We need to remember that Leninism, as an allegedly coherent, monolithic, homogenous, self-sufficient ideological construct, was a post-1924 creation. It was actually the result of Grigory Zinoviev and Joseph Stalin’s efforts to delegitimize Leon Trotsky by devising something called “Leninism” as opposed to the heresy branded as “Trotskyism.” At the same time, Bolshevism was an intellectual and political reality, a total and totalizing philosophical, ethical, and practical-political direction within the world revolutionary movement.18 It was thanks to Lenin that a new type of politics emerged in the twentieth century, one based on elitism, fanaticism, unflinching commitment to the sacred cause, and the substitution of critical reason for faith for the self-appointed “vanguards” of illuminated zealots (the professional revolutionaries). Leninism, initially a Russian and then a world-historical cultural and political phenomenon, was the foundation of the system that came to an end with the revolutions of 1989 and the demise of the USSR in December 1991.19
Whatever one thinks of Lenin’s antibureaucratic struggle during his last years, or about his initiation of the New Economic Policy (NEP), the thrust of his action was essentially opposed to political pluralism. The nature of the Bolshevik “intraparty democracy” was inimical to free debate and competition of rival political views and platforms (as Lenin himself insisted, the party was not a “discussion club”). The March 1921 “ban on factions” resolution, directly related to the crushing of the Kronstadt sailors’ uprising, indicated the persistent dictatorial propensity of Bolshevism. The persecution of such foes as the left-wing Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks confirms that for Lenin and his associates, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” meant continuous strengthening of their absolute control over the body politic. Tolerance for cultural diversity and temporary acceptance of market relations were not meant to disturb the fundamental power relationship—the party’s monopolistic domination and the stifling of any ideological alternative to Bolshevism.20 In this respect, there were no serious differences among the members of Lenin’s Politburo—Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Bukharin included. To put it briefly, if there had been no Lenin, there would have been no totalitarianism—at least not in its Stalinist version.
The October 1917 Bolshevik putsch (later elevated to the status of revolution) was the event that irreversibly changed the course of Western civilization and world history. In claiming to unify humanity under the banner of a collectivist and egalitarian ideal, Bolshevism actually ignited the insurrection of the masses in politics. It annihilated the mechanisms of limited government, as envisaged by the liberal tradition, and it founded a despotic system defined by an unprecedented disregard for the individual and the rule of law. It was a gigantic historical adventure meant to bring about heaven on earth, to materialize utopia.21 According to Claude Lefort, Lenin renounced the principle of consensus juris as a precondition for the regime’s cultivation of lawlessness. Instead, Leninism “promises to release the fulfillment of law from all action and the will of man; and it promises justice on earth because it claims to make mankind itself the embodiment of the law.”22
Therefore, post-Communism means a continuous struggle to overcome the “remains of Leninism” or “the Leninist debris,” a term I proposed as an elaboration of Ken Jowitt’s illuminating concept of the Leninist legacy as a civilizational constellation that includes deep emotions, nostalgias, sentiments, resentments, phobias, collectivist yearnings, and attraction to paternalism and even corporatism.23 Jowitt is among the few political scientists who accurately understood the deep appeals of Leninism as directly related to the emergence of the vanguard party as a substitute for traditional charismatic, religious-type reference frameworks in times of deep moral and cultural crisis: “Leninism and Nazism were each, in different ways, perverse attempts to sustain and restore a heroic ethos and life in opposition to a liberal bourgeois individualistic system…. [T]he defining principle of Leninism is to do what is illogical, and that is to make the impersonal charismatic. Charisma is typically associated with a saint or a knight, some personal attribution, and what Lenin did was remarkable. He did exactly what he claimed to do: he created a party of a new type. He made the party charismatic. People died for the party.”24 Thus Jowitt’s definition of Leninism links ideological, emotional, and organizational components in a comprehensive dynamic constellation: “Leninism is best seen as a historical as well as organizational syndrome, based on charismatic impersonalism; a strategy based on an ‘ingenious error’ leading to collectivization/industrialization; and an international bloc led by a dominant regime, with the same definition as its constituent parts, acting as leader, model and support.”25
Leninism as a political and cultural regime, or as an international system, is undoubtedly extinct. On the other hand, the Leninist-Stalinist model of the highly disciplined, messianic sect-type organization based on the rejection of pluralism and the demonization of the Other has not lost its appeal—suffice it to remember Lenin’s diatribes against the Mensheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries, the kulaks, the aristocrats, the “bourgeois intellectuals,” and so on. In his view, their place, even when they disguised themselves as individuals unaffiliated with the party, was in jail or, if they were lucky, in exile.26 This quasi-rational, in fact almost mystical, identification with the party (conceived as a beleaguered fortress surrounded by vicious enemies) was a main psychological feature of Bolshevism before what Robert C. Tucker defines as its deradicalization (what Jowitt would call the rise of the Aquinas temptation, in the figure of “modern revisionism,” as Mao Zedong quite accurately defined Titoism and Khrushchevism). To be a Leninist meant to accept the party’s claim to scientific knowledge (grasping the “laws of historical evolution”) as well as its oracular pretense. Doubting the party’s omniscience and omnipotence was the cardinal sin (as finally admitted by the Old Bolshevik Nikolai Rubashov, Arthur Koestler’s hero in Darkness at Noon).27 For Lenin, the party member was dispensable human capital in the revolutionary struggle. The individual was a simple particle, a zero compared to the infinity of the cause.28 On this point, he closely followed—although he would have never admitted it—Russian terrorist Sergey Nechaev’s ruthless fanaticism, as formulated in the Revolutionary Catechism:
Paragraph 1. The revolutionary is a lost man he has no interests of his own, no cause of his own, no feelings, no habits, no belongings; he does not even have a name. Everything in him is absorbed by a single, exclusive interest, a single thought, a single passion—the revolution
Paragraph 2. In the very depths of his being, not just in words but in deed, he has broken every tie with the civil order, with the educated world and all laws, conventions and generally accepted conditions, and with the ethics of this world. He will be an implacable enemy of this world, and if he continues to live in it, that will only be so as to destroy it more effectively….
Paragraph 4. He despises public opinion: he despises and hates the existing social ethic in all its demands and expression; for him, everything that allows the triumph of the revolution is moral, and everything that stands in its way is immoral.