Paragraph 4. He despises public opinion: he despises and hates the existing social ethic in all its demands and expression; for him, everything that allows the triumph of the revolution is moral, and everything that stands in its way is immoral.
Paragraph 5. The revolutionary is the lost man; with no pity for the state and for the privileged and educated world in general, he must himself expect no pity. Everyday he must be prepared for death. He must be prepared to bear torture.
Paragraph 6. Hard with himself, he must be hard towards others. All the tender feelings of family life, of friendship, love, gratitude and even honor must be stifled in him by a single cold passion for the revolutionary cause. For him there is only one pleasure, one consolation, one reward, and one satisfaction—the success of the revolution. Day and night he must have one single thought, one single purpose: merciless destruction. With this aim in view, tirelessly and in cold blood, he must always be prepared to die and to kill with his own hands anyone who stands in the way of achieving it.
Paragraph 7. The character of the true revolutionary has no place for any romanticism, sentimentality, enthusiasm or seduction. Nor has it any place for private hatred and revenge. This revolutionary passion which in him becomes a daily, hourly passion, must be combined with cold calculation. Always and everywhere he must become not what his own personal inclination would have him become, but what the general interest of the revolution demands.29
THE MYSTICISM OF THE PARTY
Bolshevik humanism was by definition concrete, hinging upon the success of the cause. The individual's existence maintained its weight in the world insofar as it contributed to the construction of the revered social utopia. In this ideologically defined universe, the only agent capable of fulfilling and thereby ending history by bringing humanity to the promised land of classless society was the party. Two pronouncements by Yury Piatakov, one of Lenin's favorites in the younger generation of the Bolshevik Old Guard, spelled out this cosmic, or mystical, identification with the party in the most dramatic terms: “In order to become one with this great Party he would fuse himself with it, abandon his own personality, so that there was no particle left inside him which was not at one with the Party, did not belong to it.”30 The former Central Committee secretary (in 1918) added, “Yes I shall consider black something that I felt and considered to be white since outside of the party, outside accord with it, there is no life for me.”31 Or, in Marxian lingo, the party was the medium through which the individual erased the duality between self and the reified social being. The Bolsheviks were harbingers of the beginning of true history.
Ideological absolutism, worship of the ultimate goal, voluntary 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. The subordination of conventional moral criteria to the ultimate end of achieving a class society was the main problem with Leninism. It shared with Marxism what Steven Lukes calls “the emancipated vision of a world in which the principles that protect human beings from one another would no longer be needed.”32 One of the best descriptions of the Communist mind can be found in the testimony of Lev Kopelev, the model for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's character Rubin in The First Circle: “With the rest of my generation I firmly believed that the ends justify the means. Our great goal was the universal triumph of Communism, and for the sake of that goal everything was permissible—to lie, to steal, to destroy hundreds of thousands and even millions of people, all those who were hindering our work or could hinder it, everyone who stood in the way. And to hesitate or doubt about all this was to give in to ‘intellectual squeamishness’ and ‘stupid liberalism,’ the attributes of people who “could not see the forest for the trees.’”33 Political philosopher Steven Lukes was therefore correct in emphasizing the structural-generative ideological and emotional matrix of Communism that made its crimes against humanity possible: “The defect in question causing moral blindness at a heroic scale was congenital.”34 This same point is emphasized by novelist Martin Amis, for whom Lenin “was a moral aphasiac, a moral autist.”35 Lenin, once in power, “set about placing History on a large gauge railway track altogether, where it would be pulled by the locomotives of a revolutionary design.”36
The magic evaporated once the historically anointed leader ceased to be the custodian of absolute truth. This makes Khrushchev's onslaughts on Stalin at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) on February 25, 1956, crucially important (as admitted by Mikhail Gorbachev in his conversation with former Prague Spring chief ideologue Zdeněk Mlynář.37) At the same time, it was precisely charismatic impersonalism, as Jowitt argues, that provided the antidote to desperation at the moment when Khrushchev exposed Stalin's crimes. This feature, indeed, crucially distinguished Bolshevism from Nazism: “The leader is charismatic in Nazism; the program and (possibly) the leader are charismatic in Leninism.”38 Lenin's ultimate goal was the elimination (extinction) of politics through the triumph of the party as the embodiment of an exclusionary, even exterminist general will.39
In the context of monastic certitude, recognition of fallibility was the beginning of the end for any ideological fundamentalism. During “heroic” times, though, such as War Communism and the “building of socialism,” the unity between party and vozhd (leader) was, no less than terror, key to the system's survival. Homo sovieticus was more than a propaganda concoction. In her acceptance speech for the Hannah Arendt Award of 2000, given jointly by the city of Bremen, the Heinrich Boll Foundation, and the Hannah Arendt Association, Elena Bonner stated, “One of Hannah Arendt's key conclusions was ‘The totality of terror is guaranteed by mass support.’ It is consonant with a later comment by Sakharov: ‘The slogan “The people and the Party are one,” painted on every fifth building, are not just empty words.’”40 This is precisely the point: the internalization of Leninist forms of thinking by millions of denizens of the Sovietized world, and their readiness to accept paternalistic collectivism as a form of life preferable to risk-driven, freedom-oriented experiences. In my view, the major cleavage in today's Russian political culture is between the Leninist heritage and the democratic aspirations and practices associated with Andrei Sakharov and Russia's human rights movement. To quote Elena Bonner again, “In the preamble to his draft of a Soviet Constitution, Sakharov wrote: ‘The goal of the people of USSR and its government is a happy life full of meaning, material and spiritual freedom, well-being and peace.’ But in the decades after Sakharov, Russia's people have not increased their happiness, even though he did everything humanly possible to put the country on the path leading to the goal. And he himself lived a worthy and happy life.”41
As a political doctrine (or perhaps as a political faith), Bolshevism was a synthesis between radical Jacobinism or Blanquism (elitism, minority rule distinguished as “dictatorship of the proletariat,” exaltation of the heroic vanguard), unavowed Russian “Nechaevism” (a radical-conspiratorial mentality), and the authoritarian-voluntaristic components of Marxism.42 Bolshevism emphasized the omnipotence of the revolutionary organization and nourished contempt for what Hannah Arendt once called “the little varieties of fact”—such as Lenin and Trotsky's fierce attacks on the “renegade” Social Democrat theorist Karl Kautsky, who had dared to question the Bolshevik repudiation of all “formal” liberties in the name of protecting the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” never mind that Lenin borrowed from Kautsky his “injection of consciousness” theory.