Totalitarianism was a novel political, social, and cultural construct that first suspended and then abolished traditional distinctions between good and evil. An imperfect concept, to be sure, it was not an empty signifier or a mere Cold War propaganda weapon, as some have suggested in recent years. Those who developed the concept of totalitarianism during the interwar period knew what appalling realities it designated: from the exiled Mensheviks to the emigré scholars from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, these intellectuals knew that something unprecedented and quite terrifying had occurred.1 The concept of totalitarianism offered important and still valid interpretive keys for understanding the unique blending of ideology, organization, and terror in unprecedented attempts to create perfectly homogenized communities through genocidal methods. All these experiments included quasi-religious, unavowed yet palpable mystical components. In fact, they were political religions, with their own rituals, prophets, saints, zealots, inquisitors, traitors, renegades, heretics, apostates, and holy writs. The totalitarian story began with the Bolshevik dream of total revolution and became a global phenomenon in the 1920s and 1930s with the rise to power of totalitarian party-movements in Italy and Germany. For example, the Romanian Iron Guard was a totalitarian movement that combined political radicalism and religious fanaticism. Its short-lived stay in power (September 1940-January 1941) was marked by a frantic attempt to carry out, using murderous violence, what historian Eugen Weber once called the archangelic revolution.2 Whereas these Fascist dictatorships collapsed as a result of World War II, Soviet Communism lasted for more than seven decades and ended only in December 1991 in the USSR. The catalyst for this final wreckage was the liberal, anti-Leninist revolutionary upheaval of 1989. In transformed incarnations, it is still alive in China and a few other countries.
To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, during the reign of these totalitarian movements, conscience broke down. Furthermore, “the insanity of such systems lies not only in their first premise but in the very logicality with which they are constructed.”3 Communism was a radical economic, moral, social, and cultural doctrine centered upon the accomplishment of radical transformative ends. Fascism appeared as its arch rival, yet it shared with Communism the collectivistic, antiliberal, anticapitalist approach, the neoromantic dream of the total community, and the longing for a completely purified existence.4 With its universalistic goals, eschatological promises, and totalizing ambitions, it was often described as a political or secular religion (and so was Fascism in its Italian, German, and Romanian incarnations). The ultimate purpose of Communism was to create a new civilization founded upon a New Man. Two factors were fundamental for this doctrine: the privileged role of the party and the revolutionary transformation of human nature. One of the main distinctions between radicalism of the extreme Left and the extreme Right is the emphasis the former placed on the institution of the party as an immanent incarnation of absolute, transcendental historical knowledge. In the words of historian Walter Laqueur,
The Fascist experience in Italy and Germany has shown the crucial role of the Duce and the Führer. Hitler and Mussolini created their parties in their image, and it is perfectly legitimate to talk about the Hitler and the Mussolini “movement,” for theirs were not political parties in traditional sense…. But Stalin's role in the Soviet Union was initially less decisive. Communist power was already firmly established. There is every reason to believe that if Stalin had been shot or died of a disease or had never existed, the party would have still remained in power in the 1920s and 1930s.5
Communism advanced a new conception of human existence (society, economy, social and individual psychology, art). According to this conception, building the New Man was the supreme goal of political action. Communism's ambition was to transcend traditional morality, yet it suffered from moral relativism. It assigned to the party-state its own morality, granting only to it the right to define the meaning and ultimate aim of human existence. The state became the supreme and absolute value within the framework of an eschatological doctrine of revolution. Through the cult of absolute unity on the path to salvation by knowledge of history, Communism produced a new, total social and political project centered on purifying the body of the communities that fell under its ideological spell. Its revolutionary project was total and totalizing. As a potent political myth, Communism promised immanent deliverance, the chance to achieve prosperity, freedom, and equality. In fact, throughout the twentieth century, the Communist Weltanschauung was the foundation for ideologically based totalitarian political experiments with terrible human costs.
As for Fascism—and especially its paroxistic version, National Socialism—it emphasized the lack of equality between biologically defined groups and a predestined mission for the Aryan nations. At the same time, it praised heroism, youth, and valiance and despised bourgeois modernity as much as the Communists did. Placing Fascism at the right end of the political spectrum masks the strong socialist origins of these movements based on ethnic ressentiment.6
Marxism's fundamental thesis was the centrality of class struggle (historical violence) in the development of society. For Marx (and later for twentieth-century Marxist philosophers Ernst Bloch, Antonio Gramsci, and Georg Lukács), the revolutionary class symbolized the viewpoint of totality, thereby creating the epistemic premises for grasping historical truth. In the name of proletarian (authentic) democracy, formal liberties could be curtailed, even suppressed. Marx's myth of the proletariat as the messiah class, the heart of Communism, nurtured a revolutionary project imbued with a sense of prophetic mission and charismatic-heroic predestination. This became an immensely appealing mythological matrix embraced by intellectuals worldwide.7 Marx gave an ultimate apocalyptic verdict: since the bourgeoisie is guilty of the barbarous distortion of human life, it deserves its fate.8 Marx viewed the social universe primarily (but not only) in terms of social and economic determinism. Freedom meant for Marx and his disciples “understood necessity,” that is, efforts to carry out the presumed goals of history. All human reality was subordinated to the dialectical laws of development, and history was projected into a sovereign entity, whose diktat was beyond any human questioning. He declared his social theory the ultimate scientific formula.
The ingredient that allowed the realization of the revolutionary mission was revolutionary class consciousness.9 Through it, mankind's pre-history would end and its real history could begin. According to the young Marx, the revolutionary intellectuals were those who created the doctrine, but the proletarians were not perceived as an amorphous mass into which a self-appointed group of teachers had the duty of injecting the consciousness of the historical truth. Nevertheless, Karl Marx's Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach best expressed the revolutionary mission of critical thinking: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”10 With the rubble of the past cleared away, the chosen agent of history would point the way to a new society that would bring about the complete fulfillment of the human spirit.
Communism was simultaneously an eschatology (a doctrine of mundane salvation) and an ecclesiology (a ideology of the revolutionary party or movement). Reality as it stood was fatally reified; it was to be superseded, on the one hand, by the emancipation and revolution of the proletariat, and on the other hand, by the utopia of the classless society. Subsequently, Communism's vision of the future society relied upon a “dictatorship over needs” (Agnes Heller, Ferenc Fehér, and György Márkus). It presupposed the dissolution of the autonomous individual within the all-devouring framework of total control, the disastrous politicization of the psyche, the manipulation of the subjective field, the attempted obliteration of the private sphere as an ultimate sanctuary of the ego. It was a total experiment in social engineering. Once it constructed its vision of modernity on the principle of a chosen, socially homogenized community crossing the desert of history from darkness into light, there could be only one solution for those who failed to qualify to their inclusionary criteria: stigmatization, elimination, and eventually, extermination
The Marxist eschatology was a rationalized theodicy: history replaced God, the proletariat was the universal redeemer, and the revolution meant ultimate salvation, the end of human suffering. History had only one direction, as it unfolded from scarcity to abundance, from limited to absolute freedom. Freedom, in turn, was understood as overcoming necessity via revolutionary praxis. Hegel had said that all that was real was rational. For Marx, all that was real was historical, and history was governed by dialectical laws. The kingdom of necessity was the realm where economy could not ensure full equality among human beings, where the political was dependent on partisan interests and the social sphere was painfully atomized. In contrast, in the kingdom of freedom there was an identity between existence and essence, antagonism disappeared, men and women recovered their lost sense of work as joy, as unfettered creativity. In this context, human existence could fully reach its development, and the condition for the freedom of all lay in each individual's liberation. At the basis of Communism, therefore, lay a teleological fundamentalism. Its final station was the City of God on earth, that is, the triumph of the proletariat.
Marxian social theory's cult of totality as the ultimate explanatory archetype set the stage for its degeneration, in Bolshevik (Leninist) terms, into dogma and the ruthless persecution of heretics. Marx's emphasis on human emancipation as the conscious absorption of society by the individual and his equation of social conflict with class antagonism resulted in advocacy of the elimination of “superstructural” intermediaries (laws, institutions, etc.) regulating the relationship between civil society and the state. Marx failed to give instructions on the achievement of social unity. The utopian, eschatological vision of Marx's body of political thought was translated into a revolutionary program of action by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (born Ulianov). Lenin operated a creative understanding of necessity that led to the Bolshevik version of man's salvation. In Lenin's vision, the monolithic vanguard party became the repository of human hope, a tightly knit fraternity of illuminated militants, and therefore the true vehicle of human freedom. The combination of Marxism with party/power set the Communist body politic on the path to self-purification (permanent purge and revolutionary offensive).
For Lenin, the fate of the Communist revolution predicted by Karl Marx depended on the maturity and political will of the revolutionary party. His vision of the new type of party was formulated in the pamphlet What Is To Be Done (1902), which articulated the Leninist concept of revolutionary practice in the twentieth century. Lenin's notion of the party led to the split within Russian social democracy between moderates (Mensheviks) and radicals (Bolsheviks). Leninism consists fundamentally of Lenin's theory of the vanguard revolutionary party, the doctrine of proletarian revolution in the age of imperialism, and the emphasis on the dictatorship of the proletariat as a new type of state emerging from the collapse of the old, bourgeois order. From the outset, the Leninist regime in the Soviet Union was based on abuses, violence, and repression directed against any form of political opposition. Bolshevism was the opposite of a rule-of-law state.11 These authoritarian features of Leninism were further exacerbated by Stalin, who transformed the Soviet Union into a totalitarian state. Bolshevik humanism was conditioned only by the success of the cause it was engaged in. The individual's existence maintained its weight in the world insofar as it contributed to the construction of social utopia.
Like Marx, Lenin saw the proletarian revolution as a global phenomenon, but he modified some basic tenets of the Marxist theory. Lenin noticed the passivity of the workers in the advanced industrial countries and explained it as a consequence of the ability of the bourgeoisie to co-opt the working class within the system. According to Lenin, the bourgeoisie succeeded in ideologically corrupting the proletarians and their parties. It was therefore important to create a new type of political party that would refuse any form of collusion with the existing dominant forces and would eventually exert exclusive political power. For Lenin, a tightly knit, phalanxlike revolutionary organization, structured almost like a military order, was needed to inject revolutionary consciousness into the proletariat and direct the workers in the revolutionary battles. The party was the embodiment of historical reason and militants were expected to carry out its orders without hesitation or reservation. Discipline, secrecy, and rigid hierarchy were essential for such a party, especially during clandestine activities (like those in Russia). The main role of the party was to awaken proletarian self-consciousness and instill the revolutionary doctrine (faith) into the dormant proletariat. Instead of relying on the spontaneous development of consciousness in the working class, Leninism saw the party as a catalytic agent bringing revolutionary knowledge, will, and organization to the exploited masses. It was with Lenin that the mystique of a new type of party became an indelible feature of radical politics in the twentieth century.
The Fascists absorbed the Bolshevik lesson, internalizing Lenin's cult of the party, but they never developed a mystical partolatry. The main distinction, therefore, was that neither the Fascist Party in Italy nor the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) became charismatic institutions like the Bolshevik Party. They were the sounding boards for the leaders' harangues, collective entities meant to ensure the perpetuation of the Fürhrerprinzip. Alfredo Rocco was Mussolini's minister of justice and a close friend of Il Duce. His views emphasized organicism, romanticism, and statism as key components of the Fascist ideology: “To the existence of this ideal content of Fascism, to the truth of this Fascist logic we ascribe the fact that though we commit many errors of detail, we very seldom go astray on fundamentals, whereas all the parties of the opposition, deprived as they are of an informing, animating principle, of a unique directing concept, do very often wage their war faultlessly in minor tactics, better trained as they are in parliamentary and journalistic maneuvers, but they constantly broke down on the important issues.”12Benito Mussolini, Italy's Fascist dictator between 1922 and his death in 1945, contributed in 1932 to the Enciclopedia Italiana with a famous entry on the doctrine of Fascism:
Thus Fascism could not be understood in many of its practical manifestations as a party organization, as a system of education, a discipline, if it were not always looked at in the light of its whole way of conceiving life, a spiritualized way…. The man of Fascism is an individual who is nation and fatherland, which is a moral law, biding together individuals and the generations into a tradition and a mission, suppressing the instant for a life enclosed within the brief round of pleasure in order to restore within duty the higher life free from the limits of time and space: a life in which the individual, through the denial of himself, through the sacrifice of his own private interests, through death itself, realizes that completely spiritual existence in which his value as a man lies. Fascism is a religious conception in which man is seen in his immanent relationship with a superior law and with an objective Will that transcends the particular individual and raises him to conscious membership in a spiritual society. Whoever has seen in the religious politics of the Fascist regime nothing than mere opportunism has not understood that Fascism besides being a system of government is also, above all, a system of thought.13
Ideological absolutism, sanctification of the ultimate goal, 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 and definitely imbued Mussolini's political imagination.
I argue that the seeds of Stalin's regime were sowed by Lenin.14 He carried to an extreme Leninism's intolerant logic and turned the USSR into a police state. The Communist Party was transformed from a revolutionary elite into a bureaucratic caste whose sole aim was to preserve and enhance the leader's power and its privileges. Gradually, the dictatorship of the proletariat became an empty slogan legitimizing Stalin's absolute reign and secret police repression against the population. Invoking Lenin's struggle against factionalism, Stalin completely destroyed any intraparty democracy, viciously persecuted all (real or imaginary) opponents, and imposed a monolithic dictatorship based on permanent purges and mass terror. In the physical absence of the numinous leader incarnating the absolute power of the party, Lenin, the congregation of his disciples had to reinvent itself by means of founding its charisma on the scriptures of its founding fathers. The invented tradition of Marxism-Leninism was then thrust upon the party ranks as a means of stabilizing the normative identity of the party. The “return to Leninism” became an important theme of the anti-Stalin opposition, especially among Trotsky's supporters. Later, after Stalin's death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev proclaimed the restoration of the Leninist norms of party life and denounced Stalin's “cult of personality” (i.e., the quasi-religious adoration of the supreme leader) as non-Leninist. In the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev deepened Khrushchev's critique of Stalinism and sought to instill pluralism within Soviet institutions. In his democratizing efforts, Gorbachev went beyond the logic of Leninism and abandoned both the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the party's claim to monopoly of power.
In 1919 Lenin created the Third (Communist) International—the Comintern, a global institution that the Fascists were never able to establish. Earlier he had lambasted the Second International for its loss of revolutionary fervor and complicity with bourgeois parliaments and governments. The Comintern consecrated Moscow's centrality and hegemonic role within world Communism. For a party to be accepted into the Comintern it had to unconditionally acquiesce to twenty-one conditions, including complete subordination to Soviet dictates. Lenin created the Comintern as an instrument for expanding the revolution and allowing Soviet Russia to escape “imperialist encirclement.” Later, Stalin transformed it into a mere instrument of Soviet foreign policy and by implication Russian imperialism. The Comintern was disbanded in 1943, but Communist parties continued to toe the Stalinist line. In the aftermath of World War II, Leninist parties came to power in East-Central Europe, China, North Korea, and North Vietnam (a Soviet-style regime existed in Mongolia since the 1920s). Later, in 1960, Fidel Castro publicly espoused Leninism and proclaimed the Communist nature of the Cuban Revolution. In all these cases, Communism represented the sum of political and ideological techniques (tactics) used by revolutionary parties to seize and consolidate monopolistic dictatorial regimes. Their only claim to legitimacy derived from the organized belief-structure shared by the elites and inculcated into the masses, according to which the party was the sole beneficiary of direct access to historical truth.
Marx proclaimed Communism to be the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man: “Communism is the riddle of history solved, and knows itself to be the solution.”15 The explanation for the consequences of this doctrine is founded upon a few essential factors: the vision of its followers, a superior elite whose utopian goals sanctify the most barbaric methods; the denial of the right to life of those who are defined as “degenerate parasites and predators”; the deliberate dehumanization of state-defined enemies and victims; and the falsification of the idea of good (Alain Besançon). The revolutions of 1989 demonstrated that Communism had exhausted its appeal and led to the breakdown of the Leninist regimes in East-Central Europe. In December 1991, the USSR came to an end. The demise of Communism in Europe allowed space for alternative political mythologies, which left a proliferation of what I called fantasies of salvation.
In his monumental volume Postwar, Tony Judt argues that the Europe of our days is “bound together by the signs and symbols of its terrible past.” The remarkable accomplishment of forging a democratic identity this way “remains forever mortgaged to that past” because the latter “will have to be taught afresh with each passing generation.”16 The main lessons of the twentieth century that this book has tried to highlight are that no ideological commitment, no matter how frantically absorbing, should ever prevail over the sanctity of human life and that no party, movement, or leader holds the right to dictate that followers renounce their critical faculties to embrace a pseudo-miraculous, in fact mystically self-centered, delusional vision of mandatory happiness. Anne Applebaum judiciously emphasized that the most important path to understanding the terrible historical experience of the past century is by empathizing with and trying to comprehend the people who lived through it.17 It is now clear, based on the abysmal experiences of totalitarian states, that contempt for the individual and his/her rights inevitably leads to the destruction of any trace of democracy. The Communist “people's democracies” were actually a mockery of this very term, in fact its antithesis. They shared with the Fascist regimes a hyperdeterministic, quasi-scientific ideological hubris. No less importantly, conspiratorial visions of world history, including the current Islamist fantasies, result in an obsession with infiltrated enemies, a politics of vindictive mythological scapegoating, and state-organized persecution, exclusion, and extermination of those ideologically branded as “perfidious vermin” and “treacherous scum” (Jews, kulaks, etc.).18 As Hannah Arendt put it in 1946 (and these words should stay with us as an enduring warning),
One of the most horrible aspects of contemporary terror is that, no matter what its motives and ultimate aims, it invariably appears in the clothes of an inevitable logical conclusion made on the basis of some ideology or theory. To a far lesser degree, this phenomenon was already to be seen in connection with the liquidation of the anti-Stalinists in Russia—which Stalin himself predicted and justified in 1930…. The obvious conclusion was that one had to deal with these factions as with a hostile class or with traitors. The trouble is, of course, that nobody except Stalin knows what the “true interests of the proletariat” are … This “scientificality” is indeed the common feature of all totalitarian regimes of our time. But it means nothing more than that purely man-made power—mainly destructive—ts dressed in the clothes of some superior, superhuman sanction from which it derives its absolute, not-to-be-questioned, force. The Nazi brand of this kind of power is more thorough and more horrible than the Marxist or pseudo-Marxist, because it assigns to nature the role Marxism assigns to history … But neither science nor “scientificality,” neither scholars nor charlatans supplied the ideas and techniques that operated the death factories. The ideas came from politicians who took power-politics seriously, the techniques came from modern mob-men who were not afraid of consistency.19
Tens of millions of dead, the memory of barbed wire and gas chambers, and a sense of unbearable tragedy are the main legacies left by the reckless ideological pledges of the twentieth century to build the City of God here and now.