CHAPTER 2

Diabolical Pedagogy and the (Il) logic of Stalinism

I am too busy defending innocents claiming their innocence to waste my time with guilty individuals claiming their guilt.

—Paul Éluard, refusing to sign a petition against the hanging of Czech surrealist poet Zàšvis Kalandra (in Stéphane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism)

Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu died as a soldier serving his political ideals which he pursued through darkness, underground, and palaces, tenaciously, fiercely and fanatically.

—Petre Pandrea, Memoriile Mandarinului Valah (Memoirs of a Wallachian Mandarin)

With ascetic rigor towards itself and others, fanatical hatred for enemies and heretics, sectarian bigotry and an unlimited despotism fed on the awareness of its own infallibility, this monastic order labors to satisfy earthly, too “human” concerns.

—Semyon Frank, Vekhi (Landmarks)

It's not only the word “impossible” that has gone out of circulation, “unimaginable” also has no validity anymore.

—Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness

One of the main distinctions between the Nazi and Stalinist tyrannies was the absence in Germany of permanent purges of the ruling party elite as a mechanism of mobilization, integration, and scapegoating. In fact, Slovene philosopher Slavoj Žižek is right to observe that there were no Moscow-style show trials in Hitler's Germany (or for that matter in Mussolini's Italy).¹ The explanation lies in the differences between the centrality of the charismatic party in Bolshevik regimes and the prevailing status of the leader in Fascist dictatorships. This is not say that the leader (whether Stalin, Mao, Mátyás Rákosi, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, Klement Gottwald, or Enver Hoxha) was not an omnipotent figure under Leninism, but his cultic power derived from the apotheosis of the party as the carrier of history's behests. The absence of show trials in Nazi Germany did not eliminate purges as a means to consolidate the Führer's power.² The Blomberg-Frisch affair, when Hitler entrenched his dominance over the army leadership, and the elimination of the Ernst Rohm SA faction during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, were, according to Ian Kershaw, “stepping-stones in cementing Hitler's absolute power.”³

In order to understand the dynamics of the Stalinist experiment in Eastern Europe, one must take into account the paramount role of direct Soviet intervention and intimidation.⁴ Local Communist formations were pursuing the Stalinist model of systematic destruction of non-Communist parties, the disintegration of the civil society, and the monopolistic occupation of the public space through state-controlled ideological rituals and coercive institutions.⁵ The overall goal was to build a passive consensus based on unlimited commitment to the ideocratic political program of the ruling elite. The true content of the political regime was described by the “cult of personality.” Stalin, as the Egocrat (to use Solzhenitsyn's term), was the ultimate figure of power. Echoing earlier critiques of the Leninist vertical-authoritarian logic by Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, French political philosopher Claude Lefort points out that this principle presupposed a specific “logic of identification”: “Identification of the people with the proletariat, of the proletariat with the party, of the party with the leadership, of the leadership with the Egocrat…. The denial of social division goes hand in hand with the denial of a symbolic distinction which is constitutive of society.”⁶ The personalization of political power, its concentration in the hands of a demigod, led to his forcible religious adoration and the masochistic humiliation of its subjects. British journalist George Urban described this system as “a paranoia of despotism” that boasted its own (il) logic. It looks now and did then “like a form of madness to us, observing it as we are from the outside, but did not seem so to anyone identifying himself with the context in which Stalin operated.Within that context Stalin pursued his objectives relentlessly and rationally.”⁷ In the context of such absolute inversion of the life-world, Old Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin's letter to Stalin on December 10, 1937, a few months before his public trial and execution as an “enemy of the people” in March 1938, can make sense. Bukharin, like Karl Radek, another Bolshevik luminary, was the prototype of the character Nikolai Salmanovich Rubashov in Arthur Koestler's masterpiece Darkness at Noon (it was Radek who spoke of the “algebra of confession”).⁸ As historians J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov point out, “According to Stalin's formula, criticism was the same as opposition; opposition inevitably implied conspiracy; conspiracy meant treason. Algebraically, therefore, the slightest opposition to the regime or failure to report such opposition was tantamount to terrorism.”⁹

Once Stalin's close friend and supporter, ousted under charges of “right-wing deviation” in 1929 and reinstated into the Central Committee in 1934, Bukharin had been described by Lenin in his “Testament” as the party's “favorite child.”¹⁰ He had bowed to Stalin's supremacy and was in fact one of the authors of the 1936 Stalinist Constitution. The same year, Bukharin traveled to Paris to retrieve the Marx-Engels Archive from the exiled German social democrats. In spite of old friends’ warnings (among them veteran Mensheviks Fyodor Dan and Boris Nikolaevsky) that back in Moscow he would be arrested, Bukharin refused to remain abroad. He was imprisoned after the notorious February 1937 Central Committee Plenum when Stalin spelled out his theory of the sharpening of class struggle as the USSR advanced toward socialism. Bukharin was forced to publicly confess to surreal charges. However, he refused to acknowledge having participated in a plot to arrest Lenin in 1918. Stalin's outstanding biographer, Robert C. Tucker, best describes Bukharin's contradictory stance: “He pleaded guilty to ‘the sum total of the crimes committed by this counter-revolutionary organization,’ but thereupon suggested that not only did he not take part in but he even lacked knowledge of ‘any particular act’ involved.”¹¹

During the last days of his trial, Bukharin wrote a letter to Stalin. In it he claimed “personal intimacy” with the Soviet leader, actually reaffirming his unswerving faith in the party's vision of social utopia and the Bolshevik revolutionary cause. Furthermore, this love for the party translated into an almost neurotic desire to reassure Stalin of his unbending dedication to the infallible leader himself. This document (which Stalin kept in his personal drawer until his death in March 1953) bears testimony to the mystical underpinnings of the Bolshevik belief system and its reverberations in the interpersonal relations within the top party elite. It is therefore worth quoting extensively from Bukharin's letter:

This is perhaps the last letter I shall write to you before my death. That is why, though I am in prison, I ask you to permit me to write this letter without resorting to officialese [ofitsial'shchina], all the more so since I am writing this letter to you alone: the very fact of its existence or nonexistence will remain entirely in your hands. I have come to the last page of my drama and perhaps of my very life. I agonize over whether I should pick up pen and paper—as I write this, I am shuddering all over from this quiet and from a thousand emotions stirring within me and I can hardly control myself. But precisely because I have so little time left, I want to take my leave of you in advance, before it's too late, before my hand ceases to write, before my eyes close, while my brain somehow still functions…. Standing on the edge of a precipice, from which there is no return, I tell you on my word of honor, as I await my death, that I am innocent of those crimes which I admitted to at the investigation…. So at the Plenum I spoke the truth and nothing but the truth but no one believed me. And here now I speak the absolute truth: all these past years, I have been honestly and sincerely carrying out the party line and have learnt to cherish and love you wisely…. There is something great and bold about the political idea of a general purge. It is a) connected to the pre-war situation and b) connected with the transition to democracy. This purge encompassed 1) the guilty; 2) persons under suspicion; and 3) persons under potential suspicion. This business could not have been managed without you. Some are neutralized one way, others in another way, and the third group yet another way…. For God's sake, don't think that I am engaged here in reproaches, even in my inner thoughts. I wasn't born yesterday. I know all too well that great plans, great ideas, and great interests take precedence over everything, and I know that it would be petty to place the question of my own person on a par with the universal-historical tasks resting, first and foremost, on your shoulders. But it is here that I feel my deepest agony and find myself facing my chief, agonizing paradox…. My head is giddy with confusion, and I feel like yelling at the top of my voice. I feel like pounding my head against the wall: for, in that case, I have become a cause for the death of others. What am I to do? What am I to do? Oh, Lord, if only there were some device which would have made it possible for you to see my soul flayed and reaped open! If only you could see how I am attached to you, body and soul…. Well, so much for “psychology”—forgive me. No angel will appear now to snatch Abraham's sword from his hand. My fatal destiny shall be fulfilled … Iosif Vissarionovich! In me you have lost one of your most capable generals, one who is genuinely devoted to you … but I am preparing myself mentally to depart from this vale of tears, and there is nothing in me toward all of you, toward the party and the cause, but a great and boundless love. I am doing everything that is humanly possible and impossible…. I have written to you about all this. I have crossed all the t's and dotted all the i's. I have done all this in advance, since I have no idea at all what condition I shall be in tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, etc…. Being a neurasthenic I shall perhaps feel such universal apathy that I won't be able even so much as to move my finger. But now, in spite of a headache and with tears in my eyes, I am writing. My conscience is clear before you now, Koba. I ask you one final time for your forgiveness (only in your heart, not otherwise). For that reason I embrace you in mind. Farewell forever and remember kindly your wretched. N. Bukharin¹²

Bukharin's letter can be taken at face value or with a grain of salt. He obviously was trying to save his young wife and child; the letter was a last desperate attempt in this sense. Such an argument does not, however, explain the exaltation in the letter. Bukharin died as a true believer committed to achieving Bolshevik utopia. Furthermore, it is still questionable if he perceived his death as a last service made to the party, as suggested by Koestler's Darkness at Noon. Stephen E. Cohen, Bukharin's quite empathetic biographer, considered that he wanted to protect “Bolshevism's historical legacy by refuting the criminal indictment” rather than accepting it.¹³ Robert C. Tucker argued for a more nuanced reading of Bukharin's transcript: “Bukharin thus had a twofold objective in the trial—to comply with Stalin by confessing and at the same time to turn the tables on him. He wants to make two trials in one.” According to Tucker, “there was an active effort on Bukharin's part to transform the trial into an anti-trial. The fight he put up against Vyshinsky was entirely dedicated to this purpose.”¹⁴ Undoubtedly Bukharin, in his final public appearance, was trying to make a last political statement against Stalin and the system the latter had created. One should not forget that during a fateful meeting of the Central Committee on February 23, 1937, Bukharin warned Stalin that “I am not Zinoviev or Kamenev, and I will not tell lies about myself.” After this event, he wrote a letter entitled “To a Future Generation of Party Leaders,” which he asked his wife to memorize, in which he ominously noted, “I feel my helplessness before a hellish machine, which … has acquired gigantic power, fabricates organized slander, acts boldly and confidently.” He then accused Stalin: “By political terrorism, and by acts of torture on a scale hitherto unheard of, you have forced old Party members to make ‘depositions.’”¹⁵

All things considered, the case of Bukharin cannot be read solely as the heroic tale told by Cohen or as Koestler's self-immolation only in service of the party. What remains is a paradox: on the hand, Bukharin was committed to the Bolshevik cause while knowing full well Stalin's “theory of sweet revenge”;¹⁶ on the other hand, his letter to Stalin reveals that he preserved an uncanny attachment to his former ally and friend. Upon being devoured by the utopia that he had helped build, his last moments were a mixture of obedience, opportunism, fear, and most important, faith. Last but not least, Cohen's and Tucker's interpretations of his last stand at the trial were formulated without any knowledge of Bukharin's letter to Stalin.

Bukharin, however, was not the only case of faith in the party and the Communist cause in the face of an impending exterminatory purge. In June 2010, I delivered a lecture in Bucharest on secular religions and totalitarian movements, focusing on the meanings of purges and show trials. I quoted extensively from Bukharin's letter. Immediately after I finished my presentation, a Romanian historian approached me and mentioned the existence in the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives of a strikingly similar letter addressed to the party by veteran communist Mirel Costea (Nathan Zaider), head of the Party Cadres Department, before he committed suicide during the heyday of Stalinist terror in Romania (June 1951). Costea's brother-in-law, engineer Emil Calmanovici, had been one of the Romanian Communist Party's main financial backers during the underground years. Closely associated with people involved in the Lucrețiu Pătraășcanu affair, he was arrested and charged with treason. Having to choose between the “objective” logic of his unflinching devotion to the party and his subjective understanding of Calmanovici's innocence, Costea decided to take his own life. In his last massage to his comrades, Costea wrote:

A communist must maintain faith in the Party and must be the happiest person in the world when he feels that a Party trusts him. I was happy, I enjoyed the Party's trust and I say that I deserved it because I did not mislead the Party. Since 1939, I had no other life than for the Party. I hated and I hate the enemies of the working class, its traitors…. I cannot bear the thought that the Party lost its trust in me. For this reason I kiss my Party card which I have never sullied before I had it in this form of hereafter. I give in to the Party. I thank the Party for the trust showed to me up to a certain moment. This [committing suicide] is not the gesture of the communist, I have not learned these gestures from the Party, it is a leftover of bourgeois education and morality. I would have been able to bear tortures in the cells of the Siguranta [interwar Romanian political police], but I cannot bear the agony that I have lost the trust of my Party. My last thought goes to comrade Stalin, to the Central Committee of the Romanian Workers’ Party, to comrade Gheorghiu-Dej.

I also found in the Securitate archives Mirel Costea's last letter to his daughters, Rodica and Dana, written a few minutes before he shot himself:

Your daddy, whom you have loved and who has loved you apologizes that he needs to leave. When you grow older you will understand that the most precious good for an honest human being is to enjoy the trust of the Party. Until recently I have enjoyed this trust; until recently, and this is something I cannot bear. My life has been for the Party, without its trust it has no meaning. I beg you to live well and to love each other as we have loved you, me and your mother. Keep in mind that your father was an honest man, faithful to the Party. However, if you ever find out that the Party thinks differently about me, then you should believe what the Party says. Your mother will take care of you and will educate you in the spirit of love for comrade Stalin, for the USSR, for our Party, for the beloved leaders of our Party, as I have educated you.¹⁷

The symbolic vehicle for this moral and political regimentation was the Stalinist definition of internationalism as unbounded allegiance to the USSR (the “touchstone theory”). To keep strict control over all mechanisms that guaranteed social reproduction and preserved the matrix of domination in such a system, the party had to play the central role. Based on my research in the Romanian Communist Party's archives, it appears that no segment of the body social, economic, or cultural, as well as no repressive institution, escaped continuous and systematic party intervention. Even during the climactic terrorist period (1948-53), the secret police served as the party's obedient instrument and not the other way around. Indeed, as one scholar stated, “The USSR, in other words, did not keep two sets of books, at least on ideological questions.”¹⁸ Ideological purity and revolutionary vigilance were imposed as main political imperatives. political police, cast in the Soviet mold and controlled by Soviet advisers, took care to fulfill the ideological desiderata. The political content of that ideological dictatorship in its radical incarnation (the first five years) was sheer terror and permanent propaganda warfare waged within a personalized dictatorship embodied by local “little Stalins.”

What these countries experienced was not merely an institutional import or imperial expansion. They went through what one could label, using Stephen Kotkin's formulation, a “civilizational”¹⁹ transfer that transplanted a secular eschatology (Marxism-Leninism), a radical vision of the world (capitalist encirclement and the touchstone theory of proletarian internationalism²⁰ spelled out by Stalin in the 1920s), and ultimately, an alternative idea of modernity (based upon anticapitalism and state-managed collectivism) self-identified as infallibly righteous—in other words, Stalinism. Kotkin's characterization of Stalinism as civilization comes very close to the comparison by Anthony Stevens, a Jungian analyst, to National Socialism. According to Stevens, “Nazism had its Messiah (Hitler), its Holy Book (Mein Kampf), its cross (the Swastika), its religious processions (the Nuremberg Rally), its ritual (the Beer Hall Putsch Remembrance Parade), its anointed elite (the SS), its hymns (the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’), excommunication for heretics (the concentration camps), its devils (the Jews), its millennial promise (the Thousand Year Reich), and its Promised Land (the East).”²¹ Both Stalinism and Nazis were radical, revolutionary civilizations that aimed at establishing an alternative, illiberal modernity by instrumentalizing the political religion that lay at their core.

Stalinism was a self-sufficient, pre-established plan to restructure society, in the name of which the movement dispensed with as many human lives as needed while frantically engineering radical transformation.²² The personality cult (and the growing Russianization of the Stalinist system during and after World War II) combined with the intrinsic and increasingly orthodox outlook of Communism (as “a lived system”)²³ exacerbated the exclusionary logic in the “people's democracies.” As in the Soviet Union, in Eastern Europe Stalinism itself was the revolution:²⁴ it broke through the already frail structures of the ancien régime and laid the groundwork of state socialism in each of the region's countries. It created an all-pervasive party-state that tried and in most cases succeeded in extending its tentacles into all walks of life.²⁵ In the words of the director of the French Institute in Tallinn, Jean Cathala, in 1940 the process of Sovietization meant “the incorporation into another world: into a world of institutions, of practices and ways of thinking, that had to be accepted as a bloc, because the spiritual and the temporal, doctrine and the state, the regime and methods of government, the homeland and the party in power were all mixed together in it.”²⁶

At the same time, Sovietization was “part of an imperialist conception, whereby a system of domination and subjugation was effected and rationalized, and whereby a subaltern identity was ascribed to the subjected peoples.”²⁷ The main weakness of this system, however, was its chronic deficit of legitimacy. Under mature Stalinism, both in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, autocratic despotism ruined the functioning of the party as an autonomous institution, its potential for “charismatic impersonalism” inherent in Leninism as an organizational model. This phenomenon explains the neotraditionalist features of Stalinism. If one follows Ken Jowitt's argument, the mutation of the definition of revolutionary heroism (initially belonging to the party, but now the prerogative of one) cancelled the fundamental characteristic of novelty in Leninism as an ideo-political form of aggregation.²⁸ In this monolithic structure dominated by the revolutionary phalanx, plans to reshape man, nature, and society were frantically pursued. Stalinism as a political religion overturned traditional morality: good and evil, vice and virtue, truth and lie were drastically revalued. The goal was to create a system that unified victim and torturer, that abolished traditional moral taboos and established a different code, with different prescriptions and prohibitions. The dramaturgy of show trials with their “infernal pedagogy” (Annie Kriegel) was the main component of a system based on universal fear, duplicity, and suspicion.

The “oceanic feeling,” the ecstasy of solidarity, the desire to dissolve one's autonomy into the mystical supra-individual entity of the party, aptly described by Arthur Koestler, was the emotional ground for a chiliastic type of revolutionary commitment.²⁹ In his conversations with Czesław Miłosz, Polish poet Aleksander Wat formulated a memorable evaluation of the phenomenon: “Communism is the enemy of interiorization, of the inner man…. But today we know what exteriorization leads to: the killing of the inner man, and that is the essence of Stalinism. The essence of Stalinism is the poisoning of the inner man so that it becomes shrunken the way headhunters shrink heads—those shriveled little heads—and then disappears entirely…. The inner man must be killed for the communist Decalogue to be lodged in the soul.”³⁰ Community, defined in terms of class, was the antipode of the execrated petty egotism of the bourgeois individual. The self had to be denied in order to achieve real fraternité. Generations of Marxist intellectuals hastened to annihilate their dignity in this apocalyptical race for ultimate certitudes. The whole heritage of Western skeptical rationalism was easily dismissed in the name of the revealed light emanating from the Kremlin. The age of reason was thus to culminate in the frozen universe of quasi-rational terror. Paradoxically, in the aftermath of World War II, Georg Lukács, a paragon of Marxist philosophy and staunch supporter of Bolshevism, wrote a whole treatise accusing Western philosophy of having abandoned humanist traditions in favor of an overall attempt to destroy Reason.³¹

The subject, the human being—totally ignored at the level of philosophical discourse—was eventually abolished as a physical entity in the vortex of the “great purges.” Historian Jochen Hellbeck accurately remarked in his analysis of diaries during Stalinism that “an individual living under the Bolshevik system could not conceivably formulate a notion of himself independently of the program promulgated by the Bolshevik state. An individual and the political system in which he lived cannot be viewed as two separate entities.”³² These images were more than metaphors, since metaphor suggests an ineffable face of reality, whereas what happened under Stalin was awfully visible and immediate. Even those diarists who were targets of political campaigns or whose close relatives were victims of the purges tried to align their thought with the official line:

Stalin-era diarists’ desire for a purposeful and significant life reflected a widespread urge to ideologize one's life, to turn it into the expression of a firm, internally consistent, totalizing Weltanschauung. … The regime was thus able to channel strivings for self-validation and transcendence that emerged outside the ideological boundaries of Bolshevism. In this light, the Soviet project emerges as a variant of a larger European phenomenon of the inter-war period that can be described as a two-fold obligation for a personal world view and for the individuals’ integration into a community…. The power of the Communist appeal, which promised that those who had been slaves in the past could remold themselves into exemplary members of humanity, cannot be overestimated.³³

Under Stalin, the process of establishing one's identity was fundamentally conditioned by the party-state's project of radical transformism.

It can be hardly denied that Fascist and Communist regimes were the antithesis of the Western humanist legacy. In the words of Hungarian critical Marxist philosopher Ferenc Fehér, the all-embracing telos of Nazism was “universal conquest which can only conclude either in a collective of the ‘race’ or in the irrelevance of the objective itself when the conquest becomes truly universal.” As for the characteristics of the Communist bestiarum, Fehér listed the following: the everyday drabness of the gulag, the moblike rudeness of its personnel, rudeness as a general atmosphere, a false kind of atheism, and the Jacobin element. Writes Fehér:

It is a strange dialectic that many refined aspects of the Jacobin project serve as a foundation of the outright animal indifference of the bestiarum. The first of them is the legitimation of all inhuman acts in the name of the “future generations,” whose happiness is allegedly at sake. This is a good antidote against the vestiges of a personal conscience. The second is the collective moral slandering of the enemy: belonging to a non-accepted group becomes here a sin which also has the useful side-effect of eliminating the remnants of Christian compassion…. The extension of the bestiarum in “real socialism” cannot be reasonably reduced to the scope of the Gulag proper. The culture created by Stalin, attenuated but left fundamentally unaltered by his heirs and successors, is barbaric precisely in the sense that in it there is no line of demarcation between the bestial and the non-bestial…. Therefore it is not accidental that the only cultural creation in this society has been coming for decades now only from dissidents who are writing about the bestiarum and whose outraged question is precisely this: what have you done to our people?³⁴

At the same time, François Furet and Pierre Hassner were right to emphasize the nature of Leninism/Stalinism as pathology of universalism, a derailed (devoyé) offspring of the Enlightenment. Naturally, it would be preposterous to restrict ourselves to mere ethical condemnation. But it would not be by any means commendable to gloss over the moral implications of Stalinism or, echoing a famous essay by the young Georg Lukács, the dilemmas of “Bolshevism as a moral problem.” It is important, when pondering the fate of Marxism in the twentieth century, to grasp the split of personalities, the clash between lofty ideals and palpable practices, the methods of the Stalinist terrorist pedagogy in its endeavor to produce a new type of human being whose loyalties and beliefs would be decreed by the party. The revenge of history on its worshippers—thus could be depicted the terrorist psychosis of the Stalinist massacres. To quote sociologist Alvin W. Gouldner's perceptive interpretation, “The central strategy of the Marxist project, its concern with seeking a remedy to unnecessary suffering, was thus in the end susceptible to a misuse that betrayed its own highest avowals. The root of the trouble was that this conception of its own project redefined pity…. The human condition was rejected on behalf of the historical condition.”³⁵

As Koestler once pointed out (in his 1938 letter of resignation from the exiled German Communist Writers’ Union), for Lenin it was not enough to smash his enemy—he wanted to make him look contemptible. László Rajk, Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu, Rudolf Slánský, Ana Pauker, Vladimir Clementis, Traicho Kostov, Bedřich Geminder, Artur London, Rudolf Margolius—all of them had to be portrayed as despicable scoundrels and scurrilous vermin. Yesterday's heroes had become today's scum.³⁶ To a certain extent, Robert C. Tucker is right to point out that “the show trials of 1936-1938 … for Stalin were a dramatization of his conspiracy view of the Soviet and contemporary world…. The Stalinist terror was in large part an expression of the needs of the dictatorial personality of Stalin, and these needs continued to generate the terror as long as he lived.”³⁷However, at the core of Lenin's vision of a new society lay an exterminist ethos. Bukharin, whom Cohen labeled the “last Bolshevik” and who considered himself the true heir of Lenin, emphasized in his volume Economics of the Transition Period, published in 1920, that “proletarian coercion in all of its forms, beginning with shooting and ending with labor conscription, is … a method of creating communist mankind out of the human materials of the capitalist epoch.” By the beginning of the 1930s, Bukharin had shifted to a theory of “growing into socialism.” However, as he had wisely been warned by Trotsky, “The system of apparatus terror cannot come to a stop only at the so-called ideological deviations, real or imagined, but must inevitably spread throughout the entire life and activities of the organization.”³⁸ The Great Terror might have been Stalin's doing and might have reflected his “warfare personality” (as Tucker argues), but the principle of widespread excisionary violence against those opposed or alien to dictatorship of the proletariat was encoded at the heart of Leninism.

Especially after 1951, Stalinist anti-Western, anti-intellectual, and anti-Titoist obsessions merged with an increasingly rabid anti-Semitism:

Stalin feared that other peace champ countries would follow the independent Yugoslav model and break away from the influential sphere of the Soviet Union. He instigated the terror of political trials to uncover “enemies” within each Communist Party in order to discourage dissent. Victims were sought out and accused of connection with Tito's opposition attitudes and treachery. In later cases, the Soviets turned to Zionism and its supposed link with Western imperialism as the cause of the Communist betrayal. The show trial was a propaganda arm of political terror. Its aim was to personalize an abstract political enemy, to place it in the dock in flesh and blood and, with the aid of a perverted system of justice, to transform abstract political-ideological differences into easily intelligible common crimes. It both incited the masses against the evil embodied by defendants and frightened them away from supporting any potential opposition.³⁹

Among the East European Stalinist legal frame-ups, the Slánský trial in Prague, in the fall of 1952, symbolized the ultimate conversion of Bolshevism into an emerging version of Communist-Fascism. The selection of the defense (eleven of the fourteen were prominent Communists of Jewish descent); the vicious brutality of the interrogations, which included crude anti-Semitic slurs; the hysterical anti-Zionist media campaigns in Czechoslovakia and the other Communist countries; the rabidly racist indictment uttered by the chief prosecutor, Josef Urválek; the direct involvement of Stalin's envoys in the concoction of this mega-provocation—all these elements conjured up an unprecedented chain of broken illusions, bitter vendettas, and betrayed loyalties. In the words of Artur London, one of three survivors of the trial and a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and the French anti-Nazi maquis, who was at the moment of his arrest in 1951 deputy foreign minister of Czechoslovakia: “Every physical and moral torture was carried to an extreme. I had been forced to walk on continuously…. [I]t went on for months, and was made all the worse by my having to keep my arms to my sides. My feet and legs became swelled. The skin round my toenail burst, and the blisters became suppurating wounds.”⁴⁰ The son of Margolius, one of the defendants, imagines his father's thoughts the night before the trial opened at the High Court in Pankrác on November 20, 1952:

Rudolf recalled reading Søren Kierkegaard's The Concept of Anxiety written in 1844, where the great philosopher stated: “The individual becomes guilty not because he is guilty but because of his anxiety about being thought guilty.” Rudolf felt it was his duty to perform as demanded; he was not guilty but the Party asked him to support it in its hour of need … ironically it was exactly like Koestler's Darkness at Noon, which [Pavel] Tigrid [a major figure of the Czech democratic exile] had lent him. [Karol] Bacilek [the Stalinist minister of state security, 1952-53] sounded like Gletkin, who told Rubashov: “Your testimony at the trial will be the last service you can do to the party.” The Party denied the free will of the individual—and at the same time, exacted his will in sacrifice. Except all that had been fiction: Rudolf was in the real world.⁴¹

On the second day of the Slánský trial, Bedřich Geminder, a former Comintern official and chief of the International Department of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, was subjected to unspeakable deprecations linked to his German-Jewish origin:

Judge Novák: “What nationality are you?”

Defendant Geminder: “Czech”

Judge Novák: “Can you speak Czech well?”

Defendent Geminder: “Yes.”

Judge Novák: “Do you want an interpreter?”

Defendant Geminder: “No.”

…

Prosecutor Urválek: “… you never really learned to speak Czech well, not even in 1946 when you came back to Czechoslovakia and occupied important posts in the Communist Party?”

Defendent Geminder: “No, I didn't learn to speak Czech properly.”

…

Prosecutor Urválek: “You cannot really speak any language properly, can you? You are a typical cosmopolitan. As such you sneaked into the Communist Party.”⁴²

“Rootless cosmopolitanism” was a Stalinist code word, a counterpart to Julius Streicher's vicious anti-Semitic propaganda. The vilified Geminder, born into a German-Jewish family in Moravia in 1901, had joined a Zionist youth group before he became a member of the Communist Party in 1921. In 1928, he was elected to the Executive Committee of the Communist International of Youth (KAM). Following the Munich Pact of 1938, Geminder moved to the Soviet Union, where he joined the Comintern as head of its Press and Information Service under the nom de guerre G. Friedrich.⁴³ For his revolutionary services he was given the Order of Lenin. He was married to Irene Falcon, a Spanish Communist and personal secretary to the general secretary of the Spanish Communist Party, the legendary Dolores Ibarruri, la Passionaria.⁴⁴ Sentenced to death on November 27, 1952, Geminder was shot on December 3. On March 6, 1953, Stalin passed away.⁴⁵

The magic impact of power in classical Stalinism would have been unthinkable in the absence of ideology. They feed each other; power derives its mesmerizing force from the seductive potential of ideology. Man is proclaimed omnipotent, and ideology supervises the identification of abstract man with concrete power. Veneration of power is rooted in contempt for traditional values, including those associated with the survival of reason. It is important, therefore, to resist the temptation of critical thought, since reason is the enemy of total regimentation. To quote one of Stalin's most important (and vicious) accomplices, Lazar Kaganovich, “Treachery in politics always begins with the revision of theory.”⁴⁶ In one of his late aphorisms, Max Horkheimer hinted at the philosophical revolution provoked by Marxism. Defending the dignity of the individual subject becomes a seditious undertaking, a challenge to the prevailing myth of homogeneity: “However socially conditioned the individual's thinking may be, however necessarily it may relate to social questions, to political action, it remains the thought of the individual which is not just the effect of collective processes but can also take them as its object.”⁴⁷ Political shamanism, practiced by alleged adversaries of mysticism, thwarts attempts to resist the continual assault on the mind. Marxism-Leninism, which was the code name for the ideology of the nomenklatura, aimed to dominate both the public and private spheres of social life. Man, both as an individual and as a citoyen, had to be massified. The cult of violence and the sacralization of the infallible party line created totally submissive subjects for whom any crime ordered by the upper echelons was justified in the name of “glowing tomorrows.” Like the ideologically driven Eichmann, Stalin's “willing executioners” acted on the base of what Hannah Arendt called “thoughtlessness.” ⁴⁸

A climate of fear is needed to preserve monolithic unity. To cement this frail cohesion, the Stalinist “warfare personality” contrived the diabolical figure of the traitor: “The characteristically paranoid perception of the world as an arena of deadly hostilities being conducted conspiratorially by an insidious and implacable enemy against the self finds highly systematized expression in terms of political and ideological symbols that are widely understood and accepted in the given social milieu. Through a special and radical form of displacement of private affects upon public objects, this world-image is politicized. In the resulting vision of reality, both attacker and intended victim are projected on the scale of large human collectivities.”⁴⁹ In René Girard's sense, scapegoating⁵⁰ fed a utopia freed of exploitation, antagonism, and the imperative of necessity. The origin of this exclusionary logic is of course Lenin's combatant, intransigent Manichaeism, us versus them, who will get rid of whom (kto kogo).⁵¹ Or, to return to Bukharin's 1920 volume, Economics of the Transition Period, revolutionary force is “midwife” to the transition from the ancien régime to the new order: “[It] must destroy the fetters on the development of society, i.e., on one side, the old forms of ‘concentrated force,’ which have become a counterrevolutionary factor—the old state and the old type of production relations. This revolutionary force, on the other side, must actively help in the formation of production relations, being a new form of ‘concentrated force,’ the state of the new class, which acts as the lever of economic revolution, altering the economic structure of society.”⁵² For Bukharin, as for Lenin or Stalin, “the dismantled social layers” of the old were recombined by a proletarian state through the etatization, militarization, and mobilization of the production forces. Subsequently, the author of The ABC of Communism concluded that “the process of socialization in all of its forms [my emphasis]” was “the function of the proletarian state.”⁵³ As already shown, in the process of eliminating the ambivalences of the Soviet society, the Bolsheviks introduced indiscriminate state violence in the functions of the proletarian state. Terror was a central mechanism of ordering the new polity.

Who are the enemies? Where do they come from? What are their purposes? Providing answers to these questions was the main function of the show trials. Maintaining vigilance, stigmatizing the presumed villains, and preserving the psychology of universal anguish were the tasks Stalin assigned to the masterminds of successive purges. No fissures were admitted in the Bolshevik shield, no doubt could arise that did not conceal mischievous ploys aimed at undermining the system. Time and again the refrain was repeated by spineless sycophants: we are surrounded by sworn enemies, we are invincible only inasmuch as we stay united. Expressing dissenting views necessarily meant weakening the revolutionary avant-garde. Breaking ranks was considered a mortal sin, and suspiciousness was the ultimate revolutionary virtue. In fact, when acquiescence is the golden rule, it takes great moral courage to rebel. In the homogenous space of totalitarian domination, opposition amounted to crime and opponents were treated as mere criminals. They incarnated difference and were therefore seen as outcasts. Ostracism led ultimately to mental emancipation, the autonomy of the mind acquired by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's zeks, the population of Stalin's gulag. The barbed wire was thus the symbol of a new kind of boundary between absolute victims and relative accomplices of evil. The whole tragedy of Communism lies in this hallucinating statement: the vision of a superior elite whose utopian goals sanctify the most barbaric methods; the denial of the right to life to those who are defined as “degenerate parasites and predators,” the deliberate dehumanization of victims.

The image of man as a mechanism, put forward by French philosophes, found its strange echo in this all-pervading technology of socially oriented murder. This was the acme of radical utopianism, when nothing could resist the perpetual motion of foul play. Marxist eschatology was imposed through Stalinist demonology. The purge functioned as a panopticon where sinners and their secrets came into the open. It was a ritual of self-deprecation and ultimate submission to the party's sacrosanct will. Criticism and self-criticism were party rituals of certitudo salutis for the inner-worldly vocation of its members: “The party appeared as a panopticon which could discover at ‘open meetings of the nuclei’ the ‘moral corruption and discreditable conduct on the part of Party members. The required self-criticism and criticism of the party cadres was used as medium to reach their inner conscience, and therefore to convert and to convince them to show self-discipline and ‘self-sacrificing work for the benefit of communism.’”⁵⁴ Within this construct, morality was defined in terms of loyalty to a sense of ultimate historical transcendence. Igal Halfin eminently presented the process by which, through cyclical purges in the Soviet Union (one can consider their embryonic stage as 1920-21), Marxist eschatology morphed into a demonology that reached its discursive, exacerbated, and criminal maturity with the Second Socialist Transformation triggered by the pyatiletka unleashed to build socialism in one country.⁵⁵ Public discourse was saturated with frightening images of deviators, heretics, spies, agents, and other scoundrels. By the mid-1930s, one can see under Stalinism a process that bears a strong resemblance to terror practices under Nazism: “the desubjectification of the victim” became “a programmed precondition for his/her victimization, a precondition enabling the perpetrator's enactment of the narrative program of extermination.”⁵⁶ A phenomenology of treason was devised to justify carnage, and there was no paucity of intellectuals to support this morbid scenario. In other words, perpetrators successfully defined victims in their own terms. A lingering sentiment that there was after all something moral in Bolshevik utopianism, plus the exploitation of anti-Fascist emotions, led to a persistent failure to acknowledge the basic fact that from its inception Sovietism was a criminal system.

In Stalin's mind the purges were means of political consolidation and authority-building, a springboard for newcomers and time-servers. They would secure the human basis for effective control over society. One of the foremost biographers of Stalin commented on the function and consequences of the Great Purge: “He wanted to achieve an unrestricted personal dictatorship with a totality of power that he did not yet possess…. Emerging from the events of 1936-38 as a personal dictator in what was now a truly totalitarian system of power, Stalin had achieved the international political purpose of the Great Purge.”⁵⁷ In one of his most poignant essays, published before World War II in Partisan Review, Phillip Rahv put forward a thorough interpretation of the mechanism that led to the “great terror”: “These are trials of the mind and of the human spirit…. In the Soviet Union, for the first time in history, the individual has been deprived of every conceivable means of resistance. Authority is monolithic: property and politics are one. Under the circumstances it becomes impossible to defy the organization; to set one's will against it. One cannot escape it: not only does it absorb the whole of life but it also seeks to model the shapes of death.”⁵⁸ Without the purges the system would have looked radically different. Both victims and beneficiaries of the murderous mechanism were lumped together by this sacrificial ritual. For some of the Bolshevik militants liquidated or deported during the great purge, the terrorist ordeal amounted to necessary self-deprecation and self-abasement. Moreover, it was an opportunity to attain the long-expected absolution for those moments of “derailment” when they had dared to oppose Stalin. Zbigniew Brzezinski synthetically listed long ago the main objectives of the purge: “The cleansing of the party, the restoration of its vigor and monolithic unity, the elimination of enemies, and the establishment of the correctness of its line and the primacy of the leadership.”⁵⁹An entire phenomenology of mystical servility came about in the process of massacring society, and it was irresponsibly (and enthusiastically) reproduced by many intellectuals who had accepted this emasculation of their critical faculties. Residual hopes for elusive crumbs of morality within the Communist utopia combined with a Machiavellian exploitation of anti-Fascist sentiment led to a tragic failure to acknowledge the criminal nature of the Soviet experiment. Still, one needs to mention those who saw the reality and refused to remain silent. Among these voices of lucidity, one should mention Panait Istrati, Boris Souvarine, Ignazio Silone, Carlo Roselli, George Orwell, and other intellectuals who challenged the Big Lie.⁶⁰

The problem with Leninism was the sanctification of ultimate ends, and thus the creation of an amoral universe in which the most terrible crimes could be justified in the name of a radiant future. In practice, the elimination of politics seemed a logical terminus, for the party was the embodiment of an extremist collective will.⁶¹ This fixation on ends and the readiness to use the most atrocious means to attain them are features of many ideological utopias, but in the Leninist experience they reached grotesquely tragic limits. Lenin's ultradeterministic belief in the coming of the proletarian order functioned after 1917 as a nihilistic mechanism for bringing the world in line with such millennialism. The old order needed to be smashed, so its human embodiments were demonized and became targets for merciless persecution. In his manifesto against the Mensheviks, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904), Lenin proclaimed that “it would be the most criminal cowardice to doubt even for a moment the inevitable and complete triumph of the principles of revolutionary Social-Democracy, of proletarian organization and Party discipline [my emphasis].”⁶² Bertrand Russell noticed as early as 1920 that there was a central duality within Bolshevism that contained the movement's doom: there was, on the one hand, “its commitment to a certain conception of modernization,” and, on the other hand, “an ideological commitment to an ideological world view shaped by ideological zeal and intolerance of other world views, which was a denial of the Enlightenment to rational discourse.”⁶³ In other words, Bolshevism was pregnant with its own Inquisition from the beginning.

No less important, the appeal of Communism was linked to the extraordinary power of its ideology (and the core myth of the party as the carrier of reason in history). No other revolutionary movement has been as successful as Leninism in turning a gnostic creed into a self-hypnotizing weapon. Leninist militants worldwide believed in the myth of the party with an ardor comparable only to the illuminates of religious millennial sects. It is important to insist on both the ideological and institutional foundations of Leninism when we try to fathom the mystery of Leninism's endurance in the twentieth century. The myth of the party as the repository of historical wisdom and rationality is the key to grasping the dynamics and finally the decay and extinction of Leninism. Leninism, in its various phases, was what Ken Jowitt described as a “Catholic moment” in history, when “a universal ‘word’ becomes institutional ‘flesh,’ an authoritatively standardized and centered institutional format dominates a highly diverse set of cultures.” The Althusserian interpretation remains valid only if one performs a phraseological inversion: Leninism was a new praxis of philosophy. The explanation of its longevity in the twentieth century can therefore be found in “the promise of the Great October Revolution … of the Soviet Union as socialist hierophany.”⁶⁴

The biographies of the ideological elites in Soviet-type regimes were usually colorless and lacked any moment of real distinction. In Eastern Europe, the ideological watchdogs were recruited from the Muscovite factions of the ruling parties. In Hungary, József Révai, once one of Georg Lukács's promising disciples, became a scourge of intellectual life. Révai was a member of the Hungarian delegation to various Cominform meetings and enthusiastically implemented the Zhdanovist strategy. In Romania, the tandem of Iosif Chișinevschi and Leonte Răutu forced the national culture into a mortal impasse. Similar denials of genuine national traditions and an apocryphal sense of internationalism were promoted by ideological bureaucracies in Czechoslovakia (Vilem Kopecky, Jiři Hendrich)⁶⁵ and East Germany (Gerhart Eisner, Albert Norden, Kurt Hager).⁶⁶ All devices were convenient when it came to uprooting vicious deviationist temptations. “Bourgeois nationalism” was fused with “rootless cosmopolitanism” in the diabolical figure of the malignant enemy. In the meantime, socialist nationalism was thriving. The members of the ideological army were willingly officiating in the rites of the cult. Deprived of their own personality, they were glad to identify with and invest in Stalin's superpersonality. After the terrorist dissolution of the ego, it was normal for the apparatchiks to project themselves into Stalin's myth as an institutionalized superego.

The Cominform emerged in September 1947 as the first attempt to institutionalize the satellitization of Eastern Europe. It represented an initiative to contain and annihilate the centrifugal trends within world Communism (the “domesticist” temptation and the search for a “national path to socialism” championed by militants as different as Gottwald, Gomułka, and Pătraășcanu). It laid the foundation for future frameworks of supragovernmental domination and ideological hegemony from the Soviet Communist Party. Paradoxically, the Cominform brought about the first instance of dissent and revisionism from a partystate (the Titoist “heresy”). In Tito's case there was a significant level of ambivalence: he supported enthusiastically Stalin's new orientation (Zhdanov's “two camp theory”) but thought the moment was propitious for furthering his own hegemonic agenda in the Balkans. One could call such a strategic syndrome parallel hegemonism. The irony of the situation was that the break between the two leaders happened at a time when Soviet and Yugoslav visions of class struggle at the world level mirrored each other. In 1947-48, Tito underestimated the total monopoly of power achieved by the Kremlin tyrant, and he fancied himself the beneficiary of some leverage in regional decision-making. Historian Ivo Banac correctly diagnosed the paradox: “The dramatic denouement of 1948 was directly connected with Stalin's fears that Yugoslavia began to take on a role of regional communist center and the inherent potential provocations against the West that such a position entailed.”⁶⁷ Indeed, the leader of the League of Communists in Yugoslavia (until 1952 the Yugoslav Communist Party) carried along unabated with his plans of creating a Communist Danubian confederation (which was to incorporate Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Romania)⁶⁸ while simultaneously persevering in the assimilation of the Albanian Communist Party (which in 1948 became the Albanian Party of Labor).

The conflict with Yugoslavia and Tito's excommunication from the Cominform in June 1948 signaled the beginning of dramatic purges in Eastern Europe Communist parties. It also indicated that Moscow's hegemony could not completely suppress domestic tendencies even in the most pro-Soviet Communist factions. Nevertheless, in Stalin's view, at such a dangerous time, when the imperialists had decided to intensify their aggressive actions against the budding “people's democracies,” and the threat of a new world war loomed large, no country or leader could be allowed to engage in national Communist experiments. Those identified as nationalists could be charged with the most fantastic sins. After all, the sole principle of legitimation for the ruling Communist parties in the Soviet bloc was their unreserved attachment to the Soviet Union, their readiness to carry out unflinchingly all of Stalin's directives. The harshness of Stalin's reaction can be explained by the fact that the Soviet Communist Party leadership reactivated the geopolitical motif of “capitalist encirclement.” In this vein, the end of the Second World War triggered a new imperialist offensive against Communism that, according to Stalin, signaled an imminent world-scale armed conflict. Under the circumstances, any national Communism temptation had to be crushed in the bud. Therefore, within the countries of the Soviet bloc, party leaders would be allowed to enjoy the adoration of their subordinates, but their cults were only echoes of the true faith: unswerving love for Stalin. In the words of Władisław Gomułka, the cult of the local leaders “could be called only a reflected brilliance, a borrowed light. It shone as the moon does.”⁶⁹

Links with Tito were used as arguments to demonstrate the political unreliability of certain East European leaders (e.g., László Rajk in Hungary, who fought in the Spanish Civil War and had maintained friendly relations with members of Tito's entourage). It is worth discussing in this context the analysis of forced confessions proposed by Erica Glaser Wallach, Noel Field's foster daughter, whose parents were members of the medical units associated with the International Brigades in Spain:

That depends on you, confess your crimes, cooperate with us, and we shall do anything in our power to help you. We might even consider letting you go free if we are satisfied that you have left the enemy camp and have honestly contributed to the cause of justice and progress. We are no man-eaters, and we are not interested in revenge. Besides you are not the real enemy; we are not interested in you but in the criminals behind you, the sinister forces of imperialism and war. You do not have to defend them; they will fight their own losing battle. People like you we want to help—and we do frequently—to find their way back to a normal life and a decent place in society…. You want to know what a capitalist snake looks like? Take a look at her, at that bag of filth standing over there. You will never see such a low and abominable creature…. Take that dirty smile off your face, you American stooge…. You are a prostitute! That's what you are. Worse than that: prostitutes sell only their bodies: you sold your soul. For American dollars, stinking American dollars.⁷⁰

Domesticism, according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, was an exaggerated if frequently unconscious “preoccupation with local, domestic communist objectives, at the expense of broader, international Soviet goals.”⁷¹ It was not an elaborated philosophy of opposition to Soviet hegemony, but a conviction on the part of some East European leaders, like Gomułka in Poland, Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu in Romania, and Traicho Kostov in Bulgaria, that national interests were not necessarily incompatible with the Soviet agenda and that such purposes could therefore be pursued with impunity. Henceforth, the Cominform's main task—if not its only task—was to suppress such domestic ambitions. The fulfillment of the Stalinist design for Eastern Europe included the pursuit of a singular strategy that could eventually transform the various national political cultures into carbon copies of the “advanced” Soviet experience. Local Communist parties, engaged in frantic attempts to imitate the Stalinist model, transplanted and sometimes enhanced the most repulsive characteristics of the Soviet totalitarian system. The purpose of the show trials that took place in the people's democracies was to create a national consensus surrounding the top Communist elite and to maintain a state of panic in the population. According to George H. Hodos, a survivor of the 1949 László Rajk trial in Hungary, those frame-ups were signals addressed to all potential freethinkers and heretics in the satellite countries. The trials also “attempted to brand anyone who displayed differences of opinion as common criminals and/or agents of imperialism, to distort tactical differences as betrayal, sabotage, and espionage.”⁷² However, one needs to emphasize that these trials were not a simple repetition of the bloody purges that had devastated the Soviet body politic in the 1930s. Between 1949 and 1951 the main victims of the trials were members of the “national Communist elites,” or “home Communists,” as opposed to doctrinaire Stalin loyalists. Koçi Xoxe, Traicho Kostov, Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu, Wladysław Gomułka, and László Rajk had all spent the war years in their own countries participating in the anti-Nazi resistance movement. Unlike their Moscow-t rained colleagues, they could invoke legitimacy from direct involvement in the partisan movement. Some of these “home-grown” Communists may have even resented the condescending attitudes of the “Muscovites,” who traded on their better connections with Moscow and treated the home Communists like junior partners. Stalin was aware of those factional rivalries and used them to initiate the permanent purges in the satellite countries.

In the early 1950s, Stalin became increasingly concerned with the role of the Jews as carriers of a “cosmopolitan worldview” and as “objective” supporters of the West. For the Communists, it did not matter whether an individual was “subjectively” against the system; what mattered was what he or she might have thought and done by virtue of his or her “objective” status (for instance, coming from a bourgeois family, having studied in the West, or belonging to a certain minority). While there is a growing and impressive literature dealing with Stalin's anti-Semitism during the later years of his reign, there is a regrettable scarcity of analysis of anti-Semitism as a defining feature of post-1948 political culture in the East European satellites. In a assessment from 1972 of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, William Korey made an interesting observation:

Anti-Jewish discrimination had become an integral part of Soviet state policy ever since the late thirties. What it lacked then was an official ideology rationalizing the exclusion of Jews from certain positions or justifying the suspicion focused upon them. First during 1949-1953, and then more fully elaborated since 1967, the “corporate Jew,” whether “cosmopolitan” or “Zionist,” became identified as the enemy. Popular anti-Semitic stereotyping had been absorbed into official channels, generated by chauvinist needs and totalitarian requirements…. The ideology of the “corporate Jew” was not and is not fully integrated into Soviet thought. It functions on a purely pragmatic level—t o fulfill limited, though clearly defined, domestic purposes. This suggests the possibility that it may be set aside when those purposes need no longer be served.⁷³

In Stalin's mental universe, Jews were associated with the Mensheviks, but even more seditiously with the intraparty opposition headed in the 1920s by Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinoviev. While Stalin championed the interests of the Communist apparatus, the oppositionists were portrayed as reckless adventurers deprived of commitment to the building of “socialism in one country.” In the 1930s, in a famous interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Stalin defined anti-Semitism as a latter-day form of cannibalism. It may well have been that strong anti-Semitic feelings developed in his mind, especially after World War II, during the campaigns to assert Russian priorities in culture and science and restore complete ideological regimentation.

Timothy Snyder argues that the anti-Semitism in postwar Stalinism was tightly connected to the affirmation of Russians as the “safe base” of the regime after 1945. The starting point of this process was, of course, Stalin's famous victory toast to “the Great Russian nation” just after the end of the war. However, as Snyder stressed, “war on the Soviet territory was fought and won chiefly in Soviet Belarus and Soviet Ukraine, rather than in Soviet Russia.” But “Soviet Russia was much less marked by the Holocaust than Soviet Ukraine or Soviet Belarus, simply because the Germans arrived later and were able to kill fewer Jews (about sixty thousand, or about one percent of the Holocaust). In this way, too, Soviet Russia was more distant from the experience of the war.” In the operation of insulating “the Russian nation, and of course all of the other nations, from cultural infection … [o]ne of the most dangerous intellectual plagues would be interpretations of the war that differed from Stalin's own.”⁷⁴ The tragedy of the Jews in the Soviet Union

could not be enclosed within the Soviet experience, and was thus a threat to postwar Soviet mythmaking. About 5.7 million Jewish civilians had been murdered by the Germans and Romanians, of whom some 2.6 million were Soviet citizens in 1941. This meant not only that more Jewish civilians were murdered in absolute terms than members of any other Soviet nationality. It also meant that more than half of the cataclysm took place beyond the postwar boundaries of the Soviet Union. From a Stalinist perspective, even the experience of the mass murder of one's peoples was a worrying example of exposure to the outside world…. Precisely because extermination was a fate common to Jews across borders, its recollection could not be reduced to that of an element in the Great Patriotic War.⁷⁵

The outcome of the new founding myth of Stalin's Soviet Union had an ominous impact upon the memory and role of the Jews in the new polity: “The murder of the Jews was not only an undesirable memory in and of itself; it called forth other undesirable memories. It had to be forgotten.”⁷⁶Under the circumstances, the Soviet Jews rapidly became enemies “masquerading in the guise of Soviet people.”⁷⁷

Chief ideologue Andrei Zhdanov played a major role in the campaign, including the notorious Central Committee resolutions regarding literary journals, philosophy, and music. Initially a supporter of the formation of the State of Israel, Stalin developed strong misgivings regarding the presumed “divided loyalty” of Soviet Jewish citizens to their homeland. Members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (a Soviet propaganda arm during the war) were arrested under hallucinating charges of conspiracy to disband the Soviet Union and to create “a Jewish state in Crimea.” Among the victims of this anti-Semitic witch hunt were major Yiddish language poets (among them Peretz Markisch and David Bergelson), Old Bolshevik intellectuals, a former member of the Central Committee and deputy minister of foreign affairs, Solomon Lozovsky, and academician Lina Shtern, a prominent physician who had come to the USSR as a political refugee from Nazi Germany. The defendants, including Lozovsky, refused to confess. With several exceptions recruited among secret political police informers, they were sentenced to death and executed in the summer of 1952 (Lina Shtern was the exception, probably because of her prestige among German Communists).⁷⁸

Stalin's final paranoia consisted in the designation of Jews—i n the USSR as well as in East Central Europe—as the new “enemies of the people,” as treacherously villainous as the Trotskyists in the 1930s. No one was spared suspicion: even the most loyal Communists could be spies and renegades, double-dealers and wreckers, especially those who might nourish hidden Zionist propensities. This Judeophobic cosmology included real and imagined Zionists but no real enemy of the Soviet Union. During the last month of Stalin's life, the anti-Semitic campaign reached its climax with thousands of layoffs of Jews in major Soviet institutions and the arrest of Kremlin doctors, mostly Jewish, who were accused of having poisoned or deliberately applied wrong treatments to such Stalinist luminaries as Andrei Zhdanov, Aleksander Scherbakov, and Marshall Ivan Konev.⁷⁹ The propaganda department was instructed to obtain public endorsements from highly recognized Jewish personalities in support of imminent decisions to punish those suspected of disloyalty and treason. Among those approached by Central Committee emissaries were writer Ilya Ehrenburg and historian Isaac Mints, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science. Although a flamboyant supporter of Stalinist peace campaigns, the former refused to sign a letter meant to be published in the party daily, Pravda.⁸⁰ The latter did it, probably after heartbreaking agony:

Mints's daughter said that her father was deeply frightened and troubled by the accusations against him, and news of the Doctor's Plot only exacerbated his fears. She still remembers how pale he was when, after Stalin's death, he brought her the newspaper announcing that the so-called plot had been a fabrication. He spoke not a word, just showed her the headline. But Mints may also have felt that he was acting within the prescribed norms of Bolshevik academic culture. Mints could accept his public denunciation and participate in an obvious fabrication of Jewish sentiments because these were part of a cultural process and lexicon that he knew well. It was part of the standard public ritual that one had to go through to be a Bolshevik and to show one's commitment and loyalty.⁸¹

While the specter of a massive pogrom loomed over the Soviet Jewish population, in the people's democracies, the struggle against “rootless cosmopolitanism” allowed certain local leaders to engage in an elite purge against the “Muscovite” factions dominated by Communists of Jewish extraction (many of whom had fled Fascism and had sought refuge in the Soviet Union between the two wars).⁸² The elimination of those otherwise totally loyal Stalinists reached a spectacular level in Czechoslovakia, where the chief defendant was Rudolf Slánský, who until September 1951 had been the general secretary of the ruling Communist Party and in that capacity had presided over the ruthless persecution of Communists and non-Communists. Since the trial had to confirm Stalin's conviction about the existence of a worldwide conspiracy threatening the Communist bloc, there was no way to exonerate any of the defendants. Furthermore, the anti-Semitic charges were bound to appeal to pro-Communist chauvinistic prejudices in the whole region. The numerous instances of anti-Semitism under so-called state socialism cannot be simply disregarded as aberrations. As Vassily Grossman rightly pointed out, since under totalitarian regimes there is no civil society, “there can only be state anti-Semitism.”⁸³ Under Communism, the Jews became a target of policies of exclusion, isolation, and punishment on the basis of their ethnicity, were deemed potentially disloyal (“enemies of the people”) and inherently bourgeois (“class enemies”). Jewish identity turned at times under Communism into an innate, invariable, and even hereditary source of otherness that called for state-engineered excision.

In addition, postwar Stalinist anti-Semitism forced Jewish Communists to persevere in the denial of their own identity. Very few maintained their Jewish names (Ana Pauker, Jakub Berman), while most adopted names attuned to ethnic majorities (Mátyás Rákosi, Roman Zambrowski, Leonte Răutu). Generally speaking, Jewish Communists abjured their background, proudly severed all links with their ancestors’ traditions, and engaged in vitriolic attacks on “Jewish bourgeois nationalism.” They were, to use Isaac Deutscher's term, “non-Jewish Jews.” After 1945, though, “Jewish Stalinists … were caught between Stalinist anti-Semitism in Moscow and popular anti-Semitism in their own country.” For example, Timothy Snyder remarks that in Poland “Jewish communists had to stress that their political identification with the Polish nation was so strong that it erased their Jewish origins and removed any possibility of distinct Jewish policies.”⁸⁴ Under the circumstances, Stalinist anti-Semitism was both criminal and conducive to an entire community's erasure from the recognized grand narratives of the postwar order under Communism.

A direct consequence of the Slánský events in Czechoslovakia was the purge trial of Paul Merker, a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) since 1946. His initial downfall came about because of his relationship during the Second World War with Noel Field and Otto Katz (part of the group tried and executed in Prague in 1951). However, the crux of the accusations against Merker concerned his opinions and positions on the Jewish question in post-194 5 Germany. In 1952, the SED's Central Party Control Commission produced a document that detailed Merker's errors. Unsurprisingly, it was entitled “Lessons of the Trial against the Slánský Conspiracy Centre.” The commission insisted that Merker was involved in “the criminal activity of Zionist organizations,” which, allied with “American agents,” aimed to destroy the “people's democracies” in Eastern Europe. Additionally, it claimed that Merker tried “winning over SED comrades of Jewish descent.”⁸⁵ During interrogation (both by the Stasi and the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), Merker was stamped as a Judenknecht (“servant of the Jews”). In an interesting twist, even after the 1954 resolution of the Noel Field case, Merker was not released. On the contrary, now his whole trial was focused on his alleged collaboration with Jewish capitalist and cosmopolitan circles. He was sentenced in 1955 to eight years in prison but was released in 1956 without ever being fully rehabilitated. Nevertheless, Merker and his spouse never attempted to flee to West Germany. Taking an exemplarily Rubashov-like approach, Merker stated, “In the trial against me, I did without a defense lawyer in order to help keep the proceedings absolutely secret.” Again, the (il) logic of Stalinism was at work: “He had made efforts to prevent ‘enemies of the DDR’ from using his case, and he and his wife had been and would remain silent about the case.”⁸⁶ His trial, sentence, and interrogation minutes were indeed kept secret, emerging only after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In May 1952 the Romanian media announced the elimination of three members of the Politburo, two of whom had been the leaders of the party's Moscow émigré center during World War II. All three had been party secretaries and had shared absolute power with the leader of the domestic faction, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. Ana Pauker, a veteran Communist leader who long had been lionized by international propaganda as an impeccable Communist fighter, lost her job as minister of foreign affairs and was put under house arrest. Her Muscovite ally, the Hungarian-born Vasile Luca, was accused of economic sabotage during his tenure as minister of finance and of collaboration with the bourgeois police during the party's underground activity. Luca was arrested and died in prison in the early 1960s. The third member of the group, Teohari Georgescu, a home Communist and former minister of internal affairs whose principal fault consisted in his close association with the Pauker-Luca faction, was also jailed but soon released, though never reinstated in party positions. The Romanian case is a perfect example of country dynamics determined by party factionalism and sectarianism. It can be said that the more marginal and less historically representative a Communist party was, the more profound its sectarianism was. The Romanian Communist Party (RCP), torn apart by internal struggles among its three centers⁸⁷ during the underground period, preserved a besieged fortress mentality even after World War II. Given that in the pre-1945 period mutual accusations had usually resulted in the expulsion of the members of the defeated faction, once the party was in power, the effects of the continued struggles were catastrophic. Once established as a ruling party, the RCP projected a vision based on exclusiveness, fierce dogmatism, and universal suspicion at the national level.

The mystique of the party called for complete abrogation of its members’ critical faculties. As Franz Borkenau put it, Communism, “a Utopia based upon the belief in the omnipotence of the ‘vanguard,’ cannot live without a scapegoat, and the procedures applied to detect them, invent them, become only more cruel and reckless.”⁸⁸ For all practical purposes, the political history of the international Communist movement is the history of continual purges of different factions branded by the victors as “anti-party deviations.” Those defeated in party power struggles were labeled factionalists, whereas the winners were lionized as champions of the “holy cause” of party unity.

Whereas the Slánský trial and the “doctor's plot” seem to represent the limits of the Stalinist system's irrationality, the purge of the Pauker-Luca-Georgescu group is primarily an expression of domestic revolutionary pragmatism. This process involved massive purges of the Jewish Democratic Committee and the Hungarian Committee, suggesting a concerted campaign of weakening the Moscow faction. In the Byzantine schemes that devoured the Romanian Communist elite, the mystical internationalism of the Comintern period was gradually replaced by a cynical position embellished with nationalist, even xenophobic, motifs. Gheorghiu-Dej and his acolytes not only speculated about Stalin's anti-Semitism but did not hesitate to play the same card.⁸⁹ The stakes were absolute power, and the Jewishness of rivals was an argument that could be used with the Soviet dictator. If the national Stalinists were the prime beneficiaries of Stalin's warning not to transform the party from a “social and class party into a race party,”⁹⁰ they were neither its initiators nor its architects. No less caught up in the same perverse mechanism of self-humiliation than their Polish and Hungarian colleagues, the Romanian Stalinists—Gheorghiu-Dej, Chișinevschi, and Ceaușescu as much as Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca—were willing perpetrators of Stalin's designs. They were allowed by the Soviet dictator to gain autonomy not from the center but from another generation of the center's agents. It was indeed a sort of moment of emancipation, but one that signaled Moscow's sanctioning of the coming of age of a new Stalinist elite in Romania. The history of the Stalinist ruling group in other East-Central European countries is strikingly similar. There is the same sense of political predestination, the same lack of interest in national values, the same obsequiousness vis-à-vis the Kremlin.

An indicator of the continuous Stalinist nature of the Romanian regime, of its permanent purge mentalité, is Leonte Răutu's fateful longevity in the highest power echelons as the high priest of a cultural revolution à la roumaine.⁹¹ A prominent party veteran of Bessarabian-Jewish origin, perfectly fluent in Russian, he was the architect of anticultural politics of Stalinism in Romania. Until his removal from the Political Executive Committee in the summer of 1981, he epitomized a perinde ac cadaver commitment to the Marxist-Leninist cause. He was the most significant figure of the “party intellectuals,” who produced, reproduced and instrumentalized ideological orthodoxy. A professional survivor prone to the most surreal dialectical acrobatics, Leonte Răutu adjusted and took advantage of the regime's gradual systemic degeneration, making a successful transition from professional revolutionary to cunning and slippery bureaucrat always ready to hunt down heretics among party ranks and within society as whole. Born in 1910, Răutu joined the RCP in 1929 (while a student in mathematics at Bucharest University) and in the 1930s became head of the propaganda and agitation department. In Doftana Prison he came in contact with Gheorghiu-Dej and Nicolae Ceaușescu. In the following years he became the editor of Scînteia, the party's illegal newspaper. In 1940 he left Romania and took refuge in the USSR, becoming the director of the Romanian section of Radio Moscow. He returned to the country with Ana Pauker, Vasile Luca, and Valter Roman, and initiated a domestic version of Zhdanovism. In one of his most vehemently Zhdanovite speeches, “Against Cosmopolitanism and Objectivism in Social Sciences,”⁹² Răutu declared war on everything that was worthy in the national culture: “The channels by which cosmopolitan views become pervasive, especially among intellectuals, are well known: servility to and kowtowing to bourgeois culture, the empty talk of the so-called community of progressive scientists and the representatives of reactionary, bourgeois science, national nihilism, meaning the negation of all that is valuable and progressive for each people in his culture and history, the contempt for the people's language, hatred of the building of socialism, the defamation of all that is new and developing, replacing the partiinost with bourgeois objectivism, which ignores the fundamental difference between socialist, progressivist culture and bourgeois, reactionary culture.”⁹³

After 1953, he pursued a seemingly more balanced approach, as a defense mechanism in the context of de-Stalinization. His main weapon in these changing times was that of manipulation. The individual was always a tool with no distinct personality (rather being a complex of acquired or ascribed features); when s/he displayed the will for autonomous action, s/he became a victim of the diabolical logic of the purge (an excellent example is the career of Mihai Beniuc, the “little tyrant from the Writers’ Union,” as veteran Communist poet Miron Radu Paraschivescu once called him). Răutu's cynicism and opportunism were flagrant in 1964, when the same individual who had directed the Sovietization of Romanian culture initiated a strident campaign against academia, which he unmasked and accused of “having forgotten true national values” and of “shamelessly showing fealty to even the slightest Soviet achievement.” Leonte Răutu's career was fundamentally characterized by an extraordinary capacity for siding with those in power within the RCP. He first became a favorite of Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca, obtaining his position at Radio Moscow and his initial nominations in Romania because of this connection. By 1952, he jumped into Dej's boat, being, along with Miron Constantinescu, the author of the May-June Plenary Session resolution, the text on which the purge proceedings were based (what came to be known as “the June nights”). His inquisitorial contribution to the Pauker case was not the first (see his involvement in unmasking Pătrășcanu's intellectual “crimes”) and wouldn't be the last such activity. In 1957, he was again on the prosecutor's bench during the party action against Chișinevschi-Constantinescu (these events are often labeled in Romanian historiography “a failed de-Stalinization”). After the downfall of these two, who had been direct competitors in the struggle to administer the cultural front, Răutu became the unchallenged patriarch of the Communist politics of culture. With the exception of the period when he shared power with Grigore Preoteasa, Răutu created an apparatus manned by mediocre individuals, whose ego equaled their incompetence (e.g., Mihail Roller and Pavel Țugui). The biography of Leonte Răutu is the perfect expression of the perverse game of Stalinist masks. Dissimulation, ethical promiscuity, and hypocrisy were the only constants of the apparatchik's existence, a full-blown retreat from any moral imperative. Răutu was the incarnation of the diabolical antilogic of Stalinism: an individual experiencing an irresistible process of personal decline based upon unswerving subordination to the party leader beyond considerations such as reason, honor, and dignity.

The mind of the Stalinist elites in Eastern Europe was impressively revealed by the Polish journalist Teresa Toránska in a series of interviews conducted in the early 1980s with some former leaders of the Polish Communist Party. The most illuminating of these interviews is with the former Politburo member and Central Committee secretary Jakub Berman, who tried to defend the actions of his political generation. According to Berman, Polish Communists were right in championing Stalin’ policies in Poland because the Soviets guaranteed his country's social and national liberation. The leaders of the Soviet-bloc Communist parties were convinced, like Lenin at the moment he founded the Bolshevik party, that the people needed an external force to enlighten them, that without such a vanguard party there was no hope of true emancipation. Berman was convinced that a day would come when mankind would do justice to this chiliastic dream of global revolution, and all the atrocities and crimes of Stalinism would be remembered only as passing incidents: “I am nonetheless convinced that the sum of our actions, skillfully and consistently carried out, will finally produce results and create a new Polish consciousness; because all the advantages flowing from our new path will be borne out, must be borne out, and … there will finally be a breakthrough in mentality which will give it an entirely new content and quality.”⁹⁴

In his absolute belief that history was on his and his comrades’ side, Berman was not alone. His was a mindset characteristic of the Communist elites in all Soviet satellite countries. Such (il)logic explains the frenzy of submission syndrome: the readiness to engage in any form of self-debasement and self-deprecation as long as such gestures were required by the party. The East European Communist leaders were seasoned militants for whom Stalin's personality was an example of correct revolutionary conduct. They admired the Soviet leader's intransigence and his uncompromising struggle against oppositional factions, and they shared his hostility to the West. They believed in the theory of permanent intensification of the class struggle and did their best to create a repressive system where critical tendencies could be immediately weeded out. Their minds were Manichean: Socialism was right, capitalism was wrong, and there was no middle road. During their Communist underground service, the Soviet-bloc Communists had learned to see Stalin's catechistic formulations as the best formulations of their own thoughts and beliefs. They fully internalized a diabolical pedagogy based upon a belief in being ordained as both juror and executioner, for their legitimacy drew from a fanatical obedience to the vozhd. When Stalin died, his East European disciples were orphaned: more than their parties’ supporter, they lost their protector, the embodiment of their highest dreams, the hero they had come to revere, the symbol of their vigor, passion, and boundless enthusiasm.

The logic of Stalinism excluded vacillation and hesitation, numbed critical reasoning and intelligence, and instituted Soviet-style Marxism as a system of universal truth inimical to any form of doubt. The permanent purge, the basic technique of Stalinist demonology, was the modern equivalent of the medieval witch hunt. It was eagerly adopted by Stalin's East European apprentices and adapted to their own purposes. Echoing Stalin's fervid cult, East European leaders engineered similar campaigns of praise and idolatry in their own countries. The party was identified with the supreme leader, whose chief merit consisted in having correctly applied the Stalinist line. The solutions to all disturbing questions could be found in Stalin's writings, and those who failed to discover the answers were branded “enemies of the people.” Members of the traditional political elites, members of the clergy, and representatives of the nationalist intelligentsia who had refused to collaborate with the new regimes were sentenced to long prison terms following dramatic show trials or cursory camera trials. That was the first stage of the purge in Eastern Europe. After 1949 the purges fed upon the Communist elites themselves, and through them many faithful Stalinists experienced firsthand the effects of the unstoppable terrorist machine they had helped set in motion.

Societies under Stalinism were restructured by a reimagining of class community, which in itself reflected these regimes’ visions of all-out conspiracies both internally and externally. As Sheila Fitzpatrick judiciously notes, it took only one step and “the imagined class basis of the conspiracy would fall away.”⁹⁵ Class guilt frequently overlapped with national profiling during Stalin's reign. Erik van Ree explains that for Stalin “national characters were shared by all members of the nation; they formed a ‘mentality [dukhovnyi oblik] of the people who come together in a nation.’ This ‘stable’ mentality was furthermore transmitted over time, as a ‘psychological makeup [psikhicheskii sklad] that was formed among them from generation to generation as a result of identical conditions of existence.’”⁹⁶ Such an approach to the nationalities problem allowed Stalin to indulge in national stereotypes, which he superimposed upon Bolshevism's ultrarationalistic vision of social engineering. In this worldview, Russians and other nationalities became the heroes storming any fortress, while those who were perceived as unwilling to dedicate themselves to Stalin's “heroic modernity” were stigmatized as a decadent species spoiled by a profit-seeking mentality. This form of political romanticism played upon existing stereotypes in the population at large. No wonder that in the letters sent to Pravda in early 1953, most speakers agreed that “it was high time to purge Jews from the Party and from leading positions in state service and the professions.” The solution to the perceived treacherousness of the Jews was their “education through labor.”⁹⁷

Thus a central aspect of post-1945 purges both in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was Stalinist anti-Semitism. This phenomenon was rooted in Stalin's own mentality, in the immediate aftermath of the war, and in the prejudices of majority populations in these countries. Even if some of its origins lay in the 1930s (after all, many of the Old Bolsheviks who were eliminated by Stalin were of Jewish origin), Stalinist anti-Semitism was a direct product of the Soviet leader's post-1945 world-view. It may not have had the same murderous results as the Great Terror, but “it confused the European past”: “Stalinist anti-Semitism haunted Eastern Europe long after the death of Stalin. It was rarely a major tool of governance, but it was always available in moments of political stress. Anti-Semitism allowed leaders to revise the history of wartime suffering (recalled as the suffering only of Slavs) and also the history of Stalinism itself (which was portrayed as the deformed, Jewish form of communism).”⁹⁸ Indeed, anti-Semitism resurfaced often during the existence of the Soviet bloc. In some cases, it was part and parcel of the building of socialist nations. As I discussed elsewhere, national Stalinism in Romania or in Poland or East Germany was characterized, among other things, by reaffirmation of the Jew among the archetypical Others of the dominant ethnic group.⁹⁹ But the most destructive legacy of Stalinist anti-Semitism is its obfuscation of the Holocaust. Timothy Snyder excellently formulates this paradox: “So long as communists governed most of Europe, the Holocaust could never be seen for what it was.”¹⁰⁰ In other words, Stalin's mystification of the mass murder of the Jews set up the competitive regimes of memory in post-1989 East and Central Europe. On the one hand, for decades the Holocaust had not been remembered and the truth about the genocide of the Jews had remained hidden. On the other hand, the dimensions of the crimes of Stalinism and of the various Communist regimes were only surfacing to their true extent. Taking Snyder's point a bit further, the silence about both the gulag and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe ensured that these radically traumatic historical experiences are yet to fully be a part of the common history of Europe.¹⁰¹

To return to the more general problem of Stalinism's exterminism, I agree with Leszek Kołakowski, who believed the purges had an integrative function, contributing to the destruction of the last vestiges of subjective autonomy and creating a social climate where no one would even dream of criticism. According to the great Polish philosopher, “The object of a totalitarian system is to destroy all forms of communal life that are not imposed by the state and closely controlled by it, so that individuals are isolated from one another and become mere instruments in the hands of the state. The citizen belongs to the state and must have no other loyalty, not even to the state ideology.”¹⁰² Communist victims belonged to a category described by Stalinist legal theory as “objective enemies.” They were people who once in their lives might have expressed reservations about the sagacity of Soviet policies or, even worse, might have criticized Stalin personally. Stalinism functioned on the basis of an exhaustively repressive strategy displaying pedagogical ambitions and vaunting itself as the triumph of ethical spirit and egalitarian collectivism. Nicolas Werth enunciates, along these lines, the following diagnosis: “Throughout Stalin's dictatorship of a quarter of a century, repressive phenomena varied, evolved, and took on different forms and scope. They reflected transformations of the regime itself in a changing world. This adaptable violence was characterized by various levels of intensity, continual displacements, shifting targets, often unpredictable sequences, and excesses that blurred the line between the legal and extralegal.”¹⁰³ Maniacal purging consummate with self-devouring was both the praxis and the theoretical legitimation of this extremist and exterminist system. To paraphrase the title of a famous novel of Stalin's era, this is How the Steel Was Tempered.