The Devil in History

“enlargement, intensification, and dynamicization of political power”¹⁵⁶ with the purpose of radically transforming the world.

With this in mind, I would conclude that Slavoj Zizek’s proposed “return to Lenin” means simply a return to a politics of irresponsibility, the resurrection of a political ghost whose main legacies are related to the limitation, rather than the expansion, of democratic experimentation. After all, it was Lenin who suppressed direct democracy in the form of councils, disbanded the embryonic Russian parliament, and transformed terror into a privileged instrument for preserving power. Zizek seems to adopt, and truly enjoy, the role of Thomas Mann’s character, the Jesuit dialectician Leo Naphta: an oracle of the resurrection of what one might call le desir de revolution. In his defense of Leninism, Zizek actually advocates the rehabilitation of chiliastic experiences, secular soteriologies, and visionary messianism, all for the sake of regaining the “authentically apocalyptical Paulinian atmosphere.” Simultaneously, though, he (and others who imitate his plea) does not seem to mind the mass graves that people keep discovering wherever the Leninist ideal, in one form or the other, has been implemented. When Hitler destroyed the Weimar constitutional system and abolished all “bourgeois freedoms,” he imitated the Bolshevik precedent of the permanent emergency as a justification for legitimizing the destruction of legality and eliminating (including physical annihilation) all those regarded as “objective” obstacles to building a perfect, organic community. Despite their pretense of rationality, the Bolsheviks, “unconstrained by concerns of legality or any usual checks on executive power, were particularly prone to resort to naked force.”¹⁵⁷

In the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany, the abolition of the prerevolutionary state created “the institutional precondition for cumulative radicalization. Flexible, extra-legal; and extra-bureaucratic agencies institutionalized the terror against fictitious enemies; the fiction of a future civilization and a new moral sense that legitimized it.”¹⁵⁸ The new order of the utopia in power opened the door to a sort of “institutional Darwinism” defined by “political activism occurring on its own, or at least without immediate direction” from the power center (the leader or party).¹⁵⁹ This process can account for both the escalation of terror and the organizational corruption and ultimate demise of these totalitarian political movements. The fundamental difference with National Socialism (but not so much with Mussolini’s Fascism, considering that it did survive for at least two decades) was that Lenin and Stalin “achieved not only a social revolution but the conditions of a stable political order.”¹⁶⁰ Bertrand Russell in The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, written upon his return from the Soviet Union in 1920, diagnosed the murderous reality lying at the heart of Lenin’s political invention, the specter that contemporary prophets of irresponsibility such as Zizek choose to ignore: “I felt that everything I valued in human life was being destroyed in the interests of a glib and narrow philosophy, and that in the process untold misery was being inflicted upon many millions of people.”¹⁶¹ Once victorious in 1917, Lenin opened a Pandora’s box. By the end of the twentieth century, all we found was tyranny and bloodshed anywhere his world-historical exploit was emulated, from Shanghai to Rostock.

CHAPTER 4 Dialectics of Disenchantment Marxism and Ideological Decay in Leninist Regimes

The Western system may be flawed in many social respects, but it is, after all, a fully operational democratic system, not a dictatorship. I would certainly agree that the Western democracies, too, are now without a universally accepted value-system, but whereas the loss of such a system in a live democracy is balanced by the interaction of a broad variety of democratic institutions, the loss of ideology in a totalitarian society means the complete collapse of the morale of that society, because the sole justification of totalitarian rule is the ideology on which it rests.

—Zdenek Mlynar (in George Urban, ed., Communist Reformation)

Communist regimes were partocratic ideocracies (as discussed by authors such as Leonard Schapiro, Alain Besancon, Martin Malia, Richard Pipes, Orlando Figes, and Stephen Kotkin). Their only claim to legitimacy was purely ideological, that is, derived from the organized belief system shared by the elites and inculcated into the masses that the party benefited by special access to historical truth. If this interpretation is correct, then deradicalization, the decline of self-generated energy, primarily in the field of ideological monopoly, leads to increased vulnerability. The demise of the supreme leader (Stalin, Mao, Enver Hoxha, or Tito) has always ushered in ideological anarchy and loss of self-confidence among the rulers. Kenneth Jowitt correctly pointed out that “there is a constant tendency in Leninism toward strong executive leaders.”¹ Sometimes, though, Communist parties invoke also the leadership of a messiahlike prophet, a charismatic guide.² The cases of Stalin and Mao are the most obvious, but Nicolae Ceau?escu, Enver Hoxha, Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il-sung, and others come to mind as well. Building upon Jowitt’s argument, we can observe the following trend: in an attempt to permanently confirm and sustain the “charismatic impersonalism” of the party under Communism (particularly in its Stalinism avatars), magic, miracle, and mysticism blended in totalitarian regimes that were apparently scientifically justified. In fact, they were chiliastic ideologies, redemptive doctrines shrouded in rationalistic disguise, political religions based on their own sense of original sin, the fall of mankind, historical torment, and final salvation. Attempts to restore the “betrayed values” of the original project (Nikita Khrushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev) resulted in ideological disarray, a change of mind among former supporters, desertion of critical intellectuals from the “fortress,” criticism of the old dogmas, awakening, a break with past, and eventually apostasy. If we compare the Leninist experiments with Fascist revolutionary utopias, the absence of a revisionist temptation within Fascism is striking. With very few exceptions, like the brothers Gregor and Otto Strasser (early Nazis who broke with Hitler’s regime soon after the takeover), there were no disenchanted Nazis. The plot against Hitler in 1944 was fomented by conservative aristocrats and military luminaries who wanted to avoid a crushing defeat by the Allies and a much feared occupation by the Red Army.³

This chapter looks into the adventures of critical Marxism in Soviet-style regimes and its corrosive impact on the Moscow center during the 1970s and particularly the 1980s. Furthermore, I conceptualize the Gorbachev phenomenon as a culmination of the revisionist ethos in the socialist bloc, which implicitly turns the focus of my contribution on the inherent paradoxes and fallacies of perestroika. The latter is perceived to be inherent in the incompleteness of East European Marxist revisionism’s promise for change. Nevertheless, by no means do I deny the role of this fascinating period of intellectual and political history in providing a fundamental lesson about the role of ideas in the disintegration of authoritarian regimes of Leninist persuasion. Such a self-critical development would have been unthinkable under the Nazi regime, as already shown in previous chapters.

My point is that the impact of Marxist revisionism and critical intellectuals can hardly be overestimated and that this impact is one of the main distinctions between Communism and Fascism. The adventure of revisionism led these intellectuals beyond the once-worshipped paradigm, critical Marxism turned into post-Marxism and even, as in the case of Kolakowski, into liberal anti-Marxism. In his gripping book about the postwar Soviet intelligentsia, historian Vladislav Zubok concludes that the story of this group, which is crucial to understanding the fate of Leninism in the twentieth century, was about “the slow and painful disappearance of their revolutionary-romantic idealism and optimism, their faith in progress and in the enlightenment of people.” He emphasizes that “the children of Zhivago spent their lives on ‘a voyage from the coast of Utopia’ into the turbulent open sea of individual self-discovery.”⁴

Among Soviet and Eastern European intelligentsia, Marxism was found wanting in its most powerful ambition, to respond in a positively engaging way to the challenges of democratic modernity, to restructure democratic imagination itself:

With one resolute gesture of contempt, therefore, Marx swept away all particularities: the interests of the