The problem with Leninism was the sanctification of ultimate ends, and thus the creation of an amoral universe in which the most terrible crimes could be justified in the name of a radiant future. In practice, the elimination of politics seemed a logical terminus, for the party was the embodiment of an extremist collective will.61 This fixation on ends and the readiness to use the most atrocious means to attain them are features of many ideological utopias, but in the Leninist experience they reached grotesquely tragic limits. Lenin’s ultradeterministic belief in the coming of the proletarian order functioned after 1917 as a nihilistic mechanism for bringing the world in line with such millennialism. The old order needed to be smashed, so its human embodiments were demonized and became targets for merciless persecution. In his manifesto against the Mensheviks, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904), Lenin proclaimed that “it would be the most criminal cowardice to doubt even for a moment the inevitable and complete triumph of the principles of revolutionary Social-Democracy, of proletarian organization and Party discipline [my emphasis].”62 Bertrand Russell noticed as early as 1920 that there was a central duality within Bolshevism that contained the movement’s doom: there was, on the one hand, “its commitment to a certain conception of modernization,” and, on the other hand, “an ideological commitment to an ideological world view shaped by ideological zeal and intolerance of other world views, which was a denial of the Enlightenment to rational discourse.”63 In other words, Bolshevism was pregnant with its own Inquisition from the beginning.
No less important, the appeal of Communism was linked to the extraordinary power of its ideology (and the core myth of the party as the carrier of reason in history). No other revolutionary movement has been as successful as Leninism in turning a gnostic creed into a self-hypnotizing weapon. Leninist militants worldwide believed in the myth of the party with an ardor comparable only to the illuminates of religious millennial sects. It is important to insist on both the ideological and institutional foundations of Leninism when we try to fathom the mystery of Leninism’s endurance in the twentieth century. The myth of the party as the repository of historical wisdom and rationality is the key to grasping the dynamics and finally the decay and extinction of Leninism. Leninism, in its various phases, was what Ken Jowitt described as a “Catholic moment” in history, when “a universal ‘word’ becomes institutional ‘flesh,’ an authoritatively standardized and centered institutional format dominates a highly diverse set of cultures.” The Althusserian interpretation remains valid only if one performs a phraseological inversion: Leninism was a new praxis of philosophy. The explanation of its longevity in the twentieth century can therefore be found in “the promise of the Great October Revolution… of the Soviet Union as socialist hierophany.”64
The biographies of the ideological elites in Soviet-type regimes were usually colorless and lacked any moment of real distinction. In Eastern Europe, the ideological watchdogs were recruited from the Muscovite factions of the ruling parties. In Hungary, József Révai, once one of Georg Lukács’s promising disciples, became a scourge of intellectual life. Révai was a member of the Hungarian delegation to various Cominform meetings and enthusiastically implemented the Zhdanovist strategy. In Romania, the tandem of Iosif Chișinevschi and Leonte Răutu forced the national culture into a mortal impasse. Similar denials of genuine national traditions and an apocryphal sense of internationalism were promoted by ideological bureaucracies in Czechoslovakia (Vilem Kopecky, Jiři Hendrich)65 and East Germany (Gerhart Eisner, Albert Norden, Kurt Hager).66 All devices were convenient when it came to uprooting vicious deviationist temptations. “Bourgeois nationalism” was fused with “rootless cosmopolitanism” in the diabolical figure of the malignant enemy. In the meantime, socialist nationalism was thriving. The members of the ideological army were willingly officiating in the rites of the cult. Deprived of their own personality, they were glad to identify with and invest in Stalin’s superpersonality. After the terrorist dissolution of the ego, it was normal for the apparatchiks to project themselves into Stalin’s myth as an institutionalized superego.
The Cominform emerged in September 1947 as the first attempt to institutionalize the satellitization of Eastern Europe. It represented an initiative to contain and annihilate the centrifugal trends within world Communism (the “domesticist” temptation and the search for a “national path to socialism” championed by militants as different as Gottwald, Gomułka, and Pătraășcanu). It laid the foundation for future frameworks of supragovernmental domination and ideological hegemony from the Soviet Communist Party. Paradoxically, the Cominform brought about the first instance of dissent and revisionism from a partystate (the Titoist “heresy”). In Tito’s case there was a significant level of ambivalence: he supported enthusiastically Stalin’s new orientation (Zhdanov’s “two camp theory”) but thought the moment was propitious for furthering his own hegemonic agenda in the Balkans. One could call such a strategic syndrome parallel hegemonism. The irony of the situation was that the break between the two leaders happened at a time when Soviet and Yugoslav visions of class struggle at the world level mirrored each other. In 1947-48, Tito underestimated the total monopoly of power achieved by the Kremlin tyrant, and he fancied himself the beneficiary of some leverage in regional decision-making. Historian Ivo Banac correctly diagnosed the paradox: “The dramatic denouement of 1948 was directly connected with Stalin’s fears that Yugoslavia began to take on a role of regional communist center and the inherent potential provocations against the West that such a position entailed.”67 Indeed, the leader of the League of Communists in Yugoslavia (until 1952 the Yugoslav Communist Party) carried along unabated with his plans of creating a Communist Danubian confederation (which was to incorporate Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Romania)68 while simultaneously persevering in the assimilation of the Albanian Communist Party (which in 1948 became the Albanian Party of Labor).
The conflict with Yugoslavia and Tito’s excommunication from the Cominform in June 1948 signaled the beginning of dramatic purges in Eastern Europe Communist parties. It also indicated that Moscow’s hegemony could not completely suppress domestic tendencies even in the most pro-Soviet Communist factions. Nevertheless, in Stalin’s view, at such a dangerous time, when the imperialists had decided to intensify their aggressive actions against the budding “people’s democracies,” and the threat of a new world war loomed large, no country or leader could be allowed to engage in national Communist experiments. Those identified as nationalists could be charged with the most fantastic sins. After all, the sole principle of legitimation for the ruling Communist parties in the Soviet bloc was their unreserved attachment to the Soviet Union, their readiness to carry out unflinchingly all of Stalin’s directives. The harshness of Stalin’s reaction can be explained by the fact that the Soviet Communist Party leadership reactivated the geopolitical motif of “capitalist encirclement.” In this vein, the end of the Second World War triggered a new imperialist offensive against Communism that, according to Stalin, signaled an imminent world-scale armed conflict. Under the circumstances, any national Communism temptation had to be crushed in the bud. Therefore, within the countries of the Soviet bloc, party leaders would be allowed to enjoy the adoration of their subordinates, but their cults were only echoes of the true faith: unswerving love for Stalin. In the words of Władisław Gomułka, the cult of the local leaders “could be called only a reflected brilliance, a borrowed light. It shone as the moon does.”69