THE MYTH OF THE PREDESTINED PARTY
The party as the incarnation of historical rationality, with the revolutionary avant-garde elected to lead the otherwise lethargic masses into the Communist paradise, was the hallmark of the Leninist intervention in the political praxis of the twentieth century. Without the party, there would be no Bolshevik revolution and no gulag, one can say. The myth of the party, more than the myth of the leader, explains the longevity and endurance of the Leninist project. The other side, the Fascists, while invoking the commands of historical providence, invested the ultimate center of power less in the institution than in the infallible “genius” of the leader. The party mattered, but there was never the same type of institutional charismatic magnet that Leninist formations represented, particularly in the case of Nazi Germany. In the case of Fascist Italy, when the charismatic leader was deposed in 1943, the party simply could not reinvent itself despite the fact that it successfully managed to reassert its autonomy vis-à-vis the leader by way of the Fascist Grand Council.19 In Italy proper the party disintegrated, while in the Salo Republic (the part of the country under German control) Mussolini simply became a puppet in Hitler's hands.20 Mussolini had lost the ability to perform the role of “of a modern propheta who offered his followers a new ‘mazeway’ (world-view) to redeem the nation from chaos and lead it into a new era, one that drew on a mythicized past to regenerate the future.”21 Hitler's myth was much more resilient. Ian Kershaw remarked that his personality cult, as the nexus of “the social expectations and motivations invested in him by his followers,”22 experienced a “slow deflation rather than the swift puncture.”23
A note should be made here regarding the possible difference between Italian Fascism and Nazism. As many scholars have already noted, in the German case the institutionalization of charisma was overshadowed by the “Führer principle.” Philippe Burrin stresses that in Nazi Germany politics were fundamentally marked by “personalized power—in the double meaning of the term, centered around the person of Hitler and founded upon direct person-to-person relationships.” In his classic study, Karl Dietrich Bracher considered that “the creation of the system of terror and extermination and the functioning of the police and SS apparatchiks operating that system rested on this overturning of all legal and moral norms by a totalitarian leader principle which did not tolerate adherence to laws, penal code, or constitution but reserved to itself complete freedom of action and decision-making. Political power was merely the executive of the Leader's will.”24 Ian Kershaw's fundamental analysis of the “Hitler myth” showed the leader as a political entity almost independent of the party, “the motor for integration, mobilization, and legitimation within the Nazi system of rule.”25 In this sense, the attraction of the leader principle, for the case of Germany, comes closer rather to the Lenin cult in the Soviet Union than to the cult of Stalin or Mussolini. Leaving aside its all-out religious aspects, Lenin's cult took the form of a myth of the founding father as the infinite source of ideological rebirth and sustenance for the Communist polity. And indeed the return to “true Leninist principles” repeatedly brought relief for the Soviet regime. The perpetuation and domination of a Khrushchevite understanding of post-Stalinist Communist systems allowed for the invocation of Lenin (the leader without sin, to paraphrase Kershaw) as safeguard of the original utopia, regardless of the latter's terrible toll on the societies that enacted it. Only the consistent failure of such ideological, cultic revivals finally showed the obsolescence of the “Lenin myth,” which ultimately crumbled under its violent legacy.
In Mussolini's Italy, Il Duce's myth did not represent the rationale of the Fascist religion. In Gentile's words, “It was created out of the collective experience of a movement that considered itself invested with a missionary charisma of its own, one that was in fact not, in its beginnings, identified with Mussolini…. The Mussolini myth came into being within the environment of the Fascist religion once the latter had been institutionalized.”26 Italian Fascism enshrined the leader as an institution potentially independent of Mussolini. An Italian jurist contemporary to those times formulated the problem as follows: “If the new state is to become a permanent way of being, that is a ‘life-system,’ it cannot do without the role of the Leader because of its hierarchical structure, even if this Leader does not have the extraordinary magnitude of the Man who promoted the revolution in the first place.”27 In 1934, the Sardinian born Fascist intellectual Edgardo Sullis published a book whose title echoed Thomas á Kempis, II Duce—Imitatione de Mussolini, in which he urged the militants to pursue a political life totally dedicated to a radical transformation of society and themselves: “You should imitate Mussolini alone. You should have no other example in life except him.”28 This “totalitarian Caesarism” (to use Gentile's term), or hierocratic Bonapartism, which allowed for the interchangeability of charisma between the leader and the party is strikingly similar to the Soviet formula of the general secretary as the “Lenin of our times” (one often used in other Communist regimes as well). In fact, the struggle between Stalin and his arch-rival Trotsky revolved around the crucial question, Who can legitimately claim to be “today's Lenin”?
The primary form of charisma, in the Soviet case, was that of the party as scientific socialism incarnate, the eschatological agent that stressed “the gap between the proletariat ‘in itself’ and the proletariat ‘for itself’ and the creation of an agent charged with closing this gap.”29 Even Stalin's legitimacy, at the peak of the cult of personality, “in the eyes of his fellow party leaders rested in what they saw as his role of guarantor of their collective power of the state.”30 As in Mussolini's case,31 Lenin remained the founder of Bolshevism, the head of the Soviet state (first workers’ state), and the leader of the Soviet peoples. Under Stalinism, “the fact that the party existed as a continuous, integrated hierarchy, which was institutionally and ideologically embedded in the system, meant that it always existed as a resource for correcting and reining in the regime's most extreme policies. The institutional continuity of the party provided the basis for self-containment.”32 Such a specific alignment allowed for successive Leninist reinventions and stagnations in both the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. One possible explanation for the immensely explosive impact of Nikita Khrushchev's “Secret Speech” (February 1956) was, besides the classical remark about the acceptance of fallibility in the implementation of the party line at the highest level of power, that the revealed crimes were against the party. The Stalin myth irreversibly subverted the party's “charismatic impersonalism” (in the words of Ken Jowitt).33 The bottom line is, for the moment, that both Fascism (in its Italian avatar) and Leninism had the possibility of charismatic regeneration built in regardless of the leadership's persona. What counted for true believers was the salvific promise incarnated in the party—the source of freedom through successful experimentation with history. However, in the Italian case, such a revival of the party after Mussolini's demise proved impossible because of the disastrous situation in which the country found itself as a result of the National Fascist Party's shockingly incompetent administration of the war effort. Historian R. J. B. Bosworth noticed that even during the Salo Republic, “the new regime carefully avoided the word ‘Fascist,’ opting instead for ‘social’ as a signal of its revolutionary commitment to a ‘new order’ at home and abroad.” The new República Sociale Italiana can be perceived as a desperate but doomed attempt to revive the heroic mission of Fascism in Italy.34