The Devil in History

bringing the world in line with such millennialism. The old order needed to be smashed, so its human embodiments were demonized and became targets for merciless persecution. In his manifesto against the Mensheviks, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904), Lenin proclaimed that “it would be the most criminal cowardice to doubt even for a moment the inevitable and complete triumph of the principles of revolutionary Social-Democracy, of proletarian organization and Party discipline [my emphasis].”⁶² Bertrand Russell noticed as early as 1920 that there was a central duality within Bolshevism that contained the movement’s doom: there was, on the one hand, “its commitment to a certain conception of modernization,” and, on the other hand, “an ideological commitment to an ideological world view shaped by ideological zeal and intolerance of other world views, which was a denial of the Enlightenment to rational discourse.”⁶³ In other words, Bolshevism was pregnant with its own Inquisition from the beginning.

No less important, the appeal of Communism was linked to the extraordinary power of its ideology (and the core myth of the party as the carrier of reason in history). No other revolutionary movement has been as successful as Leninism in turning a gnostic creed into a self-hypnotizing weapon. Leninist militants worldwide believed in the myth of the party with an ardor comparable only to the illuminates of religious millennial sects. It is important to insist on both the ideological and institutional foundations of Leninism when we try to fathom the mystery of Leninism’s endurance in the twentieth century. The myth of the party as the repository of historical wisdom and rationality is the key to grasping the dynamics and finally the decay and extinction of Leninism. Leninism, in its various phases, was what Ken Jowitt described as a “Catholic moment” in history, when “a universal ‘word’ becomes institutional ‘flesh,’ an authoritatively standardized and centered institutional format dominates a highly diverse set of cultures.” The Althusserian interpretation remains valid only if one performs a phraseological inversion: Leninism was a new praxis of philosophy. The explanation of its longevity in the twentieth century can therefore be found in “the promise of the Great October Revolution… of the Soviet Union as socialist hierophany.”⁶⁴

The biographies of the ideological elites in Soviet-type regimes were usually colorless and lacked any moment of real distinction. In Eastern Europe, the ideological watchdogs were recruited from the Muscovite factions of the ruling parties. In Hungary, Jozsef Revai, once one of Georg Lukacs’s promising disciples, became a scourge of intellectual life. Revai was a member of the Hungarian delegation to various Cominform meetings and enthusiastically implemented the Zhdanovist strategy. In Romania, the tandem of Iosif Chi?inevschi and Leonte Rautu forced the national culture into a mortal impasse. Similar denials of genuine national traditions and an apocryphal sense of internationalism were promoted by ideological bureaucracies in Czechoslovakia (Vilem Kopecky, Jiri Hendrich)⁶⁵ and East Germany (Gerhart Eisner, Albert Norden, Kurt Hager).⁶⁶ All devices were convenient when it came to uprooting vicious deviationist temptations. “Bourgeois nationalism” was fused with “rootless cosmopolitanism” in the diabolical figure of the malignant enemy. In the meantime, socialist nationalism was thriving. The members of the ideological army were willingly officiating in the rites of the cult. Deprived of their own personality, they were glad to identify with and invest in Stalin’s superpersonality. After the terrorist dissolution of the ego, it was normal for the apparatchiks to project themselves into Stalin’s myth as an institutionalized superego.

The Cominform emerged in September 1947 as the first attempt to institutionalize the satellitization of Eastern Europe. It represented an initiative to contain and annihilate the centrifugal trends within world Communism (the “domesticist” temptation and the search for a “national path to socialism” championed by militants as different as Gottwald, Gomulka, and Patraa?canu). It laid the foundation for future frameworks of supragovernmental domination and ideological hegemony from the Soviet Communist Party. Paradoxically, the Cominform brought about the first instance of dissent and revisionism from a partystate (the Titoist “heresy”). In Tito’s case there was a significant level of ambivalence: he supported enthusiastically Stalin’s new orientation (Zhdanov’s “two camp theory”) but thought the moment was propitious for furthering his own hegemonic agenda in the Balkans. One could call such a strategic syndrome parallel hegemonism. The irony of the situation was that the break between the two leaders happened at a time when Soviet and Yugoslav visions of class struggle at the world level mirrored each other. In 1947-48, Tito underestimated the total monopoly of power achieved by the Kremlin tyrant, and he fancied himself the beneficiary of some leverage in regional decision-making. Historian Ivo Banac correctly diagnosed the paradox: “The dramatic denouement of 1948 was directly connected with Stalin’s fears that Yugoslavia began to take on a role of regional communist center and the inherent potential provocations against the West that such a position entailed.”⁶⁷ Indeed, the leader of the League of Communists in Yugoslavia (until 1952 the Yugoslav Communist Party) carried along unabated with his plans of creating a Communist Danubian confederation (which was to incorporate Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Romania)⁶⁸ while simultaneously persevering in the assimilation of the Albanian Communist Party (which in 1948 became the Albanian Party of Labor).

The conflict with Yugoslavia and Tito’s excommunication from the Cominform in June 1948 signaled the beginning of dramatic purges in Eastern Europe Communist parties. It also indicated that Moscow’s hegemony could not completely suppress domestic tendencies even in the most pro-Soviet Communist factions. Nevertheless, in Stalin’s view, at such a dangerous time, when the imperialists had decided to intensify their aggressive actions against the budding “people’s democracies,” and the threat of a new world war loomed large, no country or leader could be allowed to engage in national Communist experiments. Those identified as nationalists could be charged with the most fantastic sins. After all, the sole principle of legitimation for the ruling Communist parties in the Soviet bloc was their unreserved attachment to the Soviet Union, their readiness to carry out unflinchingly all of Stalin’s directives. The harshness of Stalin’s reaction can be explained by the fact that the Soviet Communist Party leadership reactivated the geopolitical motif of “capitalist encirclement.” In this vein, the end of the Second World War triggered a new imperialist offensive against Communism that, according to Stalin, signaled an imminent world-scale armed conflict. Under the circumstances, any national Communism temptation had to be crushed in the bud. Therefore, within the countries of the Soviet bloc, party leaders would be allowed to enjoy the adoration of their subordinates, but their cults were only echoes of the true faith: unswerving love for Stalin. In the words of Wladislaw Gomulka, the cult of the local leaders “could be called only a reflected brilliance, a borrowed light. It shone as the moon does.”⁶⁹

Links with Tito were used as arguments to demonstrate the political unreliability of certain East European leaders (e.g., Laszlo Rajk in Hungary, who fought in the Spanish Civil War and had maintained friendly relations with members of Tito’s entourage). It is worth discussing in this context the analysis of forced confessions proposed by Erica Glaser Wallach, Noel Field’s foster daughter, whose parents were members of the medical units associated with the International Brigades in Spain:

That depends on you, confess your crimes, cooperate with us, and we shall do anything in our power to help you. We might even consider letting you go free if we are satisfied that you have left the enemy camp and have honestly contributed to the cause of justice and progress. We are no man-eaters, and we are not interested in revenge. Besides you are not the real enemy; we are not interested in you but in the criminals behind you, the sinister forces of imperialism and war. You do not have to defend them; they will fight their own losing battle. People like you we want to help—and we do frequently—to find their way back to a normal life and a decent place in society…. You want to know what a capitalist snake looks like? Take a look at her, at that bag of filth standing over there. You will never see such a low and abominable creature…. Take that dirty smile off your face, you American stooge…. You are a prostitute! That’s what you are. Worse than that: prostitutes sell only their bodies: you sold your soul. For American dollars, stinking American dollars.⁷⁰

Domesticism, according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, was an exaggerated if frequently unconscious “preoccupation with local, domestic communist objectives, at the expense of broader, international Soviet goals.”⁷¹ It was not an elaborated philosophy of opposition to Soviet hegemony, but a conviction on the part of some East European leaders, like Gomulka in Poland, Lucre?iu Patra?canu in Romania, and Traicho Kostov in Bulgaria, that national interests were not necessarily incompatible with the Soviet agenda and that such purposes could therefore be pursued with impunity. Henceforth, the Cominform’s main task—if not its only task— was to suppress such domestic ambitions. The fulfillment of the Stalinist design for Eastern Europe included the pursuit of a singular strategy that could eventually transform the various national political cultures into carbon copies of the “advanced” Soviet experience. Local Communist parties, engaged in frantic attempts to imitate the