So, is there a reason to consider Lenin's political praxis a source of inspiration for those who look for a new political transcendence? Is it a blueprint for a resurrected radicalism, as suggested by Slavoj Žižek, who proposes the revival of the Leninist 1917 revolutionary leap into the kingdom of utopia? Reenacting Lenin's defiance of opportunistic or conformist submission to the logic of the status quo is for Žižek the voie royale for restoring a radical praxis:
This is the Lenin from whom we still have something to learn. The greatness of Lenin was that in this catastrophe situation he wasn't afraid to succeed—in contrast to the negative pathos discernible in Rosa Luxemburg and Adorno, for whom the ultimate authentic act is the admission of the failure, which brings the truth of the situation to light. In 1917, instead of waiting until the time was ripe, Lenin organized a pre-emptive strike; in 1920, as the leader of the party of the working class with no working class (most of it being decimated in the civil war), he went on organizing a state, fully accepting the paradox of the party which was to organize—even recreate—its own base, its working class.101
Compare this exalted vision of Lenin to that of a former Communist ideologue, the apostate Alexander Yakovlev's indictment of Lenin's essential role in the establishment of a dictatorial regime in which the working class was to suffer as much as other social strata the effects of utopian social engineering.102 Can Leninism be separated from the institution of the vanguard party and be conceived as a form of intellectual and moral resistance to the conformist debacle of the international Left at a moment of civilization collapse (World War I)? The debate on Leninism bears upon the possibility of radical-emancipatory practice and the need to reconstruct areas of autonomy in opposition to the logic of instrumental rationality. The burning question remains whether such efforts are predestined to end in new coercive undertakings, or whether Leninism was a peculiar, sui generis combination of Marxism and an underdeveloped political and economic structure. Indeed, as Trotsky insisted, the defeat of “world revolution”—after all, the main strategic postulate on which Lenin had built his whole revolutionary adventure—made the rise of Stalinism a sociological and political necessity. Here we may remember Isaac Deutscher's analysis: “Under Lenin, Bolshevism had been accustomed to appeal to reason, the self-interest, and the enlightened idealism of ‘class-conscious’ industrial workers. It spoke the language of reason even when it appealed to the muzhiks. But once Bolshevism had ceased to rely on revolution in the West, once it had become aware that it could only fall back on that environment and dig itself in, it began to descend to the level of primitive magic, and to appeal to the people in the language of that magic.”103
At this point, the last element of our dilemma comes into play. If one is to even partially accept the validity of the Russian Sonderweg thesis, the next problem is how much this Russ ian distortion was Stalin's. What needs to be discussed is not only Deutscher's claim that Stalinism was “the language of magic,” but also Robert C. Tucker's theory of reversion. The latter consists of the claim that under Stalin one can identify “the revival of certain features which belonged to the past, especially the more distant past, and had receded or been abolished (like serfdom) in nineteenth century Russia, but resurfaced in the Stalin period.” Tucker takes this analysis even further as he labels Stalinism Russian National Bolshevism, a blend of Leninist Marxism and Russ ian nationalism.104 His thesis is consonant with more recent views advocated by authors such as Terry Martin and David Brandenberger, who emphasize a neotraditionalist turn in the process of building socialism in one country. During mature Stalinism, “Soviet patriotism” became an apology for national authenticity, pride, and loyalty. At the same time, the Soviet Union, “a state with no ambition to turn itself into a nation-state—indeed with the exact opposite ambition,” became a site of large-scale ethnic cleansing.105 Moreover, the society was a hierarchy on the basis of “Stalinist soslovnost.” According to Sheila Fitzpatrick, “soslovnost provides a framework within which it becomes immediately comprehensible that the ‘classes’ of the Stalinist society should have been defined, like sosloviia, in terms of their relationship to the state rather than, like Marxist classes, in terms of their relationship to each other.”106 This whole array of developments originated in Stalin's development of a new, non-class, “popular” form of mobilization. As David Priestland points out, “The unified narod, now no longer divided by class, embodied socialism, and was to achieve heroic feats in the struggle against largely external enemies.”107 Subsequently, the USSR itself became “the avant-garde of the international communist movement and the dynamic centre of world politics.”108 This phenomenon was symptomatic for the Soviet experiment, where “the sense of collectively creating socialism was more important than the use of class categories and the assumption of proletarian privilege.”109 In the context of building socialism in one country, for Stalin the body social was the chosen community bringing into state-reality Lenin's social utopia.110
What this “mutation” of Marxist orthodoxy tells, though, is that the ultimate aim of Stalin's policies remained Communism. Even his cult of personality functioned as “a unifying mechanism,” “a personification of socialist state-building.”111 Graeme Gill simply states that “the Stalin cult grew upon the edifice of Leninist orthodoxy.” In his study of K. Popov's article “The Party and the Role of the Leader,” one of the pieces theoretically underpinning the cult, Gill pointed to “three main grounds for recognition of the vozhd”: the leader “armed with Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory, hardened by many years experience of the struggle for Leninism, hand in hand with Lenin”; the ability to endure “those difficulties which befell the narrow circles of selfless revolutionaries” by way of exceptional organizational talent; and “the will of an individual leader [that] could personify the will of the proletariat.”112 Indeed, Lenin was the embodiment of the theory, the struggle, and the party. This was his model of successful radical revolutionary transformation. In 1930, Stalin claimed to be the personification of this heritage of Lenin. He upheld this assertion of supremacy over his rivals by organizational power, thus creating an environment fundamentally inimical to any form of opposition. Like Lenin, but to an exaggerated degree, by the end of the 1930s, Stalin managed to become synonymous with the party itself.
Stalin also emulated Lenin's creativity in his approach to the political thought of the founding fathers. In 1941, Stalin warned the authors of the commissioned Short Course of Political Economy, “If you search for everything in Marx, you'll get off track …. In the USSR you have a laboratory … and you think Marx should know more than you about socialism.” By 1950, his attitude toward Marxism resembled Lenin's famous remark from the Philosophical Notebooks: “Half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx.” Stalin wrote in Pravda: “In the course of its development Marxism cannot help but be enriched by new experience, by new knowledge; consequently, its individual formulas and conclusions must change with the passing of time, must be replaced by new formulas and conclusions corresponding to new historical tasks. Marxism does not recognize immutable conclusions and formulas obligatory for all epochs and periods.”113 Ultimately, Stalin's rehashing of Marxism (and) Leninism could be read in a more general key. It should be placed in the original interpretative ethos of Bolshevik “substitutionism.” Georg Lukács justified Lenin's theory of the revolution based on the idea of “ascribed class consciousness,” that is, “the appropriate rational reactions ‘imputed’ to a particular typical position in the process of production.”114 Why would we not accept the same ascription for the building of state socialism? Both for Lenin and for Stalin, the state that seemed to stubbornly refuse to wither away remained the ultimate test for “the real understanding and recognition of Marxism.”115
Going back to the ambivalence of Leninism, I think that what we need to stress, beyond the debates about its Marxist, Russian, or reified core (by Stalin), is that “its goal is to transcend any particular politics … and to realize a philosophical project over the heads (or behind the backs) of the participants. Its justification lies in its claim to transcend their (alienated) self-consciousness in the name of the really real truth. It is politics as antipolitics.”116 From this point of view, regardless of distinctions between party persuasion and coercion (in Tucker's formulation) or the language of reason versus that of magic, it is undeniable that Lenin was the one who created the possibility for the culmination of “Marx's hypothesis that the working class has a privileged knowledge of the final purpose of history in the assertion that Comrade Stalin is always right.”117 Lenin produced and implemented a charismatic doctrine of universal human regeneration, a New Faith (as Czesław Miłosz called Bolshevism) based on “the archetypal human faculty for imbuing the home and the community, and hence the new home and the new community, with suprahuman, ritual significance.”118 In the final analysis, Leninism was the child of three mothers: the Enlightenment with its focus on reason and progress; Marx's social theory and project of world historical transformation; and the Russian revolutionary tradition with its utilitarian nihilism and a quasi-religious socialist vision of the transformation of mankind.
With this intellectual pedigree in mind, one needs to be very cautious in writing Leninism's definitive obituary. Yes, as a Russian model of socialism it is exhausted, but there is something in Leninism—if you want, its antidemocratic, collectivist pathos associated with the invention of the party as a mystical body transcending individual fears, anguishes, despair, loneliness, and so on—that remains with us. All political figures in post-Soviet Russia—all parties, movements, and associations—define themselves, and must do so, in relationship to Lenin's legacies. In this respect, as an organizational principle but not as a worldview, Leninism is alive, if not well. Ideologically it is extinct, of course, but its repudiation of democratic deliberation and contempt for “sentimental bourgeois values” has not vanished. This is because the cult of the organization and the contempt for individual rights is part and parcel of one direction within the “Russian tradition.” Russian memory includes a plurality of trends, and one should avoid any kind of Manichean taxonomy. It is doubtless that, as Christian existentialist philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev noticed, there is something deeply Russian in the love for the ultimate, universally cathartic, redeeming revolution, which explains why Lenin and his followers (including the highly sophisticated philosophers Georg Lukács and Ernst Bloch) embraced a certain cataclysmic, messianic, absolutist direction within the Marxist tradition.119 The Bolshevik revolution was indeed the expression of Russ ian intellectuals' obsession with “a version of a thirst for the sacred with a concomitant revulsion against the profane, a contest of values that can be seen in an early paradigm, the story of Christ's throwing the money changers out of the temple.”120 In his revolutionary praxis, Lenin, as famously formulated by Robert C. Tucker, “married the old image of two warring Russias with Marxism.”121 Leninism was “not solely a revolutionary response to the inequities of the Tsarist state and the social injustice endemic to capitalist liberalism, but also a response to the crisis of modernity.”122
At the same time, one should place Leninism in contradistinction to other versions of Marxism, which were at least as legitimate if not more legitimate than the Bolshevik doctrine. It is not at all self-evident that one can derive the genocidal logic of the gulags from Marx's universalistic postulates, whereas it is quite clear that much of the Stalinist system existed in embryo in Lenin's Russia. Together with Robert C. Tucker, we should admit the heterogeneous nature of the Bolshevik tradition itself and avoid the temptation of “retrospective determinism.” Thus Stalin's Lenin was only one of the possibilities implied in the Leninist project.
Now, in dealing with the impact of Russian ideas and practices on the West, there is always a problem: what Russian tradition do we refer to?123 The Decembrist or the czarist-autocratic one? Cernyshevsky or Herzen? Chaadaev or Gogol? Turgenev or Dostoyevski? The humanists who opposed the pogroms and the blood libel or the Black Hundreds? The liberal writer Vladimir Korolenko or the czarist reactionary Konstantin Pobedonostsev? The Bolshevik apocalyptical scenario or the Menshevik evolutionary socialism? The Nechaev-style terrorist rejection of the status quo, the intelligentsia's perpetual self-flagellation and outrage, or the dissident vision of a tolerant polis? Even within the dissident culture, there has always been a tension between the liberals and the nationalists, between the supporters of Andrei Sakharov and those of Igor Shafarevich, between Solzhenitsyn's Slavophile inclinations and Sergey Kovalev's democratic universalism.124 All these questions remain as troubling now as they were one hundred years ago. Once again, Russia is confronted with the eternal questions “What is to be done?” and “Who are to be blamed?” And whether they admit it or not, all participants in the debate are haunted by Lenin's inescapable presence. Lenin was the most influential Russian political personality of the twentieth century, and for Eastern Europeans, Lenin's influence resulted in the complete transformation of their life worlds. It would be easy to simply say that Leninism succumbed to the events of 1989–91, but the truth is that residual Bolshevism continues to be a major component of the hybrid transitional culture of post-Soviet Russia (and East Central Europe).
To return to our initial dilemma about the proper interpretation of the Soviet experiment, one needs to draw one final line and ask, What was Lenin's unique, extraordinary innovation? What was the substance of his transformative action? Here I think that Jowitt rather than Žižek gave the accurate answer. The charismatic vanguard party, made up of professional revolutionaries, was invented by Lenin over one hundred years ago, in 1902, when he wrote his most influential text, What Is to Be Done? Lars Lih disagrees with the “textbook interpretation” of Leninism (the predestined-pedagogical role of the revolutionary vanguard, i.e., the Communist Party) and insists that many, if not most, Social Democrats at the beginning of the twentieth century were convinced of the need to bring consciousness to the class from “without.”125 According to Lih, the thrust of the criticism from other socialists was aimed not at What Is to Be Done, but rather at his “Letter to a Comrade,” written in September 1902, and especially One Step Forward Two Steps Backwards, published in the spring of 1904. But this “injection approach” (bringing consciousness from the outside, awakening a dormant proletariat) was not the thrust of Lenin's main revision of classical Marxism: it was not educational action per se, but rather the nature of the pedagogical agent that mattered in the story. This “party of a new type” symbolized what Antonio Gramsci later called the “New Prince”: a new figure of the political that absorbs and incorporates the independent life of society up to the point of definitive osmosis or asphyxiation.