The Devil in History

37.

66. In my Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism, and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), I defined, with reference to Eric Hoffer’s analysis of political fanaticism, ideological hubris as “the firm belief that there is one and only one answer to the social questions, and that the ideologue is the one who holds it” (p. 28). Also see Eric Hofer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Time, 1963); Elie Halevy, a French thinker who, in the 1930s, wrote about the age of tyranny dominated by the “etatisation of thought” and the “organization of enthusiasm.” See Alberto Toscano, Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (London: Verso, 2010), p. 206. Political religions were also instruments for the organization of social resentment, envy, and hatred. See Gabriel Liiceanu, Despre ura (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2007).

67. Richard Shorten, “Francois Furet and Totalitarianism: A Recent Intervention in the Misuse of a Notion,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 3, no. 1 (Summer 2002): 10-11. For an extensive presentation of Lefort’s analysis of ideology, see Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society (Oxford: Polity Press, 1986).

68. I am paraphrasing Ken Jowitt’s conclusions on the neotraditionalism of the Soviet-type system. See Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 121-58. See also Ken Jowitt, “Stalinist Revolutionary Breakthroughs in Eastern Europe,” in Stalinism Revisited, ed. Tismaneanu, pp. 17-24.

69. Roger Griffin, “Ideology and Culture,” Journal of Political Ideologies 11, no. 1 (Feb. 2006): 77-99.

70. See for instance Stephen Kinzer, “In ‘East Germany,’ Bad Ol’ Days Now Look Good,” New York Times, August 27, 1994. This restorative theme was the gist of Russian leader Gennady Zyuganov’s 1996 presidential campaign. He challenged Boris Yeltsin in the name of an idealized vision of the historical past, heroic value, ethnic solidarity, and opposition to corruptive Western influences. E.g., David Remnick, “Hammer, Sickle, and Book,” New York Review of Books 23 (May 1996): 44-51.

71. I am putting together here two of the essential statements Ken Jowitt made in his analysis of Leninism and its legacy. The first: “The political individuation of an articulated potential citizenry treated contemptuously by an inclusive (not democratic), neotraditional (not modernized) Leninist polity was the cause of Leninist breakdown” (Ken Jowitt, “Weber, Trotsky and Holmes on the Study of Leninist Regimes,” Journal of International Affairs [2001]: 3149). The second: “It should be equally clear that today [1992] the dominant and shared Eastern European reality is severe and multiple fragmentation” (Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder, pp. 299-300).

72. Findlay, Caring for the Soul, p. 133.

73. Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: Its Origins, Growth and Dissolution, vol. 3, The Breakdown (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 526-30.

74. Robert D. English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 109.

75. George Konrad, The Melancholy of Rebirth, p. 23.

76. Literary critic Vladimir Potapov quoted in Horvath, The Legacy, p. 1. Horvath tellingly describes the nature of the experience associated with reading the Gulag Archipelago. He quotes Natalya Eksler’s recollections about the peregrinations of a copy of volume 2 that Andrei Amalrik gave her in 1976: “It was borrowed by friends, then returned, then borrowed for the friends of friends, and the book left home for longer and longer intervals before reappearing. Then it somehow vanished for an extended period. And since some friends wanted their children, who had come of age, to read it, we tried to call it back. After a while we were told: ‘Wait a little, please. It’s in the Urals: let it circulate, since it might be the only copy there.’ We waited. After a year, we tried again, and were informed: ‘The book is in the Baltics, there is an enormous queue, which they call the queue for The Book.’ We waited another few years, and learned that it was now in the Ukraine” (p. 25).

77. For example, the coming of age of the dissident was celebrated at the Theatre Recamier in June 1977, when Andre Glucksmann and Michel Foucault organized a reception for French intellectuals and East European dissident exiles to protest Brezhnev’s visit to Paris. In an interview, Foucault explained that “we thought that on the evening when Mr. Brezhnev is received with grand pomp by Mr. Giscard d’Estaing, other French people could receive other Russians who are their friends.” This hospitality marked a vast reversal in attitudes since Brezhnev’s arrival in 1971, when hardly a murmur of criticism had been elicited by the decision of the French authorities to welcome the Soviet leader with a police round-up of prominent East European emigre intellectuals, who were banished to a Corsican hotel for the duration of the visit.” See Horvath, “’The Solzhenitsyn Effect,’” p. 902.

78. Horvath, The Legacy, p. 22.

79. Ibid., p. 24.

80. Vadim Medvedev, Central Committee secretary for ideology, quoted in Horvath, The Legacy, p. 6.

81. Tucker, Philosophy and Politics, p. 117.

82. Bo Strath, “Ideology and History,” Journal of Political Ideologies 11, no. 1 (February 2006): 23-42.

83. For the exact quotation, see V. Havel, “Sifra socialismus [Cipher Socialism]” (June 1988), DRS, pp. 202 -4; Martin J. Matustik, “Havel and Habermas on Identity and Revolutions,” Praxis International 10, nos. 3-4 (October 1990-January 1991): 261-77.

84. Vaclav Havel, Letters to Olga (New York: Knopf, 1988), p. 145.

85. Matustik, “Havel and Habermas,” p. 269.

86. Vaclav Havel, “The Post-Communist Nightmare,” p. 48.

87. This statement belongs to L. Kolakowski and appears in his interview with G. Urban, in G. R. Urban, ed., Stalinism—Its Impact on Russia and the World (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1982), p. 277.

88. Steven Lukes, “On the Moral Blindness of Communism,” Human Rights Review 2, no. 2 (January-March 2001): 113-24.

89. Vaclav Havel, “New Year Address,” East European Reporter 4, no.1 (Winter 1989-1990): 56-58.

90. I chose a counterpart to Umberto Eco’s category for the extreme Right based on the noticeable communality of features between what he brands ur-Fascism and what I regard as ur-Leninism. If one took each characteristic of ur-Fascism pointed out by Eco, one could find a corresponding characteristic of ur-Leninism: the cult of tradition based on syncretism and the rejection of capitalist modernity (one can easily point to late 1930s and early 1950s Stalinism, to Ceau?escu’s national Stalinism, to Honecker’s Prussianism, etc.); the cult of action for action’s sake (Leninism is fundamentally a mobilization-centered ideology abhorrent of intellectualism and what it considers to be petit-bourgeois culture); monolithic unity (“the party of a new type”); hatred of difference (homogenization of the social, i.e., “the society of non-antagonistic classes” or anticosmopolitanism); reliance on the middle class (Leninism as a social system was sustained through both the creation of a New Class and the transformation of social categories via cultural revolution); “obsession with a plot” (suffice to mention here the “21 Conditions” for the Third International and the ban on factions); antipacifism and the mentality of permanent warfare (read “the deepening of class struggle” and “the continuous revolution”); “contempt for the weak” (the project of the New Man); “selective populism” (one has only to think of, among many other possible examples, Gomulka’s anti-Semitic campaign in Poland in March 1968); newspeak (read langue de bois). See Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism,” New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995; and Umberto Eco, Five Moral Pieces, trans. Alastair McEwen (New York: Harcourt, 2002).

91. Bradatan, “Philosophy and Martyrdom,” in Marx’s Shadow, ed. Bradatan and Oushakine, p. 120.

92. Ulrich Klaus Preuss and Ferran Requejo Coll, eds., European Citizenship, Multiculturalism, and the State (Baden Baden: Nomos, 1998), p. 127.