The Devil in History

opposition, deprived as they are of an informing, animating principle, of a unique directing concept, do very often wage their war faultlessly in minor tactics, better trained as they are in parliamentary and journalistic maneuvers, but they constantly broke down on the important issues.”¹² Benito Mussolini, Italy’s Fascist dictator between 1922 and his death in 1945, contributed in 1932 to the Enciclopedia Italiana with a famous entry on the doctrine of Fascism:

Thus Fascism could not be understood in many of its practical manifestations as a party organization, as a system of education, a discipline, if it were not always looked at in the light of its whole way of conceiving life, a spiritualized way…. The man of Fascism is an individual who is nation and fatherland, which is a moral law, biding together individuals and the generations into a tradition and a mission, suppressing the instant for a life enclosed within the brief round of pleasure in order to restore within duty the higher life free from the limits of time and space: a life in which the individual, through the denial of himself, through the sacrifice of his own private interests, through death itself, realizes that completely spiritual existence in which his value as a man lies. Fascism is a religious conception in which man is seen in his immanent relationship with a superior law and with an objective Will that transcends the particular individual and raises him to conscious membership in a spiritual society. Whoever has seen in the religious politics of the Fascist regime nothing than mere opportunism has not understood that Fascism besides being a system of government is also, above all, a system of thought.¹³

Ideological absolutism, sanctification of the ultimate goal, suspension of critical faculties, and the cult of the party line as the perfect expression of the general will were imbedded in the original Bolshevik project and definitely imbued Mussolini’s political imagination.

I argue that the seeds of Stalin’s regime were sowed by Lenin.¹⁴ He carried to an extreme Leninism’s intolerant logic and turned the USSR into a police state. The Communist Party was transformed from a revolutionary elite into a bureaucratic caste whose sole aim was to preserve and enhance the leader’s power and its privileges. Gradually, the dictatorship of the proletariat became an empty slogan legitimizing Stalin’s absolute reign and secret police repression against the population. Invoking Lenin’s struggle against factionalism, Stalin completely destroyed any intraparty democracy, viciously persecuted all (real or imaginary) opponents, and imposed a monolithic dictatorship based on permanent purges and mass terror. In the physical absence of the numinous leader incarnating the absolute power of the party, Lenin, the congregation of his disciples had to reinvent itself by means of founding its charisma on the scriptures of its founding fathers. The invented tradition of Marxism-Leninism was then thrust upon the party ranks as a means of stabilizing the normative identity of the party. The “return to Leninism” became an important theme of the anti-Stalin opposition, especially among Trotsky’s supporters. Later, after Stalin’s death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev proclaimed the restoration of the Leninist norms of party life and denounced Stalin’s “cult of personality” (i.e., the quasi-religious adoration of the supreme leader) as non-Leninist. In the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev deepened Khrushchev’s critique of Stalinism and sought to instill pluralism within Soviet institutions. In his democratizing efforts, Gorbachev went beyond the logic of Leninism and abandoned both the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the party’s claim to monopoly of power.

In 1919 Lenin created the Third (Communist) International—the Comintern, a global institution that the Fascists were never able to establish. Earlier he had lambasted the Second International for its loss of revolutionary fervor and complicity with bourgeois parliaments and governments. The Comintern consecrated Moscow’s centrality and hegemonic role within world Communism. For a party to be accepted into the Comintern it had to unconditionally acquiesce to twenty-one conditions, including complete subordination to Soviet dictates. Lenin created the Comintern as an instrument for expanding the revolution and allowing Soviet Russia to escape “imperialist encirclement.” Later, Stalin transformed it into a mere instrument of Soviet foreign policy and by implication Russian imperialism. The Comintern was disbanded in 1943, but Communist parties continued to toe the Stalinist line. In the aftermath of World War II, Leninist parties came to power in East-Central Europe, China, North Korea, and North Vietnam (a Soviet-style regime existed in Mongolia since the 1920s). Later, in 1960, Fidel Castro publicly espoused Leninism and proclaimed the Communist nature of the Cuban Revolution. In all these cases, Communism represented the sum of political and ideological techniques (tactics) used by revolutionary parties to seize and consolidate monopolistic dictatorial regimes. Their only claim to legitimacy derived from the organized belief-structure shared by the elites and inculcated into the masses, according to which the party was the sole beneficiary of direct access to historical truth.

Marx proclaimed Communism to be the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man: “Communism is the riddle of history solved, and knows itself to be the solution.”¹⁵ The explanation for the consequences of this doctrine is founded upon a few essential factors: the vision of its followers, a superior elite whose utopian goals sanctify the most barbaric methods; the denial of the right to life of those who are defined as “degenerate parasites and predators”; the deliberate dehumanization of state-defined enemies and victims; and the falsification of the idea of good (Alain Besancon). The revolutions of 1989 demonstrated that Communism had exhausted its appeal and led to the breakdown of the Leninist regimes in East-Central Europe. In December 1991, the USSR came to an end. The demise of Communism in Europe allowed space for alternative political mythologies, which left a proliferation of what I called fantasies of salvation.

In his monumental volume Postwar, Tony Judt argues that the Europe of our days is “bound together by the signs and symbols of its terrible past.” The remarkable accomplishment of forging a democratic identity this way “remains forever mortgaged to that past” because the latter “will have to be taught afresh with each passing generation.”¹⁶ The main lessons of the twentieth century that this book has tried to highlight are that no ideological commitment, no matter how frantically absorbing, should ever prevail over the sanctity of human life and that no party, movement, or leader holds the right to dictate that followers renounce their critical faculties to embrace a pseudo-miraculous, in fact mystically self-centered, delusional vision of mandatory happiness. Anne Applebaum judiciously emphasized that the most important path to understanding the terrible historical experience of the past century is by empathizing with and trying to comprehend the people who lived through it.¹⁷ It is now clear, based on the abysmal experiences of totalitarian states, that contempt for the individual and his/her rights inevitably leads to the destruction of any trace of democracy. The Communist “people’s democracies” were actually a mockery of this very term, in fact its antithesis. They shared with the Fascist regimes a hyperdeterministic, quasi-scientific ideological hubris. No less importantly, conspiratorial visions of world history, including the current Islamist fantasies, result in an obsession with infiltrated enemies, a politics of vindictive mythological scapegoating, and state-organized persecution, exclusion, and extermination of those ideologically branded as “perfidious vermin” and “treacherous scum” (Jews, kulaks, etc.).¹⁸ As Hannah Arendt put it in 1946 (and these words should stay with us as an enduring warning),

One of the most horrible aspects of contemporary terror is that, no matter what its motives and ultimate aims, it invariably appears in the clothes of an inevitable logical conclusion made on the basis of some ideology or theory. To a far lesser degree, this phenomenon was already to be seen in connection with the liquidation of the anti-Stalinists in Russia—which Stalin himself predicted and justified in 1930…. The obvious conclusion was that one had to deal with these factions as with a hostile class or with traitors. The trouble is, of course, that nobody except Stalin knows what the “true interests of the proletariat” are… This “scientificality” is indeed the common feature of all totalitarian regimes of our time. But it means nothing more than that purely man-made power— mainly destructive—ts dressed in the clothes of some superior, superhuman sanction from which it derives its absolute, not-to-be-questioned, force. The Nazi brand of this kind of power is more thorough and more horrible than the Marxist or pseudo-Marxist, because it assigns to nature the role Marxism assigns to history… But neither science nor “scientificality,” neither scholars nor charlatans supplied the ideas and techniques that operated the death factories. The ideas came from politicians who took power-politics seriously, the techniques came from modern mob-men who were not afraid of consistency.¹⁹

Tens of millions of dead, the memory of barbed wire and gas chambers, and a sense of unbearable tragedy are the main legacies left by the reckless ideological pledges of the twentieth century to build the City of God here