Communism and Fascism, there is a bottom line that all can accept. Perhaps with minimal difficulty all can agree with Emilio Gentile’s conclusion that “totalitarian experiments, even if they were imperfect and flawed, involved, conditioned, transformed, deformed and ended the existence of millions of human beings. In no uncertain terms, this was determined by the conviction of the principal protagonists that they were the forebears of a new humanity, the builders of a new civilization, the interpreters of a new truth, the repositories for the discrimination between good and evil, and the masters of the destinies of those caught up in their enterprise.”¹³⁹ At the end of the day, reflecting on the “why” of the whole Communist experience, one needs to remember that Leninism emerged from the meeting between a certain direction of European revolutionary socialism, one that could in no way come to terms with the established liberal order and the rights of the individual, and the Russian tradition of conspiratorial violence. The mixture of revolutionary anticapitalism and ultranationalist German racism led to Hitler’s chiliastic dreams of Aryan supremacy.¹⁴⁰ At a speech in the Berlin Sports Palace on February 10, 1933, Hitler formulated with religious fervor his “predestined mission” to resurrect the German nation: “For I cannot divest of my faith in my people, cannot dissociate myself from the conviction that this nation will one day rise again, cannot divorce myself from my love for this, my people, and I cherish the firm conviction that the hour will come at last in which the millions who despise us today will stand by us and with us will hail the new, hard-won and painfully acquired German Reich we have created together, the new German kingdom of greatness and power and glory and justice. Amen.”¹⁴¹ Similarly, Mussolini confessed in My Autobiography that “I felt the deep need for an original conception capable of bringing about a more fruitful rhythm of history in a new period of history. It was necessary to lay the foundation of a new civilization.” Fascism for Mussolini was the solution to “the Spiritual Crisis of Italy.”¹⁴² The same frenzy for “a new temporality and nomos,” alternative and opposite to that of liberal modernity, was also at the core of Communism. Such a sense of mission was apparent at the Congress of Victors (the Seventeenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) in January-February 1934, as the Soviet regime entered the second five-year plan and finalized the Cultural Revolution, after Stalin had murdered, starved, and deported millions of kulaks in Ukraine and forcibly resettled several ethnic groups, and as he consolidated his position as undisputed leader of the Bolshevik party. At such a “glorious moment,” almost two and a half years before the beginning of the Great Terror, Politburo member Lazar Kaganovich praised Stalin as the creator “of the greatest revolution that human history has ever known.”¹⁴³

The plight of Communism’s millions of victims (many of whom had once espoused the generous promises of the Marxian doctrine) cannot be explained without reference to the Leninist party and its attempt to forcibly impose the will of a small group of fanatics over reticent and more often than not hostile populations. Mikhail Bakunin put it most aptly in an angry letter disavowing Sergey Nechaev’s apotheosis of destructive violence and psychological terrorism: “Out of that cruel renunciation and extreme fanaticism you now want to make a general principle applicable to the whole community. You want crazy things, impossible things, the total negation of nature, man, and society!”¹⁴⁴ Communism and Fascism believed that fundamental change was possible. They engineered radical revolutionary projects in order to answer this belief.¹⁴⁵ However, they enacted their utopias with complete disregard for individual human life. Their frantic acceleration of human development engendered the materialization of radical evil in history.

CHAPTER 2 Diabolical Pedagogy and the (Il) logic of Stalinism

I am too busy defending innocents claiming their innocence to waste my time with guilty individuals claiming their guilt.

—Paul Eluard, refusing to sign a petition against the hanging of Czech surrealist poet Zasvis Kalandra (in Stephane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism)