Thus a central aspect of post-1945 purges both in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was Stalinist anti-Semitism. This phenomenon was rooted in Stalin’s own mentality, in the immediate aftermath of the war, and in the prejudices of majority populations in these countries. Even if some of its origins lay in the 1930s (after all, many of the Old Bolsheviks who were eliminated by Stalin were of Jewish origin), Stalinist anti-Semitism was a direct product of the Soviet leader’s post-1945 world-view. It may not have had the same murderous results as the Great Terror, but “it confused the European past”: “Stalinist anti-Semitism haunted Eastern Europe long after the death of Stalin. It was rarely a major tool of governance, but it was always available in moments of political stress. Anti-Semitism allowed leaders to revise the history of wartime suffering (recalled as the suffering only of Slavs) and also the history of Stalinism itself (which was portrayed as the deformed, Jewish form of communism).”98 Indeed, anti-Semitism resurfaced often during the existence of the Soviet bloc. In some cases, it was part and parcel of the building of socialist nations. As I discussed elsewhere, national Stalinism in Romania or in Poland or East Germany was characterized, among other things, by reaffirmation of the Jew among the archetypical Others of the dominant ethnic group.99 But the most destructive legacy of Stalinist anti-Semitism is its obfuscation of the Holocaust. Timothy Snyder excellently formulates this paradox: “So long as communists governed most of Europe, the Holocaust could never be seen for what it was.”100 In other words, Stalin’s mystification of the mass murder of the Jews set up the competitive regimes of memory in post-1989 East and Central Europe. On the one hand, for decades the Holocaust had not been remembered and the truth about the genocide of the Jews had remained hidden. On the other hand, the dimensions of the crimes of Stalinism and of the various Communist regimes were only surfacing to their true extent. Taking Snyder’s point a bit further, the silence about both the gulag and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe ensured that these radically traumatic historical experiences are yet to fully be a part of the common history of Europe.101
To return to the more general problem of Stalinism’s exterminism, I agree with Leszek Kołakowski, who believed the purges had an integrative function, contributing to the destruction of the last vestiges of subjective autonomy and creating a social climate where no one would even dream of criticism. According to the great Polish philosopher, “The object of a totalitarian system is to destroy all forms of communal life that are not imposed by the state and closely controlled by it, so that individuals are isolated from one another and become mere instruments in the hands of the state. The citizen belongs to the state and must have no other loyalty, not even to the state ideology.”102 Communist victims belonged to a category described by Stalinist legal theory as “objective enemies.” They were people who once in their lives might have expressed reservations about the sagacity of Soviet policies or, even worse, might have criticized Stalin personally. Stalinism functioned on the basis of an exhaustively repressive strategy displaying pedagogical ambitions and vaunting itself as the triumph of ethical spirit and egalitarian collectivism. Nicolas Werth enunciates, along these lines, the following diagnosis: “Throughout Stalin’s dictatorship of a quarter of a century, repressive phenomena varied, evolved, and took on different forms and scope. They reflected transformations of the regime itself in a changing world. This adaptable violence was characterized by various levels of intensity, continual displacements, shifting targets, often unpredictable sequences, and excesses that blurred the line between the legal and extralegal.”103 Maniacal purging consummate with self-devouring was both the praxis and the theoretical legitimation of this extremist and exterminist system. To paraphrase the title of a famous novel of Stalin’s era, this is How the Steel Was Tempered.
CHAPTER 3
Lenin’s Century
Bolshevism, Marxism, and the Russian Tradition
The use of inhumane methods to achieve impossible ends is the essence of revolutionary utopianism.
Created by Lenin and refined by Stalin, the one-party dictatorship and command economy would be Russian’s most consequential bequest to twentieth-century history.
Marxism was, as Leszek Kołakowski once said, the greatest philosophical fantasy of modern times. It was a gigantic Manichean political myth, a major script of political modernity that contrasted the forces of reaction, barbarism, and decay to those of historical progress, reason, and human liberation. It promised salvation via the destruction of a system based on domination, exploitation, and alienation. The proletariat, in this soteriological vision, was the universal redeemer or, as young Marx put it, the messiah-class of history.1 Feverishly appealing to what historian Norman Cohn called highly emotional mass movements, both Leninism and Fascism created millenarian sociological and psychological constellations. Both were militant chiliasms that energized extraordinary ardor among unconditionally committed followers. Focusing on revolutionary messianism in medieval and Reformation Europe and its reverberations in modern totalitarian experiences, Cohn pointed out that there was no call “to distinguish overmuch between what so far had been the two major forms of totalitarianism, Communism on the one hand and German National Socialism on the other.” He continues: “Admittedly it seems a far cry from the atavism, the crude tribalism, the vulgar irrationalism and open sadism of the Nazis to the ostensibly humanitarian and universalistic, scientific, and rational outlook of the Communist—and still it is true that both these movements shared certain features so extraordinary as to suggest the emergence of a form of politics vastly different from any known in the past.”2