This statement, however, takes us to another ramification of the dilemma of the Sonderwegs. The major theme of the Richard Pipes-Martin Malia controversy is important not only for our interpretation of Russian modern history but also for the discussion of the nature and future of left-wing, socialist politics in the twentieth century: was it Russia that destroyed (compromised) socialism, as Pipes and, earlier, Max Weber put it, or rather was it revolutionary socialism that, because of its political, indeed metaphysical, hubris, imposed immense sufferings on Russia?98 Objecting to the young Georg Lukács's celebration of Lenin's takeover of power in Russia, Weber insisted on the impossibility of building the socialism Karl Marx had envisioned in the absence of genuine capitalist, bourgeois market developments: “It is with good reason,” he wrote, “that the Communist Manifesto emphasized the economically revolutionary character of the bourgeois capitalist entrepreneurs. No trade-unions, much less state-socialist officials, can perform this role for us in their place.”99 Earlier than many critics of Sovietism, Weber concluded that the Leninist experiment would discredit socialism for the entire twentieth century.100
REENACTING LENIN?
So, is there a reason to consider Lenin's political praxis a source of inspiration for those who look for a new political transcendence? Is it a blueprint for a resurrected radicalism, as suggested by Slavoj Žižek, who proposes the revival of the Leninist 1917 revolutionary leap into the kingdom of utopia? Reenacting Lenin's defiance of opportunistic or conformist submission to the logic of the status quo is for Žižek the voie royale for restoring a radical praxis:
This is the Lenin from whom we still have something to learn. The greatness of Lenin was that in this catastrophe situation he wasn't afraid to succeed—in contrast to the negative pathos discernible in Rosa Luxemburg and Adorno, for whom the ultimate authentic act is the admission of the failure, which brings the truth of the situation to light. In 1917, instead of waiting until the time was ripe, Lenin organized a pre-emptive strike; in 1920, as the leader of the party of the working class with no working class (most of it being decimated in the civil war), he went on organizing a state, fully accepting the paradox of the party which was to organize—even recreate—its own base, its working class.101
Compare this exalted vision of Lenin to that of a former Communist ideologue, the apostate Alexander Yakovlev's indictment of Lenin's essential role in the establishment of a dictatorial regime in which the working class was to suffer as much as other social strata the effects of utopian social engineering.102 Can Leninism be separated from the institution of the vanguard party and be conceived as a form of intellectual and moral resistance to the conformist debacle of the international Left at a moment of civilization collapse (World War I)? The debate on Leninism bears upon the possibility of radical-emancipatory practice and the need to reconstruct areas of autonomy in opposition to the logic of instrumental rationality. The burning question remains whether such efforts are predestined to end in new coercive undertakings, or whether Leninism was a peculiar, sui generis combination of Marxism and an underdeveloped political and economic structure. Indeed, as Trotsky insisted, the defeat of “world revolution”—after all, the main strategic postulate on which Lenin had built his whole revolutionary adventure—made the rise of Stalinism a sociological and political necessity. Here we may remember Isaac Deutscher's analysis: “Under Lenin, Bolshevism had been accustomed to appeal to reason, the self-interest, and the enlightened idealism of ‘class-conscious’ industrial workers. It spoke the language of reason even when it appealed to the muzhiks. But once Bolshevism had ceased to rely on revolution in the West, once it had become aware that it could only fall back on that environment and dig itself in, it began to descend to the level of primitive magic, and to appeal to the people in the language of that magic.”103
At this point, the last element of our dilemma comes into play. If one is to even partially accept the validity of the Russian Sonderweg thesis, the next problem is how much this Russ ian distortion was Stalin's. What needs to be discussed is not only Deutscher's claim that Stalinism was “the language of magic,” but also Robert C. Tucker's theory of reversion. The latter consists of the claim that under Stalin one can identify “the revival of certain features which belonged to the past, especially the more distant past, and had receded or been abolished (like serfdom) in nineteenth century Russia, but resurfaced in the Stalin period.” Tucker takes this analysis even further as he labels Stalinism Russian National Bolshevism, a blend of Leninist Marxism and Russ ian nationalism.104 His thesis is consonant with more recent views advocated by authors such as Terry Martin and David Brandenberger, who emphasize a neotraditionalist turn in the process of building socialism in one country. During mature Stalinism, “Soviet patriotism” became an apology for national authenticity, pride, and loyalty. At the same time, the Soviet Union, “a state with no ambition to turn itself into a nation-state—indeed with the exact opposite ambition,” became a site of large-scale ethnic cleansing.105 Moreover, the society was a hierarchy on the basis of “Stalinist soslovnost.” According to Sheila Fitzpatrick, “soslovnost provides a framework within which it becomes immediately comprehensible that the ‘classes’ of the Stalinist society should have been defined, like sosloviia, in terms of their relationship to the state rather than, like Marxist classes, in terms of their relationship to each other.”106 This whole array of developments originated in Stalin's development of a new, non-class, “popular” form of mobilization. As David Priestland points out, “The unified narod, now no longer divided by class, embodied socialism, and was to achieve heroic feats in the struggle against largely external enemies.”107 Subsequently, the USSR itself became “the avant-garde of the international communist movement and the dynamic centre of world politics.”108 This phenomenon was symptomatic for the Soviet experiment, where “the sense of collectively creating socialism was more important than the use of class categories and the assumption of proletarian privilege.”109 In the context of building socialism in one country, for Stalin the body social was the chosen community bringing into state-reality Lenin's social utopia.110
What this “mutation” of Marxist orthodoxy tells, though, is that the ultimate aim of Stalin's policies remained Communism. Even his cult of personality functioned as “a unifying mechanism,” “a personification of socialist state-building.”111 Graeme Gill simply states that “the Stalin cult grew upon the edifice of Leninist orthodoxy.” In his study of K. Popov's article “The Party and the Role of the Leader,” one of the pieces theoretically underpinning the cult, Gill pointed to “three main grounds for recognition of the vozhd”: the leader “armed with Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory, hardened by many years experience of the struggle for Leninism, hand in hand with Lenin”; the ability to endure “those difficulties which befell the narrow circles of selfless revolutionaries” by way of exceptional organizational talent; and “the will of an individual leader [that] could personify the will of the proletariat.”112 Indeed, Lenin was the embodiment of the theory, the struggle, and the party. This was his model of successful radical revolutionary transformation. In 1930, Stalin claimed to be the personification of this heritage of Lenin. He upheld this assertion of supremacy over his rivals by organizational power, thus creating an environment fundamentally inimical to any form of opposition. Like Lenin, but to an exaggerated degree, by the end of the 1930s, Stalin managed to become synonymous with the party itself.