The use of inhumane methods to achieve impossible ends is the essence of revolutionary utopianism.
—John Gray, Black Mass
Created by Lenin and refined by Stalin, the one-party dictatorship and command economy would be Russian's most consequential bequest to twentieth-century history.
—Steven G. Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World
Marxism was, as Leszek Kołakowski once said, the greatest philosophical fantasy of modern times. It was a gigantic Manichean political myth, a major script of political modernity that contrasted the forces of reaction, barbarism, and decay to those of historical progress, reason, and human liberation. It promised salvation via the destruction of a system based on domination, exploitation, and alienation. The proletariat, in this soteriological vision, was the universal redeemer or, as young Marx put it, the messiah-class of history.1 Feverishly appealing to what historian Norman Cohn called highly emotional mass movements, both Leninism and Fascism created millenarian sociological and psychological constellations. Both were militant chiliasms that energized extraordinary ardor among unconditionally committed followers. Focusing on revolutionary messianism in medieval and Reformation Europe and its reverberations in modern totalitarian experiences, Cohn pointed out that there was no call “to distinguish overmuch between what so far had been the two major forms of totalitarianism, Communism on the one hand and German National Socialism on the other.” He continues: “Admittedly it seems a far cry from the atavism, the crude tribalism, the vulgar irrationalism and open sadism of the Nazis to the ostensibly humanitarian and universalistic, scientific, and rational outlook of the Communist—and still it is true that both these movements shared certain features so extraordinary as to suggest the emergence of a form of politics vastly different from any known in the past.”2