The Devil in History

but palliatives. The only way to a rebirth is the school of public life itself, the most unlimited, the broadest democracy and public opinion. It is rule by terror which demoralizes.” With great foresight, Luxemburg warned that the path taken by the Bolsheviks would lead to “the brutalization of public life.”⁹¹

The restoration of state prerogatives was for Lenin a “necessary evil,” and he tried to justify the notion of a proletarian dictatorship by defining it as the dictatorship of the majority of the population (poor peasants included), and therefore not exactly a dictatorship. Lenin was convinced, however, that these exceptional measures, including the persecution of dissidents and banning of all political parties but the Bolsheviks, were needed for the survival of the revolution in Russia. In the long run, however, he hoped that the revolution would triumph in the West and a certain political and economic relaxation would become possible. Lenin saw this as a temporary stage; he never accepted the idea that the Russian Revolution would be the sole proletarian revolution for decades to come. At the end of the day, though, Lenin imposed two fundamental elements on the Bolshevik conception of politics: law as an epiphenomenon of revolutionary morals and the heteronomy of individual action. In this sense, Lenin opened the door to the realization of radical evil, for the latter, if one is to follow Hannah Arendt, means “making human beings as human beings superfluous…. This happens as soon as all unpredictability—which, in human beings, is the equivalent of spontaneity—is eliminated.”⁹² Here lies the essential ambivalence in interpreting Leninism: was it a form of Russian Sonderweg (special road) on the path to implementing modernity or was it a Marxist Sonderweg in the accomplishment of socialist revolution?

Whatever one thinks of the final disintegration of Leninism, it was a quite successful experiment in reshaping political community according to a certain interpretation of Marxist socialism.⁹³ How does one make sense of the fact that, unlike all other Eastern European societies, Russia is the only one that seems unable to restore pro-Communist traditions and parties? Where are the Socialist Revolutionaries, Kadets, or Mensheviks? The answer is that Lenin produced “the end of politics” via the ultimate triumph of political will.⁹⁴ In fact, this meant that a sect of self-appointed revolutionary pedagogues managed to coerce a large population to accept their obsessions as the inexorable imperative of history. Using the example of the implementation of surveillance (considered one of the practices of “institutionalizing modernity”), Peter Holquist shows that its enforcement was not “a specifically Bolshevik, Marxist, or even totalitarian practice—it was a modern one.” In his opinion, what gave the Soviet regime its singularity was “the intersection of a particular ideology with the simultaneous implementation of a particular modern understanding of politics—put succinctly, an understanding that views populations as both the means and the goal of some emancipatory project.” With its specific Marxist conception of politics, society, and history in the background, Leninism developed “a closed, rather than open, model of historical progress.”⁹⁵

Communism and Fascism were sustained by the historical-political sense of historical urgency and their willingness to act in a radical mode. The vanguards that brought these political movements to power and kept them there were mobilized and vindicated by the ethical-political change that they considered themselves uniquely prepared to spearhead because of their postliberal consciousness, as well as their spirit, will, discipline, self- sacrifice, and willingness to act.⁹⁶ Imposing the dictatorship of the Communist Party as the sole instrument for history-making action, the Bolsheviks successfully exhausted the political sphere, eliminating all alternative visions of the body politic. Lenin, and later Stalin, transformed the political system into “the central and sacralized arena for the self-salvation and self-sacrifice of revolutionaries striving to implement the utopian designs which have to be realized in the present and on earth.”⁹⁷ Considering that the Soviet Union survived for over seventy years, the operation of making sense of the pre-Communist past logically faces a historical hiatus. The various trajectories of Russian political thought must overcome either an utter lack of domestic continuity or the thorny issue of synthetic reinterpretation. In the final analysis, it is difficult to recuperate tradition into the twenty-first century, when the country’s only version of mature modernity was Leninism.

This statement, however, takes us to another ramification of the dilemma of the Sonderwegs. The major theme of the Richard Pipes-Martin Malia controversy is important not only for our interpretation of Russian modern history but also for the discussion of the nature and future of left-wing, socialist politics in the twentieth century: was it Russia that destroyed (compromised) socialism, as Pipes and, earlier, Max Weber put it, or rather was it revolutionary socialism that, because of its political, indeed metaphysical, hubris, imposed immense sufferings on Russia?⁹⁸ Objecting to the young Georg Lukacs’s celebration of Lenin’s takeover of power in Russia, Weber insisted on the impossibility of building the socialism Karl Marx had envisioned in the absence of genuine capitalist, bourgeois market developments: “It is with good reason,” he wrote, “that the Communist Manifesto emphasized the economically revolutionary character of the bourgeois capitalist entrepreneurs. No trade-unions, much less state-socialist officials, can perform this role for us in their place.”⁹⁹ Earlier than many critics of Sovietism, Weber concluded that the Leninist experiment would discredit socialism for the entire twentieth century.¹⁰⁰

REENACTING LENIN?

So, is there a reason to consider Lenin’s political praxis a source of inspiration for those who look for a new political transcendence? Is it a blueprint for a resurrected radicalism, as suggested by Slavoj Zizek, who proposes the revival of the Leninist 1917 revolutionary leap into the kingdom of utopia? Reenacting Lenin’s defiance of opportunistic or conformist submission to the logic of the status quo is for Zizek the voie royale for restoring a radical praxis:

This is the Lenin from whom we still have something to learn. The greatness of Lenin was that in this catastrophe situation he wasn’t afraid to succeed—in contrast to the negative pathos discernible in Rosa Luxemburg and Adorno, for whom the ultimate authentic act is the admission of the failure, which brings the truth of the situation to light. In 1917, instead of waiting until the time was ripe, Lenin organized a pre-emptive strike; in 1920, as the leader of the party of the working class with no working class (most of it being decimated in the civil war), he went on organizing a state, fully accepting the paradox of the party which was to organize—even recreate—its own base, its working class.¹⁰¹

Compare this exalted vision of Lenin to that of a former Communist ideologue, the apostate Alexander Yakovlev’s indictment of Lenin’s essential role in the establishment of a dictatorial regime in which the working class was to suffer as much as other social strata the effects of utopian social engineering.¹⁰² Can Leninism be separated from the institution of the vanguard party and be conceived as a form of intellectual and moral resistance to the conformist debacle of the international Left at a moment of civilization collapse (World War I)? The debate on Leninism bears upon the possibility of radical-emancipatory practice and the need to reconstruct areas of autonomy in opposition to the logic of instrumental rationality. The burning question remains whether such efforts are predestined to end in new coercive undertakings, or whether Leninism was a peculiar, sui generis combination of Marxism and an underdeveloped political and economic structure. Indeed, as Trotsky insisted, the defeat of “world revolution”—after all, the main strategic postulate on which Lenin had built his whole revolutionary adventure—made the rise of Stalinism a sociological and political necessity. Here we may remember Isaac Deutscher’s analysis: “Under Lenin, Bolshevism had been accustomed to appeal to reason, the self-interest, and the enlightened idealism of ‘class-conscious’ industrial workers. It spoke the language of reason even when it appealed to the muzhiks. But once Bolshevism had ceased to rely on revolution in the West, once it had become aware that it could only fall back on that environment and dig itself in, it began to descend to the level of primitive magic, and to appeal to the people in the language of that magic.”¹⁰³

At this point, the last element of our dilemma comes into play. If one is to even partially accept the validity of the Russian Sonderweg thesis, the next problem is how much this Russ ian distortion was Stalin’s. What needs to be discussed is not only Deutscher’s claim that Stalinism was “the language of magic,” but also Robert C. Tucker’s theory of reversion. The latter consists of the claim that