This chapter looks into the adventures of critical Marxism in Soviet-style regimes and its corrosive impact on the Moscow center during the 1970s and particularly the 1980s. Furthermore, I conceptualize the Gorbachev phenomenon as a culmination of the revisionist ethos in the socialist bloc, which implicitly turns the focus of my contribution on the inherent paradoxes and fallacies of perestroika. The latter is perceived to be inherent in the incompleteness of East European Marxist revisionism's promise for change. Nevertheless, by no means do I deny the role of this fascinating period of intellectual and political history in providing a fundamental lesson about the role of ideas in the disintegration of authoritarian regimes of Leninist persuasion. Such a self-critical development would have been unthinkable under the Nazi regime, as already shown in previous chapters.
My point is that the impact of Marxist revisionism and critical intellectuals can hardly be overestimated and that this impact is one of the main distinctions between Communism and Fascism. The adventure of revisionism led these intellectuals beyond the once-worshipped paradigm, critical Marxism turned into post-Marxism and even, as in the case of Kołakowski, into liberal anti-Marxism. In his gripping book about the postwar Soviet intelligentsia, historian Vladislav Zubok concludes that the story of this group, which is crucial to understanding the fate of Leninism in the twentieth century, was about “the slow and painful disappearance of their revolutionary-romantic idealism and optimism, their faith in progress and in the enlightenment of people.” He emphasizes that “the children of Zhivago spent their lives on ‘a voyage from the coast of Utopia’ into the turbulent open sea of individual self-discovery.”4
Among Soviet and Eastern European intelligentsia, Marxism was found wanting in its most powerful ambition, to respond in a positively engaging way to the challenges of democratic modernity, to restructure democratic imagination itself:
With one resolute gesture of contempt, therefore, Marx swept away all particularities: the interests of the peasants, of middle classes, of nations, and of colonialism. This absolute universalism made Marx particularly insensitive to political questions in general, and to democratic politics in particular. Democratic politics is one of the basic components of modernity, and, when Marx failed to cope with this problem, his pioneering theory of modernity was drastically curtailed. One could only speculate as to why a man of genius, who discovered and analyzed so many basic features of modernity, was not to the slightest degree superior to any of his socialist contemporaries whenever he embarked in discussing political problems. When it came to politics, his genius invariably failed him. The bombastic style of his political writings, the vagueness of his political ideas, the open bias of his judgments, and the mythologization of his favorite heroes shift Marx back to a period and its guises, the epoch of the French Revolution and Bonapartism, precisely that period the ideological customs of which Marx had so vigorously sought to debunk.5
I argue that only the reinvention of politics operated by the dissident movement could offer the possibility of achieving genuine democracy and full liberty in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The proposed analysis represents a revisiting and development of my theses on the role of ideological disillusionment in the ultimate decline (deradicalization) of Leninist regimes as formulated in the 1980s and early 1990s.6
Several generations have come of political age in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union by assimilating a radical promise of universal redemption, genuine equality, and emancipation. The civilization built and exported by the Bolsheviks had a totalizing ambition encompassing all spheres of life. In the early 1980s, exiled dissident writer Andrei Sinyavsky argued that this alternative illiberal modernity was “a durable, stable … structure, … [which] arouses the interest and attention of the world as, perhaps, the most unusual and awe-inspiring [groznoe] phenomenon of the twentieth century. It is awe-inspiring because it makes claims to the future of all mankind and … considers itself as an ideal and as the logical conclusion of the development of world history.”7 This construct of Leninism was first and foremost erected on faith. Emancipation from such radically transformative conviction became an odyssey synonymous with the history of Communism. As one Soviet philosopher put it, “I resisted long and fiercely, until I had to surrender before … life itself [my emphasis].”8
Marxism in its Leninist avatar was imposed as the philosophy par excellence, the unique scientific worldview, the spiritual complement of the technological-industrial evolution of the society. It jealously guided, inspired, and motivated the political-intellectual development of East European societies. It regulated their main political, philosophical, ethical, and aesthetic corpus of hypotheses, theses, values, norms, and opinions. Moreover, under the specific circumstances of the Stalinist period, Marxism was converted into dialectical materialism (Diamat), a simulacrum of dialectical jargon combined with pseudoscientific claims. The latter was gradually instituted into a monopolistic orthodoxy imagined according to the requirements of self-sufficient, noncontradictory, and a priori infallible religious dogmas. Conceived as such, it brought about a continual stiffening of spiritual life in Eastern European countries, as well as a normal, absolutely logical counterreaction of refusal and dissatisfaction with the prevalent ideas.
The Stalinist functionalist-pragmatic Weltanschauung succeeded in emphasizing as altogether certain and genuinely axiomatic a number of theses from Karl Marx's early writing, The German Ideology (such as economic determinism and the assumption that the dominant ideas within a social organization are the ideas of the hegemonic group). It also took on several naive materialist positions defended and promoted by Lenin in Materialism and Empiriocriticism, above all Lenin's vulgar representation of the philosophical parties. Under Stalin, dialectics suffered a strange metamorphosis, a process of refunctionalization, the result of which was its transformation into a mere ideological weapon, a mythological instrument supporting each political step of the regime, each tactical turning. Robert C. Tucker, in his attempt to understand Stalin's urge to master the supposedly objective laws of socioeconomic development, pointed to his adoption of “a legislative attitude toward reality…. [W]hat he referred to as ‘objective scientific laws’ were an externalization of his inner policy dictates; they were a projection upon Soviet history of the formulas for socio-economic development generated in his own mind. His own ideas appeared to him as natural necessities governing the development of society [original emphasis].”9