Is this all over? Far from it—and this applies not only to the countries once ruled by Leninist parties, but also to nationalist-socialist parties like Baath and charismatic fundamentalist, neototalitarian movements, including Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda.62 The Leninist (Bolshevik) mental matrix was rooted in a political culture suspicious of open dialogue and democratic procedures, and hostile to spontaneous developments from below. Leninism was not only an ideology but also a set of precepts and techniques meant to inspire revolutionary global activism and militantism opposed to bourgeois liberalism and democratic socialism. Both Leninism and Fascism were discourses of domination that achieved effectiveness by functioning as “closed rhetorical systems that determined content as well as limits of political consciousness.”63 This is precisely the similarity but also the main distinction between these two onslaughts on liberal individualism: Fascism was a pathology of romantic irrationalism, and Bolshevism was a pathology of Enlightenment-inspired hyperrationalism. I don't want to be misunderstood: as an offspring of nineteenth-century antibourgeois, often antimodern, ideologies of resentment, Fascism did not need Bolshevism in order to emerge and mature (as demonstrated in Isaiah Berlin's fascinating essay on Joseph de Maistre and the origins of Fascism).64 The cult of race, the blending of pseudo-scientism (social Darwinism) with the neopagan worship of blood and soil, and the resentful rejection of liberal values as “soulless arithmetic” predated Leninism. On the other hand, it is hard to deny that the triumph of Bolshevism and the intensity and scope of the Red Terror, together with the traumatic effects of World War I and the widespread sentiment that “the world of yesterday” (to quote Stefan Zweig) had irretrievably come to an end, mobilized the Fascist offensive against the universalistic traditions of the Enlightenment.
Fascism was no less a fantasy of salvation than was Bolshevism: both promised to rescue humanity from the bondage of capitalist mercantilism and to ensure the advent of the total community. Fascism was a type of hysteria rooted in pseudopoetic heroic nostalgias, in militant collectivism, and above all, in the programmatic abhorrence of the fundamental values of liberal democracy. Its potential for emotional identification originated in myth, in the obsessive invocation of supposedly pristine origins, in the excessive cult for what Sigmund Freud once called “the narcissism of small differences.”65 Fascism aimed at homogenization through the sublimation of the body politic to the common denominator of its imagined genetic bedrock. Its fundamental nature is expressed in the principle that “in order for the national phoenix to arise, everything and everyone that stands in its way first has to be brunt to ashes, literally if necessary.”66 In the aftermath of the First World War, Italo Balbo, one of the main ideologues of Italian Fascism, expressed the ethos of this new political movement by contrasting it to the old order, which he deemed effete, corrupt, degenerate, and decaying. Rather than helping to restore prewar society, Balbo emphatically declared, “No, better to deny all, destroy all, renew all, from the base.”67 Contempt for the old bourgeois order and fascination with the utopian new one were attitudes shared by Communists and Fascists.
Both Leninism and Fascism were creative forms of nihilism, extremely utilitarian and contemptuous of universal rights. The essential element of their modus vivendi was the “sanctification of violence.”68 They envisioned society as a community of “bearers of beliefs,” and every aspect of their private life and behavior was expected to conform with these beliefs. Upon coming into power and implementing their vision of the perfect society, the two political movements established dictatorships of purity in which “people were rewarded or punished according to politically defined criteria of virtue.”69 Dario Lupi, an undersecretary of the Ministry of Education in Fascist Italy, warned menacingly that “he who joins us either becomes one of us in body and soul, in mind and flesh, or he will inexorably be cut off. For we know and feel ourselves in possession of the truth…. [W]e know and feel ourselves to be part of the only movement in marvelous harmony with the history time…. For ours is the only movement that faithfully reflects the innermost layers of the souls and feelings of our own kind.”70 Similarly, Hitler considered that the movement he led was a necessary creative destruction generated by the imperative of reestablishing the chosen community on the right track of history. On July 1934, Hitler stated that “when a deathly check is violently imposed upon the natural development of a people, an act of violence may serve to release the artificially interrupted flow of evolution to allow it once again the freedom of natural development.”71
Both Leninism and Fascism presented themselves as revolutionary breakthroughs to a new life. Their novelty lay in the shrill ideological sacralization of revolutionary power. They preconditioned reconstruction by unleashing destruction. Oblivious to any independent moral dimension, both stressed “force and guile in shaping history,” exposing “hypocrisy, the absurdity of human condition,” while simultaneously preaching a political zeal that was supposed to “construct meaning, and sought, through political organization and action, to bring it into being.” Each of them was, as A. E. Rees showed, forms of a “revolutionary Machiavellian conception of politics…. More precisely, Nazism and Bolshevism might be defined as the Machiavellianism of parties which claimed to rule in the name of the masses.”72 To paraphrase Eugen Weber, in the case of both Leninism and Fascism, the locomotives that dragged them across history were their tactics. Leninism was therefore based on a “goal rationality,” which implied “the validity of its demands.” In this mental framework, “compliance is claimed to be based on a rational relationship between the ultimate goal of communism and the specific tasks assigned to social units, and individuals' rationality relates to the appropriateness of the means used … to the goals set.”73
Such a radically utilitarian, transformist conception of politics ultimately materialized in the divinization of a mythical state holding the right of life and death over its subjects. Or as the Catholic intellectual Adolf Keller wrote, “A superhuman giant, claiming not only obedience, but confidence and faith such as only a personality has the right to expect.”74 In this conception, the state was beyond moral limitations, for it was the only producer of morality. However, as sociologist Michael Mann underlines, Fascism and Communism, despite the presence of party or leader despotism, “ruled more as a fluid, continuing revolutionary movement than as an institutionalized state.” They were, according to Mann, “regimes of continuous revolution.”75 These political movements were fueled by their projected heroic perpetual dynamism. In the case of Communism, stagnation and ultimately demise developed as its “shrill confidence in the history-making mode of action dissipated … in light of what experience had revealed.”76
The leader, of course, played an essential role in such movements.77 As Leszek Kołakowski puts it, “Party mindedness, the political principle revered by all Leninists, resulted in the infallible image bestowed on the general secretary.”78 Paul Berman explains: “Lenin was the original model of such a Leader—Lenin, who wrote pamphlets and philosophical tracts with the confidence of a man who believes the secrets of the universe to be at his fingertips, and who established a weird new religion with Karl Marx as god, and who, after his death, was embalmed like a pharaoh and worshipped by the masses. But il Duce was no less a superhuman. Stalin was a colossus. About Hitler, Heidegger, bug-eyed, said: ‘But look at his hands.’”79 Peter Ehlen makes the insightful observation that Lenin “redefined the ground upon which the Communist renewal would be based. Henceforth, it would be the will of the leader.” In this context, power would become “absolute power and knows to lend itself a quasi-numinous appearance.”80 In other words, Leninism was also vitally premised on the apotheosis of the leader. An amusing but telltale example of the weight of this founding element of Leninism is Comrade Lazurkina's intervention at the Twenty-second Party Congress in Moscow. In October 1961, during discussions about the expulsion of Stalin from the Lenin Mausoleum, an Old Bolshevik, Comrade Lazurkina, “who had spent 17 years in prisons and camps, reported that Lenin had appeared to her repeatedly in a dream. Lenin had demanded that his successor be removed from his mausoleum. And so it came to pass.”81 The ghost of one leader could not bear that of his successor anymore. The pantheon of Bolshevism had only one master—Lenin. Another matter related to the insertion of the will of the leader into the practice of Leninism was the “continuing inability of the party's leading legislative organs—the congress, CC [Central Committee] and Politburo—to develop a strong sense of institutional integrity and coherence,” according to Graeme Gill. Gill shows how the organizational basis of Stalin's power in the aftermath of Lenin's death, and even earlier, was “the absence of a major commitment of leading political figures to strengthen the organizational norms and identity of these bodies, inertia and the methods of action adopted by the party leadership.”82 For Gill, the weaknesses of Leninism evident in the 1920s set the stage for Stalin's autocratic rule over the party and over the Soviet Union.
Spontaneity (stikhiinost’) has always been the Leninists' nemesis (think of Lenin's polemics on the relationship between class and party, first with Rosa Luxemburg, then with the left-wing Communists). Its counterpart was the obsession with partiinost' (partisanship), the unbounded acceptance of the party line (philosophy, sociology, and aesthetics had to be subordinated to party-defined “proletarian interests,” hence the dichotomy between “bourgeois” and “proletarian” social science). However, in the context of the Russian proletariat's underdeveloped class consciousness, Lenin, on the occasion of the 1905 revolution, revealed, according to Ana Krylova, “the ‘true nature’ of the working class … not through workers' conscious revolutionary initiative, as had been expected, but through an ‘instinctive urge’ that the workers ‘felt’ for open revolutionary action.” His discovery lay in the fact that the workers had the ability to “sense history and act in accordance with its objective needs without necessarily understanding them.”83 To close the circle, this reading of the December uprising reinforced Lenin's belief that behind the party, under proper leadership, the workers would fulfill their class mission despite an insufficient understanding of their historical role. This allowed him to justify both the voluntarism of Bolsheviks' takeover of power and the Enlightenment mission the party embarked on once in power.
Moreover, this insertion of “class instinct” in the equation of stikhiinost'-partiinost' explains to a large extent Lenin's theory of the common struggle (alliance) between the workers and the peasants (smychka). Its fundamental presupposition was that the Bolsheviks could awaken the peasants' class instincts, thus winning them over to the side of the revolution. According to Lenin, “The more enlightened the peasantry becomes the more consistently and resolutely will it stand for a thoroughgoing democratic revolution.”84 This is what Ken Jowitt called “the ingenious error of Leninism”—lransplanting class struggle to the countryside: “The ideological-conceptual map with which Leninists work leads them to see economic differences as evidence of social polarization and the existence of ‘class allies’ in the villages, and it enables them to do politically what nationalists can do only analytically—that is, distinguish and oppose competing social bases and conceptions of the nation-state. Working with such a paradigm, Leninists attack the institutional bases, not simply the elite organization of peasant society.”85 And if Bukharin's model of the gradual growth of private property in socialist agriculture does not happen (and it did not during the New Economic Policy), then Leninism's vision of a spontaneous class “transformist” commitment and interests opened the door to collectivization. This amounted to an all-out attack on the foundation of the peasants' institutional and private lives, the rural counterpart to the urban socialist revolution. In their pursuit of this goal, the Bolsheviks had no limits, no pangs of conscience, no scruples. The result was genocide.
Much of Leninism's dogmatism stemmed from Russian authoritarian traditions and the lack of a culture of public debate. Remember Antonio Gramsci's reflections on Russia's “gelatinous” civil society and the omnipotence of the bureaucratic state? Wasn't Lenin himself, by the end of his life, terrified by the resurgence of the time-honored traditions of rudeness, violence, brutality, and hypocrisy that he had lambasted and against which the revolution was presumably directed? As one author remarked, “Lenin was a direct heir to the tradition of revolutionary Machiavellianism in Russian history and to the Jacobin tradition in the European revolutionary movement.”86 On the one hand, as we have already discussed, Lenin believed that revolution was essential and inevitable, and that it would, of necessity, be violent; he considered any other approach to be conciliatory and doomed to failure.87 On the other hand, his Jacobinism was “a metaphor for revolutionary energy, incorruptibility and a willingness to push forward as far as possible in the interests of the working masses.” It was founded on his dedication to plebeian politics, “and the twentieth century plebeians were of course the class of wage-laborers. Hence consistent proletarian socialists had to be Jacobins.”88 Or, to use Lenin's formula, the Bolsheviks were Jacobins working for the proletariat.89
Lenin was conscious that his most difficult trial was the transition from revolutionary action to governance and the preservation of state power. The success of the October Revolution seemed to confirm that he had successfully merged “the elemental destructive force of the masses” and “the conscious destructive force of the organization of revolutionaries.” But how was the newly won power to be consolidated? The initial drive toward democracy from below and self-empowerment of the masses, was replaced in 1917 by emphasis on the reconstructed state machine that according to Lenin was indispensable for defending the revolution and pursuing its main goals. In form, Lenin said, this was a dictatorship, but in substance, because it represented the interests and aspirations of the large majority of the population, it was the true, substantive democracy. The main problem with Lenin's concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat was his contempt for the rule of law. For him, the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat “is power won and maintained by the violence of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, power that is unrestricted by any laws.”90 This was the central point of Rosa Luxemburg's criticism of the Russian Revolution. She argued that “[Lenin] is completely mistaken in the means he employs. Decree, dictatorial force of the factory overseer, Draconic penalties, rule by terror—all these things are but palliatives. The only way to a rebirth is the school of public life itself, the most unlimited, the broadest democracy and public opinion. It is rule by terror which demoralizes.” With great foresight, Luxemburg warned that the path taken by the Bolsheviks would lead to “the brutalization of public life.”91
The restoration of state prerogatives was for Lenin a “necessary evil,” and he tried to justify the notion of a proletarian dictatorship by defining it as the dictatorship of the majority of the population (poor peasants included), and therefore not exactly a dictatorship. Lenin was convinced, however, that these exceptional measures, including the persecution of dissidents and banning of all political parties but the Bolsheviks, were needed for the survival of the revolution in Russia. In the long run, however, he hoped that the revolution would triumph in the West and a certain political and economic relaxation would become possible. Lenin saw this as a temporary stage; he never accepted the idea that the Russian Revolution would be the sole proletarian revolution for decades to come. At the end of the day, though, Lenin imposed two fundamental elements on the Bolshevik conception of politics: law as an epiphenomenon of revolutionary morals and the heteronomy of individual action. In this sense, Lenin opened the door to the realization of radical evil, for the latter, if one is to follow Hannah Arendt, means “making human beings as human beings superfluous…. This happens as soon as all unpredictability—which, in human beings, is the equivalent of spontaneity—is eliminated.”92 Here lies the essential ambivalence in interpreting Leninism: was it a form of Russian Sonderweg (special road) on the path to implementing modernity or was it a Marxist Sonderweg in the accomplishment of socialist revolution?
Whatever one thinks of the final disintegration of Leninism, it was a quite successful experiment in reshaping political community according to a certain interpretation of Marxist socialism.93 How does one make sense of the fact that, unlike all other Eastern European societies, Russia is the only one that seems unable to restore pro-Communist traditions and parties? Where are the Socialist Revolutionaries, Kadets, or Mensheviks? The answer is that Lenin produced “the end of politics” via the ultimate triumph of political will.94 In fact, this meant that a sect of self-appointed revolutionary pedagogues managed to coerce a large population to accept their obsessions as the inexorable imperative of history. Using the example of the implementation of surveillance (considered one of the practices of “institutionalizing modernity”), Peter Holquist shows that its enforcement was not “a specifically Bolshevik, Marxist, or even totalitarian practice—it was a modern one.” In his opinion, what gave the Soviet regime its singularity was “the intersection of a particular ideology with the simultaneous implementation of a particular modern understanding of politics—put succinctly, an understanding that views populations as both the means and the goal of some emancipatory project.” With its specific Marxist conception of politics, society, and history in the background, Leninism developed “a closed, rather than open, model of historical progress.”95
Communism and Fascism were sustained by the historical-political sense of historical urgency and their willingness to act in a radical mode. The vanguards that brought these political movements to power and kept them there were mobilized and vindicated by the ethical-political change that they considered themselves uniquely prepared to spearhead because of their postliberal consciousness, as well as their spirit, will, discipline, self-sacrifice, and willingness to act.96 Imposing the dictatorship of the Communist Party as the sole instrument for history-making action, the Bolsheviks successfully exhausted the political sphere, eliminating all alternative visions of the body politic. Lenin, and later Stalin, transformed the political system into “the central and sacralized arena for the self-salvation and self-sacrifice of revolutionaries striving to implement the utopian designs which have to be realized in the present and on earth.”97 Considering that the Soviet Union survived for over seventy years, the operation of making sense of the pre-Communist past logically faces a historical hiatus. The various trajectories of Russian political thought must overcome either an utter lack of domestic continuity or the thorny issue of synthetic reinterpretation. In the final analysis, it is difficult to recuperate tradition into the twenty-first century, when the country's only version of mature modernity was Leninism.
This statement, however, takes us to another ramification of the dilemma of the Sonderwegs. The major theme of the Richard Pipes-Martin Malia controversy is important not only for our interpretation of Russian modern history but also for the discussion of the nature and future of left-wing, socialist politics in the twentieth century: was it Russia that destroyed (compromised) socialism, as Pipes and, earlier, Max Weber put it, or rather was it revolutionary socialism that, because of its political, indeed metaphysical, hubris, imposed immense sufferings on Russia?98Objecting to the young Georg Lukács's celebration of Lenin's takeover of power in Russia, Weber insisted on the impossibility of building the socialism Karl Marx had envisioned in the absence of genuine capitalist, bourgeois market developments: “It is with good reason,” he wrote, “that the Communist Manifesto emphasized the economically revolutionary character of the bourgeois capitalist entrepreneurs. No trade-unions, much less state-socialist officials, can perform this role for us in their place.”99 Earlier than many critics of Sovietism, Weber concluded that the Leninist experiment would discredit socialism for the entire twentieth century.100