under Stalin one can identify “the revival of certain features which belonged to the past, especially the more distant past, and had receded or been abolished (like serfdom) in nineteenth century Russia, but resurfaced in the Stalin period.” Tucker takes this analysis even further as he labels Stalinism Russian National Bolshevism, a blend of Leninist Marxism and Russ ian nationalism.104 His thesis is consonant with more recent views advocated by authors such as Terry Martin and David Brandenberger, who emphasize a neotraditionalist turn in the process of building socialism in one country. During mature Stalinism, “Soviet patriotism” became an apology for national authenticity, pride, and loyalty. At the same time, the Soviet Union, “a state with no ambition to turn itself into a nation-state—indeed with the exact opposite ambition,” became a site of large-scale ethnic cleansing.105 Moreover, the society was a hierarchy on the basis of “Stalinist soslovnost.” According to Sheila Fitzpatrick, “soslovnost provides a framework within which it becomes immediately comprehensible that the ‘classes’ of the Stalinist society should have been defined, like sosloviia, in terms of their relationship to the state rather than, like Marxist classes, in terms of their relationship to each other.”106 This whole array of developments originated in Stalin’s development of a new, non-class, “popular” form of mobilization. As David Priestland points out, “The unified narod, now no longer divided by class, embodied socialism, and was to achieve heroic feats in the struggle against largely external enemies.”107 Subsequently, the USSR itself became “the avant-garde of the international communist movement and the dynamic centre of world politics.”108 This phenomenon was symptomatic for the Soviet experiment, where “the sense of collectively creating socialism was more important than the use of class categories and the assumption of proletarian privilege.”109 In the context of building socialism in one country, for Stalin the body social was the chosen community bringing into state-reality Lenin’s social utopia.110
What this “mutation” of Marxist orthodoxy tells, though, is that the ultimate aim of Stalin’s policies remained Communism. Even his cult of personality functioned as “a unifying mechanism,” “a personification of socialist state-building.”111 Graeme Gill simply states that “the Stalin cult grew upon the edifice of Leninist orthodoxy.” In his study of K. Popov’s article “The Party and the Role of the Leader,” one of the pieces theoretically underpinning the cult, Gill pointed to “three main grounds for recognition of the vozhd”: the leader “armed with Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory, hardened by many years experience of the struggle for Leninism, hand in hand with Lenin”; the ability to endure “those difficulties which befell the narrow circles of selfless revolutionaries” by way of exceptional organizational talent; and “the will of an individual leader [that] could personify the will of the proletariat.”112 Indeed, Lenin was the embodiment of the theory, the struggle, and the party. This was his model of successful radical revolutionary transformation. In 1930, Stalin claimed to be the personification of this heritage of Lenin. He upheld this assertion of supremacy over his rivals by organizational power, thus creating an environment fundamentally inimical to any form of opposition. Like Lenin, but to an exaggerated degree, by the end of the 1930s, Stalin managed to become synonymous with the party itself.
Stalin also emulated Lenin’s creativity in his approach to the political thought of the founding fathers. In 1941, Stalin warned the authors of the commissioned Short Course of Political Economy, “If you search for everything in Marx, you’ll get off track…. In the USSR you have a laboratory… and you think Marx should know more than you about socialism.” By 1950, his attitude toward Marxism resembled Lenin’s famous remark from the Philosophical Notebooks: “Half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx.” Stalin wrote in Pravda: “In the course of its development Marxism cannot help but be enriched by new experience, by new knowledge; consequently, its individual formulas and conclusions must change with the passing of time, must be replaced by new formulas and conclusions corresponding to new historical tasks. Marxism does not recognize immutable conclusions and formulas obligatory for all epochs and periods.”113 Ultimately, Stalin’s rehashing of Marxism (and) Leninism could be read in a more general key. It should be placed in the original interpretative ethos of Bolshevik “substitutionism.” Georg Lukacs justified Lenin’s theory of the revolution based on the idea of “ascribed class consciousness,” that is, “the appropriate rational reactions ‘imputed’ to a particular typical position in the process of production.”114 Why would we not accept the same ascription for the building of state socialism? Both for Lenin and for Stalin, the state that seemed to stubbornly refuse to wither away remained the ultimate test for “the real understanding and recognition of Marxism.”115
Going back to the ambivalence of Leninism, I think that what we need to stress, beyond the debates about its Marxist, Russian, or reified core (by Stalin), is that “its goal is to transcend any particular politics… and to realize a philosophical project over the heads (or behind the backs) of the participants. Its justification lies in its claim to transcend their (alienated) self-consciousness in the name of the really real truth. It is politics as antipolitics.”116 From this point of view, regardless of distinctions between party persuasion and coercion (in Tucker’s formulation) or the language of reason versus that of magic, it is undeniable that Lenin was the one who created the possibility for the culmination of “Marx’s hypothesis that the working class has a privileged knowledge of the final purpose of history in the assertion that Comrade Stalin is always right.”117 Lenin produced and implemented a charismatic doctrine of universal human regeneration, a New Faith (as Czeslaw Milosz called Bolshevism) based on “the archetypal human faculty for imbuing the home and the community, and hence the new home and the new community, with suprahuman, ritual significance.”118 In the final analysis, Leninism was the child of three mothers: the Enlightenment with its focus on reason and progress; Marx’s social theory and project of world historical transformation; and the Russian revolutionary tradition with its utilitarian nihilism and a quasi-religious socialist vision of the transformation of mankind.
With this intellectual pedigree in mind, one needs to be very cautious in writing Leninism’s definitive obituary. Yes, as a Russian model of socialism it is exhausted, but there is something in Leninism—if you want, its antidemocratic, collectivist pathos associated with the invention of the party as a mystical body transcending individual fears, anguishes, despair, loneliness, and so on—that remains with us. All political figures in post-Soviet Russia—all parties, movements, and associations—define themselves, and must do so, in relationship to Lenin’s legacies. In this respect, as an organizational principle but not as a worldview, Leninism is alive, if not well. Ideologically it is extinct, of course, but its repudiation of democratic deliberation and contempt for “sentimental bourgeois values” has not vanished. This is because the cult of the organization and the contempt for individual rights is part and parcel of one direction within the “Russian tradition.” Russian memory includes a plurality of trends, and one should avoid any kind of Manichean taxonomy. It is doubtless that, as Christian existentialist philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev noticed, there is something deeply Russian in the love for the ultimate, universally cathartic, redeeming revolution, which explains why Lenin and his followers (including the highly sophisticated philosophers Georg Lukacs and Ernst Bloch) embraced a certain cataclysmic, messianic, absolutist direction within the Marxist tradition.119 The Bolshevik revolution was indeed the expression of Russ ian intellectuals’ obsession with “a version of a thirst for the sacred with a concomitant revulsion against the profane, a contest of values that can be seen in an early paradigm, the story of Christ’s throwing the money changers out of the temple.”120 In his revolutionary praxis, Lenin, as famously formulated by Robert C. Tucker, “married the old image of two warring Russias with Marxism.”121 Leninism was “not solely a revolutionary response to the inequities of the Tsarist state and the social injustice endemic to capitalist liberalism, but also a response to the crisis of modernity.”122
At the same time, one should place Leninism in contradistinction to other versions of Marxism, which were at least as legitimate if not more legitimate than the Bolshevik doctrine. It is not at all self-evident that one can derive the genocidal logic of the gulags from Marx’s universalistic postulates, whereas it is quite clear that much of the Stalinist system existed in embryo in Lenin’s Russia. Together with Robert C. Tucker, we should admit the heterogeneous nature of the Bolshevik tradition itself and avoid the temptation of “retrospective determinism.” Thus Stalin’s Lenin was only one of the possibilities implied in the Leninist project.
Now, in dealing with the impact of Russian ideas and practices on the West, there is always a problem: what Russian tradition do we refer to?123 The Decembrist or the czarist-autocratic one? Cernyshevsky or Herzen? Chaadaev or Gogol? Turgenev or Dostoyevski? The humanists who opposed the pogroms and the blood libel or the Black Hundreds? The liberal writer Vladimir Korolenko or the czarist reactionary Konstantin Pobedonostsev? The Bolshevik apocalyptical scenario or the Menshevik evolutionary socialism? The Nechaev-style terrorist rejection of the status quo, the intelligentsia’s perpetual self-flagellation and outrage, or the
