20. Kołakowski, Main Currents, p. 770.
21. Anne Applebaum, “Dead Souls: Tallying the Victims of Communism,” Weekly Standard, December 13, 1999, http://www.anneapplebaum.com/, accessed on October 1, 2011.
22. See Slavoj Žižek, ed., Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917 (London: Verso, 2002), p. 113 (Lenin's italics).
23. Robert Horvath, The Legacy of Soviet Dissent: Dissidents, Democratisation and Radical Nationalism in Russia (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 20.
24. For a perceptive approach to the main themes of Marxism and an evaluation of what is dead and alive in that doctrine, see Jon Elster, An Introduction to Karl Marx (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 186-200; Jeffrey C. Isaac, Power and Marxist Theory: A Realist View (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1987). Shlomo Avineri's masterful book, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1968), which came out on the 150th anniversary of Marx's birth (a year full of revolutionary pathos, illusions, and resurrected utopias), remains a most useful discussion of Marx's concept of revolution. Avineri's conclusion on the relationship between Marxism and Bolshevism is worth quoting: “One must concede that, with all the differences between Marx and Soviet, Leninist Communism, Leninism would have been inconceivable without Marxism” (p. 258).
25. See Richard H. Crossman, ed., The God That Failed, with a foreword by David C. Engerman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). For an insightful approach to the literature of antitotalitarian disenchantment, see John V. Fleming, The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books That Shaped the Cold War (New York: Norton, 2009). An outstanding contribution to the topic is Michael Scammell, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic (New York: Random House, 2009).
26. See Stanislao Pugliese's superb biography, Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2009), p. 105. Unlike many fellow ex-Communists, Silone remained attached to the ideals of a democratic Left, defining himself as “a Christian without a Church, a socialist without a party” (p. 244).
27. See Ferenc Fehér and Agnes Heller, Eastern Left, Western Left: Totalitarianism, Freedom, and Democracy (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1987), especially “An Imaginary Preface to the 1984 Edition of Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism” and “In the Bestiarium: A Contribution to the Cultural Anthropology of ‘Real Socialism,'” pp. 243-78.
28. Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965-1990 (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), p. 136.
29. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998).
30. Aviezer Tucker, Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patočka to Havel (Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), p. 191.
31. Ivars Ijabs, “'Politics of Authenticity' and/or Civil Society,” in In Marx's Shadow: Knowledge, Power, and Intellectuals in Eastern Europe and Russia, ed. Costica Bradatan and Serguei Alex. Oushakine (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010), p. 246.
32. Findlay, Caring for the Soul, p. 150.
33. Costica Bradatan, “Philosophy and Martyrdom: The Case of Jan Patočka,” in In Marx's Shadow, ed. Bradatan and Oushakine, p. 120.
34. Ibid.
35. Ijabs, “'Politics of Authenticity' and/or Civil Society,” p. 255.
36. Vàclav Havel, “The Post-Communist Nightmare,” New York Review of Books 27 (May 1993): 8.
37. George Konrád, The Melancholy of Rebirth: Essays from Post-Communist Central Europe, 1989-1994 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1995), p. 101.
38. Findlay, Caring for the Soul, pp. 141-42.
39. Tucker, Philosophy and Politics, p. 136.
40. Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 54-55.
41. Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, p. 1212.
42. Andrzej Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 5-13. For an interesting comparison of Walicki's approach to other seminal attempts to evaluate the degree of influence of Marxism-Leninism in Soviet politics and systemic dynamics, see David Priestland, “Marx and the Kremlin: Writing on Marxism-Leninism and Soviet Politics after the Fall of Communism,” Journal of Political Ideologies 5, no. 3 (2000): 337-90. For example, Priestland stresses that Walicki noticed a tension between Marx's concern that man be free from subordination to others and his demand that man be free from dependence on nature. He then inscribes this observation, by comparison to other authors (including N. Robinson, S. Hanson, M. Malia, and M. Sandle), into a larger picture of the multiple dichotomies that characterized Bolshevism: “The conflict between participation and technocracy … the conflict between voluntarism and evolutionary determinism … t he tension between a position which one might call ‘populist radical' … and an ‘elitist radicalism.'” Antonio Gramsci wrote about the tension between fatalism and voluntarism as a permanent feature of revolutionary theory.
43. Claude Lefort, Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
44. Neil Robinson, “What Was Soviet Ideology? A Comment on Joseph Schull and an Alternative,” Political Studies 43 (1995): 325-32. For a detailed application of his approach (the telos of radical democratization and Communism vs. the vanguard party), see Neil Robinson, Ideology and the Collapse of the Soviet System (Aldershot: E. Elgar, 1995).
45. Rachel Walker, “Thinking about Ideology and Method: A Comment on Schull,” Political Studies 43 (1995): 333-42; and “Marxism-Leninism as Discourse: The Politics of the Empty Signifier and the Double Bind,” British Journal of Political Science 19 (1989): 161-89.
46. In the fifth chapter (“Melancholy, Utopia and Reconciliation”) of Another Country, Jan-Werner Müller provides an excellent example of the point I am making. The writer Jurek Becker (a former émigré from the GDR) stated that “somehow, across all experiences and beyond all insight, existed the hope that the socialist countries could find another path. That's over now.” In justifying his vote against reunification, he stated: “The most important thing about the socialist countries is nothing visible, but a possibility. There not everything has been decided like here.” Or Uwe Timm: “One has to remember that socialism in the GDR was an alternative to the FRG, admittedly an ugly, bureaucratically bloated alternative, but still an alternative, and that this ‘real socialism,' despite all ossification, would have been capable of self-transformation is not a mere assertion. That is demonstrated by the grassroots democratic movements” (my emphasis). Jan-Werner Müller, Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification, and National Identity (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 125; also see pp. 124-29.
47. Raymond Aron, Memoirs: Fifty Years of Political Reflection (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1990), p. 414; Vladimir Tismaneanu, Despre communism: Destinul unei religii politice (Nucjhares: Humanias, 2011).