STALINISM AS A POLITICAL MYTH

The Short Course of History of the CPSU, published in 1938, represented the paradigm of Bolshevik intellectual debasement: “It not only established a whole pattern of Bolshevik mythology linked to the cult of Lenin and Stalin, but prescribed a detailed ritual and liturgy…. The Short Coursewas not merely a work of falsified history but a powerful social institution—one of the party's most important instruments of mind control, a device for the destruction both of critical thought and of society's recollections of its own past.”²¹ Turned into a gospel for the international Communist movement, this parody of Marxism was extolled as the pinnacle of human wisdom. Stalinist ideology brought to fruition the pauperization of Marxist theoretical practice and actually functioned as an effective counterdoctrine to emasculate the originally emancipatory momentum of negative dialectics and to substitute for it an opportunist-positivistic sociology deliberately situated beyond traditional moral borders. Through the Short Course, Leninism became a “true book religion” (in the words of Riegel). This “Stalinist revolution of belief” provided unitary guidance and unity of will among the cadres involved in building socialism in one country, in the Soviet modernization project. It was the literary reflection of the “monopoly of the legitimate use of hierocratic coercion” (as Max Weber put it) exercised by Stalin in the show trials. To paraphrase Souvarine, theShort Course paradigm officially transformed Leninism into a religion d'état.²² The human being that Stalinism envisaged was supposed to repudiate the classical distinctions between good and evil, scornfully discredited as obsolete through exposure to another moral code, in many points suggestive of the Nazi Übermensch. Its ideology was rooted in hatred and resentment and developed into a logic of manipulation, domination, and survival. The main task of propaganda was to purify the mind; it was like an exorcising ritual through which the regime attempted to eliminate all the vestiges of Western culture and to create the human instrument of perfect social reproduction. Its content consisted in a few mechanically reiterated themes; its method was symbolic aggression, ideological violence. In 1929, Stalin had proclaimed the “year of the great break” (god velikogo pereloma), which, according to Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, connoted “the Marxist leap from ‘necessity’ to ‘freedom’ … a complete rupture with the accursed old world…. Under Stalin's leadership, the masses were building an earthly paradise.”²³ What was really happening at the time was an annihilation of free will, total intoxication, moral dereliction, and thereby absolute identification with the system. It was the Soviet version of an individual Gleichschaltung.

Stalinism's modus operandi was excess in matters such as bureaucratization, police terror, absence of democracy, and censorship: “Not, for example, merely coercive peasant policies, but a virtual civil war against the peasantry; not merely police repression, or even civil war–style terror, but a holocaust by terror that victimized tens of millions of people for twenty-five years; not merely a Thermidorean revival of nationalist tradition, but an almost fascist-like chauvinism; not merely a leader cult, but deification of a despot.”²⁴ After the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, the same form of Leninism—ihey never dared call it Stalinism—was decreed the unique interpretation of Marxism. Stalin's death was “a necessary prerequisite of post-Stalin change and, indeed, as the essential first act of ‘de-Stalinization.’”²⁵ After Nikita Khrushchev's fulminating attack on Stalinism at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in February 1956, certain changes became inevitable within the rigid structure of Soviet dogma. In addition to institutional innovations, de-Stalinization meant dedogmatization, the end of the boundless worship of sacred texts written by or attributed to Stalin. As one author remarked, with de-Stalinization, “the relations between the party-state and society underwent significant changes, with a new emphasis on mediation through soft controls, inducements and strategies of incorporation. But the monolithic structure of the party-state rule and of economic management remained fundamentally unchanged.”²⁶