The Devil in History

Lucre?iu Patra?canu died as a soldier serving his political ideals which he pursued through darkness, underground, and palaces, tenaciously, fiercely and fanatically.

—Petre Pandrea, Memoriile Mandarinului Valah (Memoirs of a Wallachian Mandarin)

With ascetic rigor towards itself and others, fanatical hatred for enemies and heretics, sectarian bigotry and an unlimited despotism fed on the awareness of its own infallibility, this monastic order labors to satisfy earthly, too “human” concerns.

—Semyon Frank, Vekhi (Landmarks)

It’s not only the word “impossible” that has gone out of circulation, “unimaginable” also has no validity anymore.

—Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness

One of the main distinctions between the Nazi and Stalinist tyrannies was the absence in Germany of permanent purges of the ruling party elite as a mechanism of mobilization, integration, and scapegoating. In fact, Slovene philosopher Slavoj Zizek is right to observe that there were no Moscow-style show trials in Hitler’s Germany (or for that matter in Mussolini’s Italy).¹ The explanation lies in the differences between the centrality of the charismatic party in Bolshevik regimes and the prevailing status of the leader in Fascist dictatorships. This is not say that the leader (whether Stalin, Mao, Matyas Rakosi, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, Klement Gottwald, or Enver Hoxha) was not an omnipotent figure under Leninism, but his cultic power derived from the apotheosis of the party as the carrier of history’s behests. The absence of show trials in Nazi Germany did not eliminate purges as a means to consolidate the Fuhrer’s power.² The Blomberg-Frisch affair, when Hitler entrenched his dominance over the army leadership, and the elimination of the Ernst Rohm SA faction during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, were, according to Ian Kershaw, “stepping-stones in cementing Hitler’s absolute power.”³

In order to understand the dynamics of the Stalinist experiment in Eastern Europe, one must take into account the paramount role of direct Soviet intervention and intimidation.⁴ Local Communist formations were pursuing the Stalinist model of systematic destruction of non-Communist parties, the disintegration of the civil society, and the monopolistic occupation of the public space through state-controlled ideological rituals and coercive institutions.⁵ The overall goal was to build a passive consensus based on unlimited commitment to the ideocratic political program of the ruling elite. The true content of the political regime was described by the “cult of personality.” Stalin, as the Egocrat (to use Solzhenitsyn’s term), was the ultimate figure of power. Echoing earlier critiques of the Leninist vertical- authoritarian logic by Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, French political philosopher Claude Lefort points out that this principle presupposed a specific “logic of identification”: “Identification of the people with the proletariat, of the proletariat with the party, of the party with the leadership, of the leadership with the Egocrat…. The denial of social division goes hand in hand with the denial of a symbolic distinction which is constitutive of society.”⁶ The personalization of political power, its concentration in the hands of a demigod, led to his forcible religious adoration and the masochistic humiliation of its subjects. British journalist George Urban described this system as “a paranoia of despotism” that boasted its own (il) logic. It looks now and did then “like a form of madness to us, observing it as we are from the outside, but did not seem so to anyone identifying himself with the context in which Stalin operated. Within that context Stalin pursued his objectives relentlessly and rationally.”⁷ In the context of such absolute inversion of the life-world, Old Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin’s letter to Stalin on December 10, 1937, a few months before his public trial and execution as an “enemy of the people” in March 1938, can make sense. Bukharin, like Karl Radek, another Bolshevik luminary, was the prototype of the character Nikolai Salmanovich Rubashov in Arthur Koestler’s masterpiece Darkness at Noon (it was Radek who spoke of the “algebra of confession”).⁸ As historians J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov point out, “According to Stalin’s formula, criticism was the same as opposition; opposition inevitably implied conspiracy; conspiracy meant treason. Algebraically, therefore, the slightest opposition to the regime or failure to report such opposition was tantamount to terrorism.”⁹

Once Stalin’s close friend and supporter, ousted under charges of “right-wing deviation” in 1929 and reinstated into the Central Committee in 1934, Bukharin had been described by Lenin in his “Testament” as the party’s “favorite child.”¹⁰ He had bowed to Stalin’s supremacy and was in fact one of the authors of the 1936 Stalinist Constitution. The same year, Bukharin traveled to Paris to retrieve the Marx-Engels Archive from the exiled German social democrats. In spite of old friends’ warnings (among them veteran Mensheviks Fyodor Dan and Boris Nikolaevsky) that back in Moscow he would be arrested, Bukharin refused to remain abroad. He was imprisoned after the notorious February 1937 Central Committee Plenum when Stalin spelled out his theory of the sharpening of class struggle as the USSR advanced toward socialism. Bukharin was forced to publicly confess to surreal charges. However, he refused to acknowledge having participated in a plot to arrest Lenin in 1918. Stalin’s outstanding biographer, Robert C. Tucker, best describes Bukharin’s contradictory stance: “He pleaded guilty to ‘the sum total of the crimes committed by this counter-revolutionary organization,’ but thereupon suggested that not only did he not take part in but he even lacked knowledge of ‘any particular act’ involved.”¹¹

During the last days of his trial, Bukharin wrote a letter to Stalin. In it he claimed “personal intimacy” with the Soviet leader, actually reaffirming his unswerving faith in the party’s vision of social utopia and the Bolshevik revolutionary cause. Furthermore, this love for the party translated into an almost neurotic desire to reassure Stalin of his unbending dedication to the infallible leader himself. This document (which Stalin kept in his personal drawer until his death in March 1953) bears testimony to the mystical underpinnings of the Bolshevik belief system and its reverberations in the interpersonal relations within the top party elite. It is therefore worth quoting extensively from Bukharin’s letter:

This is perhaps the last letter I shall write to you before my death. That is why, though I am in prison, I ask you to permit me to write this letter without resorting to officialese [ofitsial’shchina], all the more so since I am writing this letter to you alone: the very fact of its existence or nonexistence will remain entirely in your hands. I have come to the last page of my drama and perhaps of my very life. I agonize over whether I should pick up pen and paper—as I write this, I am shuddering all over from this quiet and from a thousand emotions stirring within me and I can hardly control myself. But precisely because I have so little time left, I want to take my leave of you in advance, before it’s too late, before my hand ceases to write, before my eyes close, while my brain somehow still functions…. Standing on the edge of a precipice, from which there is no return, I tell you on my word of honor, as I await my death, that I am innocent of those crimes which I admitted to at the investigation…. So at the Plenum I spoke the truth and nothing but the truth but no one believed me. And here now I speak the absolute truth: all these past years, I have been honestly and sincerely carrying out the party line and have learnt to cherish and love you wisely…. There is something great and bold about the political idea of a general purge. It is a) connected to the pre-war situation and b) connected with the transition to democracy. This purge encompassed 1) the guilty; 2) persons under suspicion; and 3) persons under potential suspicion. This business could not have been managed without you. Some are neutralized one way, others in another way, and the third group yet another way…. For God’s sake, don’t think that I am engaged here in reproaches, even in my inner thoughts. I wasn’t born yesterday. I know all too well that great plans, great ideas, and great interests take precedence over everything, and I know that it would be petty to place the question of my own person on a par with the universal- historical tasks resting, first and foremost, on your shoulders. But it is here that I feel my deepest agony and find myself facing my chief, agonizing paradox…. My head is giddy