The Devil in History

that was supposed to “construct meaning, and sought, through political organization and action, to bring it into being.” Each of them was, as A. E. Rees showed, forms of a “revolutionary Machiavellian conception of politics…. More precisely, Nazism and Bolshevism might be defined as the Machiavellianism of parties which claimed to rule in the name of the masses.”⁷² To paraphrase Eugen Weber, in the case of both Leninism and Fascism, the locomotives that dragged them across history were their tactics. Leninism was therefore based on a “goal rationality,” which implied “the validity of its demands.” In this mental framework, “compliance is claimed to be based on a rational relationship between the ultimate goal of communism and the specific tasks assigned to social units, and individuals’ rationality relates to the appropriateness of the means used… to the goals set.”⁷³

Such a radically utilitarian, transformist conception of politics ultimately materialized in the divinization of a mythical state holding the right of life and death over its subjects. Or as the Catholic intellectual Adolf Keller wrote, “A superhuman giant, claiming not only obedience, but confidence and faith such as only a personality has the right to expect.”⁷⁴ In this conception, the state was beyond moral limitations, for it was the only producer of morality. However, as sociologist Michael Mann underlines, Fascism and Communism, despite the presence of party or leader despotism, “ruled more as a fluid, continuing revolutionary movement than as an institutionalized state.” They were, according to Mann, “regimes of continuous revolution.”⁷⁵ These political movements were fueled by their projected heroic perpetual dynamism. In the case of Communism, stagnation and ultimately demise developed as its “shrill confidence in the history- making mode of action dissipated… in light of what experience had revealed.”⁷⁶

The leader, of course, played an essential role in such movements.⁷⁷ As Leszek Kolakowski puts it, “Party mindedness, the political principle revered by all Leninists, resulted in the infallible image bestowed on the general secretary.”⁷⁸ Paul Berman explains: “Lenin was the original model of such a Leader—Lenin, who wrote pamphlets and philosophical tracts with the confidence of a man who believes the secrets of the universe to be at his fingertips, and who established a weird new religion with Karl Marx as god, and who, after his death, was embalmed like a pharaoh and worshipped by the masses. But il Duce was no less a superhuman. Stalin was a colossus. About Hitler, Heidegger, bug-eyed, said: ‘But look at his hands.’”⁷⁹ Peter Ehlen makes the insightful observation that Lenin “redefined the ground upon which the Communist renewal would be based. Henceforth, it would be the will of the leader.” In this context, power would become “absolute power and knows to lend itself a quasi-numinous appearance.”⁸⁰ In other words, Leninism was also vitally premised on the apotheosis of the leader. An amusing but telltale example of the weight of this founding element of Leninism is Comrade Lazurkina’s intervention at the Twenty-second Party Congress in Moscow. In October 1961, during discussions about the expulsion of Stalin from the Lenin Mausoleum, an Old Bolshevik, Comrade Lazurkina, “who had spent 17 years in prisons and camps, reported that Lenin had appeared to her repeatedly in a dream. Lenin had demanded that his successor be removed from his mausoleum. And so it came to pass.”⁸¹ The ghost of one leader could not bear that of his successor anymore. The pantheon of Bolshevism had only one master—Lenin. Another matter related to the insertion of the will of the leader into the practice of Leninism was the “continuing inability of the party’s leading legislative organs—the congress, CC [Central Committee] and Politburo—to develop a strong sense of institutional integrity and coherence,” according to Graeme Gill. Gill shows how the organizational basis of Stalin’s power in the aftermath of Lenin’s death, and even earlier, was “the absence of a major commitment of leading political figures to strengthen the organizational norms and identity of these bodies, inertia and the methods of action adopted by the party leadership.”⁸² For Gill, the weaknesses of Leninism evident in the 1920s set the stage for Stalin’s autocratic rule over the party and over the Soviet Union.

Spontaneity (stikhiinost’) has always been the Leninists’ nemesis (think of Lenin’s polemics on the relationship between class and party, first with Rosa Luxemburg, then with the left-wing Communists). Its counterpart was the obsession with partiinost’ (partisanship), the unbounded acceptance of the party line (philosophy, sociology, and aesthetics had to be subordinated to party- defined “proletarian interests,” hence the dichotomy between “bourgeois” and “proletarian” social science). However, in the context of the Russian proletariat’s underdeveloped class consciousness, Lenin, on the occasion of the 1905 revolution, revealed, according to Ana Krylova, “the ‘true nature’ of the working class… not through workers’ conscious revolutionary initiative, as had been expected, but through an ‘instinctive urge’ that the workers ‘felt’ for open revolutionary action.” His discovery lay in the fact that the workers had the ability to “sense history and act in accordance with its objective needs without necessarily understanding them.”⁸³ To close the circle, this reading of the December uprising reinforced Lenin’s belief that behind the party, under proper leadership, the workers would fulfill their class mission despite an insufficient understanding of their historical role. This allowed him to justify both the voluntarism of Bolsheviks’ takeover of power and the Enlightenment mission the party embarked on once in power.

Moreover, this insertion of “class instinct” in the equation of stikhiinost’-partiinost’ explains to a large extent Lenin’s theory of the common struggle (alliance) between the workers and the peasants (smychka). Its fundamental presupposition was that the Bolsheviks could awaken the peasants’ class instincts, thus winning them over to the side of the revolution. According to Lenin, “The more enlightened the peasantry becomes the more consistently and resolutely will it stand for a thoroughgoing democratic revolution.”⁸⁴ This is what Ken Jowitt called “the ingenious error of Leninism”— lransplanting class struggle to the countryside: “The ideological-conceptual map with which Leninists work leads them to see economic differences as evidence of social polarization and the existence of ‘class allies’ in the villages, and it enables them to do politically what nationalists can do only analytically—that is, distinguish and oppose competing social bases and conceptions of the nation-state. Working with such a paradigm, Leninists attack the institutional bases, not simply the elite organization of peasant society.”⁸⁵ And if Bukharin’s model of the gradual growth of private property in socialist agriculture does not happen (and it did not during the New Economic Policy), then Leninism’s vision of a spontaneous class “transformist” commitment and interests opened the door to collectivization. This amounted to an all-out attack on the foundation of the peasants’ institutional and private lives, the rural counterpart to the urban socialist revolution. In their pursuit of this goal, the Bolsheviks had no limits, no pangs of conscience, no scruples. The result was genocide.

Much of Leninism’s dogmatism stemmed from Russian authoritarian traditions and the lack of a culture of public debate. Remember Antonio Gramsci’s reflections on Russia’s “gelatinous” civil society and the omnipotence of the bureaucratic state? Wasn’t Lenin himself, by the end of his life, terrified by the resurgence of the time- honored traditions of rudeness, violence, brutality, and hypocrisy that he had lambasted and against which the revolution was presumably directed? As one author remarked, “Lenin was a direct heir to the tradition of revolutionary Machiavellianism in Russian history and to the Jacobin tradition in the European revolutionary movement.”⁸⁶ On the one hand, as we have already discussed, Lenin believed that revolution was essential and inevitable, and that it would, of necessity, be violent; he considered any other approach to be conciliatory and doomed to failure.⁸⁷ On the other hand, his Jacobinism was “a metaphor for revolutionary energy, incorruptibility and a willingness to push forward as far as possible in the interests of the working masses.” It was founded on his dedication to plebeian politics, “and the twentieth century plebeians were of course the class of wage-laborers. Hence consistent proletarian socialists had to be Jacobins.”⁸⁸ Or, to use Lenin’s formula, the Bolsheviks were Jacobins working for the proletariat.⁸⁹

Lenin was conscious that his most difficult trial was the transition from revolutionary action to governance and the preservation of state power. The success of the October Revolution seemed to confirm that he had successfully merged “the elemental destructive force of the masses” and “the conscious destructive force of the organization of revolutionaries.” But how was the newly won power to be consolidated? The initial drive toward democracy from below and self-empowerment of the masses, was replaced in 1917 by emphasis on the reconstructed state machine that according to Lenin was indispensable for defending the revolution and pursuing its main goals. In form, Lenin said, this was a dictatorship, but in substance, because it represented the interests and aspirations of the large majority of the population, it was the true, substantive democracy. The main problem with Lenin’s concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat was his contempt for the rule of law. For him, the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat “is power won and maintained by the violence of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, power that is unrestricted by any laws.”⁹⁰ This was the central point of Rosa Luxemburg’s criticism of the Russian Revolution. She argued that “[Lenin] is completely mistaken in the means he employs. Decree, dictatorial force of the factory overseer, Draconic penalties, rule by terror—all these things are