The Devil in History

He was the most significant figure of the “party intellectuals,” who produced, reproduced and instrumentalized ideological orthodoxy. A professional survivor prone to the most surreal dialectical acrobatics, Leonte Rautu adjusted and took advantage of the regime’s gradual systemic degeneration, making a successful transition from professional revolutionary to cunning and slippery bureaucrat always ready to hunt down heretics among party ranks and within society as whole. Born in 1910, Rautu joined the RCP in 1929 (while a student in mathematics at Bucharest University) and in the 1930s became head of the propaganda and agitation department. In Doftana Prison he came in contact with Gheorghiu-Dej and Nicolae Ceau?escu. In the following years he became the editor of Scinteia, the party’s illegal newspaper. In 1940 he left Romania and took refuge in the USSR, becoming the director of the Romanian section of Radio Moscow. He returned to the country with Ana Pauker, Vasile Luca, and Valter Roman, and initiated a domestic version of Zhdanovism. In one of his most vehemently Zhdanovite speeches, “Against Cosmopolitanism and Objectivism in Social Sciences,”⁹² Rautu declared war on everything that was worthy in the national culture: “The channels by which cosmopolitan views become pervasive, especially among intellectuals, are well known: servility to and kowtowing to bourgeois culture, the empty talk of the so-called community of progressive scientists and the representatives of reactionary, bourgeois science, national nihilism, meaning the negation of all that is valuable and progressive for each people in his culture and history, the contempt for the people’s language, hatred of the building of socialism, the defamation of all that is new and developing, replacing the partiinost with bourgeois objectivism, which ignores the fundamental difference between socialist, progressivist culture and bourgeois, reactionary culture.”⁹³

After 1953, he pursued a seemingly more balanced approach, as a defense mechanism in the context of de-Stalinization. His main weapon in these changing times was that of manipulation. The individual was always a tool with no distinct personality (rather being a complex of acquired or ascribed features); when s/he displayed the will for autonomous action, s/he became a victim of the diabolical logic of the purge (an excellent example is the career of Mihai Beniuc, the “little tyrant from the Writers’ Union,” as veteran Communist poet Miron Radu Paraschivescu once called him). Rautu’s cynicism and opportunism were flagrant in 1964, when the same individual who had directed the Sovietization of Romanian culture initiated a strident campaign against academia, which he unmasked and accused of “having forgotten true national values” and of “shamelessly showing fealty to even the slightest Soviet achievement.” Leonte Rautu’s career was fundamentally characterized by an extraordinary capacity for siding with those in power within the RCP. He first became a favorite of Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca, obtaining his position at Radio Moscow and his initial nominations in Romania because of this connection. By 1952, he jumped into Dej’s boat, being, along with Miron Constantinescu, the author of the May- June Plenary Session resolution, the text on which the purge proceedings were based (what came to be known as “the June nights”). His inquisitorial contribution to the Pauker case was not the first (see his involvement in unmasking Patra?canu’s intellectual “crimes”) and wouldn’t be the last such activity. In 1957, he was again on the prosecutor’s bench during the party action against Chi?inevschi-Constantinescu (these events are often labeled in Romanian historiography “a failed de-Stalinization”). After the downfall of these two, who had been direct competitors in the struggle to administer the cultural front, Rautu became the unchallenged patriarch of the Communist politics of culture. With the exception of the period when he shared power with Grigore Preoteasa, Rautu created an apparatus manned by mediocre individuals, whose ego equaled their incompetence (e.g., Mihail Roller and Pavel ?ugui). The biography of Leonte Rautu is the perfect expression of the perverse game of Stalinist masks. Dissimulation, ethical promiscuity, and hypocrisy were the only constants of the apparatchik’s existence, a full-blown retreat from any moral imperative. Rautu was the incarnation of the diabolical antilogic of Stalinism: an individual experiencing an irresistible process of personal decline based upon unswerving subordination to the party leader beyond considerations such as reason, honor, and dignity.

The mind of the Stalinist elites in Eastern Europe was impressively revealed by the Polish journalist Teresa Toranska in a series of interviews conducted in the early 1980s with some former leaders of the Polish Communist Party. The most illuminating of these interviews is with the former Politburo member and Central Committee secretary Jakub Berman, who tried to defend the actions of his political generation. According to Berman, Polish Communists were right in championing Stalin’ policies in Poland because the Soviets guaranteed his country’s social and national liberation. The leaders of the Soviet-bloc Communist parties were convinced, like Lenin at the moment he founded the Bolshevik party, that the people needed an external force to enlighten them, that without such a vanguard party there was no hope of true emancipation. Berman was convinced that a day would come when mankind would do justice to this chiliastic dream of global revolution, and all the atrocities and crimes of Stalinism would be remembered only as passing incidents: “I am nonetheless convinced that the sum of our actions, skillfully and consistently carried out, will finally produce results and create a new Polish consciousness; because all the advantages flowing from our new path will be borne out, must be borne out, and… there will finally be a breakthrough in mentality which will give it an entirely new content and quality.”⁹⁴

In his absolute belief that history was on his and his comrades’ side, Berman was not alone. His was a mindset characteristic of the Communist elites in all Soviet satellite countries. Such (il)logic explains the frenzy of submission syndrome: the readiness to engage in any form of self-debasement and self-deprecation as long as such gestures were required by the party. The East European Communist leaders were seasoned militants for whom Stalin’s personality was an example of correct revolutionary conduct. They admired the Soviet leader’s intransigence and his uncompromising struggle against oppositional factions, and they shared his hostility to the West. They believed in the theory of permanent intensification of the class struggle and did their best to create a repressive system where critical tendencies could be immediately weeded out. Their minds were Manichean: Socialism was right, capitalism was wrong, and there was no middle road. During their Communist underground service, the Soviet-bloc Communists had learned to see Stalin’s catechistic formulations as the best formulations of their own thoughts and beliefs. They fully internalized a diabolical pedagogy based upon a belief in being ordained as both juror and executioner, for their legitimacy drew from a fanatical obedience to the vozhd. When Stalin died, his East European disciples were orphaned: more than their parties’ supporter, they lost their protector, the embodiment of their highest dreams, the hero they had come to revere, the symbol of their vigor, passion, and boundless enthusiasm.

The logic of Stalinism excluded vacillation and hesitation, numbed critical reasoning and intelligence, and instituted Soviet-style Marxism as a system of universal truth inimical to any form of doubt. The permanent purge, the basic technique of Stalinist demonology, was the modern equivalent of the medieval witch hunt. It was eagerly adopted by Stalin’s East European apprentices and adapted to their own purposes. Echoing Stalin’s fervid cult, East European leaders engineered similar campaigns of praise and idolatry in their own countries. The party was identified with the supreme leader, whose chief merit consisted in having correctly applied the Stalinist line. The solutions to all disturbing questions could be found in Stalin’s writings, and those who failed to discover the answers were branded “enemies of the people.” Members of the traditional political elites, members of the clergy, and representatives of the nationalist intelligentsia who had refused to collaborate with the new regimes were sentenced to long prison terms following dramatic show trials or cursory camera trials. That was the first stage of the purge in Eastern Europe. After 1949 the purges fed upon the Communist elites themselves, and through them many faithful Stalinists experienced firsthand the effects of the unstoppable terrorist machine they had helped set in motion.

Societies under Stalinism were restructured by a reimagining of class community, which in itself reflected these regimes’ visions of all-out conspiracies both internally and externally. As Sheila Fitzpatrick judiciously notes, it took only one step and “the imagined class basis of the conspiracy would fall away.”⁹⁵ Class guilt frequently overlapped with national profiling during Stalin’s reign. Erik van Ree explains that for Stalin “national characters were shared by all members of the nation; they formed a ‘mentality [dukhovnyi oblik] of the people who come together in a nation.’ This ‘stable’ mentality was furthermore transmitted over time, as a ‘psychological makeup [psikhicheskii sklad] that was formed among them from generation to generation as a result of identical conditions of existence.’”⁹⁶ Such an approach to the nationalities problem allowed Stalin to indulge in national stereotypes, which he superimposed upon Bolshevism’s ultrarationalistic vision of social engineering. In this worldview, Russians and other nationalities became the heroes storming any fortress, while those who were perceived as unwilling to dedicate themselves to Stalin’s “heroic modernity” were stigmatized as a decadent species spoiled by a profit-seeking mentality. This form of political romanticism played upon existing stereotypes in the population at large. No wonder that in the letters sent to Pravda in early 1953, most