Stalinism's modus operandi was excess in matters such as bureaucratization, police terror, absence of democracy, and censorship: “Not, for example, merely coercive peasant policies, but a virtual civil war against the peasantry; not merely police repression, or even civil war–style terror, but a holocaust by terror that victimized tens of millions of people for twenty-five years; not merely a Thermidorean revival of nationalist tradition, but an almost fascist-like chauvinism; not merely a leader cult, but deification of a despot.”24 After the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, the same form of Leninism—ihey never dared call it Stalinism—was decreed the unique interpretation of Marxism. Stalin's death was “a necessary prerequisite of post-Stalin change and, indeed, as the essential first act of ‘de-Stalinization.’”25 After Nikita Khrushchev's fulminating attack on Stalinism at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in February 1956, certain changes became inevitable within the rigid structure of Soviet dogma. In addition to institutional innovations, de-Stalinization meant dedogmatization, the end of the boundless worship of sacred texts written by or attributed to Stalin. As one author remarked, with de-Stalinization, “the relations between the party-state and society underwent significant changes, with a new emphasis on mediation through soft controls, inducements and strategies of incorporation. But the monolithic structure of the party-state rule and of economic management remained fundamentally unchanged.”26
THE BROKEN MONOLITH
The post-1953 political relaxation, often referred to as the “Thaw,” ushered in an era of doubt and criticism. Gone were the times of absolute certainties dictated by a presumably infallible supreme leader. Totalitarian imagery that had functioned for decades through “tremendum et fascinosum (the alternation of fear and hope, terror and salvation)”27 found its spell radically questioned. In spite of its limitations, Khrushchev's Secret Speech, one of the most important political documents of the twentieth century, revealed, to a limited extent, the crimes against the party. But its significance lay in the fact that it “stretched the limits of unbelief in postwar Soviet Russia.”28 Most importantly, the first wave of de-Stalinization put an end to terror as an instrument of governance: “The reforms to criminal justice, especially the amnesties, and the debunking of the Stalin cult in the Secret Speech stand as lasting achievements of the period, for they ensured that full re-Stalinization—of the Gulag, and of the Stalin cult—would never again be possible.”29 As early as March 1953, K. P. Gorshenin, the minister of justice, argued in Pravda that the amnesty decree, which released a total of 1,201,738 people, was evidence of “Soviet humanity.” He advocated for “socialist legality” as the correct way to ensure the country's “transition from socialism to communism.”30
However, de-Stalinization advanced reforms that “threw up more questions than they answered.”31 In the realm of culture and public life, de-Stalinization generated a panoply of initiatives aimed at moving away from the petrified doctrine toward the origins of Marxism as a philosophy, toward the so-called young Marx as the archetype of a pure, non-adulterated socialist impetus. In the Soviet Union, but also Eastern Europe, “de-Stalinization did not mean the end of the communist ideal. To the contrary, it meant a rejuvenation of the idealism and the intellectual identity of the pre-Stalin period.” Or, in the words of acclaimed Soviet poetess Bella Akhmadulina, “The Revolution isn't dead; the Revolution is sick, and we must help it.”32 Consequently, the political emancipation (de-Bolshevization) of Soviet and East European intellectuals coincided with—and was catalyzed by—the wave of liberalization touched off by Nikita Khrushchev's historical revelations.33 While the campaigns that followed the Soviet leader's Secret Speech “set out to emancipate the popular consciousness from the Stalin cult, it also inadvertently risked the ‘de-Sovietization’ of public opinion, as swathes of the Soviet population reacted in violent, unpredictable and ‘anti-Soviet’ ways to de-Stalinization.”34 All the Stalinist theoretical and political constructions had been denounced as a horrible hoax: the illusions could no longer cover the squalid reality. The dogmas had proved their total inanity. Yearning for moral reform of Communism was the basic motivation for the neo-Marxist revival in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Indeed, “it was a Marxism that led back to a European tradition of social-democratic reformism.”35 The intellectuals' rebellion against totalitarian controls threatened the endurance of Soviet-type regimes. The terrortainted legitimacy of Sovietism was questioned by critics who could not be accused of belonging to the defeated social classes. With their outspoken advocacy of humanism and democracy, they contributed to eroding the apparently monolithic consensus.
In a certain way this movement had been anticipated by Yugoslav theorists (Moša Pjade, Milovan Djilas, the Praxis group) who felt compelled, by the very logic of the political conflict with the Soviet Stalinist elite, to rediscover the initial impulses of Marxist anthropology, sociology, and philosophy.36 Those most active, however, in the struggle against Stalinist obscurantism were Hungarian and Polish intellectuals, the exponents of a radical political outlook that inflamed the masses throughout the hectic months after the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This fact has to be related to the traditions of the Left in those countries, but also to the existence of a confusion within the Communist nomenklatura heightened by the growing antibureaucratic radicalism of the working class. We have to take into consideration, in this respect, the evolution of the class consciousness of both the working class and the intellectuals and the existence of a certain psycho-emotional communication, even osmosis, between these two social groups. I stress these facts in order to suggest an explanation—beyond the sheer force of the political police—for the relative political passivity of the working class in other Communist countries (such as Romania and Bulgaria) and for the astonishing neutrality of the Czech and Slovakian intellectuals during the Hungarian and Polish revolts in 1956.
THE SAGA OF REVISIONISM
More than a decade after Stalin's death, the East European and Soviet intelligentsia was experiencing a period of ethical reconstruction, an invitation to rehabilitate the whole historical evolution of Western Marxism and to a critical approach to “institutional dialectics.” Georg Lukács, an “enigmatic heretic inside his Church” (to quote Ferenc Feher) invited to participate in the debates of the Petöfi Circle in Budapest, was perceived as the representative of another Marxism than the ossified Diamat preached by the Stalinist doctrinaires; Marxist intellectual Geza Losonczy was the soul of the discussions concerning freedom of the press; Leszek Kołakowski was launching his long fight for the humanization of the “State-socialist” Polish society, appealing to the potential of a presumed Socialist New Left. In his 1957 manifesto, “Permanent vs. Transitory Aspects of Marxism,” Kołakowski made the seminal distinction between institutional Marxism and intellectual Marxism. While the first was mere religious dogma manipulated by those in power, the second was characterized by “radical rationalism in thinking; steadfast resistance to any invasion of myth in science; an entirely secular view of the world; criticism pushed to its ultimate limits; distrust of all closed doctrines and systems … a readiness to revise accepted theses, theories and methods.”37 Freedom had again become the highest good for human beings released from the asphyxiating dependence on the party's definition of truth. In the Soviet Union, the shestidesiatniki, “the people of the sixties,” formed a community that “had ‘the ability and desire to think, to reflect about life and its complexities.’ They sought to understand the reality ‘behind every word.’”38 A “spirit of revisionism” came about in the Soviet bloc that would fundamentally mark the political and cultural dynamics of the region in the late 1950s and 1960s. In this context, revisionism, a term coined by neo-Stalinist orthodoxies to stigmatize critical currents of thought and the main adversary encountered by ruling bureaucrats since the factional struggles of the mid- and late 1920s, became the main foe of the neo-Stalinist ideological construct.39 One should note, however, that revisionism was not a social movement; rather, it was “a diffuse ideological current that articulated itself in equal parts in official and unofficial fora and which was of a highly various character in different countries.”40