Bolshevik humanism was by definition concrete, hinging upon the success of the cause. The individual's existence maintained its weight in the world insofar as it contributed to the construction of the revered social utopia. In this ideologically defined universe, the only agent capable of fulfilling and thereby ending history by bringing humanity to the promised land of classless society was the party. Two pronouncements by Yury Piatakov, one of Lenin's favorites in the younger generation of the Bolshevik Old Guard, spelled out this cosmic, or mystical, identification with the party in the most dramatic terms: “In order to become one with this great Party he would fuse himself with it, abandon his own personality, so that there was no particle left inside him which was not at one with the Party, did not belong to it.”30 The former Central Committee secretary (in 1918) added, “Yes I shall consider black something that I felt and considered to be white since outside of the party, outside accord with it, there is no life for me.”31 Or, in Marxian lingo, the party was the medium through which the individual erased the duality between self and the reified social being. The Bolsheviks were harbingers of the beginning of true history.
Ideological absolutism, worship of the ultimate goal, voluntary suspension of critical faculties, and the cult of the party line as the perfect expression of the general will were imbedded in the original Bolshevik project. The subordination of conventional moral criteria to the ultimate end of achieving a class society was the main problem with Leninism. It shared with Marxism what Steven Lukes calls “the emancipated vision of a world in which the principles that protect human beings from one another would no longer be needed.”32 One of the best descriptions of the Communist mind can be found in the testimony of Lev Kopelev, the model for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's character Rubin in The First Circle: “With the rest of my generation I firmly believed that the ends justify the means. Our great goal was the universal triumph of Communism, and for the sake of that goal everything was permissible—to lie, to steal, to destroy hundreds of thousands and even millions of people, all those who were hindering our work or could hinder it, everyone who stood in the way. And to hesitate or doubt about all this was to give in to ‘intellectual squeamishness’ and ‘stupid liberalism,’ the attributes of people who “could not see the forest for the trees.’”33 Political philosopher Steven Lukes was therefore correct in emphasizing the structural-generative ideological and emotional matrix of Communism that made its crimes against humanity possible: “The defect in question causing moral blindness at a heroic scale was congenital.”34 This same point is emphasized by novelist Martin Amis, for whom Lenin “was a moral aphasiac, a moral autist.”35 Lenin, once in power, “set about placing History on a large gauge railway track altogether, where it would be pulled by the locomotives of a revolutionary design.”36
The magic evaporated once the historically anointed leader ceased to be the custodian of absolute truth. This makes Khrushchev's onslaughts on Stalin at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) on February 25, 1956, crucially important (as admitted by Mikhail Gorbachev in his conversation with former Prague Spring chief ideologue Zdeněk Mlynář.37) At the same time, it was precisely charismatic impersonalism, as Jowitt argues, that provided the antidote to desperation at the moment when Khrushchev exposed Stalin's crimes. This feature, indeed, crucially distinguished Bolshevism from Nazism: “The leader is charismatic in Nazism; the program and (possibly) the leader are charismatic in Leninism.”38 Lenin's ultimate goal was the elimination (extinction) of politics through the triumph of the party as the embodiment of an exclusionary, even exterminist general will.39
In the context of monastic certitude, recognition of fallibility was the beginning of the end for any ideological fundamentalism. During “heroic” times, though, such as War Communism and the “building of socialism,” the unity between party and vozhd (leader) was, no less than terror, key to the system's survival. Homo sovieticus was more than a propaganda concoction. In her acceptance speech for the Hannah Arendt Award of 2000, given jointly by the city of Bremen, the Heinrich Boll Foundation, and the Hannah Arendt Association, Elena Bonner stated, “One of Hannah Arendt's key conclusions was ‘The totality of terror is guaranteed by mass support.’ It is consonant with a later comment by Sakharov: ‘The slogan “The people and the Party are one,” painted on every fifth building, are not just empty words.’”40 This is precisely the point: the internalization of Leninist forms of thinking by millions of denizens of the Sovietized world, and their readiness to accept paternalistic collectivism as a form of life preferable to risk-driven, freedom-oriented experiences. In my view, the major cleavage in today's Russian political culture is between the Leninist heritage and the democratic aspirations and practices associated with Andrei Sakharov and Russia's human rights movement. To quote Elena Bonner again, “In the preamble to his draft of a Soviet Constitution, Sakharov wrote: ‘The goal of the people of USSR and its government is a happy life full of meaning, material and spiritual freedom, well-being and peace.’ But in the decades after Sakharov, Russia's people have not increased their happiness, even though he did everything humanly possible to put the country on the path leading to the goal. And he himself lived a worthy and happy life.”41
As a political doctrine (or perhaps as a political faith), Bolshevism was a synthesis between radical Jacobinism or Blanquism (elitism, minority rule distinguished as “dictatorship of the proletariat,” exaltation of the heroic vanguard), unavowed Russian “Nechaevism” (a radical-conspiratorial mentality), and the authoritarian-voluntaristic components of Marxism.42 Bolshevism emphasized the omnipotence of the revolutionary organization and nourished contempt for what Hannah Arendt once called “the little varieties of fact”—such as Lenin and Trotsky's fierce attacks on the “renegade” Social Democrat theorist Karl Kautsky, who had dared to question the Bolshevik repudiation of all “formal” liberties in the name of protecting the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” never mind that Lenin borrowed from Kautsky his “injection of consciousness” theory.
Lenin, in contrast to Marx, emphasized the organizational element as fundamental to the success of revolutionary action. For Marx, class consciousness was an organic result of the political and ideological development of the proletariat. I am thinking here, for example, of Engels's thesis on “the German proletariat as the heir of classical German philosophy,” or the statement of young Marx regarding the dialectical relationship, which was therefore mutually binding, between “the critic of weapons” and “the weapon of the critique” during the process of overcoming/abolishing/conserving philosophy—Aufhebung). The revolutionary intellectuals were those who developed the doctrine, but the proletarians were not perceived as an amorphous mass toward which a self-appointed group of “teachers” had the duty of injecting consciousness of “historical truth.” Marx did not put forth the thesis of the party as a total institution and did not consider fanatical activism to be the sine qua non of political efficacy. Marx did not conceptualize a revolutionary sect deriving its power “not from the multitudes but from a small number of enthusiastic converts whose zeal and intolerance make each one of them the equal in strength of a hundred indifferentists.”43 Rather, Lenin created an organization in which “deracinated intellectuals and the occasional worker would be baptized into the proletarian vanguard.”44 Marx's emphasis on human emancipation as the conscious absorption of society by the individual and his equation of social antagonisms with class conflict led him to advocate the elimination of intermediaries (laws, institutions, etc.) regulating the relationship between civil society and the state. Therefore, as Kołakowski brilliantly argued, “If freedom equals social unity, then the more unity there is, the more freedom…. The concept of negative freedom presupposes a society of conflict. If this is the same as a class society, and if a class society means a society based on private property, then there is nothing reprehensible in the idea that the act of violence which abolishes private property at the same time does away with the need for negative freedom, or freedom tout court. And thus Prometheus awakens from his dream of power.”45
Marx assigned great importance to social unity but failed to give instructions on its achievement. This discrepancy left the field open for Lenin's creative understanding of necessity, which led to the Bolshevik version of man's salvation of himself. The party became the slayer of alienation and therefore the true messiah of human freedom. The combination of Marxism and state power “set the Russian body politic onto a course of self-purification.”46 In the Soviet experiment, the Marxian principle of social unity was transformed into Lenin's “unity of will,” which, under Stalin, became what Erik van Ree called “the organic theory of the party.” If, in Lenin's case, unity was a solution to factionalism, for Stalin it was an instrument for “the Gleichschaltung of the member minds.” In the midst of the December 1923 struggle for supremacy, Stalin stated that “it was wrong to see the party only as ‘something like a complex of a whole series of institutions with lower and higher functionaries.’ Instead, it was a ‘self-acting [samodeiatel'nyi] organism.’ He described it as ‘actively thinking’ and ‘living a lively life.’” The vision of the revolutionary leading body combined with the imposition of the practice of repentance for one's past incorrect political views (at the Fifteenth Party Conference in 1927) opened the door to murderous campaigns to remove the sores from the party organism so that the latter wouldn't fall ill.47 The struggle to sustain and further the Bolshevik miracle turned into fighting the degeneration of the body politic. In this context, the unity of the party became the moral-political unity of the people. Society under Stalin transformed itself into an “organism engaged in a struggle for survival. [It] develops various instruments—such as productive technology, a class system of property, and language—attuned to the need of increasing its own viability.”48 Lenin's purposeful fashioning of all aspects of human existence in the context of a life-or-death class struggle grew, under Stalin, into what Erik van Ree called “Marxist Darwinism.”49