Khrushchev exposed Stalin’s crimes. This feature, indeed, crucially distinguished Bolshevism from Nazism: “The leader is charismatic in Nazism; the program and (possibly) the leader are charismatic in Leninism.”38 Lenin’s ultimate goal was the elimination (extinction) of politics through the triumph of the party as the embodiment of an exclusionary, even exterminist general will.39
In the context of monastic certitude, recognition of fallibility was the beginning of the end for any ideological fundamentalism. During “heroic” times, though, such as War Communism and the “building of socialism,” the unity between party and vozhd (leader) was, no less than terror, key to the system’s survival. Homo sovieticus was more than a propaganda concoction. In her acceptance speech for the Hannah Arendt Award of 2000, given jointly by the city of Bremen, the Heinrich Boll Foundation, and the Hannah Arendt Association, Elena Bonner stated, “One of Hannah Arendt’s key conclusions was ‘The totality of terror is guaranteed by mass support.’ It is consonant with a later comment by Sakharov: ‘The slogan “The people and the Party are one,” painted on every fifth building, are not just empty words.’”40 This is precisely the point: the internalization of Leninist forms of thinking by millions of denizens of the Sovietized world, and their readiness to accept paternalistic collectivism as a form of life preferable to risk-driven, freedom-oriented experiences. In my view, the major cleavage in today’s Russian political culture is between the Leninist heritage and the democratic aspirations and practices associated with Andrei Sakharov and Russia’s human rights movement. To quote Elena Bonner again, “In the preamble to his draft of a Soviet Constitution, Sakharov wrote: ‘The goal of the people of USSR and its government is a happy life full of meaning, material and spiritual freedom, well-being and peace.’ But in the decades after Sakharov, Russia’s people have not increased their happiness, even though he did everything humanly possible to put the country on the path leading to the goal. And he himself lived a worthy and happy life.”41
As a political doctrine (or perhaps as a political faith), Bolshevism was a synthesis between radical Jacobinism or Blanquism (elitism, minority rule distinguished as “dictatorship of the proletariat,” exaltation of the heroic vanguard), unavowed Russian “Nechaevism” (a radical-conspiratorial mentality), and the authoritarian- voluntaristic components of Marxism.42 Bolshevism emphasized the omnipotence of the revolutionary organization and nourished contempt for what Hannah Arendt once called “the little varieties of fact”—such as Lenin and Trotsky’s fierce attacks on the “renegade” Social Democrat theorist Karl Kautsky, who had dared to question the Bolshevik repudiation of all “formal” liberties in the name of protecting the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” never mind that Lenin borrowed from Kautsky his “injection of consciousness” theory.
Lenin, in contrast to Marx, emphasized the organizational element as fundamental to the success of revolutionary action. For Marx, class consciousness was an organic result of the political and ideological development of the proletariat. I am thinking here, for example, of Engels’s thesis on “the German proletariat as the heir of classical German philosophy,” or the statement of young Marx regarding the dialectical relationship, which was therefore mutually binding, between “the critic of weapons” and “the weapon of the critique” during the process of overcoming/abolishing/conserving philosophy—Aufhebung). The revolutionary intellectuals were those who developed the doctrine, but the proletarians were not perceived as an amorphous mass toward which a self-appointed group of “teachers” had the duty of injecting consciousness of “historical truth.” Marx did not put forth the thesis of the party as a total institution and did not consider fanatical activism to be the sine qua non of political efficacy. Marx did not conceptualize a revolutionary sect deriving its power “not from the multitudes but from a small number of enthusiastic converts whose zeal and intolerance make each one of them the equal in strength of a hundred indifferentists.”43 Rather, Lenin created an organization in which “deracinated intellectuals and the occasional worker would be baptized into the proletarian vanguard.”44 Marx’s emphasis on human emancipation as the conscious absorption of society by the individual and his equation of social antagonisms with class conflict led him to advocate the elimination of intermediaries (laws, institutions, etc.) regulating the relationship between civil society and the state. Therefore, as Kolakowski brilliantly argued, “If freedom equals social unity, then the more unity there is, the more freedom…. The concept of negative freedom presupposes a society of conflict. If this is the same as a class society, and if a class society means a society based on private property, then there is nothing reprehensible in the idea that the act of violence which abolishes private property at the same time does away with the need for negative freedom, or freedom tout court. And thus Prometheus awakens from his dream of power.”45
Marx assigned great importance to social unity but failed to give instructions on its achievement. This discrepancy left the field open for Lenin’s creative understanding of necessity, which led to the Bolshevik version of man’s salvation of himself. The party became the slayer of alienation and therefore the true messiah of human freedom. The combination of Marxism and state power “set the Russian body politic onto a course of self- purification.”46 In the Soviet experiment, the Marxian principle of social unity was transformed into Lenin’s “unity of will,” which, under Stalin, became what Erik van Ree called “the organic theory of the party.” If, in Lenin’s case, unity was a solution to factionalism, for Stalin it was an instrument for “the Gleichschaltung of the member minds.” In the midst of the December 1923 struggle for supremacy, Stalin stated that “it was wrong to see the party only as ‘something like a complex of a whole series of institutions with lower and higher functionaries.’ Instead, it was a ‘self-acting [samodeiatel’nyi] organism.’ He described it as ‘actively thinking’ and ‘living a lively life.’” The vision of the revolutionary leading body combined with the imposition of the practice of repentance for one’s past incorrect political views (at the Fifteenth Party Conference in 1927) opened the door to murderous campaigns to remove the sores from the party organism so that the latter wouldn’t fall ill.47 The struggle to sustain and further the Bolshevik miracle turned into fighting the degeneration of the body politic. In this context, the unity of the party became the moral-political unity of the people. Society under Stalin transformed itself into an “organism engaged in a struggle for survival. [It] develops various instruments—such as productive technology, a class system of property, and language—attuned to the need of increasing its own viability.”48 Lenin’s purposeful fashioning of all aspects of human existence in the context of a life-or-death class struggle grew, under Stalin, into what Erik van Ree called “Marxist Darwinism.”49
LENIN’S UNBOUNDED RADICALISM
As a political gnosis, Bolshevik philosophy proposed the opposite of the young Marx’s emphasis on the relatively spontaneous revolutionary development of class consciousness. For Marx, as the young Lukacs showed, the revolutionary class symbolized the viewpoint of totality, thereby creating the epistemic premises for acceding to historical truth. For Lenin, the party was the totality—and dialectical logic served to render this oxymoron palatable to committed militants.50 This was the origin of the major conflicts between Lenin and Luxemburg and one of the main distinctions between Soviet and Western Marxism. Rosa Luxemburg anticipated the path taken by the Bolsheviks toward the totalization of power when she wrote that the development of their revolution “moves naturally in an ascending line: from moderate beginnings to ever-greater radicalization of aims and, parallel with that, from a coalition of classes and parties to the sole rule of the radical party [my emphasis].”51 In the same criticism of the Russian Revolution, Luxemburg issued a strong warning concerning the methods of preserving power adopted by Lenin and his party. She cautioned that the elimination of democracy, with its institutions that though cumbersome did prevent abuses of power, would lead to the mortification of the first workers’ state: “To be sure, every democratic institution has its limits and shortcomings, things which it doubtless shares with all other human institutions. But the remedy which Trotsky and Lenin have found, the elimination of democracy as such, is worse than the disease it is supposed to cure; for it stops up the very living source from which alone can come the correction of all the innate shortcomings of social institutions. That source is the active, untrammeled, energetic political life of the broadest masses of the people.”52 Luxemburg’s words were echoed later by one of Lenin’s closest collaborators, Nikolai Bukharin, who, in the aftermath of the Bolshevik victory in the civil war, concluded that the notion that “all tasks… can be solved by Communist decree” was “Communist conceit.”53 A few years later he added that “we do not carry out experiments, we are not vivisectionists, who… operate on a living organism with a knife; we are conscious of our historic responsibility.”54 This thinking, however, did not prevent Bukharin from purging individuals perceived as deviationists within the party. Despite moderation, his behavior essentially
