A communist must maintain faith in the Party and must be the happiest person in the world when he feels that a Party trusts him. I was happy, I enjoyed the Party's trust and I say that I deserved it because I did not mislead the Party. Since 1939, I had no other life than for the Party. I hated and I hate the enemies of the working class, its traitors…. I cannot bear the thought that the Party lost its trust in me. For this reason I kiss my Party card which I have never sullied before I had it in this form of hereafter. I give in to the Party. I thank the Party for the trust showed to me up to a certain moment. This [committing suicide] is not the gesture of the communist, I have not learned these gestures from the Party, it is a leftover of bourgeois education and morality. I would have been able to bear tortures in the cells of the Siguranta [interwar Romanian political police], but I cannot bear the agony that I have lost the trust of my Party. My last thought goes to comrade Stalin, to the Central Committee of the Romanian Workers’ Party, to comrade Gheorghiu-Dej.
I also found in the Securitate archives Mirel Costea's last letter to his daughters, Rodica and Dana, written a few minutes before he shot himself:
Your daddy, whom you have loved and who has loved you apologizes that he needs to leave. When you grow older you will understand that the most precious good for an honest human being is to enjoy the trust of the Party. Until recently I have enjoyed this trust; until recently, and this is something I cannot bear. My life has been for the Party, without its trust it has no meaning. I beg you to live well and to love each other as we have loved you, me and your mother. Keep in mind that your father was an honest man, faithful to the Party. However, if you ever find out that the Party thinks differently about me, then you should believe what the Party says. Your mother will take care of you and will educate you in the spirit of love for comrade Stalin, for the USSR, for our Party, for the beloved leaders of our Party, as I have educated you.17
The symbolic vehicle for this moral and political regimentation was the Stalinist definition of internationalism as unbounded allegiance to the USSR (the “touchstone theory”). To keep strict control over all mechanisms that guaranteed social reproduction and preserved the matrix of domination in such a system, the party had to play the central role. Based on my research in the Romanian Communist Party's archives, it appears that no segment of the body social, economic, or cultural, as well as no repressive institution, escaped continuous and systematic party intervention. Even during the climactic terrorist period (1948-53), the secret police served as the party's obedient instrument and not the other way around. Indeed, as one scholar stated, “The USSR, in other words, did not keep two sets of books, at least on ideological questions.”18 Ideological purity and revolutionary vigilance were imposed as main political imperatives. political police, cast in the Soviet mold and controlled by Soviet advisers, took care to fulfill the ideological desiderata. The political content of that ideological dictatorship in its radical incarnation (the first five years) was sheer terror and permanent propaganda warfare waged within a personalized dictatorship embodied by local “little Stalins.”
What these countries experienced was not merely an institutional import or imperial expansion. They went through what one could label, using Stephen Kotkin's formulation, a “civilizational”19 transfer that transplanted a secular eschatology (Marxism-Leninism), a radical vision of the world (capitalist encirclement and the touchstone theory of proletarian internationalism20 spelled out by Stalin in the 1920s), and ultimately, an alternative idea of modernity (based upon anticapitalism and state-managed collectivism) self-identified as infallibly righteous—in other words, Stalinism. Kotkin's characterization of Stalinism as civilization comes very close to the comparison by Anthony Stevens, a Jungian analyst, to National Socialism. According to Stevens, “Nazism had its Messiah (Hitler), its Holy Book (Mein Kampf), its cross (the Swastika), its religious processions (the Nuremberg Rally), its ritual (the Beer Hall Putsch Remembrance Parade), its anointed elite (the SS), its hymns (the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’), excommunication for heretics (the concentration camps), its devils (the Jews), its millennial promise (the Thousand Year Reich), and its Promised Land (the East).”21 Both Stalinism and Nazis were radical, revolutionary civilizations that aimed at establishing an alternative, illiberal modernity by instrumentalizing the political religion that lay at their core.
Stalinism was a self-sufficient, pre-established plan to restructure society, in the name of which the movement dispensed with as many human lives as needed while frantically engineering radical transformation.22 The personality cult (and the growing Russianization of the Stalinist system during and after World War II) combined with the intrinsic and increasingly orthodox outlook of Communism (as “a lived system”)23 exacerbated the exclusionary logic in the “people's democracies.” As in the Soviet Union, in Eastern Europe Stalinism itself was the revolution:24 it broke through the already frail structures of the ancien régime and laid the groundwork of state socialism in each of the region's countries. It created an all-pervasive party-state that tried and in most cases succeeded in extending its tentacles into all walks of life.25 In the words of the director of the French Institute in Tallinn, Jean Cathala, in 1940 the process of Sovietization meant “the incorporation into another world: into a world of institutions, of practices and ways of thinking, that had to be accepted as a bloc, because the spiritual and the temporal, doctrine and the state, the regime and methods of government, the homeland and the party in power were all mixed together in it.”26
At the same time, Sovietization was “part of an imperialist conception, whereby a system of domination and subjugation was effected and rationalized, and whereby a subaltern identity was ascribed to the subjected peoples.”27 The main weakness of this system, however, was its chronic deficit of legitimacy. Under mature Stalinism, both in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, autocratic despotism ruined the functioning of the party as an autonomous institution, its potential for “charismatic impersonalism” inherent in Leninism as an organizational model. This phenomenon explains the neotraditionalist features of Stalinism. If one follows Ken Jowitt's argument, the mutation of the definition of revolutionary heroism (initially belonging to the party, but now the prerogative of one) cancelled the fundamental characteristic of novelty in Leninism as an ideo-political form of aggregation.28 In this monolithic structure dominated by the revolutionary phalanx, plans to reshape man, nature, and society were frantically pursued. Stalinism as a political religion overturned traditional morality: good and evil, vice and virtue, truth and lie were drastically revalued. The goal was to create a system that unified victim and torturer, that abolished traditional moral taboos and established a different code, with different prescriptions and prohibitions. The dramaturgy of show trials with their “infernal pedagogy” (Annie Kriegel) was the main component of a system based on universal fear, duplicity, and suspicion.