13. Eugen Weber, “Revolution? Counterrevolution? What Revolution?” Journal of Contemporary History 9, no. 2 (April 1974): 23. Weber applies a memorable formula for this project of modern revolution: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death.”
14. Raymond Aron, The Dawn of Universal History: Selected Essays from a Witness to the Twentieth Century, intro. Tony Judt (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 203.
15. For ongoing efforts to return to an alleged pristine Leninism, see Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, Slavoj Žižek, eds., Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2007).
16. Waldemar Gurian, quoted in Michael Burleigh, “Political Religion and Social Evil,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 3, no. 2 (2002): 3.
17. See Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (London: Verso, 2001), p. 116.
18. See, in this respect, Bertram Wolfe, “Leninism,” in Marxism in the Modern World, ed. Milorad M. Drachkovitch (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1965), pp. 47-89.
19. See Michael Charlton, Footsteps from the Finland Station: Five Landmarks in the Collapse of Communism (New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Transaction Publishers, 1992); Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994); David Priestland, The Red Flag: A History of Communism (New York: Grove Press, 2009).
20. See Walicki, Marxism, pp. 269-397.
21. Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr M. Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present (New York: Summit Books, 1986).
22. Lefort quoted in Bernard Flynn, The Philosophy of Claude Lefort: Interpreting the Political (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2005), p. 293.
23. See my Fantasies of Salvation: Nationalism, Democracy, and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).
24. Harry Kreisler, “The Individual, Charisma, and the Leninist Extinction,” in A Conversation with Ken Jowitt (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, 2000).
25. Kenneth Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), p. 49.
26. See the quotations on Lenin and terror in Kostas Papaioannou's excellent anthology Marx et les marxistes (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 314.
27. See Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, 1st ed., trans. Daphne Hardy (New York: Bantam Books, 1968 (1941]); John V. Fleming, The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books That Shaped the Cold War (New York: Norton, 2009), pp. 21-96; Michael Scammell, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic (New York: Random House, 2009).
28. Darkness at Noon came out in French, to huge public success, during the early Cold War years, under the title Le zero et l'infini.
29. Sergey Nechaev, The Revolutionary Catechism, in The Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia, by Franco Venturi, intro. Isaiah Berlin (New York: Knopf, 1960), pp. 365-66. See also James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (New York: Basic Books, 1980); and Semen (Semyon) Frank, “The Ethic of Nihilism: A Characterization of the Russian Intelligentsia's Moral Outlook,” in Nikolai Berdyaev et al., Vekhi (Lanmdmarks) (Armonk, N.J.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), pp. 131-55.
30. Quoted in Michael Burleigh, Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics from the Great War to the War on Terror (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), p. 82.
31. Piatakov quoted in Walicki, Marxism, 461.
32. Steven Lukes, “On the Moral Blindness of Communism,” Human Rights Review 2, no. 2 (January-March 2001): 120.
33. Ibid., 121.
34. Ibid., 123.
35. Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (New York: Hyperion, 2002), 90.
36. Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2007), p. 171.
37. Mikhail Gorbachev and Zdeněk Mlynář, Conversations with Gorbachev: On Perestroika, the Prague Spring, ed. George Shriver, foreword by Archie Brown and Mikhail Gorbachev (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
38. Jowitt, New World Disorder, 10.
39. A. J. Polan, Lenin and the End of Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 73.
40. Elena Bonner, “The Remains of Totalitarianism” New York Review of Books, March 8, 2001, 4.
41. Ibid., p. 5.
42. Alain Besançon, The Rise of the Gulag: The Intellectual Origins of Leninism (New York: Continnum, 1981); Jacob L. Talmon, Myth of the Nation and Vision of the Revolution: Ideological Polarization in the Twentieth Century (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1991); Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and French Revolution (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006).
43. John Maynard Keynes quoted in Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 155.
44. Burleigh, Sacred Causes, p. 76.
45. Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, the Golden Age, the Breakdown, trans. P. S. Falla (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), pp. 343-44 (subsequent references to Main Currents refer to this edition.
46. Halfin, From Darkness to Light, p. 37.
47. For the whole argument, see Erik van Ree, “Stalin's Organic Theory of the Party,” Russian Review 52, no. 1 (January 1993): 43-57.
48. Erik van Ree, “Stalin as a Marxist Philosopher,” Studies in East European Thought 52 (2000): 294.
49. Ibid., p. 271. I am also paraphrasing Isaak Steinberg's description of the atmosphere in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution: “All aspects of existence—social, economic, political, spiritual, moral, familial—were opened to purposeful fashioning by human hands.” Steinberg was a left Socialist revolutionary, who for a brief period was the first Soviet commissar for justice but resigned in protest against Bolshevik extremist violence and in 1923 fled to Germany. After the coming to power of the Nazis, he left for London. During the war he was a central figure in the plans for relocation of the Jewish refugees. See Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 39.
50. For the mindset of Bolshevik-style illuminated militants, see Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Harper & Row, 1966); Arthur Koestler's contribution in Richard H. Crossman, ed., The God That Failed (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 15-75.
51. Rosa Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, ed. Mary-Alice Waters (New York and London: Pathfinder, 1997), p. 370.
52. Ibid., p. 387.
53. Cohen, Bukharin, p. 133.
54. Ibid., p. 172.
55. Ibid., p. 269.