The Devil in History

taking power was a criminal act. Political historian Stephen Cohen gave an excellent characterization of the path to government of Lenin’s party: “A minority party to the end (they received about 25 percent of the votes for the Constituent Assembly in November), the Bolsheviks neither inspired nor led the revolution from below; but they alone perceived its direction and survived it.”⁶ Just like the Nazis and Italian Fascists, Bolsheviks knew that they wanted to rule because each believed in a perceived historical, transformative, and redemptive mission. And to attain this end, all means were justified. To quote Lazar Kaganovich, one of Stalin’s henchmen, “Comrades, it has long been known that for us Bolsheviks democracy is no fetish.”⁷ Fascists and Communists alike believed in the imperative of creative destruction of the old world in order to create new civilizations based upon new men, new social systems that in their turn would generate a new international order. To paraphrase Roger Griffin, these two political movements were utterly consumed with palingenetic, revivalist fervor.

Leninism’s belief in the purifying effect of shattering the world was founded upon the writings of the founding fathers—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. According to Marx, what was unique about “the Revolution was not just that no further event was to follow it, but that no other event need follow it, because in the Revolution the whole purpose of History was to be fulfilled.”⁸ Marxism was first and foremost a Promethean attempt to get rid of an abhorred bourgeois order based on market relations (private property), transcend reified social relations, and organize revolutionary social forces for the ultimate confrontation, which would result in a “leap from the kingdom of necessity into the kingdom of freedom.”⁹ Marx’s strong demarcation of his revolutionary thought in contrast to other versions of socialism (Christian, reactionary-feudal, petty-bourgeois, critical-utopian) is intimately linked to his firm belief, especially after 1845, that he was in the know (the postulate of epistemic infallibility), and that his Weltanschauung was essentially scientific, that is, nonutopian. For Marx, the conviction that history was governed by laws, a Hegelian viewpoint that he consistently promoted, meant that once these laws were grasped, reason (thought) and revolution (action) would coincide in the global proletarian liberation.¹⁰ The understanding of social and natural forces allowed for the full realization of the transformative ethos: “Once we do understand them [social and natural forces], once we grasp their action, their direction, their effects, it depends only on ourselves to subject them more and more to our own will, and by means of them to reach our own ends.”¹¹ Subsequently, in the name of proletarian (authentic) democracy, formal liberties could be suspended, even suppressed. To achieve a higher version of morality, emancipated from the bondage of bourgeois hypocrisy, traditional morality could be abrogated.¹² Marxism perceived itself as science rather than ethics, and therefore the revolution it preached was “part of a historical mechanism: hence, purged of values.”¹³ As Raymond Aron points out:

Marxism is a Christian heresy. As a modern form of millenarianism, it places the kingdom of God on Earth following the apocalyptic revolution in which the Old World will be swallowed up. The contradictions of capitalist societies will inevitably bring about this fruitful catastrophe. The victims of today will be the victors of tomorrow. Salvation will come through the proletariat, that witness to present inhumanity. It is the proletariat that, at a time fixed by the evolution of productive forces and by the courage of the combatants, will turn itself into a class that is universal and will take charge of the fate of mankind.¹⁴

It was indeed the fate of Marxism to pretend to be in charge of the destiny of humanity by impersonating, in a simultaneously tragic and optimistic way, the solution to mankind’s millennia-long agonies, fears, and terrors. Never was a political doctrine so ambitious, never a revolutionary project so much imbued with a sense of prophetic mission and charismatically heroic predestination.

MARXIST DREAMS, LENINIST EXPERIMENTS

All its radical hubris notwithstanding, Marxism would have remained a mere chapter in the history of revolutionary ideas had Vladimir Lenin not turned it into a most potent political weapon of ideological transformation of the world. The twentieth century was Lenin’s century. In fact, Leninism was a self-styled synthesis between Marxian revolutionary doctrine and the Russian tradition of nihilistic repudiation of the status quo. Yet one should not forget that Lenin was a committed Marxist, who intensely believed that he was fulfilling the founding fathers’ revolutionary vision.¹⁵ For Lenin, Marxism was “a revelation to be received with unquestioning faith, which admits of no doubt or radical criticism.”¹⁶ This is the meaning of Antonio Gramsci’s comparison between Lenin and Saint Paul: Lenin transformed the Marxian salvationist Weltanschauung into a global political praxis. The Bolshevik revolution was applied eschatological dialectics, and the Third International symbolized the universalization of the new revolutionary matrix. Lenin’s crucial institutional invention (the Bolshevik party) and his audacious intervention in the praxis of the world socialist movement enthused Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukacs, one of Max Weber’s favorite disciples, who never abandoned his deep admiration for the founder of Bolshevism. Referring to Lukacs’s enduring attachment to Lenin’s vision of politics, Slovene political theorist Slavoj Zizek writes, “His Lenin was the one who, a propos of the split in Russian Social Democracy into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, when the two factions fought over a precise formulation of who can be a Party member as defined in the Party program, wrote: ‘Sometimes, the fate of the entire working class movement for long years to come can be decided by a word or two in the party program.’”¹⁷

We need to remember that Leninism, as an allegedly coherent, monolithic, homogenous, self-sufficient ideological construct, was a post-1924 creation. It was actually the result of Grigory Zinoviev and Joseph Stalin’s efforts to delegitimize Leon Trotsky by devising something called “Leninism” as opposed to the heresy branded as “Trotskyism.” At the same time, Bolshevism was an intellectual and political reality, a total and totalizing philosophical, ethical, and practical-political direction within the world revolutionary movement.¹⁸ It was thanks to Lenin that a new type of politics emerged in the twentieth century, one based on elitism, fanaticism, unflinching commitment to the sacred cause, and the substitution of critical reason for faith for the self-appointed “vanguards” of illuminated zealots (the professional revolutionaries). Leninism, initially a Russian and then a world-historical cultural and political phenomenon, was the foundation of the system that came to an end with the revolutions of 1989 and the demise of the USSR in December 1991.¹⁹

Whatever one thinks of Lenin’s antibureaucratic struggle during his last years, or about his initiation of the New Economic Policy (NEP), the thrust of his action was essentially opposed to political pluralism. The nature of the Bolshevik “intraparty democracy” was inimical to free debate and competition of rival political views and platforms (as Lenin himself insisted, the party was not a “discussion club”). The March 1921 “ban on factions” resolution, directly related to the crushing of the Kronstadt sailors’ uprising, indicated the persistent dictatorial propensity of Bolshevism. The persecution of such foes as the left-wing Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks confirms that for Lenin and his associates, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” meant continuous strengthening of their absolute control over the body politic. Tolerance for cultural diversity and temporary acceptance of market relations were not meant to disturb the fundamental power relationship—the party’s monopolistic domination and the stifling of any ideological alternative to Bolshevism.²⁰ In this respect, there were no serious differences among the members of Lenin’s Politburo—Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Bukharin included. To put it briefly, if there had been no Lenin, there would have been no totalitarianism—at least not in its Stalinist version.

The October 1917 Bolshevik putsch (later elevated to the status of revolution) was the event that irreversibly changed the course of Western civilization and world history. In claiming to unify humanity under the banner of a collectivist and egalitarian ideal, Bolshevism actually ignited the insurrection of the masses in politics. It annihilated the mechanisms of limited government, as envisaged by the liberal tradition, and it founded a despotic system defined by an unprecedented disregard for the individual and the rule of law. It was a gigantic historical adventure meant to bring about heaven on earth, to materialize utopia.²¹ According to Claude Lefort, Lenin renounced the principle of consensus juris as a precondition for the regime’s cultivation of lawlessness. Instead, Leninism “promises to release the fulfillment of law from all action and the will of man; and it promises justice on earth because it claims to make mankind itself the embodiment of the law.”²²