Much of Leninism's dogmatism stemmed from Russian authoritarian traditions and the lack of a culture of public debate. Remember Antonio Gramsci's reflections on Russia's “gelatinous” civil society and the omnipotence of the bureaucratic state? Wasn't Lenin himself, by the end of his life, terrified by the resurgence of the time-honored traditions of rudeness, violence, brutality, and hypocrisy that he had lambasted and against which the revolution was presumably directed? As one author remarked, “Lenin was a direct heir to the tradition of revolutionary Machiavellianism in Russian history and to the Jacobin tradition in the European revolutionary movement.”86 On the one hand, as we have already discussed, Lenin believed that revolution was essential and inevitable, and that it would, of necessity, be violent; he considered any other approach to be conciliatory and doomed to failure.87 On the other hand, his Jacobinism was “a metaphor for revolutionary energy, incorruptibility and a willingness to push forward as far as possible in the interests of the working masses.” It was founded on his dedication to plebeian politics, “and the twentieth century plebeians were of course the class of wage-laborers. Hence consistent proletarian socialists had to be Jacobins.”88 Or, to use Lenin's formula, the Bolsheviks were Jacobins working for the proletariat.89
Lenin was conscious that his most difficult trial was the transition from revolutionary action to governance and the preservation of state power. The success of the October Revolution seemed to confirm that he had successfully merged “the elemental destructive force of the masses” and “the conscious destructive force of the organization of revolutionaries.” But how was the newly won power to be consolidated? The initial drive toward democracy from below and self-empowerment of the masses, was replaced in 1917 by emphasis on the reconstructed state machine that according to Lenin was indispensable for defending the revolution and pursuing its main goals. In form, Lenin said, this was a dictatorship, but in substance, because it represented the interests and aspirations of the large majority of the population, it was the true, substantive democracy. The main problem with Lenin's concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat was his contempt for the rule of law. For him, the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat “is power won and maintained by the violence of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, power that is unrestricted by any laws.”90 This was the central point of Rosa Luxemburg's criticism of the Russian Revolution. She argued that “[Lenin] is completely mistaken in the means he employs. Decree, dictatorial force of the factory overseer, Draconic penalties, rule by terror—all these things are but palliatives. The only way to a rebirth is the school of public life itself, the most unlimited, the broadest democracy and public opinion. It is rule by terror which demoralizes.” With great foresight, Luxemburg warned that the path taken by the Bolsheviks would lead to “the brutalization of public life.”91
The restoration of state prerogatives was for Lenin a “necessary evil,” and he tried to justify the notion of a proletarian dictatorship by defining it as the dictatorship of the majority of the population (poor peasants included), and therefore not exactly a dictatorship. Lenin was convinced, however, that these exceptional measures, including the persecution of dissidents and banning of all political parties but the Bolsheviks, were needed for the survival of the revolution in Russia. In the long run, however, he hoped that the revolution would triumph in the West and a certain political and economic relaxation would become possible. Lenin saw this as a temporary stage; he never accepted the idea that the Russian Revolution would be the sole proletarian revolution for decades to come. At the end of the day, though, Lenin imposed two fundamental elements on the Bolshevik conception of politics: law as an epiphenomenon of revolutionary morals and the heteronomy of individual action. In this sense, Lenin opened the door to the realization of radical evil, for the latter, if one is to follow Hannah Arendt, means “making human beings as human beings superfluous…. This happens as soon as all unpredictability—which, in human beings, is the equivalent of spontaneity—is eliminated.”92 Here lies the essential ambivalence in interpreting Leninism: was it a form of Russian Sonderweg (special road) on the path to implementing modernity or was it a Marxist Sonderweg in the accomplishment of socialist revolution?
Whatever one thinks of the final disintegration of Leninism, it was a quite successful experiment in reshaping political community according to a certain interpretation of Marxist socialism.93 How does one make sense of the fact that, unlike all other Eastern European societies, Russia is the only one that seems unable to restore pro-Communist traditions and parties? Where are the Socialist Revolutionaries, Kadets, or Mensheviks? The answer is that Lenin produced “the end of politics” via the ultimate triumph of political will.94 In fact, this meant that a sect of self-appointed revolutionary pedagogues managed to coerce a large population to accept their obsessions as the inexorable imperative of history. Using the example of the implementation of surveillance (considered one of the practices of “institutionalizing modernity”), Peter Holquist shows that its enforcement was not “a specifically Bolshevik, Marxist, or even totalitarian practice—it was a modern one.” In his opinion, what gave the Soviet regime its singularity was “the intersection of a particular ideology with the simultaneous implementation of a particular modern understanding of politics—put succinctly, an understanding that views populations as both the means and the goal of some emancipatory project.” With its specific Marxist conception of politics, society, and history in the background, Leninism developed “a closed, rather than open, model of historical progress.”95
Communism and Fascism were sustained by the historical-political sense of historical urgency and their willingness to act in a radical mode. The vanguards that brought these political movements to power and kept them there were mobilized and vindicated by the ethical-political change that they considered themselves uniquely prepared to spearhead because of their postliberal consciousness, as well as their spirit, will, discipline, self-sacrifice, and willingness to act.96 Imposing the dictatorship of the Communist Party as the sole instrument for history-making action, the Bolsheviks successfully exhausted the political sphere, eliminating all alternative visions of the body politic. Lenin, and later Stalin, transformed the political system into “the central and sacralized arena for the self-salvation and self-sacrifice of revolutionaries striving to implement the utopian designs which have to be realized in the present and on earth.”97 Considering that the Soviet Union survived for over seventy years, the operation of making sense of the pre-Communist past logically faces a historical hiatus. The various trajectories of Russian political thought must overcome either an utter lack of domestic continuity or the thorny issue of synthetic reinterpretation. In the final analysis, it is difficult to recuperate tradition into the twenty-first century, when the country's only version of mature modernity was Leninism.