Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn: Anticommunism, Marxism, and the Fate of the Soviet Union 166693089X, 9781666930894

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Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn

Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn Anticommunism, Marxism, and the Fate of the Soviet Union Douglas Greene Foreword by Harrison Fluss

‌‌‌‌‌L E X I N G T O N B O O K S

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Dedicated to Harrison Fluss, my dear friend and comrade who inspired this book.

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Contents

Foreword ix Acknowledgments xvii Saturn and His‌‌‌‌‌‌‌ Children

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Chapter One: Stalinism as a Bolt from the Blue: The Jewish-Bolshevik Contagion Chapter Two: Stalinism as a Bolt from the Blue: Big Brother

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Chapter Three: Stalinism as a Bolt From the Blue: The CounterEnlightenment Project

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Chapter Four: Stalinism as Historical Necessity: Rubashov and Terror 93 Chapter Five: Stalinism as Historical Necessity: The Ambiguities of Western Marxism Chapter Six: From Proletarian Jacobinism to Stalinist Thermidor

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Chapter Seven: Stalinism as Thermidor: Western Retreat and Eastern Reconciliation

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Chapter Eight: Escaping Fate

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Appendix: Domenico Losurdo: A Critical Assessment of Stalin: The 283 History and Critique of a Black Legend Bibliography Index

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About the Author



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Foreword

By Harrison Fluss What does it mean to be born under the sign of Saturn? This is something Susan Sontag explored in her essay on Walter Benjamin. In terms of the zodiac, it doesn’t portend an easygoing fate, but forecasts a mood of doom, gloom, and overall melancholic temperament. Such depression according to Sontag has its metaphysical source in a neurotic fixation on the will. It is—as Hegel might have diagnosed—a “beautiful soul” syndrome. For Sontag, this personality type is fixated on the fragility of one’s own will. This results in an overcompensation. “Convinced that the will is weak, the melancholic may make extravagant efforts to develop it.”1 As for Benjamin himself, the writer linked his destiny to Saturn in his book One-Way Street: “I came into the world under the sign of Saturn—the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.”2 Benjamin was witness to so many betrayed revolutions and triumphs of fascism, and his invocation of Saturn seems fitting for the “astrological” fate of Marxism in the twentieth century. This cosmological-historical pattern is experienced as so many tragedies, farces, false dawns, and drowned hopes. And for the Left today, things seem worse than ever; impending climate change, the threat of thermonuclear war, and the rise of neofascism check all the boxes for barbarism instead of socialism. If this “dialectic of Saturn” truly governs our fate, the Left is made to act out its own psychodrama, where the abstract wish that something be done replaces what really needs to be done. In the absence of concrete material change, all focus is put on the pure, revolutionary “will,” and this will, being abstract, could point in any number of directions—from mystical quietism to revolutionary adventurism. In Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Shakespeare’s Hamlet falls under Saturn’s orbit as well. The planet’s pull over the Danish prince steers him either toward morose contemplation or frenzied action. If ix

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Hamlet’s universe is one of stagnation and sluggishness, it is also marked by Machiavellian intrigue, tyranny, and betrayal. The rightful king has been murdered, royal authority usurped, and an illegitimate sovereign rules the land. The court is hypocritically forced to pay deference to this tyrant, and the prince is rendered politically impotent. He is aware of the injustice against his family and the kingdom, but seems incapable of actively taking back his throne.3 Benjamin wrote his critical study in 1928, and its discussion of bloody farce and drama eerily anticipates the Stalinist atmosphere of the Moscow Show Trials. It also captures how many Leftists dealt with Stalin in the mode of Hamlet, that is to say, in either sad submission or blind hatred. To paraphrase Spinoza, instead of a real effort to understand concrete material circumstances, there was just so much crying and weeping. Of course, given the brutality of Stalinism, such crying and weeping were inevitable. But from this atmosphere of despair, nearly all materialist analysis of Stalin’s counterrevolution was absent. Instead, we were left with either a Cold Warrior anti-Communism or a sheepish, pro-Soviet apologetics. Stalinism was not something to be rationally understood, but only to be feared as either evil incarnate, or a quasi-mystical force demanding acquiescence. This ideological despair usually comes packaged in a superficial analysis, with the premise that Stalinism was the real essence of the October Revolution. This is a pattern of argument common to pro-Stalinists and anti-communists alike. As such, these responses are divided along the question of whether Stalinism was a Satanic outcome of an already infernal process, or something to be (fatalistically) embraced. The anti-communist perceives Stalinism and Bolshevism in demonological terms, a maleficent will beyond comprehension. The Stalinist instead casts the conservative bureaucratization of the Soviet Union as part of the iron laws of history. These opposed positions come equipped with their own philosophies of history, the former voluntarist and latter fatalist. Marx anticipated such undialectical positions in his preface to The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and Douglas Greene uses Marx’s framework to understand various responses toward Stalin’s counterrevolution. For the voluntarist, Stalin is akin to pure evil, a force of violence that appears like “a bolt from the blue,” much as Victor Hugo saw Napoleon III; for the fatalist or necessitarian position, Stalinism is simply our historical destiny, akin to how Pierre-Joseph Proudhon prostrated himself before the new Bonaparte’s Second Empire.4 Marx, on the other hand, was neither a fatalist nor a voluntarist, but a determinist. Every event has some determinate cause, and our ability to act meaningfully in the world comes down to how well we can map the various causes and effects around us. To escape the fate of blind necessity, understanding historical laws and causes is crucial.5 Freedom, if it is to have any

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intelligible sense at all, is not mere contingency or caprice (not “free will”), but is irreducibly causal. Freedom means insight; the more we know, the more we can act effectively. As Marx insisted against Wilhelm Weitling and other abstract moralists, ignorance never helped anyone. And despite Mikhail Bakunin mocking Marx for wanting to turn the worker into a theorist, the proletariat needs scientific understanding if they want to escape the muck of history. Without such understanding, artists and intellectuals like Hugo and Proudhon could only hide behind mystical abstractions; they could curse history or submit to it, but never really know it. Without the lens of class struggle and materialist analysis, we can only appreciate events tragically, or as outside the power of ordinary human beings. True, a historical materialist analysis might preach a certain stoicism depending upon the circumstances; insurrection is not always the order of the day, and it is only recently in human history, as Marx and Engels demonstrated, that we can overcome class society. The capacity to produce for “each according to their need” simply wasn’t available in antiquity or feudalism, no matter how vile and unjust these systems were. There have always been opportunities for anger and wrath against oppression, but not always an opportunity to extinguish the sources of so much injustice as it emanates from class society. Marxist necessity is opposed to all forms of demonology, i.e., an obsession with evil “will” over material causes. This includes the most popular takes (from both liberal and conservative historians) on key modern revolutions. For the bourgeois consensus, it was the bloodthirsty Robespierre who pursued revolutionary terror for its own sake (Taine), or perhaps because of personal insanity (Le Bon).6 This interpretation, of course, ignores the historical fact that France was then suffering from both a civil war and the threat of foreign invasion. The Terror was instituted as a national emergency measure to fight counterrevolution and end aristocratic hegemony. Likewise, the bourgeois historians see Stalin as personally evil and his regime as expressing the very DNA of Bolshevism. This conveniently ignores how Russia suffered through a horrendous civil war that depopulated its main city centers, starved the country, and was subjected to imperialist and reactionary violence, resulting in the bureaucratization of the revolution. In the liberal-conservative imagination, revolutions are like Saturn—that Lord of Time—doomed to consume their children. To moderates during the French Revolution, the whole event appeared as merely the subjective excesses of certain radicals. The Girondist deputy Pierre Victurnien Vergniaud invoked Saturn as a warning against such extremism: “Citizens, we have reason to fear that the revolution, like Saturn, will devour successively all its children, and only engender despotism and the calamities which accompany it.” For more reactionary characters, like

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Jacques Mallet du Pan, this classical metaphor condemned the whole effort to change society. In the year 1793, Mallet du Pan put it more succinctly: “Like to Saturn, the Revolution devours its children.” But what gave the phrase its highest artistic rendering was Georg Büchner’s play Danton’s Death (1835). There, as Danton is plagued with Hamlet-like indecision, he waxes poetic with the same refrain: “The revolution is like Saturn: it eats its children.”7 Saturn is perhaps not just the lord of hellish temporalities but could also be linked to Benjamin’s “Angel of History.” Benjamin introduces this divine creature in his interpretation of Paul Klee’s painting, Angelus Novus. The Angel does not see things in terms of mere deterministic cause and effect. Instead, “he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” The Angel, again like Hamlet, “would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.” But he cannot, since a storm is coming from “Paradise” itself, blowing the Angel further into the distance. His back is turned away from the future, and he can only see the “wreckage of the present” (which the duped see as “progress”).8 The question arises that if this storm is blowing from Paradise itself, is this a fatalistic necessity? As Benjamin’s friend Gershom Scholem pointed out, Saturn for commentators of the Kabbalah plays a role in the creation of a (fallen) universe in need of messianic repair.9 However, when does this stop being merely metaphorical in Benjamin and start being properly mystical? Benjamin’s late thought displays a perfect coincidence of opposites between voluntarism and a mystical fatalism. This coincidence does not point toward a rational, i.e., dialectical, resolution, but to endless oscillations. For Benjamin, we can break through the hellish continuum of Saturn’s rule, but never based on a rational understanding of historical laws. It is actually a matter of fate—waiting for the revolutionary moment which could come at any time. This break has a messianic character, more akin to Nietzsche’s critique of German historicism than to Marx’s own historical materialism.10 The more absolute the break from history, the more mystical and unintelligible the revolution becomes. When it comes to breaking with Stalinism however, the more Stalinism is seen as demonic evil, the more imperialism starts to look like the messiah. Undoubtedly, this was not Benjamin’s own intention. Nonetheless, this is a possible outcome of his own premises; in lacking an objective materialist standard of human flourishing, it is hard to pinpoint what counts as satanic as opposed to messianic. Absolutely any political formation can be coded as either sluggish, sclerotic history or as messianic break, or alternatively, as infernal Antichrist. Who’s to say? And if Stalinism is indeed a providential force, then shouldn’t Trotsky be seen as a Judas or Antichrist? Moralistic accounts of Stalin call for a moralistic and mystical politics.

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The “dialectic of Saturn” is thus a pseudo-dialectic since it does not point to any genuine resolution, and what is needed is not Benjamin’s astrology, but Marxist astronomy. While Doug Greene sees the dialectic of Saturn as an ideology of Cold Warrior liberals, Western Marxists, and Stalinists themselves, he does not think it is the real explanation of what happened in the Soviet Union. The dialectic of Saturn can only give us a phenomenological angle of how Stalinism emerged; it is a way to work through ideological appearances, as Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit tried to accomplish regarding the French Revolution. Nevertheless, this phenomenology is no substitute for materialist analysis. Here, Trotsky’s account of Stalinism remains the most comprehensive and accurate, and it has weathered the test of time. While those who broke with Trotsky saw the Soviet Union as a new class society—inaugurating a novel mode of production that went beyond capitalism or socialism— this hypothesis was falsified in 1991 with the fall of the USSR. The USSR was not some new, infernal entity, meant to take over the planet in an endless dystopian night. Rather, in terms of the long Marxist calendar of history, it was merely a hiccup. The fall of the USSR confirmed what Trotsky had already said in The Revolution Betrayed.11 He provided a real answer to the Russian Question: that the nature of the Soviet Union was a degenerated workers’ state, threatening to totter back into capitalism. However, apart from the accuracy of his diagnosis, the Stalinist caricature of Trotsky’s politics as abstract and romanticist—that he was a mere dreamer—remains strong. Perhaps the greatest service Doug Greene provides in the following pages is a robust defense of Trotsky’s struggle as a real, genuine alternative to Stalinism; that the Platform of the Opposition could have led the Soviet Union to a better and much more democratic position. As a determinist himself,12 Trotsky understood why the Stalinists defeated the Left Opposition in the faction fights of the 1920s. This did not invalidate his overall political line, since he knew that the Soviet Union could not remain a house divided against itself, as a degenerated workers’ state. The contradiction of Stalinism can only resolve itself in one of two ways: either with a political revolution restoring Soviet democracy, or a total restoration of capitalism. Thus, with his theory of permanent revolution, the fall of the USSR confirmed Trotsky posthumously. From the standpoint of historical materialism—sooner or later—Trotsky would be right about the USSR, just as sooner or later Marx will be right about capitalism. As Marxists, basing our impressions on the contradictory nature of capitalism, we predict socialism in the long run, since socialism is not a mere hiccup, but a real historical tendency. When Leftists invoke Luxemburg’s slogan “socialism or barbarism,” one hopes they do not think the likely outcome is a mere 50/50 split, which would turn Luxemburg’s own politics into a Pascalian wager. Hedging one’s

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bets like this does not inspire confidence, but also goes against Marx’s scientific analysis of where history is headed. Despite all the threats we face as a species, the capitalist present is still pregnant with the socialist future. Trotsky remained implacable against Stalinist counterrevolution and imperialism because there remains a genuine alternative. But without carefully explaining and justifying what that alternative is, we are only left with our indignation. As Marx put it, paraphrasing Spinoza, ignorance never helped anyone. NOTES 1. Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays, Picador, 126. 2. Quoted in Sontag, ibid., 111. This Saturnine emphasis on detour and delay fits very well with the notion of fascism as the barbaric “delay” before socialism. 3. For Benjamin on the Saturnmensch, see Walter Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel (translated by Howard Eiland), Harvard University Press, 161. 4. See Marx’s 1869 preface to the 18th Brumaire: https:​//​www​.marxists​.org​/archive​ /marx​/works​/1852​/18th​-brumaire​/preface​ htm. 5. For why Marxism is determinist without being fatalistic or “mechanically materialist” see Hal Draper’s discussion in “The ‘Inevitability’ of Socialism” from 1947: https:​//​www​ marxists​.org​/archive​/draper​/1947​/12​/inevitsoc​.htm. 6. For a discussion of Taine and Le Bon’s views on revolution, see Domenico Losurdo’s Nietzsche: The Aristocratic Rebel, Haymarket Press, 202. 7. Vergniaud quoted in François M. Mignet, History of the French Revolution, from 1789 to 1814 (London: Saville and Edwards, Printers, 1856), 199. For du Pan, see Considerations on the Nature of the French Revolution: And on the Causes which Prolong Its Duration (1793), 90. Online at: https:​//​archive​.org​/details​ /considerationson00mall. Georg Büchner, “Danton’s Death,” “Leonce and Lena,” and “Woyzeck,” trans. Victor Price (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 20. 8. For an in-depth analysis of Walter Benjamin’s angel, see Michael Löwy’s Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ (Verso, 2005). 9. Moshe Idel, Saturn’s Jews: On the Witches’ Sabbat and Sabbateanism (Continuum, 2011). 10. Regarding Benjamin’s deeper affinities to Nietzsche, see James McFarland, Constellation: Friedrich Nietzsche & Walter Benjamin in the Now-Time of History (Fordham, 2013). 11. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (Dover, 2012). 12. From Trotsky’s discussions on the Transitional Program (1938): “It is very often a petty bourgeois conception that we should have a free individuality. It is only a fiction, an error. We are not free. We have no free will in the sense of metaphysical philosophy. When I wish to drink a glass of beer I act as a free man but I don’t invent the need for beer. That comes from my body. I am only the executor. But insofar as I understand the needs of my body and can satisfy them consciously then I have the

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sensation of freedom, freedom through understanding the necessity. Here the correct understanding of the necessity of my body is the only real freedom given to animals in any question and man is an animal.” https:​//​www​ marxists​.org​/archive​/trotsky​/1938​/ tp​/tpdiscuss​.htm.

Acknowledgments

Writing a book is not a solitary exercise. The final result with all its strengths and weaknesses are ultimately the responsibility of the author, but the writing process is a collective endeavor. I want to thank those friends, comrades, and family who walked this road with me. I owe many debts of gratitude, not all of which I can acknowledge here. First of all: Harrison and Sam Fluss were not only great sources of ideas and encouragement, but are two of the finest friends and communists that I know. A special thank-you to Matthew Strauss and Wayne Rossi for helping me find needed articles. The following comrades and friends have also been constant sources of support. Forgive me if I miss anyone since there are so many of you: Amy Banelis, Jeffrey Baker, Derek Bartholomew, Peter Bloom, Alex Coy, Kyle Creasey, Eric Draitser, Jim Farmelant, Nathaniel Flakin, Jennifer Harvey, Christopher Hill, Ben Hillin, John Kaye, Brian Kelly, Marc Luzietti, Donald Parkinson, Chris Persampieri, James Rotten, Andrew Smith, Coco Smyth, Shalon van Tine, Daniel Tutt, Devin Ward, Ben Williams, and Fanshen Wong. To Ian Scott Horst, you are a true communist and friend. Also, all the other comrades who’ve offered support in other ways, I hope we can reach that better world together. I owe a special debt to the following members of my family: my mother for her tireless support. I hope both my late father and grandmother would have liked the finished book. To my brother Danny, thank you for listening to me talk about ideas on our long phone calls. My sister Lauren and the support of your pets: Munchie, Bixby, and the mighty lion Socks. Without seeing those loving animals every day, I might not have finished.

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Introduction Saturn and His‌‌‌‌‌‌‌ Children

It is therefore ridiculous to say: Stalin makes “monstrous and unprovable” charges against Trotsky, therefore Trotsky is politically right and Stalin politically wrong—which is essentially what the Trotskyites are saying. It is equally absurd to declare: Stalin must be wrong or else he wouldn’t have to use such “methods” against Trotsky. Let us recall the “methods” the Jacobins used to suppress the Girondins and the Dantonists—and where is there a Marxist today who will dare assert that Robespierre was politically wrong as against them? The fact is our judgment cannot be based on the validity of the “criminal” charges and countercharges; ultimately, fundamentally, it must be based on political considerations, on the political aims and programs that Stalin and Trotsky each represent. Ultimately, fundamentally, it must depend on whether we believe Stalin to be a Russian Robespierre sending his Brissot or Danton to death so as to remove an obstacle in the way of revolutionary advance or a Russian Tallien or Barere dispatching his Robespierre to the guillotine so as to open the way for a Thermidorian reaction.

Jay Lovestone, “The Moscow Trial in Historical Perspective”1 For nearly a century, Stalinism has cast doubt on the emancipatory potential of communism. Like the French Revolution before it, the Russian Revolution ended in despotism, purges, and terror. This appeared to lend authority to conservative claims that revolutions cannot achieve a society free of exploitation and oppression but must inevitably devour their own. Or as the French revolutionary Georges Danton said in Georg Büchner’s 1835 play, Danton’s Death: “The revolution is like Saturn, it eats its children.”2 Indeed, the conservatives painted the two revolutions in a similar light: a decrepit old regime is overthrown by fanatical revolutionaries, who, in turn, xix

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become a new breed of oppressors. The stages go from radicalism to reaction in quick succession: Jacobinism to Bonapartism in France, and Bolshevism to Stalinism in Russia. In addition, the actors in 1789 and 1917 appear to be cast in the same roles. The imbecile monarchs are played by Louis XVI and Nicholas II; the good-natured moderates by Lafayette and Kerensky. Danton and Trotsky are cast as the demagogic rabblerousers, and Robespierre and Lenin are cast as the radical leaders. The terrorists are played by Saint-Just and Dzerzhinsky; and finally, the dictators are played by Napoleon and Stalin. Does this mean that the Dialectic of Saturn and a Stalinist ending is the unavoidable fate of a communist revolution? How the question is answered is not an antiquarian concern or mere academic exercise, but it will determine whether human emancipation remains possible. To untie the Gordian knot of Stalinism, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte provides a useful starting point. In this work, Karl Marx analyzes how Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte became Emperor Napoleon III of France in 1851. In his preface, Marx notes the different views among contemporary observers about how Napoleon III was able to rise to power. This passage is worth quoting at length: Of the works on the same subject written at approximately the same time as mine, only two deserve notice: Victor Hugo’s Napoléon le petit and Proudhon’s Coup d’état. Victor Hugo confines himself to bitter and witty invective against the responsible publisher of the coup d’état. The event itself appears in his work like a bolt from the blue. He sees in it only the violent act of a single individual. He does not notice that he makes this individual great instead of little by ascribing to him a personal power of initiative such as would be without parallel in world history. Proudhon, for his part, seeks to represent the coup d’état as the result of preceding historical development. Unnoticeably, however, his historical construction of the coup d’état becomes a historical apologia for its hero. Thus he falls into the error of our so-called objective historians. In contrast to this, I demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relations that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part.3

Marx observed that there were two mutually opposed ways to explain how a seeming nobody came to lead one of the most powerful countries in Europe. The first, represented by Victor Hugo considered Napoleon III to be a demonic figure who appeared out of nowhere like a bolt from the blue. By contrast, adherents of the second view, such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, celebrated Napoleon III as a savior on horseback, who was acting in accordance with the will of history. Marx believes that both these camps share the same underlying ahistorical fatalism that cannot explain either historical events

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or Napoleon III’s role. Rather, Marx argues that only a historical materialist approach can explain the objective and subjective processes that led to the rise of a second-class hero. This book uses Marx’s three-part approach of “bolt from the blue,” “historical necessity,” and “historical materialism” as a road map to understand Stalinism. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 focus on the “bolt from the blue” perspective. Chapter 1 discusses anti-communists such as Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who see Stalinism and communism more generally as a diabolical force with no social roots, but merely as a vicious contagion that threatens to enslave humanity. Chapter 2 looks at a “left” version of the “bolt from the blue,” namely the work of George Orwell, who considered Stalinism to be a malevolent manifestation of Big Brother. Chapter 3 analyzes the “bolt from the blue” that emerged at the start of the Cold War where Stalinism was seen as a form of totalitarianism. This Cold War counterEnlightenment Project sought to locate the roots of Stalinist and communist totalitarianism in Enlightenment rationalism and Jacobinism. The key figures developing this approach include Jacob Talmon, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Leszek Kołakowski, François Furet, Ernst Nolte, Robert Conquest, Richard Pipes, and Martin Malia. The culmination of the Cold War counter-Enlightenment is The Black Book of Communism. Chapters 4 and 5 discuss the opposite camp of Communists and fellow travelers who saw Stalinism as a form of “historical necessity.” Chapter 4 looks at the life and work of the ex-communist Arthur Koestler, whose novel Darkness at Noon concluded that Stalinist historical necessity was a form of totalitarian logic. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty offered the most sophisticated response to Koestler with his defense of Stalinist historical necessity as a form of Pascalian wager. Ultimately, both Koestler and Merleau-Ponty rejected Stalinist historical necessity and concluded that its logic inevitably ended in totalitarianism. Chapter 5 provides an overview of the major figures of Western Marxism and their relationship to Stalinist historical necessity. The figures discussed include Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Herbert Marcuse, Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Eric Hobsbawm, Louis Althusser, and JeanPaul Sartre. The response of Western Marxists to Stalinism ranged from open support to outright rejection, but ultimately all of them failed to understand or effectively explain it. An appendix at the end of the book will review the work of Domenico Losurdo, the most important contemporary Western Marxist defender of Stalinism. Chapter 6 looks at the “historical materialist” or the “Proletarian Jacobin” approach to understanding Stalinism. An overview of Proletarian Jacobinism during the course of the Russian Revolution is given with a particular focus on Leon Trotsky. His alternative program to Stalinism in the 1920s will be

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presented in detail. The chapter concludes with a consideration ofdebates on Stalinism as a form of Thermidorian Reaction, which reaches its mature form in Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed. For Trotsky, Stalinism was a form of bureaucratic rule over nationalized property relations, which were originally meant to produce proletarian democracy. The governing ideology of Stalinism was not international communism, but the narrow nationalist outlook of “socialism in one country.” Chapter 7 goes into Victor Serge and Isaac Deutscher, two figures who emerged from within the Trotskyist movement, but rejected Trotsky’s position on Stalinism. Victor Serge is a case of “Western retreat” since he moves toward Western social democracy and Cold War anti-communism. By contrast, Isaac Deutscher represents a position of “eastern reconciliation,” since he identifies Stalinism as a force of historical necessity but still hopes for democratic reform in the USSR. In the end, both men found themselves far away from Trotsky’s revolutionary Marxism with their adaptations to the West and East respectfully. Finally, chapter 8 concludes this book by arguing that the camps of “bolt from the blue” and “historical necessity” are ultimately identical in their respective conclusions. These two explanations—whatever their other points of contention—both have a fatalistic view of history and agree that Stalinism is inevitable and there is no alternative to it. However, the historical materialist position does not consider Stalinism in the framework of either damnation or salvation, but as a force engendered by material circumstances and the class struggle. It was Leon Trotsky who successfully provided his own Eighteenth Brumaire to understand that the nature of Stalinism was not rooted in a Dialectic of Saturn. The dialectics of Saturn is not just about understanding the past, but looking forward to the revolutions of the future. If we accept that all revolutions are fated to devour their own children, then our chances for liberation become impossible. If we know that there are alternatives to the dialectics of Saturn, then the possibilities for communism remain open. NOTES 1. Jay Lovestone, “The Moscow Trial in Historical Perspective [Feb. 1937],” Marxists Internet Archive. https:​//​www​.marxists​.org​/archive​/lovestone​/moscow​-trials​.pdf. 2. Georg Büchner, “Danton’s Death,” “Leonce and Lena,” and “Woyzeck,”‌‌‌‌‌‌‌ trans. Victor Price (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 20. The phrase was originally coined by the royalist thinker Jacques Mallet du Pan in Considerations on the Nature of the French Revolution (London, 1793), 90.

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3. “Preface to the Second Edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 21, (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), 56–57. (henceforth MECW) Italics in the original.

Chapter One

Stalinism as a Bolt from the Blue The Jewish-Bolshevik Contagion

A. THE VIRUS From nearly the moment that the Bastille was stormed on July 14, 1789, the defenders of the ancien régime viewed revolution as a profoundly demonic force that assaulted throne and altar. The monarchist thinker Joseph de Maistre saw the demons of the French Revolution not simply in its mass upheaval and terror, but in the philosophical program of the Enlightenment: “From the fact that the action and reaction of opposing powers is always equal, the greatest efforts of the goddess of Reason against Christianity were made in France; the enemy attacked the citadel.”1 No longer was the Enlightenment the province of elite salons, but now it took to the streets. The sansculottes traded the Holy Trinity of Catholicism for the new revolutionary ‌‌ trinity of liberté, égalité, and fraternité.‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌ After the defeat of Napoleon, in order to stop any future revolutionary outbreaks, the Holy Alliance of Metternich attempted to forever enshrine the power of kings. Yet the dangers of modernity took on new and sinister forms with the industrial revolution. Capitalism created immense changes in the economy and brought forth new volatile social forces such as the modern working class: a class made of up of people with no property who were the source of the massive wealth created by the industrial revolution. More and more, radical workers took up the ideas of Jacobinism, socialism, and communism. The French Revolution had shown the power of the oppressed to mobilize themselves and fight for their demands. As Eric Hobsbawm noted: “The French Revolution gave this new class confidence, the industrial revolution impressed on it the need for permanent mobilization.”2 The power of the workers was most clearly on display in the revolutions of 1830, 1848, and in the Paris Commune of 1871. 1

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The Jewish-Bolshevik Contagion

Nineteenth-century conservatives and reactionaries increasingly demonized proletarian revolution in biological and racial terms. Modern medicine with its discovery of bacteria and viruses made it possible to envision communist ideology as a lethal disease that sapped the health of the nation. This communist contagion with its anti-imperialism, egalitarianism, and internationalism took on the malevolent shape of the “Jew.” For the Right, the Jews, seen as an alien outsider to the body politic, were considered vectors of a revolutionary disease that needed to be stamped out. The fear of the Jewish contagion was especially acute for the ruling classes of czarist Russia. A rapidly growing revolutionary movement was bringing workers, peasants, and the intelligentsia under its wing and threatening to overturn the dynasty. Behind the revolutionaries, the Romanovs saw the Jews acting as puppet masters. This image of a Jewish plot to control the world was circulated by the czarist secret police in the infamous forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion. As upheaval grew in Russia, ultraroyalists such as the Black Hundreds conducted deadly pogroms against the Jews to stop the spread of the revolutionary virus. Violence against the Jews reached terrifying new heights following the 1917 revolution. For the White Armies fighting Lenin and the Soviet Republic, anti-Semitism served as the ideological glue. They considered it common sense that the Jews and communists were identical. During the Russian Civil War, the Jews were again targeted, and upward of 200,000 were massacred in pogroms. Following the defeat of the White Armies, émigrés carried to the West their belief in the dangers of “Judeo-Bolshevism.” In the chaos of postwar Europe, this virulent anti-Semitism found many receptive ears among emerging fascist ideologues. On the counterrevolutionary Right, it was axiomatic that communism was a destructive force caused by a subversive virus. There was no uniform position on Judeo-Bolshevism on the Right with views ranging from a focus on subversive Jews in the conservative mainstream (Churchill) to the genocidal (Hitler) to a more subdued anti-Semitism (Solzhenitsyn). However, in no sense can the “bolt from the blue” of Judeo-Bolshevism rationally explain communism, Stalinism, or the Soviet Union. Rather, the principal usage of this idea is meant to defend the existing socioeconomic order, racial supremacy, and imperial domination. B. WINSTON CHURCHILL The British statesman Winston Churchill was one of the most prominent figures who warned about the dangers of subversive Jews as the driving force behind communism. During the Russian Civil War, Churchill was an



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outspoken advocate for Britain militarily aiding the White Armies to strangle the Bolshevik baby in its cradle. He considered the Bolshevik Revolution to be a plague that knew no boundaries or borders: Bolshevism is not a policy; it is a disease. It is not a creed; it is a pestilence. It presents all the characteristics of a pestilence. It breaks out with great suddenness; it is violently contagious; it throws people into a frenzy of excitement; it spreads with extraordinary rapidity; the mortality is terrible; so that after a while, like other pestilences, the disease tends to wear itself out. The population of the regions devastated by its first fury are left in a sort of stupor.3

Behind the Russian Revolution, Churchill saw the hidden hand of subversive Jews, whom he believed had long organized other revolutionary movements ranging from the Illuminati to the Spartacist League. As he said in 1920: The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all, of them have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg [sic] (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing . . . In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing. And the prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses.4

While Churchill, condemned subversive Jews as the source behind communism, he praised non-subversive Jews who professed loyalty to their country and ancestral faith: First there are the Jews who, dwelling in every country throughout the world, identify themselves with that country, enter into its national life, and, while adhering faithfully to their own religion, regard themselves as citizens in the fullest sense of the State which has received them. Such a Jew living in England would say, “I am an Englishman practising the Jewish faith.” This is a worthy conception, and useful in the highest degree.5

For Churchill, no one personified the archetype of the subversive Jew more than Leon Trotsky: “Like the cancer bacillus he grew, he fed, he tortured, he slew in fulfilment of his nature. . . . He was a Jew. He was still a Jew. Nothing

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could get over that.”6 Churchill saw the leader of the Red Army as a diabolical genius of revolution who combined within himself all the nefarious traits of Machiavelli, Cleon, and Jack the Ripper. Yet he believed that Trotsky’s universalist Bolshevism was a corruption of his underlying Jewish nature: “Hard fortune when you have deserted your family, repudiated your race, spat upon the religion of your fathers, and lapped Jew and Gentile in a common malignity, to be baulked of so great a prize for so narrow-minded a reason!”7 According to Churchill, Trotsky’s malignant character stood in stark contrast to the admirable Jewish traits found in his own bourgeois father: “His father—old Bronstein—died of typhus in 1920 at the age of 83. The triumphs of his son brought no comfort to this honest hard-working and believing Jew. Persecuted by the Reds because he was a bourgeois; by the Whites because he was Trotsky’s father, and deserted by his son, he was left to sink or swim in the Russian deluge, and swam on steadfastly to the end. What else was there for him to do?”8 In the battle against communism, Churchill viewed fascists as comrades in arms. He considered fascism to be a necessary response by the healthy antibodies of the nation against subversive elements. In 1927, Churchill expressed admiration for the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and his Blackshirts for successfully defeating Bolshevism: If I had been an Italian I am sure I should have been wholeheartedly with you in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism—[Italy] has provided the necessary antidote to the Russian poison. Hereafter no great nation will be unprovided with an ultimate means of protection against the cancerous growth of Bolshevism.9

Due to his hatred for subversive Jews, Churchill welcomed the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. He saw the Moscow Trials as a reassertion of Russian nationalism and the curbing of internationalists who were hell-bent on world revolution: “Clearly Soviet Russia has moved decidedly away from Communism. This is a lurch to the Right. The theme of a world revolution which animated the Trotskyists is cracked if not broken . . . Stalin has now come to represent Russian nationalism in somewhat threadbare Communist trappings.”10 Churchill freely admitted that he did not understand the Soviet Union. He considered it impenetrable: “It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key.”11 For Churchill, the key to unlocking the enigma of communism was understanding its character as a subversive and internationalist virus.



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C. ADOLF HITLER The idea of “Judeo-Bolshevism” found fertile ground in a Weimar Germany torn between the conflicting forces of revolution and counterrevolution. Adolf Hitler, the leader of the National Socialists, believed that the Jews were responsible for the loss of the war, the overthrow of the Kaiser, and the Spartacist uprising. Hitler viewed the Jews as a virus who threatened the national hygiene: “[The Jew] is and remains a parasite, a sponger who, like a pernicious bacillus, spreads over wider and wider areas according as some favourable area attracts him. The effect produced by his presence is also like that of the vampire; for wherever he establishes himself the people who grant him hospitality are bound to be bled to death sooner or later.”12 Hitler considered Marxism to be an especially pernicious Jewish creation due to its democratic and universal character, which “repudiates the aristocratic principle of Nature and substitutes for it the eternal privilege of force and energy, numerical mass and its dead weight.”13 Hitler believed that the Russian Revolution was orchestrated by Jews, who now ruled from the Kremlin. As he said in November 1941 with the Wehrmacht deep inside the Soviet Union: “Understandably, the power which would one day confront us is most clearly ruled by this Jewish spirit: the Soviet Union. It happens to be the greatest servant of Jewry. That made . . . the USSR the supreme enemy of National Socialism.”14 The only cure for the Jewish-Bolshevik contagion, in Hitler’s mind, was for the German volk to fight them to the death. This meant that Hitler conceived of war against the Soviet Union as necessary to destroy the Jews and save Germany. In the planning stages of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler told his generals that this would be a racial struggle where no quarter would be shown: Clash of two ideologies. Crushing denunciation of Bolshevism, identified with a social criminality. Communism is an enormous danger for our future. We must forget the concept of comradeship between soldiers. A Communist is no comrade before or after the battle. This is a war of annihilation. If we do not grasp this, we shall still beat the enemy, but thirty years later we shall again have to fight the Communist foe. We do not wage war to preserve the enemy.15

For Hitler, the destruction of Jews and Bolsheviks was practically the same thing. If Germany succeeded in its war of annihilation against the Soviet Union, the mass murder and genocide of the Jews would be the guaranteed outcome.

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D. ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn will be discussed at length elsewhere, but for now his views on the Jews and communism will be highlighted. Compared to Hitler, Solzhenitsyn was far more restrained and “moderate” in his anti-Semitism. However, anti-Semitism is a running motif in his work and undergirds his anti-communism. Solzhenitsyn’s anti-Semitism is easy to find. In The Gulag Archipelago, he highlights the Jewish administrators of the prison camps. In the second volume, photographs are included of the following six figures: Aron Solts, Naftaly Frenkel, Yakov Rappoport, Matvei Berman, Lazar Kogan, and Genrikh Yagoda. Perhaps it was only a coincidence that he picked out six Jews for pictures? Years later, Solzhenitsyn claimed that Jewish prisoners had an easier time in the gulag compared to Christian inmates: “If I would care to generalise, and to say that the life of the Jews in the camps was especially hard, I could, and would not face reproach for an unjust national generalisation. But in the camps where I was kept, it was different. The Jews whose experience I saw—their life was softer than that of others.”16 Elsewhere in The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn was open about his sympathy for anti-Semites. He says that the defeat of the pogromist White Armies and their emigration to the West meant Russia lost a “great spiritual world.”17 Later, Solzhenitsyn is practically regretful that Hitler missed an opportunity to effectively make use of the collaborationist forces of Andrey Vlasov and his Russian Liberation Army to create a truly popular movement to free Russia from Bolshevik slavery: “Hitler was unable to understand the historical fact that the opportunity to overthrow a Communist regime can come only from a popular movement, from an uprising of the long-suffering population. But Hitler was more afraid of such a Russia and such a victory than of a defeat.”18 When it comes to the Russian Revolution itself, Solzhenitsyn considers it akin to a foreign invasion and occupation. The invaders, naturally, are the Jews. In Lenin in Zürich, Solzhenitsyn views Lenin as surrounded by Jewish émigrés such as the devious Alexander Parvus. According to Solzhenitsyn, Parvus was in the pay of the German General Staff, which was using Lenin as an instrument to destroy Russia: “‘To make a revolution takes a lot of money,’ Parvus insisted, his friendly shoulder pressing against Lenin. ‘But to hold on to power when you get there will take even more.’ An odd way of putting it, but strikingly true.”19 Solzhenitsyn does not consider Lenin as a passive victim of these conspirators, but someone who was instinctively susceptible to their influence due to his Jewish blood: “Why was he born in that uncouth country? Just because a quarter of his blood was Russian, fate



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had hitched him to the ramshackle Russian rattletrap. A quarter of his blood, but nothing in his character, his will, his inclination made him kin to that slovenly, slapdash, eternally drunken country. Lenin knew of nothing more revolting than backslapping Russian hearties, tearful tavern penitents, selfstyled geniuses bewailing their ruined lives. Lenin was a bowstring, or an arrow from the bow.”20 It was only natural to Solzhenitsyn that revolutionary cosmopolitans tainted by Jewish blood wanted to destroy the Russian society they were alienated from. Another instance of Solzhenitsyn’s anti-Semitism can be found in Two Hundred Years Together (2001), a history of Jews in the Russian empire and the Soviet Union. In this work, Solzhenitsyn states that the Jews did not organize the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. However, they must bear responsibility for these revolutions because they were led by Jewish renegades. Solzhenitsyn is clever enough to maintain “balance” and to put in just enough caveats to provide plausible deniability for his anti-Semitism. For example, he says that Russians must also answer for their renegades as well: “Just as we Russians must answer—for the pogroms, for those merciless arsonist peasants, for those crazed revolutionary soldiers, for those savage sailors.”21 When it comes to renegade Jews, however, he is unforgiving. Solzhenitsyn says that the Bolshevik Party provided cohesion and coordination for their subversion of Russia. In particular, Solzhenitsyn focuses on Trotsky as a “leader and guiding genius” for organizing the Bolshevik seizure of power.22 Once in power, the Bolsheviks used Jews to staff the new terroristic apparatus of the Soviet Republic: “following the October coup, the Bolsheviks were only too happy to make use of the services of Jews in their administrative and Party structures, motivated once again not by feelings of solidarity with Jews but by the benefits received from their talents, their intelligence, and their alienation from the Russian populace.”23 While the evidence of Solzhenitsyn’s anti-Semitism is abundant, he publicly denied it and even expressed fondness for Jews on occasion. Many of his admirers, who included Adam Ulam, Robert Conquest, and Elie Wiesel, vociferously rejected the idea that Solzhenitsyn was an anti-Semite in any way. A fellow anti-communist, Richard Pipes, admitted that Solzhenitsyn was only anti-Semitic in a “Russian way,” as opposed to a fascist way: Every culture has its own brand of anti-Semitism. In Solzhenitsyn’s case, it’s not racial. It has nothing to do with blood. He’s certainly not a racist; the question is fundamentally religious and cultural. He bears some resemblance to Dostoyevsky, who was a fervent Christian and patriot and a rabid anti-Semite. Solzhenitsyn is unquestionably in the grip of the Russian extreme right’s view of the Revolution, which is that it was the doing of Jews.24

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Solzhenitsyn speaks with more refinement than the coarse Black Hundreds. He is a careful writer who knows how to speak in code. The American neo-Nazi David Duke decoded Solzhenitsyn’s “spiritual” anti-Semitism as no different from racial anti-Semitism. According to Duke, Solzhenitsyn was simply telling “the truth about the Jewish supremacist role in the creation, execution and maintenance of world Communism, and the ‘Russian’ Revolution.”25 Furthermore, Solzhenitsyn comes out of a tradition of far-right anti-Semitism that uses a particular method of argumentation by pointing out the number of non-Russians and Jews in the Bolshevik Party and Soviet government. All of this supposedly proves that the revolution was alien to Russia. For those in Solzhenitsyn’s chosen audience, it did not take much effort to discern that he was blaming the Jews for communism. NOTES 1. Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 21. 2. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Revolution 1789–1848 (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 209. 3. Winston Churchill, Churchill by Himself: The Definitive Collection of Quotations, ed. Richard M. Langworth (New York: Public Affairs, 2008), 381. 4. Winston Churchill, “Zionism versus Bolshevism,” Illustrated Sunday Herald (London), February 8, 1920, 5. In contrast to subversive Jews, Churchill considered Zionists to be a pro-imperialist force and supported their claims in Palestine: “from every point of view, [it would] be beneficial, and would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire.” Ibid. There are opposed camps on how Churchill viewed Judaism. For the position that he was a philo-Semite, see Martin Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2008). A recent work on Churchill by Pakistani leftist Tariq Ali argues that he was an anti-Semite; see Tariq Ali, Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes (New York: Verso Books, 2022). 5. Churchill, “Zionism versus Bolshevism.” 6. Winston Churchill, “When Churchill Sized Up Trotsky,” Intercollegiate Studies Institute. https:​//​isi​.org​/modern​-age​/when​-churchill​-sized​-up​-trotsky​/. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Quoted in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill. V: Prophet of Truth, 1922–1939 (London: Heinemann, 1977), 226. Elsewhere Churchill said the following about Mussolini: “Moreover, in the conflict between Fascism and Bolshevism there was no doubt where my sympathies and convictions lay.” See Winston Churchill, Their Finest Hour (New York: RosettaBooks, 2002), 155; At one point, Hitler was someone Churchill praised as a “vital force” in Germany. See: Winston Churchill, “The



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Truth About Hitler,” International Churchill Society. https:​//​winstonchurchill​.org​ /publications​/finest​-hour​/finest​-hour​-156​/the​-truth​-about​-hitler​-1935​-hitler​-and​-his​ -choice​-1937​/. 10. Winston Churchill, Step by Step, 1936–1939 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1939), 45 and 53. 11. Churchill 2008, 145. 12. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998), 238. 13. Ibid., 61. 14. Adolf Hitler, The Complete Hitler, ed. Max Domarus (Würzburg: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 1990), 2505. 15. Quoted in Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–1945 Nemesis (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000b), 356. See also Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 127; Stephen G. Fritz, Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2011), 35–36, 42, 44, and 66–67; Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944: His Private Conversations (New York: Enigma Books, 2000), 332 and 657; Enzo Traverso, Understanding Nazi Violence (New York: The New Press, 2003); Peter Ross Range, 1924: The Year That Made Hitler (New York: Back Bay Books, 2016), 214–38. 16. Quoted in Nick Walsh, “Solzhenitsyn breaks last taboo of the revolution,” The Guardian, January 25, 2003. https:​//​www​.theguardian​.com​/world​/2003​/jan​/25​/russia​ .books; see pictures in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation Volume II (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1974b), 79. 17. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (New York: Vintage Books, 2018b), 110. 18. Ibid., 102–3. Italics in the original. From a heterodox Trotskyist position, Tony Cliff had misguided ideas that Vlasov’s forces represented an anti-Stalinist socialist movement in embryo: “This deduction of the probable programme of the anti-Stalinist opposition from the objective data of bureaucratic state capitalism is clearly supported by the actual programmes of two organised anti-Stalinist movements which appeared during the World War II—the Vlassov movement and the Ukrainian Resurgent Army (UPA).” See Tony Cliff, State Capitalism in Russia (London: Pluto Press, 1974), 261–62. 19. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Lenin in Zürich (London: The Bodley Head, 1975b), 126. 20. Ibid., 89–90. 21. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Two Hundred Years Together” in The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings 1947–2005, ed. Edward E. Ericson, Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2006), 505. 22. Ibid., 500. 23. Ibid., 504. 24. Quoted in Richard Grenier, “Solzhenitsyn and Anti-semitism: A New Debate,” The New York Times, November 13, 1985. https:​//​www​ nytimes​.com​/1985​/11​/13​/ books​/solzhenitsyn​-and​-anti​-semitism​-a​-new​-debate​.html.

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25. David Duke, The Secret Behind Communism (Free Speech Press, 2013), 15. For more on Solzhenitsyn’s anti-Semitism see Paul Flewers, “Solzhenitsyn: False Prophet,” Weekly Worker, March 9, 2008. https:​//​weeklyworker​.co​.uk​/worker​/735​/ solzhenitsyn​-false​-prophet​/.

‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌C hapter Two

Stalinism as a Bolt from the Blue Big Brother‌‌

The “bolt from the blue” understanding of Stalinism is not only found on the far right but has its “left-wing” proponents as well. The most well-known figure in this camp was the British writer, George Orwell. He identified Stalinism (and communism) not as a plague, but a malevolent “Big Brother.” Orwell believed that the roots of totalitarianism could be found in a natural lust for power and cruelty inherent in human nature. Ultimately, Orwell’s understanding of Stalinism was superficial and emotional since he lacked any theoretical guide to grasp its inner workings.‌‌‌‌‌‌ Orwell’s disdain for theory can be traced back to his first announcement that he was a socialist in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). This work was based on Orwell’s firsthand experience observing working-class life in Northern England at the height of the Great Depression. Wigan Pier’s moving prose about the impoverished existence of workers recalls Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England, written nearly a century prior. However, Engels had a theoretical frame of mind that saw beneath the surface and understood capitalism’s laws of motion and the material necessity for socialism. Orwell possessed none of that. The publisher of Wigan Pier, Victor Gollancz, noted this theoretical weakness in the book’s foreword: “It is indeed significant that so far as I can remember (he must forgive me if I am mistaken), Mr Orwell does not once define what he means by Socialism; nor does he explain how the oppressors oppress, nor even what he understands by ‘liberty’ and ‘justice.’”1 Gollancz was correct. Orwell only saw socialism as a sentimental idea that meant justice and common decency. He did not consider Marxism or theory of any sort to be important to working-class struggles. For Orwell, workers instinctively understood the larger meaning of socialism and were more concerned with bread-and-butter issues: 11

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The working-class Socialist, like the working-class Catholic, is weak on doctrine and can hardly open his mouth without uttering a heresy, but he has the heart of the matter in him. He does grasp the central fact that Socialism means the overthrow of tyranny, and the “Marseillaise,” if it were translated for his benefit, would appeal to him more deeply than any learned treatise on dialectical materialism.2

This is not to say that workers could simply create socialism out of thin air. Orwell does believe in the need for a working-class political party. He argues that a party to the left of both Labour and the Communists is needed. In fact, Orwell joined the Independent Labour Party in 1938. However, Orwell had curious ideas on the role of a working-class party. Since workers already knew what they were fighting for, then anything ideological or theoretical was unnecessary: “It will have to be a party with genuinely revolutionary intentions, and it will have to be numerically strong enough to act. We can only get it if we offer an objective which fairly ordinary people will recognize as desirable. Beyond all else, therefore, we need intelligent propaganda. Less about ‘class consciousness,’ ‘expropriation of the expropriators,’ ‘bourgeois ideology,’ and ‘proletarian solidarity,’ not to mention the sacred sisters, thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; and more about justice, liberty, and the plight of the unemployed.” 3 Orwell is also unclear on who is supposed to lead his imagined proletarian party. He views middle-class intellectuals as elitist cranks who are helplessly out of touch with workers. Yet Orwell says that the party should be led by those with “better brains and more common decency.”4 Does this mean organic intellectuals from the working class in the Gramscian sense? Or something else? Orwell never quite explains who were the “better brains” he hoped to attract. Moreover, Orwell’s romanticism is replete with his antipathy toward ideas of progress and industrialization. He believed that industry would end up making people effeminate, dependent, uncreative, and degenerate: “In tying yourself to the ideal of mechanical efficiency, you tie yourself to the ideal of softness. . . . The tendency of mechanical progress, then, is to frustrate the human need for effort and creation.”5 Orwell saw industrialization leading not necessarily to socialism, but toward a collectivist society resembling fascism: “Pace the economists, it is quite easy to imagine a world-society, economically collectivist—that is, with the profit principle eliminated–but with all political, military, and educational power in the hands of a small caste of rulers and their bravos. That or something like it is the objective of Fascism.”6 Orwell believed that socialists needed to stop this outcome from becoming a reality. This thinking would prove to be one of the major elements of his understanding of totalitarianism in Nineteen Eighty-Four.



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When Wigan Pier was published in March 1937, Orwell had already left England four months earlier for Spain. For him, it was necessary to fight fascism with arms in hand. Orwell’s experience in the Spanish Civil War would prove to be a watershed moment in his political development. In Barcelona, he witnessed the working class not as passive victims, but as a revolutionary class who were transforming society: “It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. . . . There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.”7 What Orwell found in Republican Spain was that there were vastly different ideas on how to fight Franco. The Spanish Communist Party (PCE), which was rising to prominence, argued that winning the war took priority. Ironically, considering his later anticommunism, Orwell supported the Communist position: “The Communists had a definite practical policy. . . . What clinched everything was that the Communists—so it seemed to me— were getting on with the war while we and the Anarchists were standing still.”8 In opposition to the Communists were the anarchists and the semi-Trotskyist Partido Obero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), who said that the revolution could not wait. Orwell himself ended up joining a POUM militia, but disagreed heavily with their political and military program: “I spent much of my time in the militia in bitterly criticizing the P.O.U.M. ‘line.’”9 Orwell’s earlier sympathies for the Communists slowly evaporated. He observed that the Communists believed that winning the war required arms from the Western democracies. Since the war began, Britain and France had refused to support the Republic. In order to gain their support, the Communists advocated rolling back the revolution and restoring bourgeois legality. This was perfectly in line with Soviet interests since they also sought the support of Britain and France to contain fascism. Since the USSR was the only country to arm the Loyalists, their voice carried weight in Spain. According to Communist logic, this meant any organization that pursued a revolutionary line was objectively treasonous. In the atmosphere created by the Moscow Trials, the Communists perceived the POUM as their greatest enemies and were determined to annihilate them. Orwell concluded that the Communists and the USSR were in the camp of the counterrevolution: “There is very little doubt that these [Soviet] terms were, in substance, ‘Prevent revolution or you get no weapons,’ and that the first move against the revolutionary elements, the expulsion of the P.O.U.M. from the Catalan Generalite, was done under orders from the U.S.S.R.”10 In the first half of 1937, tensions grew inside the Republican camp between the anarchists and POUM on one side, and the Communists and the bourgeoisie on the other. In May, fighting erupted in Barcelona, the stronghold of

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revolutionary Spain, with a “civil war within the civil war.” Orwell fought with the POUM in Barcelona against Republican efforts to restore order and witnessed the final defeat of the Spanish revolution. In the aftermath, the POUM was accused of launching a “fascist putsch,” and its outlawed militants were arrested en masse. The POUM’s leader Andrés Nin was tortured and murdered by the Communist-run secret police. It was in Barcelona that Orwell learned the power of propaganda. Communist control of the press enabled them to successfully lie and portray the POUM as a gang of “Trotskyite-fascist” wreckers: “I must say something about the general charge that the P.O.U.M. was a secret Fascist organization in the pay of Franco and Hitler. . . . What was noticeable from the start was that no evidence was produced in support of this accusation; the thing was simply asserted with an air of authority.”11 Here one sees the germs of the totalitarian nature of information control found in the Ministry of Truth as it appears in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. As a supporter of the POUM, Orwell naturally feared arrest. He managed to escape the police dragnet and fled back to England. Almost immediately, Orwell wrote Homage to Catalonia, in which he told the truth about events in Spain: “This Spain business has upset me so that I really can’t write about anything else.”12 Since most of the British left was more sympathetic to the Communist line on Spain, this meant Orwell had difficulties getting his work published. He was furious at Communist influence in the publishing houses and even condemned Gollancz and the Left Book Club as “part of the Communism-racket.”13 Orwell did succeed in getting Homage published by Secker & Warburg in 1938, but it proved to be a commercial flop. While Homage to Catalonia is a moving mixture of war reporting and anti-Stalinist polemic, it still bore all the sentimentalism and theoretical limitations of Wigan Pier. Orwell was decidedly uninterested in Spanish politics and the causes of the civil war itself. In the book, he apologizes to the reader for the litany of political organizations he had to discuss, calling them “a plague of initials.”14 Orwell was also cavalier about the facts and got crucial details wrong about the civil war. For instance, he seemed completely unaware that the POUM did not favor a militia system like the anarchists, but was committed to creating a centralized red army. Even Orwell’s reasoning for fighting in Spain sounded like it was lifted directly from the text of Wigan Pier: I was not only uninterested in the political situation but unaware of it. I knew there was a war on, but I had no notion what kind of a war. If you had asked me why I had joined the militia I should have answered: “To fight against Fascism,” and if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered: “Common decency.”15



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The lasting impact of Orwell’s time in Spain cannot be underestimated when it comes to his later political evolution. As he said years later: “The Spanish war and other events in 1936–37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.”16 Having witnessed Stalinism up close, he was enraged at how it crushed opposition and manipulated the truth. Orwell had gone to Spain as a vague anti-fascist, but returned home with sympathy for the revolutionary left. Now he criticized the POUM from the left since they refused to complete the social revolution.17 He argued that the whole idea of a popular front was a political abomination: “It is a combination with about as much vitality, and about as much right to exist, as a pig with two heads or some other Barnum and Bailey monstrosity.”18 He believed that the bourgeoisie and the proletariat could not successfully fight together against fascism since their class interests were at odds. The bourgeoisie fought to maintain capitalism while the proletariat demanded socialism. These mutually opposed positions meant that the bourgeoisie would betray the working class. Therefore, Orwell said that the popular front placed communists on the side of the capitalists as was amply proved in Spain: When I left Barcelona in late June the jails were bulging; indeed, the regular jails had long since overflowed and the prisoners were being huddled into empty shops and any other temporary dump that could be found for them. But the point to notice is that the people who are in prison now are not Fascists but revolutionaries; they are there not because their opinions are too much to the Right, but because they are too much to the Left. And the people responsible for putting them there are . . . the Communists.19

Orwell’s newfound leftism did not mean he was now a Trotskyist. He saw the roots of Stalinism lying in Bolshevism with its rejection of democracy. He viewed the purges not as a unique feature of Stalinism, but something inherent in Leninism. As he said in June 1940: “Similarly, such horrors as the Russian purges never surprised me, because I had always felt that—not exactly that, but something like that—was implicit in Bolshevik rule. I could feel it in their literature.”20 When it came to Trotsky himself, Orwell condemned him as just as guilty for the emergence of Stalin as anyone else in the Communist Party: “Trotsky, in exile, denounces the Russian dictatorship, but he is probably as much responsible for it as any man now living, and there is no certainty that as a dictator he would be preferable to Stalin, though undoubtedly he has a much more interesting mind.”21 As war grew nearer in 1939, Orwell maintained his revolutionary, albeit non-Marxist, position. He expected that the war would not be fought to

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eliminate fascism, but would actually install fascism in Britain: “Only two or three years of it, and we may sink almost unresisting into some local variant of austro-Fascism. And perhaps a year or two later, in reaction against this, there will appear something we have never had in England yet—a real Fascist movement.”22 Orwell’s antiwar position abruptly changed once World War II began. Now he advocated rallying to the Union Jack and fighting a “People’s War” against Nazism. This position can best be described as “revolutionary patriotism,” which Orwell elaborated upon in his 1940 work, “My Country Right or Left.” Orwell’s revolutionary patriotism found its fullest expression in “The Lion and the Unicorn,” published the following year. Here, he outlined his clearest ideas on the nature of a socialist program. Among the demands were the nationalization of major industries, independence for India, and the reform of the educational system. Yet Orwell’s socialism remained confused with both a revolutionary and a conservative side. For example, he was opposed to the aristocracy, but did not advocate abolishing the monarchy. At the same time, Orwell argued that Britain should adopt the POUM’s position on revolutionary war: “The war and the revolution are inseparable. We cannot establish anything that a Western nation would regard as Socialism without defeating Hitler; on the hand we cannot defeat Hitler while we remain economically and socially in the nineteenth century.”23 Orwell readily admitted the contradictions of his vision of socialism: “It will not be doctrinaire, nor even logical. It will abolish the House of Lords, but quite probably will not abolish the Monarchy. It will leave anachronisms and loose ends everywhere, the judge in his ridiculous horsehair wig and the lion and the unicorn on the soldier’s cap-buttons. It will not set up any explicit class dictatorship.”24 Once the Soviet Union joined the war, Orwell grew ever more pessimistic about the future. By now, he considered the USSR and Nazi Germany as identical forms of totalitarianism. In a review of The Totalitarian Enemy by the ex-communist Franz Borkenau, he said: “The two régimes, having started from opposite ends, are rapidly evolving towards the same system—a form of oligarchical collectivism.”25 Orwell was particularly harsh when it came to middle class intellectuals, whom he believed practically worshipped at the altar of Stalin: “The truth is, of course, that the countless English intellectuals who kiss the arse of Stalin are not different from the minority who give their allegiance to Hitler or Mussolini. . . . It is important to notice that the cult of power tends to be mixed up with a love of cruelty and wickedness for their own sakes.”26 Orwell saw a pressing need to fight this new intellectual orthodoxy supporting the USSR. To that end, he took up his pen and wrote Animal Farm (1943), retelling the history of the Russian Revolution as a satirical children’s fable about farm animals. Animal Farm’s allegory is transparent with the



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humans representing capitalists, the pigs as the Bolsheviks, the dogs as the Soviet secret police, and the other animals representing the working class and peasantry. The pigs Snowball and Napoleon are stand-ins for Trotsky and Stalin respectively. At first, the farm animals rebel against a cruel human farmer to create an egalitarian society. But then, the revolution leads to the dictatorship of Napoleon. At the end, Orwell says the pigs are completely indistinguishable from the humans they have overthrown: Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.27

Due to the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, the publication of Animal Farm was delayed until late 1945. Animal Farm was an instant commercial and critical triumph upon its release. Arthur Koestler wrote to Orwell, hailing the book: “Envious congratulations . . . This is a glorious and heart-breaking allegory; it has the poesy of a fairytale and the precision of a chess problem. Reviewers will say that it ranks with Swift, and I shall agree with them.”28 Needless to say, the success of Animal Farm far exceeded Orwell’s expectations. Yet the meaning of Animal Farm was ambiguous for many leftist critics. Was it just a parable about Soviet totalitarianism or did the book represent a wider denunciation of socialism? The American Dwight Macdonald asked those very questions, leading Orwell to clarify his own position: [Animal Farm is meant] as a satire on the Russian revolution. But I did mean it to have wider application in so much that I meant that that kind of revolution (violent conspiratorial revolution, led by unconsciously power-hungry people) can only lead to a change of masters. I meant the moral to be that revolutions are only a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job. The turning-point of the story was supposed to be when the pigs kept the milk and apples for themselves (Kronstadt). If the other animals had had the sense to put their foot down then, it would have been all right . . . what I was trying to say was, “You can’t have a revolution unless you make it for yourself; there is no such thing as a benevolent dictatorship.”29

Judging by these remarks, Orwell still retained faith in his own idiosyncratic version of English socialism. What he rejected were revolutions of a Jacobin or Bolshevik type. Orwell considered totalitarianism to be implicit in the very nature of revolutions of that sort. Whether the leaders were Trotsky, Stalin, Robespierre, or Danton made no difference to him. Animal Farm’s moral is

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clear, if the workers undertake “that kind of revolution,” then it would inevitably end in the creation of a new dictatorship. Orwell’s thinking on the nature of totalitarianism was heavily influenced by the work of the former Trotskyist turned reactionary James Burnham. In The Managerial Revolution (1941), Burnham claimed that a collectivist society ruled by a managerial class would replace capitalism. Looking at social trends, Burnham argued that the Soviet Union was the country furthest down the road to a managerial society, but that Nazi Germany and the United States were not far behind. He even considered the New Deal to be a symptom of the coming managerial society: “But no candid observer, friend or enemy of the New Deal, can deny that in terms of economic, social, political, ideological changes from traditional capitalism, the New Deal moves in the same direction as Stalinism and Nazism. The New Deal is a phase of the transition from capitalism to managerial society.”30 Burnham concluded that a managerial revolution would fundamentally transform all aspects of society into one of total domination: “Control over the instruments of production will be exercised by the managers through their de facto control of the state institutions—through the managers themselves occupying the key directing positions in the ‘unlimited’ state which, in managerial society, will be a fused political-economic apparatus.”31 Burnham elaborated on the nature of politics in The Machiavellians (1943). He believed that politics can always be reduced to the pursuit of power: “The primary subject-matter of political science is the struggle for social power in its diverse open and concealed forms.”32 Ideology of any sort was simply a shield that masked the striving for domination. While totalitarianism may use democratic, fascist, or socialist trappings, it was simply about securing the rule of the powerful. In Burnham’s conception, humanity was moving towards a new totalitarian managerial society with an elite motivated by a sheer Nietzschean will to power. As World War II ended, Orwell believed that Burnham foresaw the division of the world between the major powers. Following in Burnham’s footsteps, Orwell predicted that these superpowers—Britain, USA, and USSR—would be locked in a permanent state of war: “Already, quite visibly and more or less with the acquiescence of all of us, the world is splitting up into the two or three huge super-states forecast in James Burnham’s Managerial Revolution. One cannot draw their exact boundaries as yet, but one can see more or less what areas they will comprise. And if the world does settle down into this pattern, it is likely that these vast states will be permanently at war with one another, though it will not necessarily be a very intensive or bloody kind of war.”33 In October 1945, Orwell said Burnham prophesized a “cold war” (in one of the earliest uses of the term): “James Burnham’s theory has been much



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discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications— that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbours.”34 It is during this period that Orwell first developed one of the main themes of Nineteen EightyFour, which was the division of the world into three superpowers locked in an unending war. As he said in 1948: “What [Nineteen Eighty-Four] is really meant to do is to discuss the implications of dividing the world up into ‘Zones of influence’ (I thought of it in 1944 as a result of the Teheran [sic] Conference), & in addition to indicate by parodying them the intellectual implications of totalitarianism.”35 In “Second Thoughts on James Burnham” published in May 1946, Orwell dissented from Burnham’s ideas on a number of points. Of interest, he noted Burnham possessed an adulation for power that Orwell had diagnosed in fellow-traveling middle-class intellectuals: “It is important to bear in mind what I said above: that Burnham’s theory is only a variant—an American variant, and interesting because of its comprehensiveness—of the power worship now so prevalent among intellectuals.”36 Orwell also disagreed with Burnham’s contention that totalitarianism was inevitable and socialism was impossible: “As for the claim that ‘human nature,’ or ‘inexorable laws’ of this and that, make Socialism impossible, is simply a projection of the past into the future. In effect, Burnham argues that because a society of free and equal human beings has never existed, it never can exist. By the same argument one could have demonstrated the impossibility of aeroplanes in 1900, or of motor cars in 1850.”37 Interestingly, Orwell asks a question of Burnham on the nature of power that applies even more to himself: “It is curious that in all his talk about the struggle for power, Burnham never stops to ask why people want power. He seems to assume that power hunger, although only dominant in comparatively few people, is a natural instinct that does not have to be explained, like the desire for food. He also assumes that the division of society into classes serves the same purpose in all ages.”38 Despite a great deal of convergence of his ideas with Burnham, Orwell still gambled on the possibilities of English democratic socialism. However, Orwell’s hope of a “third way” vanished as the Cold War with the division between East and West set in. Now he saw the spread of Soviet totalitarianism as a real danger. Orwell joined with Arthur Koestler in a campaign of “psychological disarmament” by distributing anticommunist works inside the Soviet Union. In addition, he was in contact with the International Relief and Rescue Committee (IRRC) to help promote an American speaking tour for Koestler. These associations placed Orwell squarely in the anticommunist camp. The IRRC had ties to the American State Department, and Koestler was

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positioning himself as the front man in the CIA’s cultural cold war.39 Finally in 1949, Orwell gave a list of thirty-six names of suspected communist sympathizers over to the Information Research Department (IRD), which was an arm of British intelligence: “It isn’t a bad idea to have the people who are probably unreliable listed.”40 As he told Gollancz in 1947, if war came, then he was on the side of the United States: I know that your position in recent years has been not very far from mine, but I don’t know what it would be if, for instance, there is another seeming rapprochement between Russia and the West, which is a possible development in the next few years. Or again in an actual war situation. I don’t, God knows, want a war to break out, but if one were compelled to choose between Russia and America—and I suppose that is the choice one might have to make—I would always choose America.41

Orwell had chosen his side. In the last years of his life, Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was his most mature and comprehensive work on totalitarianism. Nineteen Eighty-Four takes place in a dystopian world of the not-so-distant future (1984) where three totalitarian states—Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia—are locked in permanent conflict. The novel takes place wholly in Oceania, which is ruled by the “Party” led by the unseen, but ever-present “Big Brother.” In Oceania, all dissent is wiped out and total thought control is maintained by the Thought Police who enforce the ideology of “Ingsoc” (English socialism). The different influences used to construct the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four are easily recognizable. The division of the world into three superstates is merely Burnham’s Managerial Revolution portrayed in fictional form. Orwell also borrows heavily from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s earlier dystopian novel We. The analogies are equally transparent as well. Oceania corresponds to both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, while Big Brother is an amalgamation of Stalin and Hitler. A permanent enemy modeled on Trotsky in the person of Emmanuel Goldstein also appears. The novel’s protagonist is Winston Smith, a low-level bureaucrat at the “Ministry of Truth” who secretly opposes the party and hopes for rebellion by the proles (Orwell’s name for the proletariat). Winston’s dissidence is eventually discovered by the Party, and he is mentally tortured and broken. Nineteen Eighty-Four ends with a “reformed” Winston proclaiming that he now loves Big Brother. The strength of Nineteen Eighty-Four lies in its vivid descriptions of Oceania’s methods of control and domination. However, Orwell’s theoretical weakness stands out since he cannot explain the emergence of the system or how to combat it. For example, Winston Smith reads Emmanuel Goldstein’s



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The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism to answer those central questions: “I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.”42 Just as Winston opens the chapter that explains “why,” he is arrested. During his interrogation by the inner-party chief O’Brien, Winston is given the answers he sought: The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. . . . We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?43

No other explanation than sheer power can be given because Orwell is unable to dig any deeper. He sees only the surface level of power, where it inflicts savagery and degradation on human beings, becoming almost a sadomasochistic aphrodisiac in the hands of totalitarian torturers. In the end, Orwell’s answer to the why of totalitarianism is the same as Burnham: the goal of power is power. Orwell does not want to just throw up his arms in utter despair. At one point, Winston expresses belief that the proles would lead a popular revolt: “If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles. If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated.”44 Despite everything, the proles seem to hold onto their basic humanity and decency: “The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside.”45 In the end, Winston concludes that the proles are trapped in a vicious circle that keeps them forever enslaved: “Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”46 Whatever Orwell (or Winston) may wish, no revolutionary agency by the proles is possible. Even if a revolution did occur, it would just end with Big Brother in a new guise. Totalitarianism cannot be escaped and is the end of history. As O’Brien puts it: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”47 Like Animal Farm, Orwell claimed that Nineteen Eighty-Four was not an attack on socialism or the British Labour Party. He intended the work to serve as a warning that the dangers of totalitarianism lurked in the West as much as the East. It was a future he hoped would not come to pass: My recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralised economy is liable and which have already been partly realised in Communism and Fascism. I do not believe that the kind of society I

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describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive. I believe also that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences. The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasise that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.48

People who defend Orwell as left-wing, such as the British socialist John Newsinger, claim that Nineteen Eighty-Four was not a right-wing book. Yet as Deutscher has shown, whatever Orwell’s good intentions, the reception of Nineteen Eighty-Four certainly served reactionary ends: “The novel has served as a sort of an ideological super-weapon in the cold war. As in no other book or document, the convulsive fear of communism, which has swept the West since the end of the Second World War, has been reflected and focused in 1984.”49 The anticommunist appropriation of Orwell was no accident. His status as a dissenter and democratic socialist made him more appealing than resurrecting discredited theories of “Judeo-Bolshevism.” Yet Orwell’s ideas in a fundamental way were not so different since they both saw communism caused by evil without rhyme or reason. The end result for the “bolt from the blue,” in either its right or “left” varieties is that revolutions always create a hell on earth. NOTES 1. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1958), xx–xxi. 2. Ibid., 221. 3. Ibid., 231. For Orwell and the Independent Labour Party, see George Orwell, “Why I Joined the Independent Labour Party,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell 1920–1940, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968a), 336–38 and John Newsinger, Hope Lies in the Proles: George Orwell and the Left (London: Pluto Press, 2018), 29–32. 4. Orwell 1958, 220. 5. Ibid., 196 and 200. 6. Ibid., 215. 7. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (New York: Harcourt, 1980), 4. See Chomsky’s discussion of Orwell in Spain in New Mandarins and American Power (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969), 23–158. 8. Orwell 1980, 62–63. 9. Ibid., 71. 10. Ibid., 53. 11. Ibid., 170.



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12. “Letter to the Editor of Time and Tide,” in Orwell 1968a, 289. 13. Ibid., 279. 14. Orwell 1980, 47. 15. Ibid. For background on the POUM, see Doug Enaa Greene, “The POUM: Those who would?” LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal, January 3, 2015. http:​//​links​.org​.au​/node​/4229. 16. Why I Write in Orwell 1968a, 5. 17. See “Spilling the Spanish Beans” and “Letter to Jellinek” in Orwell 1968a, 271 and 364. 18. “Spilling the Spanish Beans” in Orwell 1968a, 271. 19. Ibid., 270. 20. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume II: My Country Right or Left 1940–1943, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Jaffrey, NH: Nonpareil Books, 2000), 346. While Orwell was completely opposed to Trotskyism, he defended Trotskyists against Stalinist slanders. At the Nuremburg trials, both Orwell and Koestler signed a petition calling for Rudolf Hess to be interrogated for allegedly meeting with Trotsky. See The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume IV: In Front of Your Nose 1945–1950, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: The Camelot Press Ltd., 1968c), 115–16. Orwell was also in correspondence with Victor Serge and read his Memoirs of a Revolutionary. See ibid., 122–23, 159, and 194. He also read Trotsky’s Stalin with interest. See ibid., 194–96. Finally, he mocked the Moscow Trials. See his review of Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia in 1968a, 368–69. 21. “Review: Russia under Soviet Rule” in Orwell 1968a, 381. 22. “Not Counting Niggers,” in ibid., 398. Austro-Fascism in lower-case in the original. In Inside the Whale, written the following year, Orwell still feared that an age of totalitarianism was fated to fall upon the world: “The autonomous individual is going to be stamped out of existence. But this means that literature, in the form in which we know it, must suffer at least a temporary death. The literature of liberalism is coming to an end and the literature of totalitarianism has not yet appeared and is barely imaginable.” See ibid., 523. 23. “The Lion and the Unicorn” in Orwell 2000, 190. 24. Ibid., 93. 25. See “Review of The Totalitarian Enemy by F. Borkenau” in Orwell 2000, 25. 26. See Raffles and Miss Blandish in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume III: As I Please 1943–1945, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1968b), 222. In “My Country Right or Left,” Orwell said the following about middle-class intellectuals and revolutionary patriotism: “It is exactly the people whose hearts have never leapt at the sight of a Union Jack who will flinch from revolution when the moment comes.” Quoted in “My Country Right or Left” in Orwell 1968a, 540. 27. George Orwell, Animal Farm (Harlow: Longman Group Ltd., 1983), 88. 28. Quoted in Michael Scammell, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic (New York: Random House, 2009), 246.

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29. Quoted in John Newsinger, Orwell’s Politics (New York: Palgrave, 1999), 118. Later Orwell said: “I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement.” See George Orwell, “George Orwell’s Preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm,” George Orwell Foundation. https:​//​www​.orwellfoundation​.com​/the​-orwell​-foundation​/orwell​/books​ -by​-orwell​/animal​-farm​/preface​-to​-the​-ukrainian​-edition​-of​-animal​-farm​-by​-george​ -orwell​/. 30. James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution or What is Happening in the World Right Now (London: Putnam and Company Limited, 1944), 243. 31. Ibid., 117. See also Daniel Kelly, James Burnham and the Struggle for the World: A Life (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2002), 91–114. 32. James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (New York: John Day Company, Inc., 1943), 224. 33. Orwell 1968b, 328. 34. “You and the Atomic Bomb” in Orwell 1968c, 9. 35. “Letter to Roger Senhouse—26 December 1948,” in Orwell 1968c, 460. 36. “James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution” in Orwell 1968c 178. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 177. 39. Scott Lucas, Orwell (London: Haus Publishing Limited, 2003), 91. See also Duncan White, Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War (New York: Custom House, 2019), 219. 40. Quoted in Lucas 2003, 109. See also Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 2013), 252. 41. See “Orwell’s letter to Victor Gollancz—25 March 1947” in Orwell 1968c., 309. 42. George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Signet Classic, 1983), 68. Goldstein’s book is an obvious parallel for Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed. See Isaac Deutscher, ‘1984’— The Mysticism of Cruelty in Heretics and Renegades (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1969), 47. However, the theoretical side of Goldstein’s book bears a resemblance to the managerial society described in James Burnham’s Managerial Revolution. Newsinger argues that the book draws from the work of Dwight MacDonald’s theorizations of bureaucratic collectivism far more than from Burnham. See Newsinger 1999, 127. See also Anna Chen, “George Orwell: A Literary Trotskyist?” International Socialism 2, no. 85 (Winter 1999). Marxists Internet Archive. https:​//​ www​.marxists​.org​/history​/etol​/newspape​/isj2​/1999​/isj2–085​/chen​ htm. 43. Orwell 1983, 217. 44. Ibid., 60. 45. Ibid., 136. 46. Ibid., 61. 47. Ibid., 220. 48. “Letter to Francis A. Henson (extract)—16 June 1949,” in Orwell 1968c, 502. Emphasis is Orwell’s. 49. “Mysticism of Cruelty” in Deutscher 1969, 35. Newsinger says the following about the leftist credentials of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: “The fable offered



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little comfort to the conservative right. Not only did it wholeheartedly endorse the initial revolutionary act, it also went on implicitly to condemn the Soviet Union, not for being socialist, but for betraying socialism, for becoming indistinguishable in its conduct from the other great powers, for exploiting its own people and joining in the division of the world.” See also Newsinger 1999, 116. For the impact of Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four in the United States, see Saunders 2013, 247–53.

Chapter Three

Stalinism as a Bolt From the Blue The Counter-Enlightenment Project

A. TOTALITARIANISM The dominant “bolt from the blue” approach of analyzing Stalinism and communism can be summarized with a single word: totalitarianism. More than a mere authoritarian dictatorship, totalitarianism implies absolute domination over all aspects of society, even reaching into the souls of ordinary people to brainwash them. As a theory of Stalinism, totalitarianism cannot explain the internal dynamics of the Soviet Union since it posits a completely static society ruled by unchallenged terror. History is frozen, with any internal reform or rebellion from below deemed impossible.‌‌ While it fails as a theory of history, totalitarianism served two other major functions. First, it acted as a convenient rationale for the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Secondly, totalitarianism was the ideological foundation of a new counter-Enlightenment project, which sought to discredit the very idea of an alternative to capitalism. In its most developed form, the high priests of this counter-Enlightenment project argued that the origins of totalitarianism lay in radical Enlightenment philosophy and the French Revolution. The mere idea of reason was condemned as the original sin of communism. However, totalitarianism and the counter-Enlightenment project did not emerge fully grown like Athena from the head of Zeus. It took time and effort for the scattered ideas found in Orwell, Burnham, and others to finally congeal together. Originally, the term “totalitarianism” had nothing to do with communism at all. One of its first uses came in 1923 when the Italian journalist Giovanni Amendola used totalitarianism to describe the nature of Benito Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship. Amendola meant this as a pejorative, but Mussolini proudly adopted totalitarianism as his own label: “Our formula is this: everything within the state, nothing outside the state, no one against the state.”1 Later, Mussolini’s official philosopher Giovanni Gentile expanded on the 27

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term in his Origins and Doctrine of Fascism (1927), making totalitarianism central to the very definition of fascism: “The first point, therefore, that must be established in a definition of Fascism, is the totalitarian character of its doctrine, which concerns itself not only with political order and direction of the nation, but with its will, thought and sentiment.”2 Therefore, both Mussolini and Gentile accepted that fascism was a totalitarian doctrine that sought to create an organic unity between the state, economy, and society that incorporated the masses in its mission of national rebirth. By the 1930s, totalitarianism was one of many ideas used by oppositional Marxists such as Boris Souvarine, Leon Trotsky, and Victor Serge to describe Stalin’s rule in the USSR. In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky identified the growth of social inequality and the power of the ruling bureaucracy as the two main totalitarian characteristics of Stalinism. While Trotsky noted the similarity between the Soviet Union and fascist states, he did not consider them identical since they were based upon different property relations.3 Others on the left worked out more systematic theories of totalitarianism to describe the Soviet Union. Using the theory of elites developed by the sociologist Vilfredo Pareto, Franz Borkenau argued that the Bolsheviks created a new and oppressive elite society. He believed that Bolshevik elitism was something that it shared with fascism: “From the point of view of the theory of domination and of elites, Bolshevism and Fascism can only really be treated as slightly different specimens of the same species of dictatorship.”4 Borkenau concluded that Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Stalinist Russia were all totalitarian states that were dominated by new elites and one-party regimes that claimed total power in both political life and over the economy. Another left analysis of the USSR as a new totalitarian state was advanced by the German social democrat Rudolf Hilferding in State Capitalism or Totalitarian State Economy (1940). Hilferding also said that Germany and Italy were moving in the same totalitarian direction.5 On the political right, Winston Churchill saw Nazi Germany as a totalitarian threat to the British Empire and Europe. As Britain rushed to appease Hitler in 1938, Churchill argued that Nazism was a totalitarian menace on par with the Soviet Union: We are confronted with another theme. It is not a new theme; it leaps out upon us from the Dark Ages—racial persecution, religious intolerance, deprivation of free speech, the conception of the citizen as a mere soulless fraction of the State. To this has been added the cult of war. Children are to be taught in their earliest schooling the delights and profits of conquest and aggression. A whole mighty community has been drawn painfully, by severe privations, into a warlike frame. They are held in this condition, which they relish no more than we do, by a party organisation, several millions strong, who derive all kinds of



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profits, good and bad, from the upkeep of the regime. Like the Communists, the Nazis tolerate no opinion but their own. Like the Communists, they feed on hatred. Like the Communists, they must seek, from time to time, and always at shorter intervals, a new target, a new prize, a new victim. The Dictator, in all his pride, is held in the grip of his Party machine. He can go forward; he cannot go back. He must blood his hounds and show them sport, or else, like Actaeon of old, be devoured by them. All-strong without, he is all-weak within. As Byron wrote a hundred years ago: “These Pagod things of Sabre sway, with fronts of brass and feet of clay.”6

After the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed, many across the political spectrum in Britain and the United States claimed that Germany and Russia were part of the same species of totalitarianism. The idea of totalitarian twins was dropped once the Wehrmacht invaded the USSR. Now, Stalin and the Red Army were praised in Western propaganda as valiant freedom-loving allies in the struggle against Hitler. The war did not mean that the concept of totalitarianism was completely abandoned. The Frankfurt School theorist, Franz Neumann utilized it in Behemoth (1942), his study of Nazi Germany. However, Neumann saw Germany’s totalitarianism located in its monopoly capitalist economy and did not consider it to be structurally similar to the USSR. These ideas were welcomed in influential government circles such as the State Department and the OSS without much issue. Other ideas on totalitarianism were considered beyond the pale of respectability. For instance, the sociologist Robert Nisbet pioneered one of the later arguments of the counter-Enlightenment that Rousseau was the intellectual source of both Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism. As Nisbet recalled, his ideas were largely marginalized during the war: “‘Totalitarianism’ was not a ready concept in the minds of American political scientists and historians during the first three decades of totalitarianism’s history in Europe. . . . There was much resistance in American universities to any use of ‘totalitarian’ that covered alike the Soviets and Nazis and their states.”7 Totalitarianism took on a new life with the beginning of the Cold War. The defeat of the Third Reich meant that the Soviet Union was now considered the new enemy to the American way of life. To fight the communist threat required not only weapons and soldiers, but experts who understood it. Now the United States government and businesses began funding research programs on communism and the Soviet Union. The subsequent expansion of Soviet studies was immense according to Stephen Cohen: “Funded generously by private foundations and the federal government, Russian-Soviet area programs spread quickly from Columbia and Harvard in the East to more than a hundred universities and colleges across the country. Administration,

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faculty, courses, graduate studies, academic and government jobs, scholarly publications, and library acquisitions proliferated.”8 Many of these anticommunist scholars willingly worked with the American State Department, military, and the Central Intelligence Agency to fight communism. The few leftists and others critical of the Cold War were largely driven out of academia once the Red Scare began. As opposed to its earlier inconsistent uses, totalitarianism was now fully fleshed out to act as the new anti-communist consensus. One of the seminal works was Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Arendt defined totalitarianism as a form of all-encompassing state power that rules people through a machinery of terror and violence. She said that totalitarianism in Germany and Russia was a radically new form of government that aimed to remake society and human beings. When it came to the ingredients that allowed totalitarianism to emerge, Arendt found them in anti-Semitism, imperialism, and mass society. The first two conditions were necessary for Nazism, but not for Stalinism. However, both forms of totalitarianism could only grow with modern culture and mass politics: “Totalitarian movements are possible wherever there are masses who for one reason or another have acquired the appetite for political organization.”9 Arendt argued that in totalitarian movements, mass politics is transformed into the frenzy of the mob. It is from the mob where aspiring dictators like Hitler appear: “But the most gifted mass leaders of our time have still risen from the mob rather than from the masses. Hitler’s biography reads like a textbook example in this respect.”10 Since Hitler owed his power to brownshirt thugs, Arendt did not think he was a bourgeois instrument: “The mob as leader of these masses was no longer the agent of the bourgeoisie or of anyone else except the masses.”11 In other words, it was murderous mobs, not the structural features of capitalism, that made Nazi totalitarianism possible. Russia was different since Stalin was not the product of a street mob but belonged to the Bolshevik party machine. To create totalitarianism, Stalin used the bureaucracy to atomize society and usurp the power of the soviets. This was a steady process that was only completed during the purges, when Stalin’s power became truly totalitarian: Mass atomization in Soviet society was achieved by the skillful use of repeated purges which invariably precede actual group liquidation. . . . In the last analysis, it has been through the development of this device to its farthest and most fantastic extremes that Bolshevik rulers have succeeded in creating an atomized and individualized society the like of which we have never seen before and which events or catastrophes alone would hardly have brought about.12



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Despite their different starting points, Arendt said that Nazism and Stalinism possessed identical organizational forms, proving their shared totalitarian nature: In this, as in so many other respects, Nazism and Bolshevism arrived at the same organizational result from very different historical beginnings. The Nazis started with the fiction of a conspiracy and modeled themselves, more or less consciously, after the example of the secret society of the Elders of Zion, whereas the Bolsheviks came from a revolutionary party, whose aim was one-party dictatorship, passed through a stage in which the party was “entirely apart and above everything” to the moment when the Politburo of the party was “entirely apart from and above everything”; finally Stalin imposed upon this party structure the rigid totalitarian rules of its conspiratory sector and only then discovered the need for a central fiction to maintain the iron discipline of a secret society under the conditions of a mass organization. The Nazi development may be more logical, more consistent in itself, but the history of the Bolshevik party offers a better illustration of the essentially fictitious character of totalitarianism, precisely because the fictitious global conspiracies against and according to which the Bolshevik conspiracy is supposedly organized have not been ideologically fixed.13

Arendt said that both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany provided a template for a new breed of dictatorship that was unlike any others in history: Up to now we know only two authentic forms of totalitarian domination: the dictatorship of National Socialism after 1938, and the dictatorship of Bolshevism since 1930. These forms of domination differ basically from other kinds of dictatorial, despotic or tyrannical rule; and even though they have developed, with a certain continuity, from party dictatorships, their essentially totalitarian features are new and cannot be derived from one-party systems. The goal of one-party systems is not only to seize the government administration but, by filling all offices with party members, to achieve a complete amalgamation of state and party, so that after the seizure of power the party becomes a kind of propaganda organization for the government. This system is “total” only in a negative sense, namely, in that the ruling party will tolerate no other parties, no opposition and no freedom of political opinion. Once a party dictatorship has come to power, it leaves the original power relationship between state and party intact; the government and the army exercise the same power as before, and the “revolution” consists only in the fact that all government positions are now occupied by party members. In all these cases the power of the party rests on a monopoly guaranteed by the state and the party no longer possesses its own power center.14

Building off Arendt’s work, the political scientists Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski in Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956)

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refined totalitarianism to six main features: 1) an all-embracing ideology; 2) a single party typically led by one dictator; 3) rule by terror carried out by a secret police force; 4) total control of the press and all forms of communication; 5) a state monopoly over all weapons; 6) state control of the entire economy.15 While the totalitarian school was united in their anti-communism, they were not homogeneous in their thinking. Theorists ranged from democratic socialists to classical liberals to conservatives to reactionaries. There was lively debate and disagreement among them on issues great and small. While Arendt saw totalitarianism as a product of modernity, Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) claimed that it had roots in Plato and Aristotle: “What we call nowadays totalitarianism belongs to a tradition which is just as old or just as young as our civilization itself.”16 Another disagreement lay over economics. Many anti-communists were supporters of the New Deal and some sort of welfare state. However, Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) argued that totalitarianism began with state interference in the natural workings of capitalism. Hayek said that totalitarianism was premised on a collectivist—as opposed to an individualist—worldview: And, indeed, socialists everywhere were the first to recognise that the task they had set themselves required the general acceptance of a common Weltanschauung, of a definite set of values. It was in these efforts to produce a mass movement supported by such a single world view, that the socialists first created most of the instruments of indoctrination of which Nazis and Fascists have made such effective use.17

Considering his fear of the power of collectivism, Hayek agreed with Arendt that mass politics was a breeding ground for totalitarianism. This led him to distrust democracy since the people could vote the “wrong way” for collectivist parties who would institute state control of the economy. Hayek stated that a planned economy would naturally require the use of totalitarian means to enforce it: “But in a society which for its functioning depends on central planning, this control cannot be made dependent on a majority being able to agree; it will often be necessary that the will of a small minority be imposed upon the people, because this minority will be the largest group able to agree among themselves on the question at issue.”18 For Hayek, the ultimate guarantee against totalitarianism lay in the unrestricted power of free-market capitalism. For all their internal debates, the totalitarian school told a singular story when it came to the history of communism. The script practically writes itself. The roots of communist totalitarianism were found in Lenin’s idea of



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the vanguard party developed in What Is to Be Done? Supposedly, Lenin said workers were too backward and stupid to understand socialist theory. For their own good, the working class must be led by a communist elite. Lenin’s vanguard party served as the model for all other communist parties in their quest to achieve totalitarian rule. As Alfred Meyer wrote in his study of Leninism: Perhaps Lenin’s most conspicuous contribution to twentieth century politics is his conception of the Communist Party as a creative history-making force and as the general staff of the world revolution. In the Bolshevik movement, he created the model on which many other modern totalitarian parties have been built. Lenin must therefore be considered a pioneer of the totalitarianism of our age.19

Since the Bolsheviks were a small conspiratorial organization by design, they were not representative of the Russian people. Thanks to Lenin’s clever manipulation and demagoguery, the Bolsheviks took power in 1917 not through a popular uprising, but by a violent coup d’état. Following the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks showed their true colors by monopolizing power and launching the Red Terror. After their victory in the civil war, the Bolsheviks were forced to retreat partially from totalitarianism by introducing the New Economic Policy (NEP). After Lenin died, there was a succession struggle between Trotsky, Stalin, and Bukharin within the Bolshevik Party. According to Sovietologist Adam Ulam, this struggle had little to do with either politics or program, but was wholly about personalities and power: Here, Communism seemed tainted by an original sin of its own: a lust for power which made those who actually wield it feel they could never have enough. And for those who tasted power and then lost it the addiction seemed to remain as strong as ever. They could not be appeased with positions of honor and influence, ministerial and ambassadorial posts that were still freely distributed to party leaders in disgrace. These were but temporary stops in their descent they felt.20

Stalin, like all other communists, could not resist the allure of power. His obsessions, ruthlessness, and sadism exemplified the Bolshevik mental universe: “But do we need any sensational revelations to understand Stalin? No, the explanation of his life is as banal as many of his own speeches: he was corrupted by absolute power. . . . His mentality mirrored that of Communism as a whole, though in a hugely exaggerated form.”21 After defeating his rivals, Stalin abandoned the NEP and embarked upon a campaign of industrialization and collectivization. This extended the total control of the Communist Party across the vast reaches of the USSR. Later in

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the 1930s, Stalin destroyed all opposition and reduced the populace to slavery and passivity. A true totalitarian state had been created in Russia that dwarfed the power of the czars. Now the USSR was permanently ruled by terror. As Merle Fainsod said in How Russia Is Ruled (1953), “terror is the linchpin of modern totalitarianism.”22 Following the brutal test of World War II, the Soviet Union emerged as a military superpower challenging the free world. Now the United States must defeat totalitarianism, otherwise the communists would usher in a new age of godlessness and servitude. B. THE REVISIONIST CHALLENGE In the early period of the Cold War, totalitarianism’s claims were accepted by the mainstream of American society without much question. Ironically, this produced a level of ideological uniformity in the United States more consistent with its communist enemy than the “open society” that it claimed to be defending. A major thaw in Soviet studies began in the 1960s and 1970s as a new generation of revisionist scholars emerged. These revisionists such as Robert C. Tucker, Moshe Lewin, Stephen Cohen, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and J. Arch Getty were open to new perspectives that challenged many of the key precepts of totalitarianism and anti-communism. Even in the 1950s at its height, the totalitarian school was not unchallenged. There were a number of dissenters, and among the most prominent was Isaac Deutscher. An independent Marxist, Deutscher was the author of widely acclaimed biographies of Stalin and Trotsky. He offered an alternative interpretation of the USSR that questioned many anti-communist truths, namely that Stalinism was a faithful evolution of Bolshevism and Marxism. As will be discussed later, while Deutscher slid into apologetics for Stalinism, he was honest enough to admit the existence of communist alternatives. Despite Deutscher’s impressive scholarship, he was blacklisted from academia and forced to work as a journalist. When there was a possibility of Deutscher being awarded a professorship at the University of Sussex, the Cold War liberal Isaiah Berlin made sure that did not happen. Writing to Sussex’s vice chancellor, Berlin said: “The candidate of whom you speak is the only man whose presence in the same academic community as myself I should find morally intolerable.”23 Another nonconformist was the former British diplomat Edward Hallett Carr. Originally a right-wing liberal, one of his earlier works was Karl Marx: A Study in Fanaticism (1934), which was an unsympathetic biography. Later in life, Carr found the work so embarrassing that he refused to allow it to be reprinted. During World War II, he developed a deep admiration for the Soviet Union: “In The Times I very quickly began to plug the Russian alliance; and,



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when this was vindicated by Russian endurance and the Russian victory, it revived my initial faith in the Russian revolution as a great achievement and a historical turning-point.”24 After the war, Carr wrote his magnum opus, a fourteen-volume History of Soviet Russia (1950–1978), which covered the first twelve years of Soviet history (1917–1929). His work was meticulously researched with an enormous amount of data gathered from primary sources and a host of secondary ones. While Carr was far more sympathetic to the Soviet Union than the totalitarian school, he accepted their view that Stalinism necessarily grew out of Bolshevism: “I think we must accept rapid industrialization as a postulate of Soviet policy. Neither in the climate of the period, nor retrospectively, did any alternative policy seem plausible.”25 Despite their different temperaments—Carr being the pragmatic realist and Deutscher being a committed Marxist—the two were close friends and scholarly compatriots. For years, they practically stood alone offering alternatives to the onslaught of anti-communism. The sensibility of the sixties and the protests against the Vietnam War extended from the streets into Soviet studies. These early revisionists questioned anti-communist orthodoxy that the Soviet Union had started the Cold War and was bent on global conquest. As Ronald Grigor Suny notes: “the revisionist undermining of the orthodox liberal consensus profoundly affected many young scholars who were then able to interrogate hitherto axiomatic foundational notions about the Soviet Union and the nature of communism.”26 Drawing upon new fields of social movements, cultural history, and structuralism, the revisionists undertook major challenges to the totalitarian paradigm. One of the older revisionists was Robert Tucker, a former diplomat to the USSR and a longtime student of Marxism. In contrast to the totalitarians, Tucker believed that the Soviet Union possessed a dynamic system. Yet he agreed with them that Stalin exercised near-total power, an assumption not shared by later revisionists. Tucker broke with totalitarianism in other ways. He did not view Stalinism as a natural evolution of Leninism, but believed its roots lay more in czarism and Russian culture. In an ironic twist, Tucker saw the USSR and Nazi Germany as similar totalitarian regimes, but he said they were both right-wing and anti-communist: Kinship is not identity. There were differences, among them the fact that Stalin’s Bolshevism, despite its covert and after the war increasingly overt anti-Semitism, did not preach a biological racism like Hitler’s. But the likenesses were many and deep. Both regimes, with the proviso just mentioned in Stalinism’s case, were anti-Communist. Both were chauvinist, and idealized elements of the national past. Both were statist and imperialist. Both were enemyobsessed. Both were terroristic and practiced torture in their prisons. Under both

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regimes state terrorism was linked with a theory of international conspiracy: a Jewish anti-Aryan conspiracy in Hitler’s case and an anti-Soviet one in Stalin’s. Both were regimes of personal dictatorship with a leader cult. Both featured cults of heroes and heroism. Both exalted youth, physical strength, and motherhood. The one emphasized what was narodny; the other, what was volkisch. Both favored grandiosity in architecture. Both were antiliberal, anticosmopolitan, and antimodernist. They were both radicalisms of the right.27

Another revisionist was Moshe Lewin, a Red Army veteran and a former member of the Israeli Communist Party, a background that provided him with unique insight into both the Soviet Union and leftist politics. In Lenin’s Last Struggle (1968), he challenged the Cold War stereotype of Lenin as a brutal dictator who laid the groundwork for Stalin. Lewin argued that at the end of his life, Lenin was deeply concerned with the growing bureaucratization of the USSR and wanted Stalin removed from power. After Lenin’s death, the Stalinist bureaucracy proceeded to annihilate Bolshevism. Lewin concluded that Stalinism represented a radical break with Leninism in every way imaginable: “Stalin worked hard, in fact, to eliminate ideologically and physically both Bolshevism as a political party and Leninism as its guiding strategic orientation.”28 Lewin rejected the claims that Stalinism was inevitable since this followed a teleological and fatalistic view of history that refused to admit the existence of alternative paths: But unless they take a rigidly deterministic view of history, in which case the fact that events followed a particular pattern is of itself sufficient proof that no other pattern was possible, then historians who interpret Stalin’s role in this light must be prepared to support their theory with proofs, as they would any other. In order to furnish such proof, they must examine the alternative courses of action which were proposed at the time, they must show what their weaknesses were, and how in the end they came to be rejected. It is just such alternatives that concern us in the present study, for in our view it is equally legitimate to argue from the opposite standpoint, and to demonstrate, where there are grounds for doing so, that there existed an alternative, which was a valid one but which, for certain reasons, was not adopted.29

Lewin’s preferred alternative to Stalinism was the market socialist Nikolai Bukharin. During the 1960s and 1970s, he sympathized with socialist reformers in the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union considering their criticisms of the wasteful overcentralized economies analogous to those raised by Bukharin decades earlier.30 Another revisionist who supported Bukharin as an alternative to Stalin was the Princeton professor, Stephen F. Cohen. In his biography of Bukharin,



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Cohen argued that the Bolsheviks were not an ideological monolith but contained many different ideas that were always contending with each other.31 This tradition of Bolshevik openness and pluralism continued into the 1920s with the NEP. For Cohen, the NEP era was a lost golden age of Bolshevism. He did not consider Stalinism inevitable since Bukharin’s program was available. When Stalin ended the NEP and launched the revolution from above, this was something no Bolshevik had ever contemplated: “Stalin’s new policies of 1929–33, the ‘great change’ as they became known, were a radical departure from Bolshevik programmatic thinking. No Bolshevik leader or faction had ever advocated anything akin to imposed collectivization, the ‘liquidation’ of alleged prosperous peasants (kulaks), breakneck heavy industrialization, the destruction of the entire market sector, and a ‘plan’ that was in reality no plan at all, only hypercentralized control of the economy plus exhortations.”32 Cohen had a direct impact on the Soviet Union as well. Like Lewin, Cohen sympathized with Bukharin-inspired reformists such as Mikhail Gorbachev. When Glasnost and Perestroika began, he enthusiastically welcomed the initiatives. Cohen even traveled to the USSR and became friends with Gorbachev, who welcomed the scholar into his inner circle. After reading Cohen’s work, Gorbachev decided to rehabilitate Bukharin in 1988.33 While Tucker, Lewin, and Cohen all stressed the discontinuity between Leninism and Stalinism, other revisionists such as Sheila Fitzpatrick emphasized overall continuity. For Fitzpatrick, the essential question regarding the Russian Revolution was not about alternative paths, but how the gains of the Bolshevik Revolution were secured by Stalin’s “second revolution” in the 1930s: I trace lines of continuity between Lenin’s revolution and Stalin’s. As to the inclusion of Stalin’s “revolution from above” in the Russian Revolution, this is a question on which historians may legitimately differ. But the issue here is not whether 1917 and 1929 were alike, but whether they were part of the same process. Napoleon’s revolutionary wars can be included in our general concept of the French Revolution, even if we do not regard them as an embodiment of the spirit of 1789; and a similar approach seems legitimate in the case of the Russian Revolution.34

Fitzpatrick argued that the Five-Year Plans opened up new opportunities for the working class to fill posts in the expanding party and state bureaucracies. In what she dubbed the Soviet “Cultural Revolution,” the old administrative elite was replaced by hundreds of thousands of workers, who were rapidly promoted into vacant positions. Fitzpatrick claims that the Cultural Revolution was not simply about material gain, but there was a genuineness

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involved since many truly believed in the ideals of communism. Whatever the limitations of the Cultural Revolution, Fitzpatrick says it represented a radical challenge to bourgeois values in all areas of Soviet life. She has also confronted the totalitarian thesis on several other counts. For instance, Fitzpatrick has shown through her studies of social history and everyday life that the Soviet Union was not an inert society, even during the darkest days of Stalinism. In Stalin’s Peasants (1994), she detailed how the peasantry managed to both accommodate and resist collectivization. In Everyday Stalinism (1999), Fitzpatrick looked at how the populace endured the new ways of life that Stalin imposed upon them in the 1930s.35 In another blow to totalitarianism, Fitzpatrick observed that there was real support for socialism and Stalin. Ordinary Soviet people sincerely believed that they were part of a grand historical experiment to construct a radically new world. Fitzpatrick concluded that the lived reality of Stalinism demolished the edifice of an all-powerful totalitarian state: “The world of Soviet government . . . was characterized not by totalitarian controls but rather by poor communications, lack of effective accountability, institutional habits of hoarding and ‘off-budget’ distribution, credulous and ill-educated officials, and personalistic practices.”36 Finally, there is the work of UCLA historian J. Arch Getty. In his groundbreaking work Origins of the Great Purges (1985), Getty challenged anticommunist claims that Stalin launched the purges as part of a master plan to achieve absolute power, noting that this thesis rested upon the false assumption that the Soviet bureaucracy exercised total control. Instead, Getty argued that the Soviet state was remarkably inefficient and weak: Although the Soviet government was certainly dictatorial (or tried to be), it was not totalitarian. The technical and technological sophistication that separates totalitarianism from dictatorship was lacking in the thirties. . . . On a local level (where most of the population interacts with the government), political administration was marked by incompetence, sloth, inertia, and real cultural backwardness. The system had the disadvantages of bureaucratism without the corresponding benefits of efficient bureaucracy. Administration on a local level often resembled a popular peasant culture that was trying clumsily and sometimes halfheartedly to be a modern bureaucracy.37

Getty argues that the purges were the culmination of a long struggle by Stalin and the party center in Moscow to assert effective control over the distant periphery. By bringing the regional bureaucracies into line, it would be easier for Stalin to implement a coordinated policy across the whole country. Getty notes that the struggle between center and periphery is normal in political history, but in the USSR it assumed violent forms that got out of hand:



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A chaotic local bureaucracy, a quasi-feudal network of politicians accustomed to arresting people, and a set of perhaps insoluble political and social problems created an atmosphere conducive to violence. . . . It is not inconsistent with the evidence to argue that the Ezhovshchina was rather a radical, even hysterical, reaction to bureaucracy. The entrenched officeholders were destroyed from above and below in a chaotic wave of voluntarism and revolutionary puritanism.38

In contrast to totalitarian theorists, who rely upon émigré and gulag literature as source material to explain the purges, Getty prefers to consult archives. He discounts a great deal of this material—including Trotsky—as too far removed from where major decisions were made: Although there is nothing inherently false about such sources, the authors, by definition, were on the “outside” of the decision-making process. They can tell us what the camps were like but not why they existed. Their guesses and observations about political decision making may be interesting but can hardly be taken as primary source material.39

Getty concluded that the Soviet Union’s dysfunctional bureaucracy, lack of centralized control, and the unplanned nature of the purges severely undercut the totalitarian school. In regards to Merle Fainsod’s characterization of the USSR as an inefficient totalitarianism, Getty states: “One wonders how much inefficiency totalitarianism can stand and still have explanatory power.”40 The revisionists under discussion, including others not mentioned such as Alexander Rabinowitch, Wendy Goldman, Robert Thurston, Ronald Grigor Suny, and William G. Rosenberg, did not create a new orthodoxy to take the place of the totalitarian school. Rather, the lasting success of revisionism demolished the cartoonish caricatures of anti-communism by subjecting Stalinism and the Soviet Union to serious study. C. ANTI-JACOBINISM Even though the totalitarian school more than proved itself as an ideological lynchpin for anti-communism, many of its adherents did not reject the heritage of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, or even social reformism. For example, Friedrich and Brzezinski explicitly denied that Jacobinism was a totalitarian movement: “In the French revolution especially, the violent controversies over the ideological ‘meaning’ of the revolution led to the terror. But since the ideology lacked that pseudo-scientific ingredient which has enabled the Communist and Fascist totalitarians to insist on the

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‘mercilessness of the dialectics’ (Stalin) and on ‘ice-cold reasoning’ (Hitler), a totalitarian ideology did not develop.”41 Other theorists did not locate the sources of Lenin’s totalitarianism in Jacobinism. Alfred Meyer’s Leninism makes no mention at all of Robespierre or the Jacobins. Likewise, Leonard Schapiro’s study of the Communist Party fails to do so as well. Adam Ulam’s The Bolsheviks claims that Lenin borrowed his organizational forms from the Narodniks and the Russian Jacobin Pyotr Tkachev: “An uncompromising insistence on centralization and discipline, contempt for the possibility of any spontaneous uprising by the majority, those are the threads uniting the Russian Jacobin Tkachev to the Socialist Lenin. Implicit in both is an antidemocratic elitist attitude.”42 At most, Ulam links Lenin to Jacobinism at one remove, but does not condemn the legacy of the French Revolution. Finally, there is Hannah Arendt, who forcefully denied that Robespierre and Jacobinism were totalitarian. Rather, she saw the anti-Jacobin and royalist anti-Semites of the Dreyfus Affair as the forerunners of totalitarianism. In the Origins of Totalitarianism, she praised Robespierre’s condemnation of colonialism.43 Only later in On Revolution (1960) would Arendt see a line of continuity stretching from Robespierre to Hegel to Marx ending in Stalin, with their shared belief in historical necessity. In other instances, anti-communists looked favorably on non-revolutionary reformists who drew inspiration from the French Revolution. For example, Ulam praised the defeated Menshevik opponents of Lenin: “It often happens that a movement or cause defeated by history gains the reputation for moral probity and democratic scruples. Such has been the case, and in the main justly so, with the Mensheviks.”44 In other cases, pro-American social democrats in Europe—who still claimed to be Marxists into the 1950s—were positively juxtaposed to Leninist totalitarianism. John Plamenatz’s German Marxism & Russian Communism is typical in this regard. He says that Marxism was fine in the West, where it was successfully domesticated and “had the influence of Marxism been confined to the West, it would probably have done much good and little harm.”45 It was in the East that Marxism was twisted beyond recognition and became totalitarian: “Lenin left Marxism poorer than he found it; he took little interest in what was truly profound or subtle in it, and used it mostly as a source of quotations and slogans to justify his many and not always consistent policies. He did not even understand how he had distorted it.”46 In The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1952) and its later two sequels, Israeli historian Jacob Talmon provided a lengthy treatment on the “totalitarian” connection between Jacobinism and Bolshevism. Talmon first noticed these parallels when he was a student in 1936. While writing a graduate paper on the Jacobin Constitution of 1793, the first Moscow Trial occurred. Talmon



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immediately saw a Dialectic of Saturn at work where terror and purges consumed the revolutionaries: “The parallel seemed to suggest the existence of some unfathomable and inescapable law which causes revolutionary salvationist schemes to evolve into regimes of terror, and the promise of a perfect direct democracy to assume in practice the form of totalitarian dictatorship.”47 Talmon identified this “unfathomable and inescapable law” as the Radical Enlightenment. According to him, the Enlightenment was composed of two wings that he deemed liberal democratic and totalitarian democratic. The former were pragmatists and reformers who upheld the values of individual freedom. They embraced liberalism and compromise instead of absolutist politics. The latter were on the opposite extreme: they were uncompromising revolutionaries. Totalitarian democrats were united around an all-encompassing worldview (Weltanschauung) drawn from “abstract reason” which wanted to rationally reorder society and perfect humanity. Like Nisbet, Talmon sees the philosophical source of totalitarian democracy in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762). According to Rousseau, men are naturally good, while evil only came from bad laws and institutions. In order to create a harmonious social order where human beings could flourish, Rousseau said all unjust laws must be removed. In this ideal state, Rousseau argued that laws should express the “general will” of the people. However, the people were corrupted by unjust laws and traditions, meaning that they did not always know what served the general will. To make the popular interest conform to the general will, Rousseau stated that it might be necessary to force people to be free: “Thus, in order for the social compact to avoid being an empty formula, it tacitly entails the commitment—which alone can give force to the others—that whoever refuses to obey the general will be forced to do so by the entire body. This means merely that he will be forced to be free.”48 For Talmon, it is this idea of the general will that is the seed of totalitarian democracy. And yet, it is only during the French Revolution that the true nature of the general will was finally revealed when Robespierre and the Jacobins adopted Rousseau as their patron saint: Now at the very foundation of the principle of direct and indivisible democracy, and the expectation of unanimity, there is the implication of dictatorship, as the history of many a referendum has shown. If a constant appeal to the people as a whole, not just to a small representative body, is kept up, and at the same time unanimity is postulated, there is no escape from dictatorship. This was implied in Rousseau’s emphasis on the all-important point that the leaders must put only questions of a general nature to the people, and, moreover, must know how to put the right question. The question must have so obvious an answer that a different sort of answer would appear plain treason or perversion. If unanimity

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is what is desired, it must be engineered through intimidation, election tricks, or the organization of the spontaneous popular expression through the activists busying themselves with petitions, public demonstrations, and a violent campaign of denunciation. This was what the Jacobins and the organizers of people’s petitions, revolutionary journées, and other forms of direct expression of the people’s will read into Rousseau.49

Talmon argued that the Jacobin dictatorship was not just a series of emergency measures to save the Republic, but was the necessary consequence of Robespierre’s ardent messianic and totalitarian faith. As a result, the Jacobins and their fanatical supporters created a totalitarian party and terroristic regime to enforce the general will: The dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety was thus no mere tyranny of a handful of men clinging to power and in possession of all the means of coercion, no mere police system in a beleaguered fortress. It rested on closely knit and highly disciplined cells and nuclei in every town and village, from the central artery of Paris to the smallest hamlet in the mountains, composed of men only waiting with enthusiastic eagerness for a sign, no more to express their spontaneous urge for freedom, but their Revolutionary exaltation through obedient and fervent execution of orders from the centre, the seat of the enlightened and infallible few.50

After Robespierre’s downfall, the split between liberal and totalitarian democracy was finally concluded. For the liberal democrats or Thermidorians, the Jacobin experience scared them away from any ideas of totally remaking society. They were content with preserving the bourgeois conditions they had already gained. Totalitarian democrats further radicalized toward socialism, reaching a new stage with Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of Equals. While a minor episode in the revolution, Babeuf’s Conspiracy had a lasting impact as it evolved from Jacobinism to communism: Babeuf and Buonarroti discovered that the Jacobin half-way house was a heart-break house. It was necessary to go the whole way towards a State-owned and State-directed economy. The solution of the economic problem was the condition of the Jacobin Republic of Virtue. The Thermidorian reaction learned a similar lesson from Jacobin dictatorship, but drew the opposite conclusions: property must become the rock of the social edifice, and social welfare must be put outside the scope of state politics.51

What followed according to Talmon was a line of communist apostolic succession. In the nineteenth century, Babeuf’s ideas were codified by his collaborator Philippe Buonarroti in A History of Babeuf’s Conspiracy for Equality (1828). Buonarroti argued that achieving communism required a



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disciplined vanguard organization, the violent seizure of power, a revolutionary dictatorship, and terror. After Buonarroti, Babuovist ideas were transmitted to the insurrectionist Louis-Auguste Blanqui, then from Karl Marx to Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. Talmon concluded that there was an unbroken line of philosophical continuity from Rousseau all the way to communist totalitarianism: “Jacobins may have differed from the Babouvists, the Blanquists from many of the secret societies in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Communists from the Socialists, the Anarchists from all others, yet they all belong to one religion.”52 Other arguments by Talmon relating to Marx, Blanqui, Rousseau, and the French Revolution need not concern us here.53 However, it is worth pointing out that Talmon’s case against the Radical Enlightenment is similar to that found in the work of the eighteenth-century conservative thinker Edmund Burke. In his polemics against the French Revolution, Burke said its radicalism could be traced back to the Enlightenment philosophes. He said that the worst offender was Rousseau, whom he described as the “founder of the philosophy of vanity.”54 Burke believed that the French revolutionaries embraced a philosophical hubris that man was a rational being and the world could be restructured according to the dictates of reason. Embracing these godless ideas, the French proceeded to tear down time-honored institutions, most particularly the Christian Church, which held man’s bestial passions in check. As a result, the leveling demons of “abstract reason” and the Rights of Man threatened to destroy civilization itself: “The levelers, therefore, only change and pervert the natural order of things; they load the edifice of society by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground.”55 Another point of agreement between Talmon and Burke is that their opposition to the French Revolution rests on a shared idealism and religious moralism. This enables them to tell a simple story explaining why the revolution failed. Neither of them looks at the material or social causes of the French Revolution in any depth. Instead, they locate the cause of the Revolution in the radical philosophes. Once the radicals were in power, they proceeded to replace God with man; in their secular arrogance that it was possible to change human nature, their plans inevitability ended in terror and tyranny. While he is certainly not the first to draw connections between the French and Russian Revolutions, Talmon’s scholarship far surpasses those of earlier efforts. He said that the Dialectic of Saturn that spawned totalitarianism was found in reason itself. His sweeping and uncompromising work paved the way for others to reject communism as a species of Enlightenment reason. As a result, Talmon cannot be overestimated when it comes to the development of the new counter-Enlightenment project.

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D. TOTALITARIANISM REBORN 1. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn As mentioned earlier, totalitarianism was challenged in the 1960s by the new revisionists in academia. The social movements of the sixties also challenged the Cold War mentality that made communism a straightforward anathema. However, the following decade breathed new life and popularity into the idea of totalitarianism with the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. In the waning days of the Cold War, anti-communism renewed its ideological offensive to bury reason and revolution once and for all. After the fall of the USSR, totalitarian theory reached its full development as a counter-Enlightenment project with the publication of The Black Book of Communism. Born in the fortuitous year of 1917, the young Solzhenitsyn was brought up in Christian Orthodoxy, but believed in the promises of the Bolshevik revolution. It was his studies of Marxism as a young man that made him into a left-wing anti-Stalinist. As a student at Rostov State University, Solzhenitsyn and his friends avidly read Marx, Hegel, and Lenin. This led him to doubt the validity of the Moscow Trials and conclude that Stalin had corrupted Marxism. As a loyal son of the revolution, Solzhenitsyn joined the Red Army in 1941. He served as an artillery officer and rose to the rank of captain. Solzhenitsyn fought with distinction and was awarded for his bravery. Yet his socialist convictions were shaken during the war. At Bobruisk in Belorussia, he watched in horror as captured Nazi collaborators were summarily punished.56 When the Red Army advanced into East Prussia, he was aghast as soldiers took revenge against the local populace. Solzhenitsyn reported these crimes to higher authorities, but nothing happened. As he recounted later, his doubts about Soviet socialism continued to grow: “Know thyself!” There is nothing that so aids-and assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one’s own transgressions, errors, mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my captain’s shoulder boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: “So were we any better?”57

Writing to his friend Nikolai Vitkevic in February 1945, Solzhenitsyn criticized not just the Red Army’s conduct of the war, but Stalin himself. This led to his arrest by military intelligence on charges of making anti-Soviet propaganda. Solzhenitsyn insisted that this was a terrible mistake and that he



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was a believer in socialism. This did not dissuade the authorities and he was sentenced to a term of eight years in the gulag. Thanks to his academic background in physics, Solzhenitsyn spent the first four years of his sentence in a sharashka or a special scientific research facility near Moscow. There, he met a diverse array of prisoners that included Christians, democrats, and Stalinists. In the first year of his imprisonment, Solzhenitsyn still considered himself a Leninist. He argued over socialism with Dmitri Panin, a Christian anti-communist. Solzhenitsyn also befriended Anatoly Ilyich Fastenko, an old Bolshevik who had known Lenin personally. However, Fastenko had largely disavowed the Soviet Union and Leninism.58 His time in the gulag caused Solzhenitsyn’s Marxist convictions to erode and he sought solace in spirituality: For my part, I was never able to get away from politics or my convictions. It is true that I used to try to defend Marxism during the early years of my imprisonment. But it turned out that I was incapable of it. There were such strong arguments and such experienced people against me that I simply couldn’t. They beat me every time. And so gradually I moved away from Marxism, and at the sharashka I describe an intermediate position of scepticism, when I didn’t quite believe in it any more. At all events, it was a most convenient position: I don’t believe in anything, I don’t know anything, leave me alone. . . . Then, while still at the sharashka, I began gradually to abandon this scepticism. In fact, I began gradually to return to my old, original childhood concepts. Through reading Dostoyevsky, actually . . . I began to move ever so slowly towards a position that was in the first place idealist, as they call it, that is, of supporting the primacy of the spiritual over the material, and secondly patriotic and religious. In other words, I began to return slowly and gradually to all my former views.59

In his seventh year of imprisonment, Solzhenitsyn returned to his ancestral Orthodox faith. Following an operation, he was treated by Doctor Boris Nikolayevich Kornfeld, a Jew who had converted to Christianity. Solzhenitsyn was curious and asked Kornfeld about his change of faith. The next morning, he learned that the doctor was dead, having been killed by some prisoners. It was at that moment when Solzhenitsyn converted to the Orthodox faith. Central to Solzhenitsyn’s newfound worldview was the fallen nature of man. He believed that good and evil did not reside in either classes or states but were found inside every single person. Salvation could only come from within through individual faith in God. This meant he rejected what he considered the Marxist credo of collective redemption by eliminating evil classes. Solzhenitsyn believed that Marxist materialism ensured damnation since it required active participation in the godless enterprise of revolution. Therefore, socialism created a greater evil than what it set out to destroy:

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Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person. And since that time I have come to understand the falsehood of all the revolutions in history: They destroy only those carriers of evil contemporary with them (and also fan, out of haste, to discriminate the carriers of good as well). And they then take to themselves as their heritage the actual evil itself, magnified still more.60

After Stalin’s death and the beginning of Khrushchev’s reforms, Solzhenitsyn was finally exonerated and freed from exile in 1956. He took a teaching job south of Moscow, but spent his free time writing. Solzhenitsyn believed that he had a moral duty to bear witness about life in the camps. Among his stories was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the story of a gulag inmate’s life during a regular day. Due to the continuing censorship, Solzhenitsyn did not believe his work would ever be published. However, he was emboldened after the Twenty-Second Congress of the Communist Party in 1961. This event promised accelerated liberalization and reforms. Solzhenitsyn took a chance and sent his Denisovich manuscript to Aleksandr Tvardovsky, chief editor of the influential literary journal Novy Mir. Tvardovsky loved the work, but he was unsure if the party would allow its publication. Yet Nikita Khrushchev was enamored by Solzhenitsyn’s book too. At two Presidium meetings Denisovich was one of the main topics of discussion. Khrushchev brushed aside the doubts of hard-liners and demanded its printing as necessary for de-Stalinization: “There’s a Stalinist in each of you; there’s even some of the Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil.”61 The party granted official approval and the November 1962 issue of Novy Mir was released, carrying One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The issue sold out almost immediately and Solzhenitsyn was propelled into stardom. However, the liberal atmosphere in the Soviet Union ended after Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964. The new regime of Leonid Brezhnev wanted to reimpose a harsh censorship and crush dissidents. Solzhenitsyn’s The Cancer Ward was denied publication by the Union of Writers unless he removed anti-Soviet statements. He refused. Even as the space for free expression evaporated, Solzhenitsyn grew defiant and condemned socialism outright: “Are we, by chance, going to admit, comrades . . . that socialism itself is inherently flawed?”62 Solzhenitsyn found that he was now harassed by the KGB and his manuscripts were seized.



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Denied the opportunity to publish in the USSR, he had The First Circle and The Cancer Ward published in the West. This led the Union of Writers to expel Solzhenitsyn from its ranks. In 1970, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but was unable to receive it until 1974. Afterward, Solzhenitsyn became an obsession for KGB leader Yuri Andropov, who wanted to expel him from the country.63 During this period, Solzhenitsyn was feverishly writing The Gulag Archipelago. In case he was arrested, Solzhenitsyn secretly sent a copy of the manuscript to the West. Inside the Soviet Union, there were only three copies of the draft, which the KGB wanted to confiscate. In 1973, the KGB found one of the copies after interrogating Solzhenitsyn’s typist, Elizaveta Voronyanskaya. Following her release, Voronyanskaya was found hanged in her apartment. It is still unclear if she committed suicide or was murdered. Once Solzhenitsyn heard about her death, he had The Gulag Archipelago published in Paris. This was a final outrage to the Soviet leadership, who arrested him. Eventually, Solzhenitsyn was stripped of his citizenship and deported to West Germany in 1974. Almost immediately after it was published, The Gulag Archipelago was recognized as an instant classic. In three mammoth volumes, Solzhenitsyn recounted the history of the gulag, its inner workings, and the suffering of its inmates. In order to tell this tale, Solzhenitsyn used not only his own personal experience, but official documents, the testimonies of 256 former prisoners, diaries, and extensive historical research. As a work of literature and an exposé of the Soviet penal system, The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn’s crowning achievement as a writer. Yet as J. Arch Getty observed, Solzhenitsyn may be a brilliant artist, but he was a terrible historian: Solzhenitsyn makes no attempt to be analytical or to explain why events happen. He artfully weaves thousands of personal horror stories into a captivating piece of subjective literature that brilliantly portrays the personal, psychological effects of being repressed. . . . Solzhenitsyn’s political and moralistic point of view tends to blur analytical categories. It makes no essential distinctions between trials of political opponents, the suppression of armed uprisings, the removal of derelict and criminal party administrators, attempts to impose literary norms, and murder by the police. All these are undifferentiated manifestations of repression or terror “from above,” despite the fact that they took place decades apart and for different reasons.64

At an even deeper level, Solzhenitsyn is not revealing anything terribly new about the gulag. Accounts about repression in the USSR had been a regular occurrence in western literature for decades. As far back as the 1930s, Victor

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Serge and Ante Ciliga had written about Soviet prisons. In 1947, I Choose Freedom by Soviet defector Victor Kravchenko was a bestseller. As will be shown later, Kravchenko caused a massive stir in France in the late 1940s not unlike Solzhenitsyn a generation later. An account of life in both Soviet and Nazi camps, Under Two Dictators by Margarete Buber-Neumann was published in 1949. Evgenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind about her eighteen years in the gulag was released in 1967. Furthermore, anticommunist propaganda was regularly filled with accounts about suffering in the camps. It was not the originality of historical research that made Solzhenitsyn’s work so impactful. One factor was the timing. The publication of The Gulag Archipelago happened just as conservative retrenchment began. Sixties radicalism had run out of steam and leftist activists were now questioning the viability of socialism altogether. David Horowitz, then still a Marxist, recalled that he found Solzhenitsyn hard to read since it challenged a lifetime of political commitment: “I had grown up in an environment where the Soviet Union was the focus of all progressive hopes and political efforts. My acute sense of our complicity in these crimes made it difficult for me to read more than a few pages of Solzhenitsyn’s text at a single sitting.”65 Many other activists read Solzhenitsyn and were converted like anti-communist Pauls on the road to Damascus. A second factor was Solzhenitsyn himself. As a gulag survivor and devout Christian, Solzhenitsyn’s unique identity gave immense credibility to his condemnation of communism. In addition, his voice helped bolster the case against easing relations and détente with the USSR. Solzhenitsyn spoke music to conservative ears when he warned about the inherent dangers of international communism: [The goal of] Communist ideology is to destroy your social order. This has been their aim for 125 years and it has never changed; only the methods have changed a little. When there is détente, peaceful co-existence, and trade, they will still insist: the ideological war must continue! And what is ideological war? It is a concentration of hatred, a continued repetition of the oath to destroy the Western world.66

Finally, the promotion of Solzhenitsyn served to mask the actual diversity of dissident views in the USSR. As an anti-communist, Solzhenitsyn was the ideal dissident in western eyes, representing the views of all those who suffered in the Soviet Union. In actuality, Soviet dissidents ranged from liberals like Andrei Sakharov; socialists such as Yuli Daniel, Andrei Sinyavsky, and Varlam Shalamov; reform communists like Roy and Zhores Medvedev; there were also fascists, anarchists, Trotskyists, and Maoists. Upholding



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Solzhenitsyn made it easier to insinuate that all socialists stood in lockstep with the Soviet Communist Party. As Andrew Smith said in his study of Maoist dissidence in the Eastern Bloc, this made it easier to promote capitalism as the only alternative to communism: “The histories accessible to the general public are the stories of men like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn. Where is the history of those that fought so hard, often losing freedom and livelihood, to oppose the regimes within their respective nations with the message of communism?”67 While Solzhenitsyn was welcomed by anti-communists, he was disgusted by the Western world. Solzhenitsyn believed that the West offered no alternative for Russia. Following in the footsteps of the nineteenth century Slavophiles, he argued that Russia should draw upon its own unique cultural and spiritual heritage, which was untouched by godless materialism. He dreamt of a Russia that had given up on Marxism, a land filled with happy peasants under the rule of a God-ordained czar. Like the USSR, he believed that the West was infected with the same rationalist and godless philosophy that promised earthly happiness. In his 1978 Harvard commencement address, Solzhenitsyn condemned both East and West for embracing this Enlightenment materialism: I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists. As humanism in its development became more and more materialistic, it made itself increasingly accessible to speculation and manipulation by socialism and then by communism. So that Karl Marx was able to say that “communism is naturalized humanism.” This statement turned out not to be entirely senseless. One does see the same stones in the foundations of a despiritualized humanism and of any type of socialism: endless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibility, which under communist regimes reach the stage of anti-religious dictatorships; concentration on social structures with a seemingly scientific approach. This is typical of the Enlightenment in the 18th Century and of Marxism. Not by coincidence all of communism’s meaningless pledges and oaths are about Man, with a capital M, and his earthly happiness. At first glance it seems an ugly parallel: common traits in the thinking and way of life of today’s West and today’s East? But such is the logic of materialistic development.68

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Naturally, Solzhenitsyn shared Talmon’s belief that the Jacobins with their radical Enlightenment worldview served as the model for the Bolsheviks. At a speech commemorating the royalist and Catholic counterrevolutionaries of the Vendée who rose up against the First French Republic, Solzhenitsyn condemned two centuries of revolutions for humanistic folly and mass murder: I would not wish a “great revolution” upon any nation. Only the arrival of Thermidor prevented the eighteenth-century revolution from destroying France. But the revolution in Russia was not restrained by any Thermidor as it drove our people on the straight path to a bitter end, to an abyss, to the depths of ruin. It is a pity that there is no one here today who could speak of the suffering endured in the depths of China, Cambodia, or Vietnam, and could describe the price they had to pay for revolution. One might have thought that the experience of the French revolution would have provided enough of a lesson for the rationalist builders of “the people’s happiness” in Russia. But no, the events in Russia were grimmer yet, and incomparably more enormous in scale. Lenin’s Communists and International Socialists studiously reenacted on the body of Russia many of the French revolution’s cruelest methods—only they possessed a much greater and more systematic level of organizational control than the Jacobins.69

Considering his belief in the long unbroken and bloody history of materialism, Solzhenitsyn doubted the existence of Stalinism as a deviation from communism. He viewed the term to be a deflection utilized by Trotskyists and other leftists to avoid blaming Leninism and their whole humanist ideology. Ironically, this led Solzhenitsyn to agree with Maoists and Stalinists who considered Stalin to be the worthy heir of Lenin: But close study of our modern history shows that there never was any such thing as Stalinism, (either as a doctrine, or as a path of national life, or as a state system), and official circles in our country, as well as the Chinese leaders, have every right to insist on this. Stalin was a very consistent and faithful—if also very untalented—heir to the spirit of Lenin’s teaching.70

Throughout The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn judged all Bolsheviks and Marxists complicit in Stalin’s crimes. He had nothing but contempt for the communists who were consumed by the purges, whom he thinks got just what they deserved: Apropos of the orthodox Communists, Stalin was necessary, for such a purge as that, yes, but a Party like that was necessary too: the majority of those in power,



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up to the very moment of their own arrest, were pitiless in arresting others, obediently destroyed their peers in accordance with those same instructions and handed over to retribution any friend or comrade-in-arms of yesterday. And all the big Bolsheviks, who now wear martyrs’ halos, managed to be the executioners of other Bolsheviks (not even taking into account how all of them in the first place had been the executioners of non-Communists). Perhaps 1937 was needed in order to show how little their whole ideology was worth—that ideology of which they boasted so enthusiastically, turning Russia upside down, destroying its foundations, trampling everything it held sacred underfoot, that Russia where they themselves had never been threatened by such retribution. The victims of the Bolsheviks from 1918 to 1946 never conducted themselves so despicably as the leading Bolsheviks when the lightning struck them. If you study in detail the whole history of the arrests and trials of 1936 to 1938, the principal revulsion you feel is not against Stalin and his accomplices, but against the humiliatingly repulsive defendants—nausea at their spiritual baseness after their former pride and implacability.71

Rarely does Solzhenitsyn have a kind word to say about any communists imprisoned in the gulag. He begrudgingly says about the Trotskyist prisoners: “I do not know whether they were prepared for that total annihilation which Stalin had allotted them, or whether they still thought that it would all end with jokes and reconciliation. In any case, they were heroic people.”72 Solzhenitsyn’s worldview meant that he naturally sympathized with the elite. As already discussed, he was especially fond of White émigrés, who were drawn from the czarist nobility. In the gulag, Solzhenitsyn saw all Bolsheviks as uncouth bloodthirsty monsters, but considered the White inmates he met to be naturally decent: “I do not know what kind of White Guards they were in the Civil War, either of them, whether they were among the exceptional few who hung every tenth worker without trial and whipped the peasants, or whether they were the other kind, the soldierly majority.”73 For Solzhenitsyn, the moral superiority and stoicism of the Whites was a testament to their aristocratic class background and refinement: “And here is the kind of self-control this meant, the sort of thing we have forgotten because of the anathema we have heaped upon the aristocracy, we who whine at every petty misfortune and every petty pain.”74 His reputation as a moralist and victim of totalitarianism notwithstanding, Solzhenitsyn did not object at all to rightwing dictatorships. For instance, he believed that Francisco Franco was a good Christian who saved Spain. In 1976, Solzhenitsyn visited the Valley of the Fallen outside of Madrid that commemorated Franco’s victory. This monument was built by the slave labor of defeated Republicans. Solzhenitsyn did not see any parallel to his own time in the gulag here, but merely Christian justice at work:

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This equality of both sides, the equality of the fallen before God, made a profound impression on me. This is the result of the Christian side having won the war! Back home, Satan’s side had won, and for sixty years had been trampling and spitting on the other side, nobody uttering so much as a syllable about equality of the dead, at least.75

After the fall of the USSR, Solzhenitsyn was finally able to return home in 1994. Russia’s new rulers were too enamored of capitalism to pay him much attention though. Yet Solzhenitsyn’s lasting legacy was not his premodern program for a czarist restoration, but serving as a moralizing propagandist who advanced the counter-Enlightenment project. 2. Leszek Kołakowski To successfully claim that the whole of Marxism was rooted in a totalitarian philosophical enterprise, the counter-Enlightenment needed to deploy its own philosophical weapons. The most famous example of this was Leszek Kołakowski’s magnum opus Main Currents of Marxism, where he claimed that the flaws of scientific socialism lay in its rationalist philosophy. Kołakowski concluded that Marxism’s “Promethean” faith in the ability of humanity to change the world made it “the greatest fantasy of our century.”76 Kołakowski himself began his political life as a Marxist. In postwar Poland, he joined the ruling party, not to advance his career, but because he sincerely wanted to construct socialism. As one of Poland’s most promising young philosophers, Kołakowski championed the humanistic values of the young Marx against Stalinist dogmatism. After the Polish October of 1956, he had hopes that the reformist leadership of Władysław Gomułka would make meaningful changes. He was disappointed when Poland’s liberal era proved short-lived. On the tenth anniversary of the Polish October in 1966, Kołakowski delivered a speech that led to his expulsion from the party. During the student protests of 1968, Kołakowski lost his job at Warsaw University and was prevented from teaching in Poland. He was further disgusted when the party mobilized anti-Semitic rhetoric and images against the protest movement. That same year, Kołakowski and his family emigrated, eventually settling in England. By the early 1970s, he abandoned any identification with Marxism. However, Kołakowski wanted to explain what had gone wrong with Marxism. In 1976, he finished Main Currents of Marxism, a three-volume work tracing its origins from distant beginnings in ancient philosophy through Hegel and Marx, and stretching forward to the Second International, Russian Marxism, the Frankfurt School, and a host of other figures and movements. Kołakowski’s argument began by observing that throughout its



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long history, philosophy searched for answers to timeless questions such as the origin and nature of human suffering and how to achieve a world free of alienation. Whatever their differences, both religious and secular thinkers wanted to return humanity to a lost golden age: “It appears in fact that the theory in question, together with the paradigmatic image of a lost paradise, is an unchanging feature of man’s speculation about himself, assuming different forms in different cultures but equally capable of finding expression.”77 In his search for this utopia, Kołakowski said that Marx was not unique. What made Marx different was that he was a “German philosopher,” who followed Hegel and the whole tradition of German classical philosophy with its quest for absolute and universalist solutions to social contradictions.78 At one point, Kołakowski described Marx as a child of the Enlightenment who burns with a “Promethean faith in human dignity rooted in freedom.”79 This was an apt metaphor since Marx admired the Greek Titan Prometheus, who rebelled against Zeus by stealing fire, then bestowed it to humanity, allowing for progress and civilization. According to Kołakowski, Marx considered the working class to be a modern Prometheus that struggles for the liberation of humanity: “Salvation, for Marx, is man’s salvation of himself; not the work of God or Nature, but that of a collective Prometheus who, in principle, is capable of achieving absolute command over the world he lives in. In this sense man’s freedom is his creativity, the march of a conqueror overcoming both nature and himself.”80 It is specifically this a priori belief in the “self-deification of mankind” that Kołakowski considers to be the fatal flaw of Marxism.81 Since Marxism does not accept the fallen and limited nature of man, this means its promises of the “Promethean” utopia of communism is impossible to achieve in this world: The idea that the existing world is so totally corrupt that it is unthinkable to improve it and that, precisely for this reason, the world that will succeed it will bring the fullness of the perfection and the ultimate liberation, this idea is one of the most monstrous aberrations of the human spirit. Rather, common sense whispers: the more corrupt the existing world, the longer, harder and more uncertain the road to the dream realm of perfection. Of course, this aberration is not an invention of our time, but it must be recognized that, besides the religious thought which opposes all temporal values to the force of supernatural grace, is much less abominable than in the worldly doctrines which certify to us that we can ensure our salvation by leaping with a single leap from the abyss of hell to the heights of heaven. Such a revolution will never happen.82

While Marxism put on the airs of science and rationalism, Kołakowski said that it functioned more as a substitute religion and a false God. Since the Marxist vision of communism was a chimera, Kołakowski considered it inevitable that the Bolshevik Revolution would end in totalitarianism.

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He saw a direct line of continuity from Lenin to Stalin to the present Soviet leadership with their flawed visions of a communist utopia. When it came to Trotsky, he saw no alternative program, but just another totalitarian architect: “Stalinism was the natural and obvious continuation of the system of government established by Lenin and Trotsky. Trotsky refused to recognize this fact and persuaded himself that Stalin’s despotism bore no relation to Lenin’s. . . . What we have here is not merely the tragedy of an epigone, but that of a revolutionary despot entangled in a snare of his own making.”83 For Kołakowski, the Soviet Union and communism could never be nontotalitarian. Kołakowski’s claims about the inherent totalitarian character of Marxism had many detractors on the left. Among them was the historian Edward P. Thompson, who wrote a lengthy letter to him in the Socialist Register. Thompson reminded Kołakowski that after 1956, they had both abandoned Stalinism without disavowing their Marxism. Now Thompson pleaded with his former comrade to remember that commitment and return to the socialist left: We rejected—as I still reject—any description of Communism or of Communist-governed societies which defines these in terms of their ruling ideologies and the institutions of their ruling élites, and which excludes by the very terms of its definition any appraisal of the conflicts characteristic to them, of the alternative meanings, values, traditions and potentials which they may contain. And I make this point the more strongly, since I have recently noted with astonishment that you yourself, in the last year or two, appear to have been falling back on such conditioned liberal definitions . . . We refused to disavow “Communism” because Communism was a complex noun which included Leszek Kołakowski.84

In his response, Kołakowski reaffirmed his position and accused Thompson of remaining trapped in utopian thinking: Absolute equality can be set up only within a despotic system of rule which implies privileges, i.e., destroys equality; total freedom means anarchy and anarchy results in the domination of the physically strongest, i.e., total freedom turns into its opposite; efficiency as a supreme value calls again for despotism and despotism is economically inefficient above a certain level of technology. If I repeat these old truisms this is because they still seem to go unnoticed in utopian thinking; and this is why nothing in the world is easier than writing utopias.85

Like other counter-Enlightenment thinkers, Kołakowski condemns Marxism for its rationalism. Yet for all its seeming comprehensive nature and erudition, the conclusions of Main Currents of Marxism is merely the old religious teaching of original sin dressed up in a philosophical guise. It is only in a



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heavenly paradise where communism is possible, but here on earth, the corrupted nature of man means it can only end in a totalitarian inferno. 3. François Furet The counter-Enlightenment needed to discredit not only the Russian Revolution, but also radical revolutions more generally. Most especially, this required undermining the Jacobin-Marxist orthodoxy on the French Revolution. The Jacobin-Marxist position hailed the French Revolution as a bourgeois revolution that laid the historical and theoretical groundwork for future proletarian revolutions. The attack on this orthodoxy fell to the historian François Furet. He concluded that Jacobin revolutionary violence had nothing to do with achieving bourgeois and liberal goals, but led to terror, totalitarianism, and ruin. A former communist, Furet intimately understood the importance of the French Revolution to Marxists. As a bourgeois revolution, the French Revolution of 1789 and Jacobinism served as historical precedents for the Russian Revolution of 1917 and Bolshevism. As Furet recalled, the French Communist Party (PCF) considered itself heir to this republican and revolutionary legacy: A perusal of L’Humanité reveals numerous references to the Jacobin example, even during the most sectarian periods of the history of the French Communist Party. This is not surprising if we think of Jacobinism as a precedent to Bolshevism in the category of terrorist dictatorships exercised in the name of the people. Until condemned by historians of the second half of the twentieth century as “totalitarian democracy,” Jacobin democracy was celebrated either as the dictatorship of public safety or as the ephemeral prefiguration of the power of the people mobilized against its foreign and domestic enemies. In both cases, especially the latter, the precedent of 1793 was essential to the legitimation of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” as conceived by Lenin—the Robespierre of the proletariat—and carried out by means of terror from 1918 onward.86

Many prominent historians of the French Revolution, such as Albert Mathiez, Albert Soboul, Maurice Dommanget, Maurice Agulhon, Claude Mazauric, and Denis Richet (Furet’s coauthor on La Révolution Française) broadly shared this view and were members of the PCF at one time or another. Furet first challenged the Jacobin-Marxist orthodoxy in the 1960s by drawing upon the work of the classical liberal historian Alfred Cobban. In two works, The Myth of the French Revolution (1955) and later in The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (1964), Cobban disputed the Marxist “social interpretation” of 1789 as a bourgeois revolution on four main points. One: he argued that by 1789 that France was no longer a feudal society since

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capitalism already dominated the countryside. Second: he claimed that the most active members of the Third Estate were not capitalists, but professionals, officeholders, and lawyers. In other words, there was no revolutionary bourgeoisie leading the people against the aristocracy and King Louis XVI. Third: the end of the Old Regime was largely accomplished by 1791, which meant that the popular mobilizations of the sansculottes and peasantry were largely meaningless to this process. Four: the revolution actually had little impact on the future development of capitalism in France.87 Furet did not adopt all of Cobban’s positions, however. He still considered the French Revolution to be a bourgeois one. In La Révolution Française (1965), he described the bourgeoisie as “faithful to its liberating mission.”88 Furet largely agreed with Cobban that the revolution’s goals had been achieved by 1791. Afterward, he considered Jacobinism to be a sort of historical accident that led to “le dérapage de la révolution” or the revolution skidding off course.89 He concluded that Jacobinism and the Reign of Terror were not historically necessary to securing bourgeois gains. The revolution only returned to its proper course during the Thermidorian Reaction. Both Claude Mazauric and Albert Soboul recognized the implications of Furet’s liberal revisionism. They understood that his arguments went beyond the French Revolution and were part of a broader attack on Marxism, popular struggles, and socialism. According to Mazauric: Their [i.e. Furet’s and Richet’s] allusions, explicit and more frequently implicit, to the Bolsheviks, to the contemporary history of the USSR and of the Communist parties, and to socialist and Marxist historiography, are sufficiently numerous to ensure that nobody can be accused of being unfair by pointing out that their hostile prejudices have led them on in just the way they accuse others of being led.90

Mazauric objected to Furet not solely on political grounds, but faulted him in other ways. He noted that La Révolution Française failed to acknowledge that the revolution only succeeded due to the alliance between the bourgeoisie and the masses. Mazauric said Furet’s thesis of “le dérapage de la révolution” rested on faulty assumptions that the French Revolution was fundamentally liberal. Rather, the war with foreign powers grew out of the radical impetus embedded within the whole revolutionary process: “Can one affirm that the war is at the origin of the so-called dérapage of the Revolution if it is almost a natural component of it?”91 Albert Soboul defended Jacobinism not as a dérapage that was detrimental to the revolution’s outcome, but essential to its ultimate victory:



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“A skid” implies that this intervention was neither indispensable to the success of the bourgeois revolution nor fundamentally motivated by it. . . . Our authors don’t ask themselves if it is not precisely in this period, which they call “a skid,” that the bourgeoisie was able to exterminate all the forms of counterrevolution and thus render possible, in the long run, the liberal system that prevailed definitively after 1794.92

Furet responded to both Mazauric and Soboul in an essay, “The Revolutionary Catechism.” He said that the terms of their debate were not over historiography, but the relationship between the French and Russian Revolutions. Since a socialist revolution followed a bourgeois one, the Bolsheviks used the Jacobins to justify their actions as historically necessary: “After 1917, the French Revolution became more than just the matrix of probabilities that could and would engender another permanently liberating revolution. . . . It had become the mother of an actual event, and its offspring had a name: October 1917, and more generally, the Russian Revolution.”93 Considering these stakes, Furet attacked the whole concept of bourgeois revolution as utilized by Mazauric and Soboul. He argued that they used 1789’s status as a bourgeois revolution to glorify past upheavals as applicable to the present. Furet said that this grand scheme of history was abusive to the truth. He contended that if the concept of bourgeois revolution was to be employed to explain events, then its applicability must be limited. He found that bourgeois revolution as a category was wanting in understanding the course of the French Revolution since those goals were largely achieved by 1791. The concept could not explain events skidding off course afterward. Furet said Jacobinism with its irrational fear of enemies bore no relation to reality and took on a life of its own: “For, in the main, Jacobin and terrorist ideology functioned autonomously, unrelated to political and military circumstance, expressed in hyperbole all the more inclusive as politics was subsumed under morality and a sense of reality faded.”94 The inference of his argument was that the importance of ideology trumped social and economic factors; these factors were integral to the Jacobin-Marxist orthodoxy and needed to be downgraded. For now, Furet’s thoughts on the primacy of revolutionary ideology were more suggestive hints than a worked-out synthesis. Furet’s ideas were largely ignored in the 1960s since the Communists remained hegemonic on the French left. However, the PCF’s authority was weakened after the student protests of May 1968. Since the PCF refused to support the students, activists looked to Maoist groups as alternatives. Yet within a few short years, the Maoist organizations themselves imploded. This radical burnout coincided with the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, which sold an astonishing 600,000 copies in France. Among these readers were ex-Maoists, who saw Solzhenitsyn’s work as a

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revelation on the evils of communism. A loose movement of former leftists known as the nouveaux philosophes, which included Christian Jambet, André Glucksmann, Pascal Bruckner, Bernard Kouchner, Alain Finkielkraut, and Bernard-Henri Lévy joined together around a shared anti-communism. The nouveaux philosophes adamantly considered the French Revolution to be the Russian Revolution’s totalitarian father. According to Lévy: “Philosophy has in fact held power at least twice in the West: in 1793 first, in the Committee of Public Safety, which held the Encyclopaedia in one hand and the guillotine in the other; then in 1917, in the Marxist brains which, claiming to give birth to the good society, brought death to the world. The dream was not born yesterday, then, but it is established that it always turns into a blood bath.”95 Within a short time, the nouveaux philosophes caused a massive shift in French intellectual life as the Jacobin-Marxist heritage was replaced by the new Counter-Enlightenment. As Perry Anderson put it: “Paris today is the capital of European intellectual reaction.”96 From the very beginning, Furet identified himself with this new anti-totalitarian movement. He was a frequent writer for Le Nouvel Observateur that promoted Solzhenitsyn’s work. Furet was heartened by the nouveaux philosophes’ rejection of Marxism and the French Revolution. In 1977, he published an essay entitled “The French Revolution is Over” where he used Solzhenitsyn and the gulag to link the Jacobins to the Bolsheviks as part of the same totalitarian endeavor: In 1920, Mathiez justified Bolshevik violence by the French precedent, in the name of comparable circumstances. Today the Gulag is leading to a rethinking of the Terror precisely because the two undertakings are seen as identical. The two revolutions remain connected; but while fifty years ago they were systematically absolved on the basis of excuses related to “circumstances,” that is, external phenomena that had nothing to do with the nature of the two revolutions, they are today, by contrast, accused of being, consubstantially, systems of meticulous constraint over men’s bodies and minds.97

Thus, there was a line of totalitarian continuity from the French to the Russian Revolutions. This meant that the gulag found its precursor in the guillotine. The Cheka and Stalin’s purges were direct descendants of the Committee of Public Safety. The universalist and rationalist worldviews of Jacobinism and Bolshevism both spawned terror. In the nouveaux philosophes thinking of the time: revolution ends in Pol Pot and the Killing Fields. Now, Furet fully developed his earlier suggestive remarks on the primacy of Jacobin ideology. He utilized the work of the right-wing historian Augustin Cochin who looked at the role of the philosophes in the French Revolution. Cochin argued that the philosophes were filled with rationalist fantasies,



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but they exercised ideological hegemony over French intellectuals. During the French Revolution, the Jacobins shared the philosophe belief in abstract reason. They used this ideological fanaticism to manipulate the sansculottes and inaugurate the Terror. Therefore, Enlightenment ideology ended up becoming a material force once its frenzy was grasped by the mob. As Cochin concluded: “Before the bloody terror of 1793, there was, from 1765 to 1780, a dry terror whose Committee of Public Safety was the Encyclopedie and whose Robespierre was d’Alembert.”98 Following Cochin, Furet argued that the main features of Bolshevism could be traced back to Jacobinism and the salons of the philosophes: It becomes clear that [Cochin] put his finger on a central feature, not only of the French Revolution but of what it shared with later revolutions, if one realises that he described in advance many traits of Lenin’s Bolshevism. It is true, of course, that Lenin, unlike Robespierre, was able to work out in advance his own theory of the role of ideology and the political machine. But then his theory was patterned, at least in part, on the Jacobin example.99

Furet’s liberal offensive against Jacobin-Marxist orthodoxy also involved adopting the historical schema developed by the nineteenth century thinker Alexis de Tocqueville. In The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856), Tocqueville argued that the French Revolution was simply the acceleration of an ongoing process of modernization, centralization, and democratization that began long before under the Bourbons. However, the Jacobins were so blinded by ideology that they failed to observe these gradual changes. Based on this interpretation, Furet argued that 1789 was part of the basic continuity of French history, not the foundation of a new society by the revolutionary bourgeoisie: “Tocqueville shows that the Revolution was the crowning point of the work of the kings of France and that Robespierre and even more Bonaparte were the true heirs of Louis XI and Louis XIV. The Revolution therefore did not represent a break but, on the contrary, a continuity, contrary to its own idea of itself.”100 Not only was there no radical break in France, but the revolution had been historically unnecessary to the process of capitalist modernization. By the time of the French Revolution’s bicentennial in 1989, Furet felt he could safely proclaim that the revolution was finally dead. After the collapse of the USSR, Furet gave his own postmortem on proletarian revolution and communism in The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century. Furet argued that communism was based on the same illusions as Jacobinism and ended in much the same way. He also offered some thoughts on the totalitarian relationship between fascism and communism, noting that both movements were born in the mass violence of World War I and possessed the shared goal of destroying liberal

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democracy. Communism and fascism were joined together as yin and yang with their violence feeding off each other. Eric Hobsbawm called Furet’s book “a belated product of the Cold War era.”101 Furet’s claims that communist and fascist violence were necessarily linked brings him close to positions advanced by the conservative German historian Ernst Nolte. As will be shown in the following section, Nolte saw Nazi violence as a defensive reaction to Bolshevik atrocities. Furet praised Nolte for having broken with “anti-fascist” taboos that refused to compare Nazism and communism. He agreed with Nolte that “the universalist extremism of Bolshevism provokes the extremism of the particular in Nazism” as a response.102 Despite their common ground on the totalitarian links between fascism and communism, the two historians disagreed on three major points. Furet maintained a distance from Nolte’s suggestion that the Nazi murder of Jews contained a “rational kernel” as defensive violence against communist terror to be “shocking and false.”103 He also believed Nolte’s insistence on Nazi anti-Bolshevism meant he erased the uniquely German sources for Hitler. Finally, Furet wondered if Nolte’s insistence on the reactive character of Nazism was an effort to exonerate the Third Reich by solely indicting the Soviet Union as a greater evil. Shortly before he died in 1997, Furet was slated to write the introduction to The Black Book of Communism. The editors correctly recognized the crucial role that the French historian had played in the new counter-Enlightenment project. Furet had clearly understood that the stakes of Jacobin-Marxist orthodoxy was not just a historical debate on 1789, but were arguments on the necessity for proletarian revolution and socialism. By attacking this communist canon, Furet delegitimized the whole idea of revolution as not merely unnecessary, but as a form of rationalist psychosis that leads to totalitarian insanity. 4. Ernst Nolte To forever discredit communism, the counter-Enlightenment project needed to go further than just asserting its totalitarian identity with fascism. Rather, communism needed to be painted as objectively worse. That mission was undertaken by Ernst Nolte in the Historikerstreit or “historians’ dispute” that dominated West German intellectual life in the 1980s. Nolte’s position claimed that Nazism was a lesser evil when set against the Soviet Union and communism. This was not only a form of historical revisionism, but implicitly rehabilitated fascism. Nolte’s relationship with the philosopher Martin Heidegger helps to explain his soft spot for Nazism. While a student at the University of Freiburg in the 1940s, Nolte studied under Heidegger and they became personal



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friends. When the war ended, Heidegger was considered a wanted criminal by the Allies due to his support for the Third Reich. However, Nolte helped his mentor evade capture for a time. Later in life, Nolte justified Heidegger’s membership in the Nazi party on anti-communist grounds: “Insofar as Heidegger resisted the attempt at the [Communist] solution, he, like countless others, was historically right. . . . In committing himself to the [National Socialist] solution perhaps he became a ‘fascist.’ But in no way did that make him historically wrong from the outset.”104 Nolte’s own work on fascism bore the influence of Heidegger’s philosophy. When Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche (Three Faces of Fascism) was published in 1963, it was acclaimed by scholars as a groundbreaking study on the history of fascism. Utilizing a “metapolitical dimension” approach to history, he prioritized great ideas which acted as commanding spiritual forces that permeated all aspects of society. Nolte saw fascism as one of these great ideas, since it was a product of the political, cultural, and ideological conditions of Europe in the early twentieth century: “we cannot do otherwise than call the era of the world wars an era of fascism.”105 In his work, Nolte looked at three fascist movements—German National Socialism, Italian Fascism, and Action Française—under a comparative lens. Even though these movements originated in different national contexts, Nolte said they possessed common intellectual traits, which made it possible to arrive at a definition of a generic form of fascism. Nolte defined fascism as a rejection of the modern world, making it anti-liberal, anti-communist, anti-bourgeois, and antidemocratic. In a complex argument, Nolte said that fascism must be understood on three separate levels. One level was the political where fascism was primarily determined by its opposition to Marxism. A second level was sociological where fascism was opposed to bourgeois values. The third level was fascism’s “resistance to transcendence.” Nolte’s usage of transcendence is where his intellectual debt to Heidegger is most readily apparent. For Heidegger, transcendence contains universalist and modern ideologies such as democracy and communism that destroy traditional social bonds. Nolte argued that fascism’s resistance to transcendence took on two forms. The first involved resistance to “practical transcendence,” which meant opposing trends toward material progress, technological change, secularization, egalitarianism, democratization, and social advancement since they aimed to liberate humanity from traditional societies. According to Nolte, the Soviet Union’s industrial power and the egalitarian ideology of communism made it into the very epitome of “practical transcendence.” The rationalist USSR showcased the terrifying possibility of humanity traveling beyond its limits into the hitherto forbidden realm of the divine. As an example, Nolte pointed to the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s space flight in 1961.106

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The second type was “theoretical transcendence,” which meant championing Enlightenment reason and optimism because they undermine premodern and backward conditions. Fascists do not just resist transcendence, but they long for their own radical revolution to create a new organic order. Charles Maurras (leader of Action Française) and Adolf Hitler both viewed the Enlightenment and modernity as two forms of “anti-nature” which ruined traditional institutions: The most central of Maurras’ ideas have been seen to penetrate to this level. By “monotheism” and “antinature” he did not imply a political process: he related these terms to the tradition of Western philosophy and religion, and left no doubt that for him they were adjuncts not only of Rousseau’s notion of liberty but also of the Christian Gospels and Parmenides’ concept of being. It is equally obvious that he regarded the unity of world economics, technology, science, and emancipation merely as another and more recent form of this “antinature.” It was not difficult to find a place for Hitler’s ideas as a cruder and more recent expression of this schema. Maurras’ and Hitler’s real enemy was seen to be “freedom toward the infinite” which, intrinsic in the individual and a reality in evolution, threatens to destroy the familiar and the beloved. From all this it begins to be apparent what is meant by “transcendence.”107

According to Nolte, Hitler believed the Jews embodied the transcendence of modernity or the “historical process itself.”108 Since the Nazis saw the Jews as a mortal threat, racial war and genocide were built into their worldview from the very beginning: “Auschwitz was as firmly embedded in the principles of the National Socialist race doctrine as the fruit in the seed, and many a man who found the fruit too bitter was fertilizing the soil.”109 The historical understanding of Three Faces of Fascism is superior to Nolte’s later work in two ways. First, he is aware of the precedents in European culture, philosophy, and history for Nazi racism. He observed that young fascists found the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche particularly appealing with its talk of a new race of supermen who would dominate the world and exterminate weaker races. In fact, Nolte said that Nietzsche’s worldview was more genocidal than that of Hitler: “Many decades in advance. Nietzsche provided the political, radical anti-Marxism of fascism with its original spiritual image, an image of which even Hitler never quite showed himself the equal.”110 Second: Nolte sees fascism not as a defensive response to communist evil, but as a continuation of Nietzsche’s aristocratic rebellion against the French Revolution, democracy, and socialism.111 Despite its groundbreaking nature, Three Faces of Fascism suffers from a number of drawbacks. Like others in the counter-Enlightenment, Nolte sees ideas as the primary factor in history. His understanding of fascism largely focuses on the ideas of Maurras, Mussolini, and Hitler. When it comes to



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the relationship between industrial capitalists and fascists in Germany, Nolte downplays any connection: “The German industrialists emerge, therefore, unconvicted, so far as the actual question of financing Hitler is concerned. With respect to the more essential question of moral responsibility, they appear as guilty and not guilty at the same time, although not on the same level.”112 His identification of fascism with the ideas of its main leaders leads Nolte to a bizarre conclusion that the whole movement effectively ended once they died. For instance, the spell Hitler exercised over his followers was abruptly broken with his death and all Nazis were transformed back into normal Germans: “After the Führer’s death the core of leadership of the National Socialist state snapped back, like a steel spring wound up too long, to its original position and became a body of well-meaning and cultured Central Europeans.”113 Nolte’s approach effectively absolves fascist militants and the upper classes who supported them of any responsibility for their crimes. Nor can he explain the continued existence of fascist tendencies after 1945. At the time Nolte wrote Three Faces of Fascism, there was little indication to the outside world of his later ideological evolution. In the coming years, Nolte argued that the crimes of Nazism needed to be viewed not as unique evils, but relativized and historicized. He said that enough time had passed since 1945 for the Third Reich to be studied as dispassionately as other areas of history so that Germans could recognize the good alongside the bad. In a series of articles, lectures and books, Nolte said that Nazi Germany should not be wholly demonized: The demonisation of the Third Reich should be opposed. We must speak of demonisation when the Third Reich is denied any humaneness, which means that everything human is finite and thus can be neither completely good nor completely bad, neither completely light nor completely dark. A thorough investigation and penetrating comparison will not eliminate the singularity of the Third Reich, but they will make it appear nevertheless as a part of the history of mankind which not only reproduced traits of the past in a very concentrated form, but which at the same time anticipated future developments and tangled manifest problems of the present. The Third Reich, too, can and must be an object of historical investigation, investigation which is not beyond politics but which is yet not merely the servant of politics.114

When it came to the extermination of the Jews, Nolte argued that Germans did not bear any special guilt for it. He said that the Bolsheviks began a “European Civil War” in 1917 with their class genocide. This form of violence was not only unprecedented, but had its origins in the French Revolution, which the communists perfected.115 The Nazi racial genocide was a defensive—albeit regrettable—response to the greater violence of Bolshevism:

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It is a notable shortcoming that the literature about National Socialism does not know or does not want to admit to what degree all the deeds—with the sole exception of the technical process of gassing—that the National Socialists later committed had already been described in the voluminous literature of the 1920s: mass deportations and executions, torture, death camps, the extermination of entire groups using strictly objective selection criteria, and public demands for the annihilation of millions of guiltless people who were thought to be “enemies.” It is likely that many of these reports were exaggerated. It is certain that the “White terror” also committed terrible deeds, even though its program contained no analogy to the “extermination of the bourgeoisie.” Nonetheless, the following question must seem permissible, even unavoidable: Did the National Socialists or Hitler perhaps commit an “Asiatic” deed merely because they and their ilk considered themselves to be potential victims of an “Asiatic” deed? Was the Gulag Archipelago not primary to Auschwitz? Was the Bolshevik murder of an entire class not the logical and factual prius of the “racial murder” of National Socialism? Cannot Hitler’s most secret deeds be explained by the fact that he had not forgotten the rat cage? Did Auschwitz in its root causes not originate in a past that would not pass?116

The implication of Nolte’s argument was not that the Soviet Union and the Third Reich were two equal totalitarian evils, but that the former prepared for the latter. It was Lenin and Stalin who pioneered genocidal methods in the gulag while the Third Reich copied them with Auschwitz: Auschwitz is not primarily a result of traditional anti-semitism. It was in its core not merely a “genocide” but was above all a reaction born out of the anxiety of the annihilating occurrences of the Russian Revolution. This copy was far more irrational than the original because it was simply absurd to imagine that ‘the Jews’ had ever wanted to annihilate the German bourgeoisie or even the German people, and it is very hard to admit even a perverted ethos. It was more horrifying than the original because the annihilation of men was conducted in a quasi-industrial manner. It was more repulsive than the original because it was based on mere assumptions, and almost free from that mass hatred which, in the framework of horror, is nevertheless an understandable and as far as it goes a reconciling element. All this constitutes singularity but it does not alter the fact that the so-called annihilation of the Jews during the Third Reich was a reaction or a distorted copy and not a first act or an original.117

Considering the genocidal nature of Bolshevism, this effectively leads to the conclusion that the invasion of the Soviet Union was justified to save Europe from subjugation by Asiatic barbarism. As Nolte said about Hitler’s



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anti-communism: “[it was] understandable, and up to a certain point, indeed, justified.”118 Wanting it both ways, Nolte justified the Holocaust and denied it happened. He justified the extermination of the Jews by citing a September 1939 letter written by Chaim Weizmann—a prominent Zionist—that Jews would fight alongside Britain in a conflict with Germany. According to Nolte, this effectively amounted to a Jewish declaration of war on Germany: “If there is someone in the world trained to speak for all Jews, not just those from Palestine, that someone was Chaim Weizmann. . . . Therefore, it does not result from any absurdity to speak in principle of a ‘Jewish declaration of war against Hitler.’”119 On the other hand, Nolte wondered whether there was a planned genocide by questioning whether the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 even occurred. In support of his revisionist positions, Nolte cited and praised the work of British neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier David Irving.120 In 1986, Nolte’s historical revisionism set off a polemical firestorm in West Germany known as the Historikerstreit. Many of Germany’s most prominent intellectuals on both the far right and center-left joined in the debate. The conservative historian Andreas Hillgruber defended Nolte by saying that the last year of the war on the Eastern Front was a heroic effort to defend Germany from Slavic vengeance by the Red Army. The very title of Hillgruber’s book Zweierlei Untergang. Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europaischen Judentums (Two Kinds of Doom: The Destruction of the German Reich and the End of European Jewry) equates the defeat of the German Reich with the Holocaust. The philosopher and Frankfurt School member Jürgen Habermas challenged Nolte’s apologetic approach to the Third Reich by attributing its crimes to Bolshevism.121 From abroad Ian Kershaw, a British expert on the Third Reich and a biographer of Hitler, contested many of Nolte’s claims. Kershaw argued that there were major differences between the dictatorships of Stalin and Hitler. In the Soviet Union, Stalin was a hands-on ruler who concentrated power into his hands. This meant Stalin bore personal responsibility for repression since he signed arrest and execution orders during the purges. In contrast to Stalin, the natural bureaucrat, Hitler was a born Bohemian who disdained attending meetings and following an orderly routine. Kershaw said the difference between Stalin and Hitler came down to the fact that the former was not secure in his position. There were Communists who contested Stalin’s leadership and Marxist credentials. To buttress his position, Stalin not only increased his power, but was willing to destabilize the USSR by removing rivals with purges and terror. Stalin’s cult of personality was an artificial graft onto Bolshevism, adopted to bolster his legitimacy.

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By contrast, Hitler’s place as German Führer was far more secure. Since Hitler wanted to maintain his image as a leader standing above petty squabbles, he did not play an active role in government. Hitler undermined efforts by other Nazi functionaries to unify administration. This ended up reducing the state, party, and SS into rival agencies. As a result, there was a gradual breakdown of clearly defined authority inside the Third Reich. The different interest groups scrambled to win Hitler’s favor, since he was the only source of legitimacy. Kershaw calls this relationship between Hitler and his underlings, “Working Toward the Führer.” This phrase was taken from a 1934 speech by a Nazi bureaucrat named Werner Willikens who elaborated on its meaning: Everyone who has the opportunity to observe it knows that the Führer can hardly dictate from above everything which he intends to realise sooner or later. On the contrary, up till now everyone with a post in the new Germany has worked best when he has, so to speak, worked towards the Führer. Very often and in many spheres it has been the case—in previous years as well—that individuals have simply waited for orders and instructions. Unfortunately, the same will be true in the future; but in fact it is the duty of everybody to try to work towards the Führer along the lines he would wish. Anyone who makes mistakes will notice it soon enough. But anyone who really works towards the Führer along his lines and towards his goal will certainly both now and in the future one day have the finest reward in the form of the sudden legal confirmation of his work.122

Kershaw believes that “Working toward the Führer” explains not only how the Third Reich operated, but how the Holocaust became a reality. Bureaucrats in the state, SS, and Nazi party who wanted to advance their careers did not need to wait for orders from Hitler. An ambitious official could anticipate the Führer’s desires by taking initiative to realize them. Therefore, Nazi functionaries attempted to outdo one another by promoting ever more extreme measures as the fulfillment of Hitler’s wishes. While Hitler’s leadership set the stage for Nazi genocide, its implementation came from zealous Nazis like Adolf Eichmann who “worked towards the Führer.” Kershaw concluded that Hitler’s charisma and program of racial purification provided direction to this steady radicalization from below that ended in genocide: “Hitler’s Weltanschauung—a set of visionary aims rather than precise policy objectives—now served, therefore, to integrate the centrifugal forces of the Nazi Movement, to mobilize the activists, and to legitimate policy initiatives undertaken to implement his expressed or implied will.”123 No comparable ideological radicalization led Stalin or the USSR toward genocide. Whatever Stalinism’s crimes and brutality, the Soviet Union had rational goals of modernization which were not comparable to Hitler’s chimera of a racial empire.



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Saul Friedländer was among the scholars who challenged historical revisionism. He said that it was impossible to “historicize” Nazi Germany since it was not a normal period of history. This ran the risk of ignoring its inherent criminality.124 Omer Bartov, an expert on the Eastern Front, noted that revisionists such as Hillgruber ignored that the Wehrmacht was saturated in National Socialist ideology and was complicit in the Holocaust. He said it was wrong to equate the defeat of the Third Reich with the genocide of the Jews. While the Soviet Union was an authoritarian dictatorship, it was not bent on genocide. The Red Army was far more lenient with Germans than the Wehrmacht had treated the Soviet people. Bartov noted that Hillgruber’s whole argument was based upon accepting Hitler as a lesser evil to Stalin. This entailed a defense of the German war effort in the USSR: “[Hillgruber] accepts the central contention of the Nazi regime that bad as Hitler might have been, he was by far better than Stalin. Consequently, one was justified to defend the Nazi regime of the former from the ‘Bolshevism’ of the latter, especially as there was ostensibly no other alternative.”125 While a great deal of Nolte’s claims have been rejected by scholars, his concept of a “European Civil War” has been surprisingly appropriated by leftist writers such as Enzo Traverso, Domenico Losurdo, and Arno Mayer. While accepting the overall concept, these three have completely changed the terms of Nolte’s narrative. All three argue that the European Civil War began not in 1917, but in 1914. The outbreak of the First World War marked the beginning of the collapse of dynastic regimes, the militarization of political life, and the subsequent clash between the forces of revolution and counterrevolution. After 1917, revolutionary violence cannot be separated from the desperate resistance of the counterrevolution. As Mayer says: “the Furies of revolution are fueled above all by the resistance of the forces and ideas opposed to it.”126 Despite Nolte’s apologetics, Traverso says he correctly understood that Nazism was a reaction to communism: “Nolte does genuinely grasp an essential feature of Nazism; its counter-revolutionary nature, that of a movement born as a reaction against the Russian Revolution and German Spartacism, as a militant anti-Marxist and anti-communist force. That is true of fascism—Mussolini’s as well as Hitler’s—and of the counter-revolution more generally, which is always inextricably, ‘symbiotically’ linked to revolution.”127 Fascism and communism are therefore bound together as radically opposed forces. Mayer notes that Hitler’s racial ideology was not a copy of Bolshevism or Marxism, but was premised on rejecting Enlightenment rationalism: “For [Hitler], international Marxism was the final culmination and distillation of the Enlightenment, the initial wellspring of the modernity that fired his burning hatred, fear, and aggression.”128 Losurdo argues that Nolte deliberately ignores colonialism when comparing Nazism and communism. This was no

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small detail in understanding the Third Reich, since the Wehrmacht’s war against the Soviet Union was modeled upon European imperialism: Hitler constantly referred to white and European expansion in the Far West, as well as to the British conquest of India. Underlying genocide is an act of naturalistic de-specification and this goes back in the first instance to the history of colonialism. Naturalistic de-specification can in fact take very different forms. . . . The attempt to revive the colonial tradition in twentieth-century Eastern Europe entailed a gigantic programme of dis-emancipation and a horrendous train of atrocities and barbarism.129

In Why the Heavens Did Not Darken? Mayer argues that the Nazi invasion of the USSR was a war of annihilation inspired by a deeply ingrained anti-communism among Germany’s bourgeoisie. This anti-communism easily inserted itself onto Nazi delusions about “Judeo-Bolshevism.” The mass murder of Jews was not a defensive response to the gulag, but a direct consequence of the failed anti-Bolshevik crusade in the East: “The Judeocide was forged in the fires of a stupendous war to conquer unlimited Lebensraum from Russia, to crush the Soviet regime, and to liquidate international bolshevism. . . . Without Operation Barbarossa there would and could have been no Jewish catastrophe, no ‘Final Solution.’”130 While Mayer, Traverso, and Losurdo agree with Nolte that the central clash of the twentieth century was a “European Civil War” between fascism and communism, the former reverses the roles: the Nazis are rightfully seen as the aggressors and communists the main victims. Nolte’s main contribution to the counter-Enlightenment project was not only to recast totalitarianism, but to make Nazi anti-communism respectable. He accepted that there was a structural and criminal identity between communism and fascism, but it was the former who pioneered genocide. Nazi genocide was merely a copy—a poor one at that—of the Bolshevik original. 5. Robert Conquest Alongside Nolte, other anti-communists also charged the USSR with surpassing the Third Reich in criminality. Among them was Robert Conquest, whose book The Harvest of Sorrow, argued that the millions of deaths in the famine of 1932–1933 were deliberately engineered by Stalin to exterminate the Ukrainian people. Conquest’s work not only provided ammunition to Reagan’s campaign against the “Evil Empire,” but also was a key component in the counter-Enlightenment project. The British-born Conquest had a long and distinguished career as a zealous anti-communist. Following military service in World War II, he was a



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member of the British Foreign Office’s IRD. Conquest was an admirer of George Orwell’s work and his assistant approached the writer for details on Soviet sympathizers. After leaving government service in 1956, Conquest pursued a career as a freelance scholar, focusing on fighting communism on the intellectual front. However, he maintained a lucrative relationship with the IRD and wrote five books on the Soviet Union at their behest between 1960 and 1965. In 1968, Conquest released one of his most well-known works, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties. This book had the merit of being the first comprehensive historical work on the Great Terror released in the West. Conquest’s thesis argued that Stalin set the terror in motion in order to crush his rivals. Following the end of the terror, Stalin perfected a new form of totalitarian dictatorship. The Great Terror achieved international renown and was hailed by anti-communists as the definitive exposé on Stalin’s purges. In 2005, Conquest was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush, who said: “The truths he told were not always in fashion, but the cautionary lessons he taught about murderous ideologies and the men who served them will always be relevant.”131 Revisionist scholars in Soviet studies were not so enamored of The Great Terror. For example, Conquest claimed that Stalin had 20 million people killed. Once the Soviet archives were opened, it was revealed that 681,692 people were executed at the high point of the terror in 1937–1938.132 Even allowing for other deaths in the gulag, the numbers do not reach anywhere close to 20 million. Conquest himself was unapologetic and believed history vindicated him. When his publisher suggested a new title for The Great Terror after the fall of the USSR, Conquest suggested: “How about I Told You So, You Fucking Fools?”133 Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Conquest worked closely with other prominent anti-communists. He was a speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher and had the ear of Reagan’s Secretary of State, George Shultz. In 1981, Conquest was approached by the far-right Ukrainian National Association (UNA) to write about the 1932–1933 famine. The product of his intellectual labors was The Harvest of Sorrow (1986), arguing that the USSR carried out a Holodomor killing 14.5 million people, more than the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust. Conquest sees the origin of the Holodomor inherent in communist ideology: “The main lesson seems to be that Communist ideology provided the motivation for an unprecedented massacre of men, women and children.”134 Conquest believes Marxism inherited its murderous ideas from 1789, which set the template for a radical revolution: “And it is indeed in France that we first find Revolution in the sense of the complete destruction of the existing order, and its replacement by abstract concepts—these latter formulated by, and dictatorially

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enforced by, theorists with no experience of real politics.”135 Thus, communism’s universalist and rationalist vision was bound to end in genocide. Conquest sees an unbroken line of descent from Marx to Stalin, which enables him to blame all Marxists for the terror-famine. However, a simple examination causes this to break down. Nowhere in their work do Marx and Engels advocate the forced collectivization of agriculture. In fact, Conquest quotes Engels explicitly saying the opposite: “Social-Democrats would never force, but only persuade, the German peasantry into collective ways.”136 He also believes Stalin’s collectivization campaign was a continuation of Lenin’s policies of War Communism. Yet this focus on ideas means Conquest completely ignores material circumstances. War Communism was an emergency measure to feed starving cities in the midst of collapse and civil war. Moreover, Lenin never advocated forced collectivization. Finally, Conquest’s myopia means he dismisses Trotsky and Bukharin’s alternatives to Stalin and simply views Oppositional Bolsheviks as “a pool of future Stalinists.”137 Teleology was never so easy. There is also good reason to reject Conquest’s claim that the Ukrainian famine was a deliberate act of genocide. For one, he twisted facts to suit his own counter-Enlightenment agenda. Conquest’s figures are wildly inflated and not based on any archival evidence. Instead, he uses unreliable Ukrainian émigré accounts such as the Black Deeds of the Kremlin (referenced more than one hundred times in The Harvest of Sorrow). Moshe Lewin dismissed Conquest’s work as “crap” that does little more than stir up emotions: “I am an anti-Stalinist, but I don’t see how this [genocide] campaign adds to our knowledge. It’s adding horrors, adding horrors, until it becomes a pathology.”138 To arrive at a figure of 14.5 million famine deaths, Conquest compares Soviet census data in 1926 and 1939 to determine the excess deaths. However, demographers Barbara Anderson and Brian Silver say that this is a basic error of methodology since Conquest assumes that the population deficit solely comes from famine deaths: “It is extremely misleading to interpret population deficits as excess deaths, because the population deficit includes not just extra people who died but also births that did not occur, whether because of delayed marriage, separation of spouses, poor nutrition of mothers, or voluntary fertility control, including the use of abortion.”139 More recent and rigorous research on the Ukrainian famine by R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft arrive at figures ranging from 4.6 to 8.5 million deaths.140 While still incredibly high numbers, these are far less than those claimed by Conquest. The claim that the famine specifically targeted Ukrainians does not hold up either. During the collectivization drive, other national minorities along with Ukrainian peasants were labelled as “kulaks” and suffered brutality at the hands of the Communist Party. As Domenico Losurdo put it: “The second



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revolution issuing from Moscow thus ended in a kind of colonial war, with all the horrors peculiar to colonial wars. It was the moment in which the system of concentration camps was developed on a broad front and affected not only entire social classes but also entire nationalities. There is no doubt that the Soviet leaders are responsible for the horrors.”141 According to Stephen Kotkin, the famine was not localized in the Ukraine, but was Soviet-wide with other regions suffering as well: “In the Kazakh autonomous republic, probably between 35 and 40 percent of the titular nation—as compared with 8 to 9 percent of Slavs there—perished from starvation or disease, not because the regime targeted Kazakhs by ethnicity, but because regime policy there consisted of forced denomadization. Similarly, there was no ‘Ukrainian’ famine; the famine was Soviet.”142 For all the famine’s horrors, there is no documentation that Stalin planned to exterminate the Ukrainians. While Stalin did not carry out a genocide, this does not mean he bears no responsibility for the famine. It was his policies that set the stage for the disaster: collectivization and de-kulakization were chaotic and carried out poorly with the unintended result of widespread famine. As Davies and Wheatcroft conclude in their study: But the story which has emerged in this book is of a Soviet leadership which was struggling with a famine crisis which had been caused partly by their wrongheaded policies, but was unexpected and undesirable. The background to the famine is not simply that Soviet agricultural policies were derived from Bolshevik ideology, though ideology played its part. They were also shaped by the Russian pre-revolutionary past, the experiences of the civil war, the international situation, the intransigent circumstances of geography and the weather, and the modus operandi of the Soviet system as it was established under Stalin. They were formulated by men with little formal education and limited knowledge of agriculture. Above all, they were a consequence of the decision to industrialise this peasant country at breakneck speed.143

Certainly, one can judge Stalin’s actions as criminally negligent, but they do not equal deliberate acts of genocide. Confronted by all these challenges, Conquest himself retracted his claims that Stalin caused a Soviet Holocaust. In 2003, he told Davies and Wheatcroft: “In correspondence Dr Conquest has stated that it is not his opinion that ‘Stalin purposely inflicted the 1933 famine. No. What I argue is that with resulting famine imminent, he could have prevented it, but put ‘Soviet interest’ other than feeding the starving first—thus consciously abetting it.’”144 Yet this admission did not matter. Conquest’s work had lasting resonance and buttressed counter-Enlightenment claims that the Soviet Union was a totalitarian, criminal, and genocidal state.

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6. Richard Pipes The dissolution of the USSR was championed by the West as proof of the final victory of capitalism. No one represented this triumphalism more forcefully than Richard Pipes. His work on the Russian Revolution was meant to hammer the final nails in the communist coffin. Throughout his life, Pipes gravitated toward the elite and their interests. His academic career was spent at Harvard University, where he was the director of the Russian Research Center. In the 1970s, Pipes served as an advisor to anti-communist hawks in the American government such as Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. While working with the CIA, Pipes adamantly opposed détente with the USSR. This foreshadowed the belligerence of the Reagan Administration, where Pipes was a member of the National Security Council. The publication of Pipes’s The Russian Revolution (1990) followed by Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (1993), could not have been more timely. The Berlin Wall had fallen and the USSR was in free fall. Communists were questioning the very legitimacy of the system and wanted to know what had gone wrong. In this moment, Pipes’s work offered a clear answer. In his account of the revolution, Pipes told a Dostoevskian story about the radical intelligentsia, who singlehandedly destroyed their country. Russian intellectuals proved so destructive due to their embrace of the Enlightenment, which replaced God with man. For Pipes, Communism’s failures could be laid at the feet of materialist philosophy: “Communism failed because it proceeded from the erroneous doctrine of the Enlightenment, perhaps the most pernicious idea in the history of thought, that man is merely a material compound, devoid of either soul or innate ideas, and as such a passive product of an infinitely malleable social environment.”145 Based on these premises, Pipes’s story is decidedly simple. He sees Lenin as a spiteful figure who just wants to watch the world burn. In 1917, the Bolsheviks used their demagoguery to whip up popular ressentiment, so they could take power. Pipes denies the October Revolution any legitimacy as a popular uprising. He condemns it as a bloody coup carried out by a cabal of fanatical power-hungry intellectuals: “October was a classic coup d’état, the capture of governmental power by a small minority, carried out, in deference to the democratic conventions of the age, with a show of mass participation, but without mass engagement.”146 Once entrenched in power, the Bolsheviks proceeded to exterminate their enemies. They modeled the Red Terror on the precedents set by the French Revolution. Pipes concludes that it was Lenin’s plan all along to set-up a totalitarian state. In an explicit reference to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s work, Pipes observed that the Bolsheviks murdered the Romanovs to join their members together in a pact of blood:



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Like the protagonists in Dostoevsky’s Possessed, the Bolsheviks had to spill blood to bind their wavering adherents with a bond of collective guilt. The more innocent victims the Bolshevik Party had on its conscience, the more the Bolshevik rank and file had to realize that there was no retreating, no faltering, no compromising, that they were inextricably bound to their leaders, and could only either march with them to “total victory,” regardless of the cost, or go down with them in “total doom.” The Ekaterinburg massacre marked the beginning of the “Red Terror,” formally inaugurated six weeks later, many of whose victims would consist of hostages executed, not because they had committed crimes, but because, in Trotsky’s words, their death “was needed.”147

Pipes believes that Lenin’s tactics of terror and genocide were eagerly copied by his fascist acolytes, Hitler and Mussolini. Like Nolte, Pipes sees Bolshevik class genocide as prefiguring the Final Solution: “Lenin hated what he perceived to be the ‘bourgeoisie’ with a destructive passion that fully equaled Hitler’s hatred of the Jews: nothing short of its physical annihilation would satisfy him.”148 Pipes finds the different intellectual origins of fascism and communism to be immaterial, since they both ended with totalitarian police states and mass enslavement: “As we have noted, both movements treat ideas as infinitely flexible tools to be imposed on their subjects to enforce obedience and create the appearance of uniformity. In the end, the totalitarianism of the Leninist-Stalinist and Hitlerite regimes, however different their intellectual roots, proved equally nihilistic and equally destructive.”149 For Pipes, there were no differences among the Bolsheviks in their totalitarian outlook. Lenin was the teacher while others such as Trotsky and Stalin were merely his devoted pupils. However, Pipes believes that Stalin was the most faithful and ruthless among Lenin’s students: “Stalin’s megalomania, his vindictiveness, his morbid paranoia, and other odious personal qualities should not obscure the fact that his ideology and modus operandi were Lenin’s. A man of meager education, he had no other source of ideas.”150 While Trotsky may have been “more honorable,” he shared the same worldview as Lenin and Stalin: “But the record indicates that in his day Trotsky, too, was one of the pack. His defeat had nothing ennobling about it.”151 Pipes considers irrelevant the question of alternatives to Stalin because all Bolsheviks were already molded in Lenin’s image with no ambitions other than power and cruelty. Pipes’ warnings about the dangers found in Enlightenment reason echo those written by Reagan’s hero Whittaker Chambers. A former communist who accused Alger Hiss of espionage, Chambers was one of the godfathers of modern American conservativism. His memoir, Witness (1952) argued that communism was the latest incarnation of a godless ideology that stretched all the way back to when Satan first tempted Eve:

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It [Communism] is not new. It is, in fact, man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: “Ye shall be as gods.” It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man’s relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God. It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man’s liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man’s destiny and reorganizing man’s life and the world. It is the vision of man, once more the central figure of the Creation, not because God made man in his image, but because man’s mind makes him the most intelligent of the animals. Copernicus and his successors displaced man as the central fact of the universe by proving that the earth was not the central star of the universe. Communism restores man to his sovereignty by the simple method of denying God.152

Pipes would not disagree that reason and the denial of God was the root of communist totalitarianism. While saying little that was new in his work, Pipes’ sweeping righteous indignation captured the triumphal counterEnlightenment mood over communism. 7. Martin Malia Pipes provided the first anti-communist examination of the Russian Revolution that coincided with its defeat. However, the counter-Enlightenment needed to offer a more comprehensive autopsy of the Soviet experiment. One of the fullest treatments was Martin Malia’s The Soviet Tragedy (1994), which went from Lenin to Gorbachev. Malia does not question that Lenin, Stalin, and other Soviet leaders were committed to socialism. However, he argued that this did not matter because communism was not a sound idea, but had failure written into its Enlightenment genetic code. Citing Dostoevsky in The Possessed, Malia said that there was a “dark side” to the Enlightenment with its “potential demonism of rationalism.”153 Marxism claimed that there was a direction in history that led toward a rational and egalitarian world. The Russian intelligentsia was captivated by these ideas which proved to be explosive enough to level the Romanov dynasty. Ultimately, the Soviet Union vindicated Dostoevsky that reason ends in moral nihilism and murderous despotism. Since the communist utopia of paradise on earth is impossible to achieve, it could only end in totalitarianism. Therefore, Stalinism was not a deviation from Marxism, but its fulfillment: “In short, the only practical way to



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realize the Marxist purpose was through Leninism; and the only practical way to complete the Leninist project was through Stalinism.”154 As a result, the USSR created a monstrous state that was not amendable to reforms with its ultimate collapse already built in: “The problem was not with the driver but with the vehicle.”155 Malia concludes that socialism is contrary to human and social nature, meaning that there is no alternative to capitalism: “the Soviet failure has demonstrated that the market is part of the social order of nature.”156 While Malia’s Soviet Tragedy repeated the standard anti-communist narratives, he expanded upon them by covering the whole life span of the Soviet Union. This proved to be a dry run for The Black Book of Communism (Malia himself wrote the foreword) which as the final act of the counter-Enlightenment project hoped to bury communism for all time. Addendum: Stephen Kotkin Princeton University professor Stephen Kotkin, one of Malia’s students, offers a potential case study of a “moderate” counter-Enlightenment figure. Overall, Kotkin agrees with Malia’s anti-communist and counter-Enlightenment position. He considers the Soviet Union, and Stalinism specifically, to be rooted in the Enlightenment: “Stalinism constituted a quintessential Enlightenment utopia, an attempt, via the instrumentality of the state, to impose a rational ordering on society, while at the same time overcoming the wrenching class divisions brought about by nineteenth-century industrialization.”157 Like other anti-communists, Kotkin also believes there was no break between Lenin and Stalin since they had a shared modernist vision of socialism. Furthermore, he believes that the USSR was bound to collapse since its alternative socialist modernity could not catch up and overtake the capitalist West. However, Kotkin refrains from a totalitarian analysis of the USSR. His work The Magnetic Mountain (1995) focuses on the Soviet showpiece city of Magnitogorsk. There, Kotkin describes the Soviet Union as a “new civilization.” Borrowing theoretical insights from the philosopher Michel Foucault (to whom the book is dedicated), Kotkin looks at the experiences of everyday life in Magnitogorsk to see how the USSR functioned as a living social system: “the city of Magnitogorsk must be understood not as a static environment, but as a perpetually shifting, dynamic grid of relations.”158 This is somewhat of a break with the counter-Enlightenment’s emphasis on Soviet totalitarianism. While Kotkin avoids the category of totalitarianism in his biography of Stalin, he still remains firmly in the anti-communist camp.159

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8. The Black Book of Communism The Black Book of Communism is the definitive synthesis of the counterEnlightenment project that draws together the ideas of totalitarianism, anti-Jacobinism, anti-Enlightenment, and religious moralism to provide a grand account of communism’s crimes across the world. The Black Book says that over the course of the twentieth century, communists were responsible for 100 million deaths, making it the most lethal force in all of human history. All the basic arguments can be found in the introduction and conclusion by Stéphane Courtois. For instance, Courtois repeats the totalitarian cliché that the Third Reich and the Soviet Union were genocidal regimes. Yet he goes further and says that the 25 million deaths due to Nazism pale in comparison to greater communist figures. Communism is the greater evil because it practiced “universal” genocide based upon class as opposed to Nazism’s “particular” genocide based on race. In contrast to Nazism, communism’s universalism permitted its genocidal tendencies to “metastasize worldwide.”160 Since communist regimes were founded as mafia-like criminal enterprises, Courtois rejects any talk of either “Good Lenin/Bad Stalin” or an alternative within communism. He concludes that there was never a “benign, initial phase of Communism before some mythical ‘wrong turn’ threw it off track.”161 The source of communist totalitarianism can be found in its science of history, which arbitrarily divided humanity into antagonistic classes. While the proletariat were seen as the bearers of truth and justice, those who found themselves outside its ranks were branded as enemies who were unworthy of life. Courtois considered Marxist science comparable to fascist racism since it denied the unity of the human species by reducing “people not to a universal but to a particular condition, be it biological, racial, or sociohistorical.”162 Naturally, Courtois noted that the Bolshevik penchant for class genocide and terror originated in Jacobinism: “Robespierre laid the first stones on the road that spurred Lenin to terror.”163 Like Talmon, Courtois considers communism to be a messianic and totalitarian democratic pseudo-religion. While Christianity preaches salvation in the afterlife, communism promises an earthly happiness. Courtois says that this makes communism appear more insidious than the Church, since it bases its utopian claims on the scientific folly of a “redemptive belief in the Promethean destiny of mankind.”164 As communism proved, if men attempt to create a paradise on earth, the results will be horrendous and destructive beyond imagination. For Courtois, original sin—or its secular equivalent of human nature—damns in advance any attempt to change the world. While The Black Book aims to be a serious historical work, it was actually an ideological production. It was no accident that Stéphane Courtois was the



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chief editor. He was a former French Maoist who abandoned revolution when Solzhenitsyn arrived in Paris. Like many others, Courtois was the latest in a long line of ex-radicals who parroted the claim that communism was “the god that failed.” As Daniel Singer noted in his book review: The establishment everywhere has the art of getting the ideological services it requires, but these were needed more in France, which had a strong Communist Party and which in 1968 was shaken by a student rising and a big general strike. When, in the mid-seventies, a structural crisis came on top of ideological questioning, the system called to the rescue the so-called “new philosophers.” Having primitively chanted “Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Lin Piao,” they simply reversed the slogan and blamed Marx for the concentration camps. They provided no more than seasoning for a mixture of von Hayek, Karl Popper and Solzhenitsyn. But as a theme of sustained propaganda, their warning - you may rebel individually, but if you act collectively to alter society you will end in the gulag was very effective. Still, its effects did wear off.165

As a work of the counter-Enlightenment, The Black Book portrays communism as history’s worst evil. This means those who fought communism, including fascists, were quietly rehabilitated. For instance, The Black Book laments the sorry fate of Vlasov and his Nazi collaborators when they were captured by the Red Army.166 The book’s French release in 1997 happened at the same time as the trial of Maurice Papon, a Vichy collaborator who was charged with helping the Nazis deport Jews to the death camps. As part of their defense strategy, Papon’s attorneys used The Black Book. In his book review, Adam Shatz noted the frightening implications of this: “Since the book’s publication coincided with Maurice Papon’s trial on charges of Nazi collaboration during the Vichy years, French readers were invited to contemplate the notion that partisan resistance fighters, many of them communists and all of them in alliance with Soviet Russia, were on no firmer moral ground than a pro-fascist bureaucrat who sent Jewish women and children to the ovens.”167 Based on The Black Book’s arguments, one could legitimately ask: were the Nazis victims of communism? Since The Black Book is an ideological work, it distorts the historical record to attribute every possible death to communism to reach the magic figure of 100 million. This gives The Black Book the impression of atrocity porn with inflated body counts and massacres without any regard to context. Whether the Soviet Union was at war or peace are not taken into account. No difference is made between the killing of Black Hundred pogromists during the Civil War and those executed during the purges. Courtois makes no distinction between intentional killings and those who died from neglect or other causes.

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It can genuinely be asked what percentage of deaths in the USSR were attributable to backwardness, capitalist encirclement, or secret police actions. However, The Black Book makes no effort to do so. Like the rest of the counter-Enlightenment, Courtois offers no material analysis of the Soviet Union or the other countries under discussion. Most observations about Soviet politics do not rise above a superficial and banal empiricism. In constructing a singular “communism” Courtois erases all differences between Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Ceaușescu, Hoxha, and others. This bias was so blatant that even two contributors, Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin objected. Werth and Margolin were so embarrassed by Courtois’s lack of scholarly scruples that they unsuccessfully took legal action to remove their chapters from The Black Book. Werth, who authored the chapters on Russia, said that despite surface similarities between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, there were still profound differences: “Death camps did not exist in the Soviet Union . . . the more you compare communism and Nazism, the more the differences are obvious.”168 Finally, The Black Book’s moralistic claim that communism was responsible for the greatest number of deaths in history does not withstand a moment of honest scrutiny. A single glance at the history of capitalism gives figures that dwarf 100 million. One can just look at the experiences of two World Wars and fascism. In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis argues that in the nineteenth century, famines in India and China killed upwards of 60 million people due to laissez-faire policies. That far exceeds the highest figures given for the Ukrainian “terror-famine.” According to Domenico Losurdo, The Black Book can only make communism into the epitome of evil by erasing the history of capitalism, particularly colonialism: Accordingly, when historical revisionism and The Black Book of Communism date the start of the history of genocide and horror from Communism, they engage in a colossal repression. Solemnly proclaimed, the moral commitment to give voice to unjustly forgotten victims turns into its opposite—a deadly silence that buries the Native Americans, the Herero, the colonial populations, the “barbarians” for a second time. This is a silence fraught with consequences on a specifically historiographical level as well, because it makes it impossible to understand Nazism and Fascism.169

The Black Book of Communism is the crowning jewel of the counter-Enlightenment project. Yet as a bolt from the blue, the counter-Enlightenment is unable to rationally explain the history of communism except by viewing it as a diabolical force. What remains is a cautionary warning that communism’s Dialectic of Saturn is found in the Enlightenment dream of human emancipation, which must necessarily end in terror, totalitarianism, and genocide.



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Ultimately, the counter-Enlightenment project must mystify both Stalinism and communism in its crusade to defend private property. NOTES 1. Quoted in David D. Roberts, The Totalitarian Experiment in Twentieth-Century Europe: Understanding the Poverty of Great Politics (New York: Routledge, 2006), 272. 2. Giovanni Gentile, Origins and Doctrine of Fascism, ed. A James Gregor (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2002), 21. 3. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going? (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972a), 248 and 278. Souvarine viewed Nazi Germany and the USSR as equally totalitarian: “It is hardly possible that so many analogies between Bolshevism and fascism in word and deed, in means and methods, in institutions and types of men, do not reflect some historical relationship, unless one admits the possibility of a complete divorce between the essence and the form.” See Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism (New York: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1939), 673. 4. Franz Borkenau, Modern Sociologists: Pareto (London: Chapman & Hall, 1936), 196. In 1940, Borkenau wrote further about totalitarianism in The Totalitarian Enemy. See also William David Jones, “Toward a Theory of Totalitarianism: Franz Borkenau’s Pareto,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53, no. 3 (July–September 1992): 455–66. 5. See William Smaldone, Rudolf Hilferding: Tragedy of a German Social Democrat (DeKalb: North Illinois University Press), 196–200. 6. Winston Churchill, “The Defence of Freedom and Peace (The Lights are Going Out),” International Churchill Society. https:​//​winstonchurchill​.org​/resources​ /speeches​/1930–1938​-the​-wilderness​/the​-defence​-of​-freedom​-and​-peace​-the​-lights​ -are​-going​-out​/. 7. Robert Nisbet, “Arendt on Totalitarianism,” The National Interest 27 (Spring 1992): 85. 8. Stephen F. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History Since 1917 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 3. 9. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1976), 311. A penetrating critique of Arendt can be found in Domenico Losurdo, “Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism,” Historical Materialism 12, no. 2 (January 2004): 25–55. 10. Arendt 1976, 317. 11. Ibid., 318. 12. Ibid., 323. 13. Ibid., 378. 14. Ibid., 419. 15. Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 22.

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16. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (New York: Routledge, 2011), xxxv. 17. Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (New York: Routledge, 2006), 117. Elsewhere, Hayek was explicit that the philosophical source of collectivist totalitarianism lay in the work of Hegel: Perhaps nobody has seen this connection between liberalism and the insight into the limited powers of abstract thinking more clearly than that ultra-rationalist who has become the fountain head of most modern irrationalism and totalitarianism, G. W. F. Hegel. See Friedrich Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty: A New Statement of the Liberal Principles of Justice and Political Economy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1982), 33. 18. Hayek 2006, 73. Winston Churchill repeated Hayek’s talking points during the 1945 general election, staying that the Labour Party’s program of a welfare state would require the use of Gestapo-like methods to enforce it. In his review of The Road to Serfdom, Orwell said that capitalism was more totalitarian than collectivism: “But [Hayek] does not see, or will not admit, that a return to ‘free’ competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State.” See Orwell 1968b, 118. 19. Alfred G. Meyer, Leninism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 19. Along similar lines, Leonard Schapiro argued that Leninism had little to do with Marxist theory proper, but was more a rationalization for holding power: “In the last resort, bolshevism proved to be less a doctrine, than a technique of action for the seizing and holding of power by the Bolshevik party.” See Leonard Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy: Political Opposition in the Soviet State, First Phase 1917–1922 (London: Macmillan, 1977), 14. 20. Adam B. Ulam, Stalin: The Man and His Era (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 261. 21. Ibid., 741. 22. Merle Fainsod, How Russia is Ruled (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), 354. In 1956, Brzezinski wrote: “terror is the most universal characteristic of totalitarianism . . . It is also a constant and pervading process of mass coercion, a continuum which persists throughout the totalitarian era.” See also Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Permanent Purge: Politics in Soviet Totalitarianism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), 27. 23. Quoted in David Caute, Isaac and Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 279. 24. E. H. Carr, The Russian Revolution from Lenin to Stalin 1917–1929 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1979), xvii. 25. Quoted in ibid., xxxiv. See also Stephen Cohen’s assessment of Carr in 1985, 34. 26. Ronald Grigor Suny, Red Flag Unfurled: History, Historians, and the Russian Revolution (New York: Verso Books, 2017), 99.



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27. Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1929–1941 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 591–92. See also Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary 1879–1929 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973); Robert C. Tucker, “Stalinism and Comparative Communism,” in Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), xviii; “Stalinism as Revolution from Above,” in ibid., 78. 28. Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005a), xxvii. For background on Lewin, see Ronald Grigor Suny, Red Flag Wounded: Stalinism and the Fate of the Soviet Experiment (New York: Verso, 2020), 131–51. 29. Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study in Collectivization (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1968), 16. See also Moshe Lewin, “The Immediate Background of Soviet Collectivization,” Soviet Studies 17, no. 2 (1965): 162–97. 30. Moshe Lewin, Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates: From Bukharin to the Modern Reformers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), xiii. Moshe Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 31. Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography 1888–1938 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 5. 32. Cohen 1985, 62. 33. Anatoly Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 138–39. 34. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3. See also Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Revisionism in Retrospect: A Personal View,” Slavic Review 67, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 687–88. For more on Fitzpatrick see Suny 2020, 152–80. 35. Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978); See also Sheila Fitzpatrick, “The Impact of the Great Purges on Soviet Elites: A Case Study from Moscow and Leningrad Telephone,” in Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, ed. J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 247–60. 36. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth Century Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 280. See also Sheila Fitzpatrick, On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). 37. J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered 1933–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 198. See also J. Arch Getty, “The Politics of Repression Revisited,” in Getty and Manning 1993, 40–62. 38. Getty 1985, 206. 39. Ibid., 213. 40. Ibid., 263. “Paradoxically, it was the very inefficiency of the state machine which helped make it tolerable.” See Merle Fainsod, Smolensk Under Soviet Rule (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 450.

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41. Friedrich and Brzezinski 1965, 372. 42. Adam Ulam, The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the ‘Triumph of Communism in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 83. 43. Arendt 1976, 125. 44. Ulam 1998, 195. 45. John Plamenatz, German Marxism & Russian Communism (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 317. 46. Ibid., xxi–xxii. 47. Jacob L. Talmon, Myth of the Nation and Vision of Revolution: Ideological Polarization in the Twentieth Century (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1991), 535. 48. The Social Contract in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Basic Political Writings, ed. Donald Cress (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), 150. 49. Jacob L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker & Warburg, 1952), 46. For more on Talmon and the anti-Rousseau tradition in totalitarian studies, see José Brunner, “From Rousseau to Totalitarian Democracy: The French Revolution in J. L. Talmon’s Historiography,” History and Memory 3, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 60–85. 50. Talmon 1952, 127. 51. Ibid., 63–64. 52. Ibid., 12. Talmon’s work struck a deep chord with Marxist-turned-reactionary David Horowitz: Along with Kołakowski’s questions came others. I had been reading Political Messianism by J. L. Talmon, which described nationalism and socialism as secular religions that lacked a doctrine of original sin. After reading Talmon’s account, I began to wish that I had inherited such a concept. The idea of original sin—that we are born flawed, that the capacity for evil is lodged within us (no matter how our consciousness may be raised)—would have instilled in me a necessary caution about individuals like Huey Newton, and movements like ours. There were people who had a will to evil that no amount of political enlightenment could overcome. Nor could any movement (no less humanity) hope to purge itself of the potential for evil that lurked in us all. See David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 272. 53. See Doug Enaa Greene, “Day of the people: Gracchus Babeuf and the communist idea,” LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal, February 20, 2013. http:​//​links​.org​.au​/node​/3228; Doug Enaa Greene, Communist Insurgent: Blanqui’s Politics of Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017); Doug Enaa Greene and Harrison Fluss, “The Jacobin Enlightenment,” Left Voice, August 9, 2020. https:​//​ www​.leftvoice​.org​/the​-jacobin​-enlightenment​/; Doug Enaa Greene, “Lessons of the Commune,” Left Voice, March 21, 2021. https:​//​www​.leftvoice​.org​/lessons​-of​-the​ -commune​/.



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54. Edmund Burke, “Letter to a Member of the National Assembly,” in The Philosophy of Edmund Burke: A Selection from his Speeches and Writings, ed. L. I. Bredvold and R. G. Ross (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 248 55. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1955), 75. 56. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation Volume I (New York: Harper & Row, 1974a), 256. 57. Solzhenitsyn 1974b, 616. 58. Quoted in Michael Scammell, Solzhenitsyn: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1984), 156–57. 59. Ibid., 245. 60. Solzhenitsyn 1974b, 615–16. Emphasis is Solzhenitsyn’s. 61. Quoted in Scammell 1984, 435. 62. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and Calf: Sketches of Literary Life in the Soviet Union (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 284. 63. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 311–12. 64. Getty 1985, 219. On similar lines, see Daniel Singer, The Road to Gdansk (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981), 36 and Ernest Mandel, “The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn’s Assault on Stalinism and the October Revolution,” Marxists Internet Archive. https:​//​www​.marxists​.org​/archive​/mandel​/1974​/05​/solzhenitsyn​-gulag​.html. 65. Horowitz 1997, 193. 66. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West: Speeches, 1975–1976 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 72. 67. Andrew Smith, Which East Is Red? The Maoist Presence in the Soviet Union and Soviet Bloc Europe 1956–1980 (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2019), 69. 68. “Harvard Address” in Solzhenitsyn 2006, 572–74. On occasion, Solzhenitsyn looked even earlier for the sources of socialism and found them more than two thousand years ago in Plato and Gnosticism. In particular, see Solzhenitsyn 1976, 74. 69. “A Reflection on the Vendée Uprising” in Solzhenitsyn 2006, 604. 70. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, From Under the Rubble (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975a), 10. 71. Solzhenitsyn 1974a, 129–30. 72. Solzhenitsyn 1974b, 317. 73. Solzhenitsyn 1974a, 266. 74. Solzhenitsyn 1974b, 45. In his preface to the 2018 edition of The Gulag Archipelago, clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson echoes Solzhenitsyn’s Nietzschean sentiments that working class revolt is an act of ressentiment: The hypothetically egalitarian, universalist doctrines of Karl Marx contained hidden within them sufficient hatred, resentment, envy and denial of individual culpability and responsibility to produce nothing but poison and death when manifested in the world.

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See Solzhenitsyn 2018b, xv. 75. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile, 1974–1978 (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018a), 218. 76. Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005), 1206. In his defection from socialism, Horowitz praised Kołakowski’s condemnation of Marxism: While I was engaged with these doubts, Kołakowski published Main Currents of Marxism a comprehensive history of Marxist thought, the world view we all had spent a lifetime inhabiting. For three volumes and fifteen hundred pages Kołakowski analyzed the entire corpus of this intellectual tradition. Then, having paid critical homage to an argument which had dominated so much of humanity’s fate over the last hundred years (and his own as well), he added a final epilogue which began with these words: “Marxism has been the greatest fantasy of our century.” This struck me as the most personally courageous judgment a man with Kołakowski’s history could make. See David Horowitz, The Politics of Bad Faith: The Radical Assault on America’s Future (New York: Free Press, 1998), 89. 77. Kołakowski 2005, 39. 78. Ibid., 5. 79. Ibid., 101. 80. Ibid., 414. For more on the relationship between Marxism and Prometheanism, see Harrison Fluss and Landon Frim, Prometheus and Gaia: Technology, Ecology and Anti-Humanism (New York: Anthem Press, 2022). 81. Kołakowski 2005, 1212. Horowitz could easily have been plagiarizing Kołakowski in his confession that the Marxist “God” had failed: The only way to paradise—if there is a way—is through a divine intervention. The idea that men can be as gods and recreate a paradise on earth is the serpentine promise of the Left. It is an idolatry that overshadows all others. When men put on the mantle of gods and attempt to remake the world in their own image, the results are hideous and destructive beyond conception. See Horowitz 1997, 414–15. 82. Leszek Kołakowski, L’esprit révolutionnaire, suivi de Marxisme, utopie et anti-utopie (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1978), 21–22. [My translation] 83. Kołakowski 2005, 962. 84. Edward P. Thompson, “An Open Letter to Leszek Kołakowski,” Marxists Internet Archive. https:​//​www​ marxists​.org​/archive​/thompson​-ep​/1973​/kolakowski​ .htm; The British political scientist Ralph Miliband also took issue with Kołakowski’s work, which he found superficial, distorting, and wanting. See Ralph Miliband, “Kołakowski’s Anti-Marx,” Political Studies 29 (1981): 122. Naturally, Horowitz took the side of Kołakowski against Thompson. See his thoughts of their exchange in Horowitz 1998, 82–88.



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85. Leszek Kołakowski, “My Correct Views on Everything,” Socialist Register 11 (1974): 20. 86. François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 218. For the PCF and the French Revolution see David Caute, Communism and the French Intellectuals 1914–1960 (New York: Macmillan Company, 1964), 293–98. 87. See Alfred Cobban, “Myth of the French Revolution” in Aspects of the French Revolution (London: Paladin, 1971) and Alfred Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). 88. François Furet and Denis Richet, The French Revolution (New York: Macmillan Company, 1970), 184. 89. Ibid., 122. As Daniel Singer said: “Furet’s main thesis is that the age of revolution is over. From the very start, his sympathies are with those, beginning with Mirabeau, who try to arrest the course of events.” See Daniel Singer, “Dancing on the Grave of Revolution” in Deserter from Death: Dispatches from Western Europe 1950–2000 (New York: Nation Books, 2005), 291. For additional criticism of Furet on the French Revolution see Jim Wolfreys, “Twilight Revolution: Francois Furet and the Manufacturing of Consensus,” in History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism, ed. Mike Haynes and Jim Wolfreys (New York: Verso, 2007), 50–70. 90. Quoted in Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 164. 91. Quoted in Michael Scott Christofferson, “An Antitotalitarian History of the French Revolution: François Furet’s ‘Penserla Révolution française’ in the Intellectual Politics of the Late 1970s,” French Historical Studies 22, no. 4 (Autumn 1999): 588. 92. Albert Soboul, Understanding the French Revolution (New York: International Publishers, 1988), 269. 93. François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 85. 94. Ibid., 128. 95. Bernard-Henri Lévy, Barbarism with a Human Face (New York: HarperCollins, 1979), 193–94. 96. Perry Anderson, In Tracks of Historical Materialism (New York: Verso, 1984), 32. The unrepentant Maoist Alain Badiou described the nouveaux philosophes worldview as positively Thermidorian. See Alain Badiou, Metapolitics (New York: Verso, 2005), 134–36. 97. Furet 1981, 12. 98. Quoted in Darrin McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 193. In addition, see Doug Enaa Greene and Harrison Fluss, “Spinoza’s Radical Enlightenment,” Left Voice, July 19, 2020. https:​//​www​.leftvoice​.org​/spinozas​ -radical​-enlightenment​/. 99. Furet 1981, 202–3. 100. François Furet, “The French Revolution Revisited,” Government and Opposition 24, no. 3 (Summer 1989): 272–73. See also Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old

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Regime and the French Revolution (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1955), 20. See also Furet 1981, 132–63 and François Furet, Revolutionary France 1770–1880 (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 9. 101. Eric Hobsbawm, “History and Illusion,” New Left Review 220 (November/ December 1996): 125. As Singer observed: “François Furet is thus a sort of rich man’s Fukuyama.” See Daniel Singer, “The Sound and the Furet,” The Nation, January 1, 1998. https:​//​www​.thenation​.com​/article​/archive​/sound​-and​-furet​/; See also Furet 1999, 125, 163, 175, and 518. When it comes to Arendt’s views on totalitarianism, Furet considers her weak on history, but agrees with her liberal anti-communist approach: I think Arendt’s historical work is weak. . . . What I admire most about Hannah Arendt is that she sought to describe Fascism and Communism from the standpoint of modern democracy, from the perspective of a society of individuals, of democratic atomization and technology. François Furet, Lies, Passions and Illusions: The Democratic Imagination in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 59–60. 102. François Furet and Ernst Nolte, Fascism and Communism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 4. 103. Furet 1999, 519. See also Richard Shorten, “Europe’s twentieth century in retrospect? a cautious note on the Furet/Nolte debate,” The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms 9, no. 3 (2004): 285–304. 104. Ernst Nolte, Martin Heidegger: Politik und Geschichte im Leben und Denken (Berlin and Frankfurt: Propyläen, 1992), 296. Also quoted in Berel Lang, Heidegger’s Silence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). Slavoj Žižek  upholds Heidegger’s political commitment as an example of “right steps in the wrong direction.” See Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (New York: Verso, 2008), 7. 105. Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism (New York: Mentor, 1965), 21. According to Ian Kershaw, Nolte’s work spawned a whole school of studies on fascism: “A new wave of interest in fascism as a phenomenon experienced in most countries of inter-war Europe was prompted in no small measure in the 1960s by the appearance of Ernst Nolte’s highly influential book Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche in 1963.” See Ian Kershaw, Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (New York: Arnold, 2000), 26. 106. Nolte 1965, 566. 107. Ibid., 538. 108. Ibid., 511. 109. Ibid., 453. 110. Ibid., 557. 111. Elsewhere, Nolte argued that the confrontation between revolution and counterrevolution following 1917 had first played out in the previous century at a philosophical level between Marx and Nietzsche. See Ernst Nolte, Nietzsche und der Nietzscheanismus (Berlin: Propyläen, 1990), 192 and 276. See the discussion on Nolte and Nietzsche in Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany,



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1890–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 323–27. The centrality of Nietzsche to the reactionary counter-Enlightenment has also been recognized by Marxist historians. For instance, the American Marxist Arno Mayer says that Nietzscheanism formed the ideological backbone to the worldview of Europe’s pre-modern elites in their effort to hold back the tides of democracy and socialism: But throughout Europe elite theories mirrored and rationalized current ruling practices while also serving as a weapon in the battle against political, social, and cultural leveling. Nietzsche was the chief minstrel of this battle. Notwithstanding the purposely provocative contradictions and ellipses in his writing, his thought was coherently and consistently antiliberal, antidemocratic, and anti-socialist, and it became more intensely so with the passage of time. Arno Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 285. Domenico Losurdo concluded that Nietzsche’s hostility to socialism was a continuous thread throughout his intellectual life and he sought to develop philosophical weapons to combat it: From the very beginning, Nietzsche positioned himself on the terrain of struggle against the socialist movement, in which the threat looming over civilization reached its apex: how to oppose this terrible war machine, which did not hold back from intimidating and even “annihilating” not only its enemies but also those who would have liked to remain neutral or at least vacillate? The young professor of philology was no less combative and tenacious than his antagonists, as he called in his turn for the “annihilation [vernichten]” of the opera soaked in revolutionary ideas and feelings. So, we are witnessing a fight in which no punches were pulled. What sort of theoretical platform was necessary for the enemies of civilisation, of modernity and subversion, to achieve victory? See Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel: Intellectual Biography and Critical Balance-Sheet (Chicago: Haymarket, 2020a), 82. 112. Ernst Nolte, “Big Business and German Politics: A Comment,” The American Historical Review 75, no. 1 (Oct., 1969): 78. 113. Nolte 1965, 504. See also Zeev Sternhell, “Fascist Ideology,” in Fascism a Reader’s Guide—Analyses, Interpretations, Bibliography, ed. Walter Laqueur (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 369. 114. Ernst Nolte, “Between Myth and Revisionism? The Third Reich in the Perspective of the 1980s,” in Aspects of the Third Reich, ed. H. W. Koch (London: Macmillan, 1985), 37. 115. Ibid., 32. 116. Ernst Nolte, “The Past That Will Not Pass: A Speech That Could Be Written but Not Delivered,” in Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? Original Documents

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of the Historikerstreit Controversy Concerning the Singularity of the Holocaust, trans. James Knowlton and Truett Cates (Atlantic Heights, NJ: Prometheus Books, 1993), 22. 117. Nolte in Koch 1985, 36. In 1951, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises made similar arguments to Nolte about how fascism copied communism: When the Soviet policies of mass extermination of all dissenters and of ruthless violence removed the inhibitions against wholesale murder, which still troubled some of the Germans, nothing could any longer stop the advance of Nazism. The Nazis were quick to adopt the Soviet methods. They imported from Russia: the one-party [sic] system and the pre-eminence of this party in political life; the paramount position assigned to the secret police; the concentration camps; the administrative execution or imprisonment of all opponents; the extermination of the families of suspects and of exiles; the methods of propaganda; the organization of affiliated parties abroad and their employment for fighting their domestic governments and for espionage and sabotage; the use of the diplomatic and consular service for fomenting revolution; and many other things besides. There were nowhere more docile disciples of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin than the Nazis were. Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 580. 118. Ernst Nolte, La guerra civil europea, 1917–1945:Nacionalsocialismo y bolchevismo (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996), 399. [My translation] 119. Ibid., 311. 120. Ibid., 311 and 484. See also Furet and Nolte 2001, 41–45. 121. Jürgen Habermas, “Eine Art Schadensabwicklung: Die apologetischen Tendenzen in der deutschen Zeitgeschichtsschreibung” [translation A kind of settlement of damages: the apologetic tendencies in German history writing], in Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistische Judenvernichtung, ed. Rudolf Augstein (Munich: Piper, 1987), 62–83. 122. Quoted in Ian Kershaw, “‘Working towards the Führer’: Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship,” in Hitler, The Germans, and the Final Solution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 42. 123. See ibid. 101. For more on “working toward the Führer,” see Ian Kershaw’s Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), 527–91 and Kershaw 2000a, 27–28. See also Ian Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). 124. Saul Friedländer, Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1993), 22–41 and Saul Friedländer, “Some Reflections on the Historicization of National Socialism,” German Politics & Society 13 (February 1988): 18. 125. Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and the War in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 143.



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126. Arno Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 4. 127. Enzo Traverso, “The New Anti-Communism: Rereading the Twentieth Century,” in Haynes and Wolfreys 2007, 141. Traverso has written a whole book devoted to the European Civil War, see Enzo Traverso, Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914–1945 (New York: Verso, 2017). In addition, see Doug Enaa Greene, “Combatants of a Greater War: A Historiography of Europe’s Second Thirty Years War 1914–1945,” LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal, June 11, 2017. http:​//​links​.org​.au​/combatants​-greater​-war​-historiography​-europe​-second​-thirty​-years​ -war​-1914–1945. 128. Arno Mayer, Why the Heavens Did Not Darken? The Final Solution in History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 97. 129. Domenico Losurdo, War and Revolution (New York: Verso, 2015), 181 and 189. Nolte even mentions Nazi plans to turn the conquered USSR into a German India. See Nolte 1996, 476. Enzo Traverso described the Nazi war against the Soviet Union as motivated by colonialism, anti-communism, and racial annihilation of the Jews. See Traverso in Haynes and Wolfreys 2007, 143. 130. Mayer 1988, 234. Another recent work of historical revisionism in regard to the Second World War was written by Sean McMeekin, who argues that Stalin and not Hitler was the animating force of WWII. As opposed to Nolte, McMeekin is more interested in criticizing Western leaders for supporting the Soviet war effort. See Sean McMeekin, Stalin’s War: A New History of the Second World War (New York: Basic Books, 2021). 131. George W. Bush, “Remarks on Presenting the Presidential Medal of Freedom,” American Presidency Project November 9, 2005. https:​//​www​.presidency​.ucsb​ .edu​/documents​/remarks​-presenting​-the​-presidential​-medal​-freedom​-9. 132. J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, ed., The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 591. See also J. Arch Getty, Gábor T. Rittersporn and Viktor N. Zemskov, “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence,” The American Historical Review 98, no. 4 (October 1993): 1017–49. 133. Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (New York: Vintage, 2002), 10. See Conquest’s confirmation on the suggested title in Robert Conquest, “Kingsley Amis and ‘The Great Terror,’” New York Review of Books, April 12, 2007. https:​//​nybooks​.com​/articles​/2007​/04​/12​/kingsley​-amis​-and​-the​-great​-terror​/. However, he did revise the figures down in the fortieth anniversary edition: “Exact numbers may never be known with complete certainty, but the total of deaths caused by the whole range of the Soviet regime’s terrors can hardly be lower than some thirteen to fifteen million.” See Robert Conquest, The Great Terror (London: Pimlico, 2008), xviii. 134. Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 344. The figure of 14.5 million is given on ibid., 196.

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135. Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000), 4. 136. Conquest 1986, 59. 137. Ibid., 78. 138. Quoted in “In Search of a Soviet Holocaust,” The Village Voice, January 12, 1988. https:​//​www​.villagevoice​.com​/2020​/11​/21​/in​-search​-of​-a​-soviet​-holocaust​/. Getty also challenged Conquest’s claims of a planned Soviet genocide in the Ukraine. His review sparked an exchange with Conquest himself. See J. Arch Getty, “Starving the Ukraine,” London Review of Books 9, no. 22 (January 1987). https:​//​ www​.lrb​.co​.uk​/the​-paper​/v09​/n02​/j​.​-arch​-getty​/starving​-the​-ukraine. 139. Barbara A. Anderson and Brian D. Silver, “Demographic Analysis and Population Catastrophes in the USSR,” Slavic Review 44, no. 3 (Autumn 1985): 522. They arrive at figures of 3.2 to 5.5 million during the famine years. 140. R. W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 412–15. See also the figures and analysis in R. W. Davies, Mark Harrison, and S. G. Wheatcroft, ed., Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 67–77. 141. Domenico Losurdo, “Marx, Columbus, and the October Revolution: Historical Materialism and the Analysis of Revolutions,” Nature, Society, and Thought 9, no. 1 (1996), 81. 142. Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 (New York: Penguin, 2018), 129. 143. Davies and Wheatcroft 2004, 441. 144. Quoted in ibid. 145. Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Alfred A. Knoppf, 1993), 511. 146. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 385. 147. Ibid., 788. I owe the observation about the relationship between Dostoevsky and Pipes to Harrison Fluss. A recent history of 1917 that takes inspiration from Pipes is Sean McMeekin, The Russian Revolution: A New History (New York: Basic Books, 2017). 148. Pipes 1990, 728. 149. Pipes 1993, 280–81. 150. Ibid., 508. 151. Ibid., 486. 152. Whittaker Chambers, Witness (Washington DC: Regnery, 1980), 9–10. See also John V. Fleming, The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books that Shaped the Cold War (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 267–346. Reagan also posthumously awarded posthumously awarded Chambers the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984. 153. Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917– 1991 (New York: The Free Press, 1994), 64. See also Martin Malia, “Judging Nazism and Communism,” National Interest 69 (Fall 2002): 63–78. 154. Malia 1994, 314.



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155. Ibid., 167. 156. Ibid., 518. 157. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 364. 158. Ibid., 154. 159. See John Marot, “Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin Is a Distorting Mirror of the Russian Revolution,” Jacobin Magazine, November 20, 2020. https:​//​jacobinmag​.com​/2020​ /11​/stephen​-kotkin​-stalin​-russian​-revolution​-book​-review. 160. Courtois, Stéphane, ed., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), xv. 161. Ibid., xviii. 162. Ibid., 752–53. 163. Ibid., 728. 164. Ibid., 755. 165. “Exploiting a Tragedy, or Le Rouge en Noir,” in Singer 2005, 301. For another negative review, see Paul Flewers, “Black Book of Communism,” Revolutionary History. https:​//​www​.marxists​.org​/history​/etol​/revhist​/backiss​/vol7​/no4​/flewers​ html. 166. Courtois 1999, 231. A more recent author who effectively whitewashes Nazi collaborators in the East is Timothy Snyder. See Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 397. In his review of Bloodlands, Daniel Lazare says that Synder operates in the same spirit as Nolte: “Snyder is very much a son of Nolte. For all its obfuscation, Bloodlands basically agrees that Stalin’s crimes were not only antecedent to those of Hitler but in some way causative.” See Daniel Lazare, “Timothy Snyder’s Lies,” Jacobin Magazine, September 9, 2014. https:​//​www​.jacobinmag​.com​/2014​/09​/timothy​-snyders​-lies​/. 167. Adam Shatz, “The Guilty Party,” Lingua Franca. http:​//​linguafranca​ mirror​ .theinfo​.org​/br​/9911​/shatz​ html. 168. Quoted in Jon Wiener, How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey Across America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 38. See also J. Arch Getty, “The Future Did Not Work,” The Atlantic, March 2000. https:​//​www​.theatlantic​ .com​/magazine​/archive​/2000​/03​/the​-future​-did​-not​-work​/378081​/. 169. Losurdo 2015, 288.

Chapter Four

Stalinism as Historical Necessity Rubashov and Terror

A. HISTORICAL NECESSITY As shown in the previous section, anti-communists consider Stalinism—or rather communism—as a force which appears as a bolt from the blue whether as a contagion, Big Brother, or totalitarianism. Supporters of the Soviet Union in the world’s Communist Parties proclaimed the opposite: that communism was the end goal of history, and Stalinism was the only way for the working class to reach this glorious future. For communists, it followed that anyone who opposed the historical necessity of Stalinism stood against the working class, reason, and the will of history itself. Before moving on to whether Stalinism represents historical necessity, it must be asked how Marxists define historical necessity. A concise and articulate discussion of the concept is provided in Literature of the Graveyard (1945) by the French Communist Roger Garaudy.‌‌ In a chapter devoted to Jean-Paul Sartre, Garaudy contrasts the Marxist and the existentialist approaches to both necessity and freedom. In existentialist philosophy, it is claimed that there is no meaning in the world and that we are condemned to be free. This means that individuals are responsible agents who must freely choose their own fate. Garaudy argues that Sartre’s notion of freedom is based on idealism since he ignores material and historical factors that shape the world: “In truth, having abandoned en route everything that can make freedom rational and our history scientific, Sartre allows the minds of his disciples to wander between a subjectivity without laws and a world without structure. Then what becomes of objectivity in this universe without rules? It simply fades out.”1 By denying material reality, Garaudy says that Sartrean freedom is left suspended in midair where choices are made in a void with no hope of effectively transforming reality. 93

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As opposed to Sartre, Garaudy says Marxists understand freedom as gaining greater power over our lives, the world, and social relations. Yet how do humans attain this freedom? We cannot pretend that individual choices devoid of a greater understanding of reality will allow us to transform the world. Therefore, we need knowledge of natural and social factors to successfully act in the world. Using knowledge and science, we learn that these factors do not exist in a vacuum, but possess history and operate according to various laws. As our knowledge expands, we learn that the world is governed by causal relations and that the interconnections of social and natural phenomena are determined. Ultimately, only a materialist worldview can provide an understanding of these laws. As science allows our knowledge of the world to become more exact, this increases our ability to successfully transform reality: The necessity that determines our action is often only approximate, as is our knowledge itself. But what remains true is that the more perfect this approximation is, the more compulsive our knowledge becomes. And on the day when there is finally no opaqueness either in our social relations or in our relations with nature, on that day the dream of Socrates will come true. This necessity, all the more compulsive in that it is more reasonable, is the highest form of freedom.2

According to Garaudy, once human beings attain knowledge of the laws that govern reality they can freely act to change the world: “I am freer the more lucid and the better informed I am; I am freer when I can say with more certainty: I cannot choose otherwise. Spinoza, and after him Hegel, taught us that to be free means to bear within ourselves all the reasons for our action.”3 For the working class, the science required to understand and transform the world is provided by Marxism. As a materialist philosophy, the Marxist argument for socialism is not based on dreams of an ideal society, but upon knowledge of capitalism’s laws of motion. In Marx’s scientific work, Capital, he observed that the system is governed by internal contradictions and will break down with socialism as the next stage of history. Therefore, Marxists conclude that the working class has a historical mission to overthrow capitalism to open the way for communism and human freedom. To realize a proletarian revolution, every communist militant must act in accordance with the will of history: My action is a necessary link in the chain of necessary struggles. The birth pangs of history require the participation of each individual—the advent of a new world will radiate all the more human warmth if each individual has participated in it with all his humanity. That is why I do not underestimate the personal contribution of each individual. And, I repeat, it does not depend on me



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to give or not to give freely of this joyful adherence. “Here I stand, I can do no other.” When once I have understood what the world some day can become as a result of our efforts, I go toward that goal with all my strength and all my joy, with passionate attachment. “Freedom,” said Hegel, “is the affirmation of self.” By refusing to heed this doubly compelling certainty, the science of history and faith in the working class, I deny myself and the world. I want this certainty passionately, and cannot help but want it when I have become conscious of it. To us, as to Spinoza, freedom is this necessity which has become conscious, this creative participation in the dialectics of necessity which ushers us into a new life of an unsuspected fullness.4

One can appreciate Garaudy’s understanding of materialist necessity as grounded in the traditions of Spinoza and Hegel without necessarily embracing his own Stalinist politics. The Trotskyist George Novack in his anthology Existentialism versus Marxism valued Garaudy’s exposition of freedom and necessity. One can even see strange similarities between Garaudy’s chapter on Sartre and the way Novack criticized Sartre in his own essay on existentialism.5 However, as an orthodox Stalinist, Garaudy believed that the international communist movement and the Soviet Union were fulfilling the mandate of history. When figures like Trotsky, Radek, and Bukharin opposed Stalin, they placed themselves on the other side of the barricades: On the other hand, having deserted the forces of life, what could such a renegade bring to the forces of death? Truths once glimpsed by us stick to us; and in my renunciation I would only have the unhappy and dual conscience of a Radek or a Bukharin. If my joining the Communist Party has been the beginning of my freedom, my betrayal would be the beginning of my agony, that agony which is always the price paid for a bad choice.6

This brought up the central dilemma of historical necessity that gripped figures such as Arthur Koestler and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Were all the Soviet Union’s compromises just the necessary price that the working class must pay to reach freedom? Or were rationalizations of historical necessity just cynical excuses for indefensible crimes and totalitarianism? B. ARTHUR KOESTLER When Arthur Koestler joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1931 at the height of the Great Depression, he was a fervent believer in the historical necessity of communism. He recalled that there was no doubt in his mind that the party possessed a road map to the future: “Both morally

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and logically the Party was infallible: morally, because its aims were right, that is, in accord with the Dialectic of History, and these aims justified all means; logically, because the Party was the vanguard of the Proletariat, and the Proletariat the embodiment of the active principle in History.”7 Koestler was ready to serve this historical necessity. In 1932, he traveled to the Soviet Union to witness this future firsthand. Arriving at the height of the Ukrainian famine, Koestler managed to brush aside any doubts. He ended up working with the famed propagandist Willi Münzenberg on behalf of the Comintern. After leaving the Soviet Union, Koestler moved to Paris, where he was active as an anti-fascist in German émigré circles. Hungry for action once the Spanish Civil War began, Koestler was sent by the Comintern to Franco’s headquarters in Seville. Using the cover of a journalist, he revealed evidence of Italian and German military support for the Nationalists. Eventually, his cover was blown and Koestler was forced to flee. He returned to Loyalist Spain in early 1937, but was captured in Málaga when the Nationalists took over the city. While in Nationalist custody, Koestler was sent to Seville and sentenced to death. It seemed his execution would be imminent, but Koestler was kept in prison. His party membership remained a secret that Koestler was desperate to hide. Whenever the guards asked if he was a communist, Koestler denied it. At one point, a friendly guard named Don Ramón asked how an educated man like him could be a communist. Koestler said that he was no longer one: “I had spoken the truth, but with the intention of telling a lie. Inwardly, I no longer was a Communist, but the break was neither conscious nor definite; and my intention in uttering that phrase was, of course, that Don Ramón should report it.”8 Miraculously, he was not killed. In June 1937, Koestler traveled to Britain after a successful campaign for his release. The time in prison changed Koestler and shook his convictions: The lesson taught by this type of experience, when put into words, always appears under the dowdy guise of perennial commonplaces: that man is a reality, mankind an abstraction; that men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite, which dislocate all mathematical operations; that the end justifies the means only within very narrow limits; that ethics is not a function of social utility, and charity not a petty-bourgeois sentiment but the gravitational force which keeps civilization in its orbit. Nothing can sound more flatfooted than such verbalizations of a knowledge which is not of a verbal nature; yet every single one of these trivial statements was incompatible with the Communist faith which I held.9



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Still outwardly loyal to the Communist International, Koestler was disturbed by reports of the Soviet purges. His childhood friend, Eva Striker, living in the USSR, was arrested and falsely accused of plotting to kill Stalin. She was imprisoned for sixteen months, spending twelve of them in solitary confinement. After being deported from the USSR in September 1937, Striker told Koestler what she endured. He was amazed at the parallels with his own time in Franco’s dungeons. Elements of Strikers’s account would find their way into Darkness at Noon. While on a book tour to promote The Spanish Testament, Koestler spoke to audiences who were largely sympathetic to the Communist Party. He attempted to hide doubts about repression in the USSR and Republican Spain. At one talk, Koestler was asked about the suppression of the POUM. He admitted that he did not agree with their revolutionary program, but in a break with Stalinist orthodoxy, said that they were not fascist traitors. This brought Koestler cheers from noncommunists in the audience, but eerie silence from party members. At a Paris stop on his book tour in March 1938, Koestler was asked by the party to publicly condemn the POUM. He outright refused and resigned from the party. Koestler’s resignation coincided with Bukharin’s show trial in Moscow. In the first of his two letters of resignation, Koestler proclaimed that he was still a communist and loyal to the Soviet Union. The second letter expanded upon Koestler’s reasons for leaving the party. While he condemned the purges for creating an inquisitorial atmosphere in the Communist International, Koestler still upheld the USSR as an expression of historical necessity: “It’s the foundation of the future. Whoever goes against the Soviet Union goes against the future. But whoever presents it, afflicted as it is by all the laws of transition and by the adolescent growing pains of Stalinism, as a finished prototype of the future, is offering us a caricature of the future. The Soviet Union is the most precious thing we have at present, but it is no prototype.”10 Until the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, he remained a dissident communist who grappled with Stalinism. One of the first works where Koestler dealt with the meaning of historical necessity was The Gladiators (1938), a historical novel about the slave revolt led by Spartacus in 73–71 BC. The figure of Spartacus was revered by communists. Marx considered him the greatest figure of antiquity, and Rosa Luxemburg named the “Spartacus Bund”—the predecessor to the German Communist Party—after him. While Koestler knew all this, he had very little knowledge of the actual revolt itself. He first became interested in Spartacus in 1935 and did extensive research on Roman history. It was only after his release from Seville that Koestler was able to finish his novel. The Gladiators was a product of Koestler’s break with the Comintern. He did not merely want to tell the story of Spartacus, but to understand

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the connection between revolutionary ends and means. Looking at the socioeconomic conditions that made the revolt possible, Koestler considered it a model of a revolutionary situation. But while the slaves greatly outnumbered the masters and nearly brought down Rome, they had still failed. Koestler wanted to know why. To answer this, he saw parallels with the failure of the German and Italian workers to defeat fascism: “And why, two thousand years later, did the German and Italian proletariat still fail to recognise their own interests, and support the Neros and Caligulas of their own age?”11 Koestler believed that Marxism with its rationalist philosophy could not explain these failures. He sought other answers in understanding the irrational nature of mob mentality: “Why did the ‘Party of the masses’ ignore the discoveries of Le Bon, Fraser, Durkheim, Levy-Bruhl, Freud and Jung, who all stressed the irrational and affective nature of group behaviour, so strikingly demonstrated by Fascism and its allied movements?”12 He concluded that the oppressed were not driven by reason, but more fickle and base motives. In addition, Koestler’s research led him to conclude that the slaves possessed a political program of utopian communism that they attempted to realize. In The Gladiators, he imagines that the slaves create an egalitarian society known as Sun City. In an obvious analogy to the Russian Revolution, slaves elsewhere fail to revolt, and Sun City is isolated. As the Roman blockade tightens, Spartacus is forced to compromise and negotiate for aid. As food becomes scarce, the slaves grow restless, and Sun City begins to fracture. Here Koestler confronts whether egalitarian ideals must be sacrificed for a revolution to survive: They had built their City, had dreamed of leading a life of Justice and Goodwill within her walls. But the period in which these unfortunate men lived would have none of it. It reached across their walls and reminded them that beyond not the laws of the Sun State reigned supreme, but the law of the stronger, which left slaves no choice besides servitude or the use of brute force. Those who had desired to live like humans, were compelled to become wolves once again.13

Spartacus confronts this choice between ends and means when a group of slaves breaks the law. According to the laws of Sun City, they must be crucified for the greater good. While Spartacus knows this is necessary, he refuses to do so: “Wisdom and knowledge alone did no longer carry enough weight to make him give the order.”14 Ultimately Spartacus’s indecisiveness means that Sun City falls apart and the slaves are defeated by Rome. Koestler believes that Spartacus should have temporarily subordinated egalitarian ideals by acting in accordance with the ruthlessness that history demands. This means that egalitarianism, momentary passions, and



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democracy must be replaced by the will of a single dictator who knows what is necessary: There must be but one will, the will of the knowing. For he alone can see the goal, the end of bad detours, the progress in apparent retrocession. He must force them upon the road so that they may not be scattered about the earth; ruthless to their sufferings, deaf to their cries. He must defend their interests against their own want of reason, with all and any means, however cruel and incomprehensible they might appear.15

Yet Spartacus failed to understand the “law of detours” and historical necessity that all revolutions must confront: The century of abortive revolutions was completed, the Party of Justice had lost out, its strength was spent and exhausted. Now nothing could impede the greed for power, nothing barred the way to despotism, no barrier to protect the People was left. He whose grasp is the most brutal can now rise to untold heights: dictator, emperor, god. Who will be the first to reach the winning post?16

In his retelling of Spartacus, Koestler embraced a Nietzschean view that social hierarchies are natural and inescapable, where a permanent class of slaves is lorded over by masters. Koestler likened slaves to prisoners, who were motivated by ressentiment and could never overcome their station in life. As Koestler said about his time in jail: Despite all my feelings of self-respect I cannot help looking on the warders as superior beings. The consciousness of being confined acts like a slow poison, transforming the entire character. This is more than a mere psychological change, it is not an inferiority complex—it is, rather, an inevitable natural process. When I was writing my novel about the gladiators I always wondered why the Roman slaves, who were twice, three times as numerous as the freemen, did not turn the tables on their masters. Now it is beginning gradually to dawn on me what the slave mentality really is. I could wish that everyone who talks of mass psychology should experience a year of prison.17

Since slaves and prisoners cannot liberate themselves, a dictator was needed to do it for them. However, this slave mentality is permanent so the egalitarian dream of Sun City and later, the October Revolution, is impossible to achieve.18 In The Gladiators, Koestler dealt with revolution at a distance since Spartacus refuses to do what history requires. He never deals with what would happen if someone fully accepted the logic of historical necessity. The confessions of lifelong revolutionaries to fantastic charges during the Moscow Trials seemed to pose those very questions. Now Koestler intended

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to confront Stalinism and historical necessity directly in his next and most famous novel, Darkness at Noon (1941). Koestler began working on the novel almost immediately after finishing The Gladiators. He wrote the bulk of Darkness at Noon in Paris (his upstairs neighbor was Walter Benjamin) as the Germans invaded. Initially written in German, the novel was translated into English by his then-wife Daphne Hardy. The original German manuscript was lost during the fall of France and not found until 2015.19 Almost immediately after its release, Darkness at Noon was recognized as an instant classic. George Orwell believed Koestler’s work was not only great literature, but clearly understood the logic of Stalinism: “Brilliant as this book is as a novel, and a piece of brilliant literature, it is probably most valuable as an interpretation of the Moscow ‘confessions’ by someone with an inner knowledge of totalitarian methods.”20 While it sold poorly in Europe due to the war, Darkness at Noon was a bestseller in the United States. Darkness at Noon focuses on a dedicated veteran Bolshevik named Nikolai Rubashov. The character himself is a composite figure of Radek, Trotsky, and Bukharin. Through a series of flashbacks, the reader learns about Rubashov’s career, which embodies all the terrible ironies and betrayals of Stalinism. During the purges, Rubashov is arrested and charged with unspecified counterrevolutionary crimes. At first, he proclaims innocence, but eventually he confesses his guilt. Rubashov willingly confesses because he now accepts that the party represents historical necessity. Rubashov states at one point: “The Party can never be mistaken,” said Rubashov. “You and I can make a mistake. Not the Party. The Party, comrade, is more than you and I and a thousand others like you and I. The Party is the embodiment of the revolutionary idea in history. History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unerring, she flows towards her goal. At every bend in her course she leaves the mud which she carries and the corpses of the drowned. History knows her way. She makes no mistakes. He who has not absolute faith in History does not belong in the Party’s ranks.”21

Throughout Darkness at Noon, Koestler fleshes out Rubashov’s logic for submitting to the party. Rubashov believes that the revolution is in dire straits and must fortify itself against all internal and external threats. Whoever refuses to do so threatens the revolution. To ensure unity of the party and criminalize dissent, the former oppositionist Rubashov must admit that he is a traitor. His interrogator Gletkin explains the rationale: “The policy of the opposition is wrong. Your task is therefore to make the opposition contemptible; to make the masses understand that opposition is a crime and that the leaders of the opposition are criminals. That is the simple language which the



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masses understand . . . Sympathy and pity for the opposition are a danger to the country.”22 Whereas Spartacus is unable to act according to the “law of detours,” Rubashov willingly sacrifices himself to that logic. A confession of guilt would mean that he would disavow his entire revolutionary career, but it would serve the higher interests of the party and history. Rubashov accepted that the immature people could not reach the future by themselves, but they needed the party to guide them: “It takes sometimes tens of years, sometimes generations, for a people’s level of understanding gradually to adapt itself to the changed state of affairs, until it has recovered the same capacity for self-government as it had already possessed at a lower stage of civilization.”23 Even though as a former oppositionist Rubashov sees sheer cynicism in the party’s demands, he remains trapped by the same logic since he is a true believer in communism. In the end, Rubashov accepts that his past opposition to the party was a mistake. If his opposition had succeeded, it would have gone against historical necessity: “I know,” Rubashov went on, “that my aberration, if carried into effect, would have been a mortal danger to the Revolution. Every opposition at the critical turning-points of history carries in itself the germ of a split in the Party, and hence the germ of civil war. Humanitarian weakness and liberal democracy, when the masses are not mature, is suicide for the Revolution. And yet my oppositional attitude was based on a craving for just these methods—in appearance so desirable, actually so deadly. On a demand for a liberal reform of the dictatorship; for a broader democracy, for the abolition of the Terror, and a loosening of the rigid organization of the Party, I admit that these demands, in the present situation, are objectively harmful and therefore counterrevolutionary in character.”24

Rubashov knows that he is subjectively innocent, but objectively guilty at the tribunal of history. For Koestler, historical necessity is the Dialectic of Saturn. This logic not only justifies the terror and misery of Stalinism, but the moral destruction of human beings. As a Bolshevik, Rubashov kills others for the revolution and then debases his own soul for the sake of history. For Koestler, the frightening reasoning of historical necessity was enough for him to reject communism. Yet Koestler was not finished dealing with the relationship between ends and means. His novel Arrival and Departure (1943), which formed a loose trilogy with The Gladiators and Darkness at Noon, dealt with the conflict between pragmatism and ethics. In The Yogi and the Commissar (1945), Koestler identified two mutually opposed ways to reach utopia. The first was the “commissar” represented by revolutionaries like Rubashov, which argued

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that change came from without. The antithesis was the Yogi represented by pacifists like Gandhi, which claimed change came from within. Koestler saw the merits in both positions, but believed they were equally flawed. The commissar’s logic led to the horrors of the Moscow Trials, while the Yogi led to passive surrender. Koestler said that a synthesis of the Commissar and Yogi was needed, but that no one in history had discovered one: “Neither the saint nor the revolutionary can save us; only the synthesis of the two. Whether we are capable of achieving it I do not know.”25 Due to the German occupation, Darkness at Noon was not published in France. Yet upon its release in 1945 under the title of Le Zéro et l’Inni, it was a sensation. Many in the French public feared a Communist takeover. At the Liberation, the Communists emerged as the largest single party in the country. The PCF had ministers in the government and demanded the punishment of Vichy collaborators. Koestler saw these demands for reprisals as reminiscent of the Stalinist witch hunts in Spain: “The Communists, who emerged from the Resistance movement as the best-organised force, used these chaotic weeks, just as they had done in Spain, for a systematic settling of accounts with their opponents under the pretext that they had been collaborators.”26 Later, Koestler believed that his book caused the defeat of a communist-supported constitutional referendum in May 1946. After years away from Paris, Koestler returned and basked in his newfound fame. He also wanted to meet Sartre and the other rising stars of existentialism. For a long time, there had been a mutual admiration between Sartre and Koestler. Koestler considered Sartre’s The Wall (1938) to be one of the finest works written on the Spanish Civil War. In turn, Sartre was influenced by Koestler’s Dialogue with Death, part two of The Spanish Testament. Thus, Koestler had ample reason to believe that Sartre would become his political ally. First, he met Albert Camus and the two men became fast friends. It was only in October 1946 that Koestler found his way into Sartre’s circle. At their first meeting, Simone de Beauvoir was unimpressed by Koestler, considering him too right-wing. After being introduced to Koestler, Sartre said: “You are a better novelist than I am, but not such a good philosopher.”27 Koestler noted that Sartre looked like “a malevolent goblin.”28 Despite these awkward moments, Koestler and Sartre appeared to get along quite well. Yet political disagreements between them appeared almost immediately. Koestler did not hide his anti-communist fervor. Beauvoir recalled the passionate arguments that ensued: Touchy, tormented, greedy for human warmth, but cut off from others by his personal obsessions—“I have my Furies,” he used to say—Koestler’s relations with us were always fluctuating. . . . “It’s impossible to be friends if we differ



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about politics!” [Koestler] said in an accusing tone. He rehashed his old grudges against Stalin’s Russia, accusing Sartre and even Camus of trying to compromise with the Soviets. We didn’t take his lugubriousness seriously; we were not aware of the passionate depths of his anti-Communism.29

Politics was intermingled with sex and love affairs. As Koestler sought to win Camus as a political comrade, Camus fell in love with Koestler’s partner Mamaine Paget. Furthermore, Koestler found time to pursue his own brief romance with Beauvoir. On October 29, 1946, there was a particularly heated argument between Koestler, Camus, Sartre, and André Malraux over communism. Koestler argued that both the USSR and Nazi Germany were two identical forms of totalitarianism. Sartre refused to condemn the Soviet Union by pointing out the lynchings in the United States. Koestler told Sartre that by keeping quiet on communism he was acting against history: “It must be said that as writers we are guilty of treason in the eyes of history if we do not denounce what deserves to be denounced. The conspiracy of silence is our condemnation in the eyes of those who come after us.”30 During the arguments, Koestler noticed that Camus was out of step with Sartre’s communist sympathies. After the exchange, Camus seemed to have been convinced by Koestler. A few days later, Camus encountered an old Resistance friend who had adopted Marxism. When they spoke, Camus used words that were reminiscent of Koestler: Met Tar. as I came away from the public statement I made concerning dialogue. He seems reticent, yet has the same friendly look in his eyes that he had when I recruited him into the Combat network. “You’re a Marxist now?” “Yes.” “Then you’ll be a murderer.” “I have already been one.” “I too. But I don’t want to be anymore.” “You were my sponsor.” That was true. “Listen Tar. This is the real problem: whatever happens, I shall always defend you against the firing squad. But you

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will be obliged to approve my being shot. Think about that.” “I’ll think about it.”31

Five years later, Camus would make his anti-communism explicit in The Rebel, which brought about his final split with Sartre. It seemed that Koestler was right: politics came before friendship. At each meeting, the chasm between Sartre and Koestler grew wider. Koestler was adamant that the Communists were plotting civil war and it was necessary to support de Gaulle against them. An ardent anti-Gaullist, Sartre advocated neutrality in the Cold War. At one disastrous meeting, Beauvoir remembered how the personal and the political collided: [Koestler] wanted to repeat our night [of October 1946] at the Scheherazade. We went with him. Mamaine, Camus, Sartre and myself—Francine wasn’t there—to another Russian nightclub. [Koestler] insisted on letting the maître d’hôtel know that he was being accorded the honor of waiting on Camus, Sartre and Koestler. In a tone more hostile than the year before, he returned to the theme of “No friendship without political agreement.” As a joke, Sartre was making love to Mamaine, though so outrageously one could scarcely have said he was being indiscreet, and we were all far too drunk for it to be offensive. Suddenly, Koestler threw a glass at Sartre’s head and it smashed against the wall.32

Sartre and Beauvoir attempted to deescalate things, but Koestler wanted to continue the quarrel. When Camus tried to calm him down, Koestler punched him in the face. The friendship between Sartre and Koestler was over. Now, the anti-communist commissar proceeded to throw his support behind the West in the Cold War. In 1949, Koestler worked as an adviser to the British IRD. In addition, they financially supported him by purchasing copies of Darkness at Noon for mass distribution in the Eastern Bloc. Koestler also found himself drawn into the cultural Cold War. During a lecture tour in the United States, he met with Bill Donovan, one of the founders of the Central Intelligence Agency. Together, they discussed the best ways to counteract Soviet propaganda.33 Koestler ended up becoming one of the guiding spirits behind The God that Failed (1950), a bestseller in the propaganda war. This anthology brought together Koestler and five other former communist supporters—Ignazio Silone, André Gide, Richard Wright, Louis Fischer, and Stephen Spender— who detailed their disillusionment with communism as a warning to the West. As Koestler said in his contribution: “It’s the same with all you comfortable, insular, Anglo-Saxon anti-communists. You hate our Cassandra cries and



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resent us as allies—but, when all is said, we ex-communists are the only people on your side who know what it’s all about.”34 While The God that Failed was a smashing success (thanks in part to the CIA), it was only a dry run for a larger cultural offensive. Koestler and the CIA wanted to unite the noncommunist left in support of the Cold War. This project became the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) launched in 1950. The CCF included many anti-communist superstars such as Ignazio Silone, Sidney Hook, Franz Borkenau, Karl Jaspers, John Dewey, Raymond Aron, and James Burnham. Their founding congress was held in West Berlin just as the Korean War began in June 1950. Koestler delivered the major address where he condemned the evils of communist totalitarianism. Koestler and the CIA hoped to win over French intellectuals to their cause, particularly the pro-communist Sartre. However, Sartre publicly condemned the Congress of Cultural Freedom and refused to attend its founding meeting. But there was one final meeting between Sartre and Koestler. While en route to West Berlin to the inaugural CCF meeting, Koestler ended up on the same train as Sartre who was heading to Frankfurt. Even though they were on opposite sides of the Cold War, the two shared an amicable meal together. Koestler believed that if Beauvoir had been there, things would not have been so pleasant: “Had la Simone been with him this would not have been possible, but minus her he behaved like a schoolboy on holiday, keeping forbidden company, and the old affection between us was restored for a night.”35 As the Cold War began, Koestler’s underlying belief in historical necessity remained. He had merely switched sides from communism to anti-communism. As Isaac Deutscher noted, this was no more than just an inverted Stalinism: But, whatever the shades of individual attitudes, as a rule the intellectual ex-communist ceases to oppose capitalism. Often he rallies to its defence, and he brings to this job the lack of scruple, the narrow-mindedness, the disregard for truth, and the intense hatred with which Stalinism has imbued him. He remains a sectarian. He is an inverted Stalinist. He continues to see the world in white and black, but now the colours are differently distributed. As a communist he saw no difference between fascists and social democrats. As an anti-communist he sees no difference between nazism and communism. Once, he accepted the party’s claim to infallibility; now he believes himself to be infallible. Having once been caught by the “greatest illusion,” he is now obsessed by the greatest disillusionment of our time.36

In the coming years, Koestler found himself disillusioned with the capitalist West as well. He saw it infected with a materialist and rationalist spirit. Ultimately, Koestler’s rejection of Stalinism was the starting point for

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him doubting the whole Enlightenment tradition and any idea of historical necessity. C. MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY The French Communists recognized that Darkness at Noon was a powerful attack on the logic of Stalinism. Therefore, it is no surprise that they did not allow Koestler to go unanswered. Roger Garaudy’s Literature of the Graveyard was one such polemic that ferociously attacked Darkness at Noon.37 However, Garaudy like the majority of Communist works directed at Koestler did not rise above crude apologetics for the Moscow Trials. In order to find a true engagement with Koestler, one must look outside of the PCF’s ranks. The most sophisticated answer to Darkness at Noon was found in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror. Just like Koestler, Merleau-Ponty was horrified by the Moscow Trials. While sympathetic to Marxism, the Great Terror caused Merleau-Ponty to distance himself from the PCF. As Sartre remembered: From a few conversations which we had later, I was left with the feeling that before 1939, he had been closer to Marxism than he was ever to be subsequently. What made him withdraw from it? I imagine that it was the Trials. He must have been very upset by them, for he spoke of them at great length, ten years later, in Humanism and Terror. After the trials, he could hardly even be disturbed by the German-Soviet Pact.38

During World War II, Merleau-Ponty did not follow Koestler toward anticommunism. Instead, he experienced the war as an apocalyptic event that shattered the old world. From those ruins, Merleau-Ponty sought a new idea of reason. As he wrote later in the inaugural issue of Les Temps Modernes in October 1945: The experience of chaos, on the speculative level as on the other, invites us to look at rationalism in an historical perspective from which it claimed in principle to escape, to look for a philosophy which will make us understand the surging forth of reason in a world it has not made, and which will prepare the vital infrastructure without which reason and freedom become empty and decompose.39

Merleau-Ponty concluded that Marxism was the necessary scaffolding for this new philosophy of reason. In 1946, he aligned with the Communist Party, stating: “the Communist is the permanent hero of our time.”40



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At the height of Koestler’s fame, Merleau-Ponty wrote a series of articles engaging him. In 1947, these were collected into a book titled Humanism and Terror. Merleau-Ponty’s work is more than a criticism of Darkness at Noon or even Arthur Koestler himself but is perhaps the most refined philosophical defense of Stalinism ever written. Merleau-Ponty argued that Marxism was the philosophy of history. He said that Marxism was chiefly a method to decipher the secrets behind events, develop analyses, and bring forth the light of reason from the darkness of unreason. At the core of Marxism was its theory on the necessity of proletarian revolution. As the universal class created by capitalism, the proletariat represents the interests of all humanity. Communism would allow for the creation of a truly humanist society. Therefore, real humanism equals communism. He says that the humanist claims of liberal society are false since they mask that capitalism is maintained by terror and violence. If the proletariat does not wish to continue to be the victim of capitalist violence, then it is necessary for them to use their own violence and overthrow the bourgeoisie. Merleau-Ponty concludes that capitalist reality means it is impossible to condemn all violence a priori and look inward for spiritual change like Koestler’s Yogi: “We do not have a choice between purity and violence but between different kinds of violence.”41 That being the case, what was Merleau-Ponty’s response to Koestler? For one, he says that Rubashov was not a faithful representation of Bukharin’s position, since his arguments for confessing are fatalistic and mechanical. Rubashov sees history proceeding behind the backs of the working class with its secrets only known to the party: “The logic which Rubashov follows is not the existential logic of history described by Marx and expressed in the inseparability of objective necessity and the spontaneous movement of the masses; it is the summary logic of the technician who deals only with inert objects which he manipulates as he pleases.”42 Darkness at Noon ends up portraying the logic of historical necessity as an inexorable process where cadres act as mindless cogs in a machine. When Rubashov says the party can make no mistakes, Merleau-Ponty notes that this attitude is more suited to papal infallibility than to Marxism: “But Rubashov’s reply is in no way Marxist if it attributes a divine infallibility to the Party; since the Party has to deliberate, there can be no question of any geometric proof or any perfectly clear line. Since there are detours it shows that at certain moments the official line needs reconsideration and that if it were persisted in would lead to error.”43 Merleau-Ponty says that Bukharin, as a Marxist, believed that history is not some mysterious external force, but required active participation by the working class to create the future. This means that Rubashov’s Commissar logic is just a caricature of Marxism invented by Koestler:

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But who said that history is a clockwork and the individual a wheel? It was not Marx; it was Koestler. It is strange that in Koestler there is no inkling of the commonplace notion that by the very fact of its duration, history sketches the outline for the transformation of its own structures, changing and reversing its own direction because, in the last analysis men come to collide with the structures that alienate them inasmuch as economic man is also a human being. In short, Koestler has never given much thought to the simple idea of a dialectic in history.44

Even if Koestler was a “mediocre Marxist” and Rubashov was a fictional character, this did not mean that the philosophical problems raised by the Moscow Trials were simply imaginary. Merleau-Ponty agrees with Koestler that these were not ordinary trials, but the oscillations between Yogi and Commissar did not reveal their true meaning. Merleau-Ponty says that the Moscow Trials must be understood as political events and the defendants should be judged according to the logic of the revolution. As demonstrated by his own testimony, Bukharin accepted this: “World history is a world court of judgment.”45 During the proceedings, Bukharin denied many of the specific charges of espionage and sabotage. However, he took full political responsibility for criminal acts, even if he had no direct involvement with them: Consequently, I plead guilty to what directly follows from this, the sum total of crimes committed by this counter-revolutionary organization. Irrespective of whether or not I knew of, whether or not I took a direct part in any particular act. Because I am responsible as one of the leaders and not as a cog of this counterrevolutionary organization.46

Did this mean that Bukharin’s contradictory stance of accepting overall responsibility and denying specific actions show that the trials were just a frame-up? Outsiders who focus simply on the judicial nature of the trials miss their wider political meaning. Merleau-Ponty says that the Moscow Trials are incomprehensible without understanding the wider context of revolutionary violence and the transition to communism: “The Moscow Trials only make sense between revolutionaries, that is to say between men who are convinced that they are making history and who consequently already see the present as past and see those who hesitate as traitors.”47 Bukharin was to be judged according to the logic of struggle. As an oppositionist, he was defeated by Stalin. However, his program served as a rallying center for enemies of the Soviet Union. Objectively, this meant Bukharin ended up in the camp of the counterrevolution. This made him guilty of “historical treason.”48 Yet Merleau-Ponty said Bukharin’s tragedy was that he was subjectively a Marxist who recognized his guilt before history:



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By contrast, the true nature of tragedy appears once the same man has understood both that he cannot disavow the objective pattern of his actions, that he is what he is for others in the context of history, and yet that the motive of his actions constitutes a man’s worth as he himself experiences it.49

As a consequence of his defeat, Bukharin accepted that he must be consumed by the Dialectic of Saturn. When it came to Trotsky, Merleau-Ponty believed that he had performed great services to the revolution in the past. However, history was not made by figures like Trotsky with “such a tenacious belief in the rationality of history that when it ceases for a while to be rational, they throw themselves into the future they seek rather than have to deal with compromises and incoherence.”50 Since Trotsky was too attached to abstract rationality, he was unable to compromise with reality like Stalin. As a result, political life became impossible for Trotsky and he ended up as a beautiful soul condemning history from the sidelines.51 Merleau-Ponty doubted Trotsky’s claims that Stalinism was the Thermidorian degeneration of the revolution. He believed this was based on a misunderstanding of the French Revolution, since Thermidor and Bonapartism were not intrinsically counterrevolutionary, but secured the gains of 1789. Merleau-Ponty left it open that Stalin, like Napoleon, had performed a necessary function by fortifying the revolution: For it remains open whether, historically, Thermidor and Bonaparte destroyed the Revolution or rather in fact consolidated its results. It is possible that in the clash of events the radical future of the Revolution is preserved better through compromise than a radical policy, just as, in the history of political thought, the Hegelian compromise had more of a future than Hölderlin’s radicalism.52

In Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty refused to pass a definitive judgement on the Moscow Trials or Stalinism. He believed that history had not cast its final verdict on communism yet. He argued that it was necessary to wait. He used the analogy of France under German occupation where the outcome of the war remained undecided. Both Vichy and the Resistance judged their actions according to a future victory. While the fighting raged, it was illegitimate to make impartial judgements on the actions of either side. A Frenchman either condemned or supported them. It was only after the defeat of Nazi Germany and Vichy that history proved the Resistance was correct. Similarly, it was still too soon to say whether Stalinism was historically necessary: “The Communist has launched the conscience and values of private man in a public undertaking which should return them a hundredfold. He is still waiting for the returns.”53 Merleau-Ponty ended up changing the terms of the debate on

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historical necessity by transforming it into a Pascalian wager on the future. If Stalinism is a historical necessity, then it can only be justified ex post facto. Merleau-Ponty offered his own criteria on when it would be appropriate to judge Stalinism. In the context of the Cold War, the USSR was a bulwark of peace and progress against Western imperialism. The United States was inciting war against the Soviet Union. Merleau-Ponty said if the Soviet Union launched an aggressive war, then history will have shown that Stalinism did not lead to communism: “If it happens tomorrow that the U.S.S.R. threatens to invade Europe and to set up in every country a government of its choice, a different question would arise and would have to be examined. That question does not arise at the moment.”54 The outbreak of the Korean War led Merleau-Ponty to conclude that the wager of history had gone against Stalinism. According to Sartre, this led Merleau-Ponty to take a neutral stance on Korea. They discussed their positions while waiting for a train: He repeated quietly: “The only thing left for us is silence.” “Who is ‘us,’” I said, pretending not to understand. “Well, us. Les Temps Modernes.” “You mean, you want us to put the key under the door?” “No, not that. But I don’t want us to breathe another word of politics.” “But why not?” “They’re fighting.” “Well, all right, in Korea.” “Tomorrow they’ll be fighting everywhere.” “And even if they were fighting here, why should we be quiet?” “Because brute force will decide the outcome. Why speak to what has no ears?” I leaned out of the window and waved, as one should. I saw that he waved back, but I remained in a state of shock until the journey’s end.55

It was only with the publication of Adventures of the Dialectic (1955) that Merleau-Ponty announced his abandonment of Marxism, historical necessity, and communism. He said that the idea of reason in history was an



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Enlightenment hangover that must be rejected: “We are living on the leftovers of eighteenth century thought, and it has to be reconstructed from top to bottom.”56 Since there is no endpoint to history, Merleau-Ponty said that revolutions had no justification in necessity. Rather, historical necessity is simply an excuse to justify purging internal enemies since revolutions inevitably ossify once they assume power: It is no accident that all known revolutions have degenerated: it is because as established regimes they can never be what they were as movements; precisely because it succeeded and ended up as an institution, the historical movement is no longer itself: it “betrays” and “disfigures” itself in accomplishing itself. Revolutions are true as movements and false as regimes.57

Drawing upon the libertarian-Marxist Daniel Guérin, who wrote about popular movements during the First French Republic, he argued that it was no accident that the French Revolution ended in disaster: The abortion of the French Revolution, and of all the others, is thus not an accident which breaks a logical development, which is to be attributed to the particularities of the rising class, and which will not take place when the rising class is the proletariat: the failure of the revolution is the revolution itself. Revolution and its failure are one and the same thing.58

Merleau-Ponty concluded that the Dialectic of Saturn was written not only into the French Revolution. The experience of Stalinism proved that proletarian revolutions followed the same pattern with bloody purges to hunt down mythical enemies: We are in the realm of the occult. All the history of communism since Trotsky, the actions and reactions, the ups and downs, the purges and turning-points, all that is verifiable, all the events are conjured away: there is only one substance of history, the advances of subversion.59

In place of historical necessity or the wager on Stalinism, Merleau-Ponty now advocated a third way between capitalism and communism. Instead of revolution, the noncommunist left should embrace parliaments and reforms. When it came to international affairs, Merleau-Ponty retreated from anti-imperialism, arguing that France must hold onto its colonies for the sake of world peace: I do not want Algeria, Black Africa, and Madagascar to become independent countries without delay; because political independence, which does not solve

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the problems of accelerated development, would give them on the other hand the means for permanent agitation on a world scale, and would aggravate the tension between the U.S.S.R. and America without either one being able to bring a solution to the problems of underdevelopment as long as they continue their arms race.60

Merleau-Ponty’s former comrades on the far left rejected his new liberalism. One of the sharpest responses came from Simone de Beauvoir. She argued that Merleau-Ponty’s view of revolutions was based on idealist abstractions since he ignored the material conditions that produced them. Furthermore, Beauvoir argued that revolutionary violence was not pointless bloodshed, but the only rational way for radicals to win: One kills from hunger, anger, and despair. One kills to live. The stake is infinite for it represents life itself with its infinity of possibilities, but it never assumes the positive and utopian image of a paradisical society. If Merleau-Ponty assumes the contrary because he ignores dire situations; neither the word nor the idea of need appear in his analyses. But an absolute of rebellion and refusal erupts from dire needs, and that does not allow the revolutionary the leisure to draw up a balance sheet. In the quiet of his study, Merleau-Ponty may tell himself that if revolution does not achieve the absolute Good, the game is not worth the effort; but he is talking for himself; therefore, revolutions betray solely his dreams and not themselves.61

When it came to Merleau-Ponty’s reformism and electoralism, Beauvoir concluded it was a dead end. The influence of the bourgeoisie in parliament was permanently weighed against the working class. This was not an accident, but done by design because the existing state served bourgeois interests. Beauvoir said that reformism was deluded to argue that the capitalist state could ever advance working-class politics: “Merleau-Ponty must be quite a fool to expect that a class that is the enemy of the proletariat, if entrusted with the task of remaking history, would do so for the proletariat.”62 From different vantage points, both Arthur Koestler and Maurice Merleau-Ponty confronted the Stalinist arguments for historical necessity. In Darkness at Noon, Koestler concluded that Stalinism’s ruthless logic did not lead to a promised communist future, but to totalitarianism. Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror recast historical necessity into a Pascalian wager. Yet he found when history rolled its dice that Stalinism came up short. In the end, Koestler and Merleau-Ponty concluded that historical necessity was the Dialectic of Saturn that led to Stalinism.



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NOTES 1. Roger Garaudy, Literature of the Graveyard: Jean-Paul Sartre, François Mauriac, André Malraux, Arthur Koestler (New York: International Publishers, 1948), 14. 2. Ibid., 13–14. 3. Ibid., 13. 4. Ibid., 58–59. 5. See George Novack, ed. Existentialism versus Marxism: Conflicting Views on Humanism (New York: Dell Publishing Co, 1966). Novack’s contribution is on 317–40 and Garaudy on 154–63. 6. Garaudy 1948, 59. 7. Arthur Koestler in The God that Failed, ed. Richard Crossman (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 34. 8. Arthur Koestler, Invisible Writing (Boston: Beacon Press, 1954), 359. 9. Koestler in Crossman 1963, 68. 10. Quoted in Scammell 2009, 163. 11. Koestler 1954, 264. 12. Ibid. 13. Arthur Koestler, The Gladiators (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1965a), 216. In The Rebel, Albert Camus includes details about Spartacus and the slaves’ political program that shows the clear influence of discussions with Koestler: “Spartacus’ rebellion recapitulates the program of the servile rebellions that preceded it. But this program is limited to the distribution of land and the abolition of slavery.” See Albert Camus, The Rebel (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 109. 14. Koestler 1965a, 232. 15. Ibid., 222. 16. Ibid., 310. 17. Arthur Koestler, Dialogue with Death (New York: Macmillan Company, 1942), 139. 18. Stanley Kubrick based his 1960 Spartacus film on the novel of the same name by the American Communist writer Howard Fast. During production, another Spartacus movie was planned, which would have been based on Koestler’s novel. This film was not made since the Kubrick version went into production first. However, Kubrick wanted to use elements from Koestler’s Gladiators in his version. The blacklisted screenwriter on Spartacus, Dalton Trumbo outright refused stating that Koestler’s novel undermined the moral grandeur of the revolt. The following quote from a memo by Trumbo highligts his criticism of Koestler’s elitism: Thus was the first campaign against the stature of Spartacus defeated. Then I began to see a second campaign to diminish the character get underway, directed, my dear Stanley Kubrick, by you. Stanley read Koestler. Koestler is a man who was for years bewitched by the idea that he was going to make a revolution, that he was going to lead the dear people in a vast freedom movement. But the revolution didn’t come off because the people, in their immense stupidity, didn’t see fit to follow Mr. Koestler. Koestler has spent all the years

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of his life since that fatal moment of rejection by the people in denouncing the common herd, which had so little comprehension of his excellence as a leader. His thesis is simple: the people are stupid, corrupt and altogether responsible for their own miseries. Leaders, on the other hand, are the elite of mankind, tragically frustrated, tragically pulled down and destroyed by the decadence and vulgarity of the very rabble they sought to lead to freedom. Thus Koestler has rationalized the stupidities of his own youth by placing them on the backs of the gross mob, which refused to recognize his virtues . . . The point is not whether the Koestler theory is philosophically or historically right or wrong: it is rather that all theories are debatable, and that the Koestler theory is directly antithetical to the theory of the script of Spartacus. . . . I think it is dead wrong to transmit any part of Koestler into Spartacus. Nevertheless, the Koestler theory still pops up, not as a “conspiracy” but as a conviction on Stanley’s part, and I think we must accept it, or reject it, since it is impossible to compromise with it. Quoted in ed. Martin M. Winkler, ed. Spartacus: Film and History (Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2007), 58–59. 19. Alison Flood, “After 80 Years, Darkness at Noon’s Original Text Is Finally Translated,” The Guardian, September 24, 2019. https:​//​www​.theguardian​.com​/books​ /2019​/sep​/24​/darkness​-at​-noon​-original​-text​-gets​-first​-english​-translation​-arthur​ -koestler. 20. George Orwell, “‘For what am I fighting?’: George Orwell on Arthur Koestler’s ‘Darkness at Noon.’” The New Statesman, January 4, 1941. https:​ //​ www​ newstatesman​.com​/culture​/2013​/01​/what​-am​-i​-fighting​-george​-orwell​-arthur​ -koestlers​-darkness​-noon. 21. Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), 34. 22. Ibid., 193. 23. Ibid., 135. 24. Ibid., 153. 25. Arthur Koestler, The Yogi and the Commissar (London: Hutchinson & Co Ltd., 1965b), 232. 26. Koestler 1954, 403. 27. Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance Volume I: After the War (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 108. 28. Arthur Koestler, Stranger on the Square: Arthur and Cynthia Koestler (New York: Random House, 1984), 67. 29. Beauvoir 1977, 109. 30. Albert Camus, Notebooks 1942–1951 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), 146. 31. Ibid. 147–48. Lowercase in the original. This is quite similar to how Camus would later talk about revolutionaries, whether Jacobins or Communists, in The Rebel: “The majority of revolutions are shaped by, and derive their originality from, murder. All, or almost all, have been homicidal.” See Camus 1991, 108. 32. Beauvoir 1977, 140. 33. Hugh Wilford, The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 58.



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34. Crossman 1963, 2. 35. Koestler 1984, 71. 36. “The Ex-Communist’s Conscience,” in Deutscher 1969, 15. 37. Ironically, one of François Furet inspirations to join the PCF was reading Darkness at Noon. See Christofferson 1999, 574. 38. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Merleau-Ponty,” in Situations (New York: George Braziller, 1965), 242–43. 39. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), xii. 40. Beauvoir 1977, 44. 41. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 109. 42. Ibid., 15. See also Barry Cooper, Merleau-Ponty and Marxism: from terror to reform (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 70. 43. Merleau-Ponty 1969, 16. 44. Ibid., 23. 45. Ibid., 62. This is also a quote from Hegel. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 372. 46. Quoted in Merleau-Ponty 1969, 45. See the trial transcript in The Great Purge Trial, ed. Robert C. Tucker and Stephen Cohen (New York: Grosset and Dunlap Publishers, 1965), 328. 47. Merleau-Ponty 1969, 29. 48. Ibid., 52. 49. Ibid., 62. 50. Ibid., 80. 51. Ibid., 152. Ironically, Merleau-Ponty defended Trotsky’s position on critical defense of the USSR in WWII as the “very language of 1917—as faithful to class and historical consciousness as it is to action.” See Merleau-Ponty 1964, 258. 52. Merleau-Ponty 1969, 73. This is reminiscent of Lukács’ arguments in “Hölderlin’s Hyperion” that will be discussed later. It is highly likely that Merleau-Ponty had read this essay since he was familiar with Lukács and discussed him at length in Adventures of the Dialectic. 53. Ibid., xxi. 54. Ibid., 184. 55. Sartre 1965, 274–75. See also Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 229. 56. Merleau-Ponty 1964, 348. 57. Merleau-Ponty 1973, 207. 58. Ibid. 219. Sartre also took issue with Guérin’s view of the French Revolution as reductionist in Search for a Method (New York: Vintage, 1968c), 39. However, Sartre did praise Guérin’s work in a footnote: “These comments and those which follow were suggested to me by Daniel Guerin’s La lutte des classes sous la Première République, a work which is often open to question but fascinating and rich in new insights. Despite all the mistakes (due to Guérin’s wish to force history), it remains

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one of the few enriching contributions that contemporary Marxists have made to the study of history.” Ibid. 37. For more on Sartre’s engagement with Guérin see Ian Birchall, “Sartre’s Encounter with Daniel Guérin,” Sartre Studies International 2, no. 1 (1996): 41–56. 59. Merleau-Ponty 1964, 342. 60. Ibid., 334–35. 61. Simone de Beauvoir, “Merleau-Ponty and Pseudo-Sartreanism,” in Political Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmerman (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2021), 246–47. 62. Ibid., 258.

Chapter Five

Stalinism as Historical Necessity The Ambiguities of Western Marxism

Others on the left, whom Merleau-Ponty dubbed “Western Marxists,” had a more complicated relationship with Stalinism. Emerging in the aftermath of World War I and the isolation of the Russian Revolution, Western Marxists kept their distance from Stalinism and social democracy. They were not a unified group, but contained diverse currents with no clear program. In the ranks of Western Marxism were members of the Frankfurt School, such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who preferred the solitude of academia to active politics. There were also Communist Party militants, such as Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukács, Louis Althusser, and Eric Hobsbawm, who were politically engaged. What all Western Marxists shared was a greater intellectual focus, particularly on issues related to culture, philosophy, and ideology than existed in the ranks of orthodox Marxism.‌‌ When it came to Stalinism, the response of Western Marxists was ambiguous. As Perry Anderson observed: “It never completely accepted Stalinism; yet it never actively combated it either.”1 These equivocations on Stalinism were the product of concrete material circumstances. Western Marxists who were Communist Party militants were obliged to defend Stalinism, due to a combination of conviction and discipline. Others such as Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Bloch, who were exiles from Nazi Germany, saw the Soviet Union as the only salvation from fascist barbarism. Western Marxists’ responses to Stalinism varied: Brecht’s agony, Adorno’s embarrassing silences, Althusser’s hidden criticisms, Sartre’s fellow traveling, and Bloch’s prosecutorial briefs. On the whole, Western Marxists failed to either understand Stalinism or develop a Marxist alternative to it.

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A. THEODOR ADORNO AND MAX HORKHEIMER No group represented the contradictory relationship of Western Marxism toward capitalism and Stalinism more than the Frankfurt School. Originally founded in 1923 as the Institute for Social Research to carry out Marxist studies, the organization only got off the ground after receiving a generous endowment from the grain merchant Hermann Weil. Bertolt Brecht noted that the Frankfurt School’s capitalist origins compromised its ability to carry out anti-capitalist research: “the story of the frankfurt sociological institute. a rich old man (weil, the speculator in wheat) dies, disturbed at the poverty in the world. in his will he leaves a large sum to set up an institute which will do research on the source of this poverty. which is, of course, himself.”2 This inside/outside approach meant that the Frankfurt School deliberately kept its distance from organized left-wing politics. Its members (with notable exceptions such as Henryk Grossman) stayed aloof from both socialist and communist parties. Strangely for an avowed Marxist institution, the Frankfurt School had no official position on the Soviet Union, whether positive or negative. When Friedrich Pollock wrote Experiments in Economic Planning in the Soviet Union 1917–1927, he delicately refrained from declaring any support. The Frankfurt School’s retreat from Marxist orthodoxy increased further after Horkheimer became its director in 1930. In “The Impotence of the German Working Class” (written in 1927 but only published in 1934), Horkheimer was skeptical about the ability of Germany’s working-class parties to carry out a proletarian revolution. He said that the social democrats were unwilling to act, and the communists were unwilling to think. This split between the two parties could only be overcome “in the last analysis on the course of economic‌‌‌‌‌ processes. . . . In both parties, there exists a part of the strength on which the future of mankind depends.”3 Ultimately, Horkheimer was pessimistic about the two parties overcoming this division. The Frankfurt School’s gloom increased once Hitler came to power and its members were forced into exile. In 1935, Adorno and Horkheimer reestablished the Frankfurt School at Columbia University in New York. Despite American exile, the Frankfurt School’s frame of reference remained fixated on Western Europe, Marxism, and the Soviet Union. The Frankfurt School saw the Soviet Union and not the capitalist West as the last bulwark against fascism. As Adorno said in 1936: “In two years at the most, Germany will attack Russia, while France and England stand back on the basis of the treaties which will have been signed by then.”4 In line with their overall apoliticism, Adorno and Horkheimer felt it was prudent for the Frankfurt School to stay discreetly silent on the Soviet Union.



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In private though, Adorno was willing to vent his anger about Stalinism. After the first Moscow Trial in August 1936, he wrote in disbelief to Horkheimer: “Has the planet really and truly gone to Hell?”5 Two years later in 1938, Adorno was angered when the Marxist composer Hanns Eisler made a joke about the execution of Bukharin. He wrote to Walter Benjamin: I listened with not a little patience to his feeble defence of the Moscow trials, and with considerable disgust to the joke he cracked about the murder of Bukharin. He claims to have known the latter in Moscow, telling me that Bukharin’s conscience was already so bad that he could not even look at him, Eisler, honestly in the eyes. I am not inventing all this.6

However, Adorno made a distinction between private remarks and public statements. While he was horrified at Zinoviev’s execution, Adorno told Horkheimer that they could not afford to say anything lest it embarrass the Soviet Union: “The most loyal attitude to Russia at the moment is probably shown by keeping quiet.”7 Adorno admitted that it was hard to stay silent about Stalinism’s crimes, but the dangerous times required it: “in the current situation, which is truly desperate, one should really maintain discipline at any cost (and no one knows the cost better than I!) and not publish anything which might damage Russia.”8 Adorno was not alone in his disgust at Stalinism. When Bloch defended the Moscow trials, Horkheimer was outraged. Adorno told Benjamin about it: “Max was just as furious about his essay on Bukharin as we both were. It is inevitable precisely with people like Bloch that they get into hot water once they start to get clever.”9 However, Horkheimer’s stance on Stalinism was more enigmatic than that of Adorno. In the 1930s, Horkheimer agreed with Adorno about the necessity to maintain discipline on Russia. Yet he was not uncritical of Stalinism. As he later admitted in 1956, he thought the Soviet Union was already well on its way to fascism: “The Russians are already halfway towards fascism.”10 While refusing to identify with the Soviet Union, Horkheimer believed it still represented something better than Western capitalism: “We have nothing in common with Russian bureaucrats. But they stand for a greater right as opposed to Western culture. It is the fault of the West that the Russian Revolution went the way it did.”11 Despite Horkheimer’s pessimism, Marxism still remained part of his thinking. His 1939 essay “The Jews and Europe” argued that fascism was an outgrowth of capitalism: “But whoever is not willing to talk about capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism.”12 In the essay, published mere weeks after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Horkheimer directed his fire against

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the Third Reich while passages about the Soviet Union were excised from the final text.13 Even though Adorno and Horkheimer offered tacit support to the USSR, they remained totally despondent when it came to the Western working class. At the end of World War II, Adorno proclaimed that the proletariat had no revolutionary potential left: “The decay of the workers’ movement is corroborated by the official optimism of its adherents.”14 For Adorno and Horkheimer, the postwar era signaled their desertion of‌‌‌‌ any class-based or orthodox Marxist analysis. Adorno believed that the experience of fascism disproved any ideas of progress or reason in history: Had Hegel’s philosophy of history embraced this age, Hitler’s robot-bombs would have found their place beside the early death of Alexander and similar images, as one of the selected empirical facts by which the state of the world-spirit manifests itself directly in symbols. Like Fascism itself, the robots career without a subject. Like it they combine utmost technical perfection with total blindness. And like it they arouse mortal terror and are wholly futile. “I have seen the world spirit,” not on horseback, but on wings and without a head, and that refutes, at the same stroke, Hegel’s philosophy of history.15

In The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Adorno and Horkheimer announced their near-absolute pessimism about the possibilities of human emancipation: “What we had set out to do was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.”16 In contrast to Marxism, they argued that humanity’s efforts to exercise control over nature, not the class struggle, was the motor of history. This led to the instrumental rationality of the Enlightenment which resulted in domination over the individual, technological rationality, and the manipulation of mass society. While Stalinism was not directly discussed, the conclusions of the Dialectic of Enlightenment implied a rejection of the Soviet Union as another form of instrumental reason. As Martin Jay observed: Marx of course was by no means the major target of the Dialectic. Horkheimer and Adorno were far more ambitious. The entire Enlightenment tradition, that process of allegedly liberating demystification that Max Weber had called die Entzauberung der Welt (the disenchantment of the world), was their real target.17

As Brecht noted, the position of the Frankfurt School, particularly Adorno and Horkheimer, was untenable: they were committed to criticizing bourgeois society while adapting to it. Lacking a social anchor and a political program, Adorno and Horkheimer saw no escape from capitalism. Ultimately, their pessimism led to complete hopelessness as they came close to the positions of the counter-Enlightenment.



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B. ERNST BLOCH For the German philosopher Ernst Bloch, the Russian Revolution offered hope for a redeemed world. In The Spirit of Utopia (1918), Bloch proclaimed that Bolshevism was the “categorical imperative with revolver in hand.”18 After his visions of a revolutionary apocalypse receded, Bloch’s faith in the Soviet Union remained unshaken. Like others in the Frankfurt School, Bloch was forced into exile by Hitler. Among the émigrés, he was second to none in his defense of Stalin. Bloch stated that the Soviet Union was the only force in the world that dared to confront fascism. That meant everyone had to stand either for or against the USSR. There was no middle ground: Monopoly capitalism does not engender ambivalence. The choice between it and the socialist cause of the people is an easy one. In today’s situation it should be clearly evident that anti-bolshevist statements serve only the devil himself. . . . This ideal can be furthered only by the popular front. And a popular front does not require a fervent or absolute commitment to Russia, but rather the modest, and one would think perfectly acceptable realization: there can be no struggle, there can be nothing good without Russia.19

During the Moscow Trials, there was no doubt in Bloch’s mind that all the accused were guilty as charged. From his home in Czechoslovakia, Bloch volunteered to write affidavits “proving” that the defendants were in league with Germany and Japan.20 The Soviet embassy never took him up on the offer. Other left-leaning intellectuals did not share Bloch’s Stalinist zeal. They saw the Moscow Trials leading to the same bloody end as the French Revolution. Bloch answered this skepticism in Jubilee for Renegades (1937) arguing that while the two revolutions were not comparable, the intellectual disillusionment of former supporters was: Often the disillusionment of today seems to be only the echo of an earlier loss of faith—like the repetition of a misfortune which had beset even greater spirits of the past. I am thinking specifically of the many German poets and thinkers who wavered at the time of the French Revolution and of the doubts which arose ten to twenty years after 1789. I am thinking of the shock that occurred when winds from the West brought with them the unmistakable odor of blood. To be sure, there are significant differences (but these differences do not shed a favorable light on the current vacillation). The French Revolution is not the Russian Revolution; and the “Reign of Terror” is certainly not comparable to the Moscow show trials. The French events affected a servile and uncommitted Germany which has little in common with the present day Germany of emigration. Moreover, the literary renegades of today are only in part German, i.e., they

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only stem in part from a politically inexperienced people. Since they do not have a Goethe or Schiller among them, they also lack the justification which Voltaire once conceded to genius: “It is the privilege of genius to make grand mistakes with impunity.” Nevertheless, there is a parallel between the shock of then and the shock of today—between the shock regarding the Revolutionary Tribunal and the shock regarding the Moscow trials. This parallel lies in the unwillingness both then and now to comprehend the sudden radicalization as stemming from the impact of foreign policy affairs. The similarity lies in the hurried and almost totally unheralded desertion at the very moment the Revolutionary Tribunal put enthusiasm to the test—to the test of a concept rooted in the concrete.21

According to Bloch, the Moscow Trials were not proof that the revolution was eating its own. It was the worsening international situation that was to blame since the Soviet Union was threatened on all sides by hostile powers. If the revolution was going to survive, then ruthless measures must be taken against enemies. Bloch dismissed Leon Trotsky’s cries of a Stalinist Thermidor. To him, Trotsky’s anti-Stalinism was merely a pretense to cover his treason and fascist collusion: How believable the sabotage here, the pernicious work, even the secession of the Ukraine: the overthrow of the Stalin bureaucracy dignifies all means, drives Trotskyism toward the enemy of its enemy and today justifies for it another Brest-Litovsk. . . . The end result of Trotskyist activity would, of course, not be world revolution (which the emigrants of the bourgeois right by no means desire). In spite of all this the result would be the introduction of capitalism in Russia and, in case this result should not be sufficiently horrifying for our right wing emigrants—on the contrary—it can be put in even plainer language: the effect would be German fascism in Moscow.22

As already discussed, Bloch’s defense of the trials revolted Adorno and Horkheimer. His Stalinism meant the Frankfurt School refused to grant him a position. An enraged Bloch is allegedly to have condemned Adorno and Horkheimer as “the swine on 117th street.”23 After the war, Bloch returned to East Germany when he was offered the chair of philosophy at the University of Leipzig. In 1955, Bloch was awarded the National Prize and full membership in the German Academy of Sciences. Despite the heretical nature of Bloch’s Marxism, he was now a full member of the East German establishment. During his years of exile and time in East Germany, Bloch did not lose his faith in the Soviet Union or Stalin. Even Khrushchev’s Secret Speech did not upset his convictions. However, he feared that Khrushchev had given free license to anti-communists. According to his son, Jan Robert:



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Bloch assessed Stalin and his terrors after the 20th Party Congress in half-critical distance from the revelations and with skeptical subjunctives with respect to their validity. His reaction was with the “same gait and plan of attack” as before—with the warning not “to slip into liberalism,” for there would be danger that “a few reactionary rats would creep out of their holes with the liberals, too.24

However, Bloch was sympathetic to reformists in Eastern Europe, particularly Władysław Gomułka in Poland. When the Warsaw Pact invaded Hungary, he was aghast. In November 1956, at a speech marking the 125th anniversary of Hegel’s death, Bloch condemned East German support for the invasion. The response of the authorities was swift. Bloch was declared unfit to teach and forced to retire. In 1961, he left for West Germany, eventually settling in Tübingen. In a case of historical irony, the ex-Stalinist Bloch ended up teaching in the very place where Hegel studied theology. In his final years, Bloch shed his Stalinism without renouncing Marxism. In 1968, at a speech commemorating Marx’s 150th birthday, Bloch reflected on the Bolshevik Revolution. He said it was a heroic effort to create socialism in unfavorable conditions. Unfortunately, the revolution succumbed to Russia’s czarist heritage, leading to the betrayal of Stalinism: It should be clear that the absence of bourgeois revolutionary modernization in Czarist Russia necessarily had specific consequences in the new Russia. There the springs of social wealth ran not richer but poorer than in more developed capitalist countries. In the absence of long-standing forms of bourgeois freedom the predicted dictatorship of the proletariat had to be established directly on the basis of the Czarism that had immediately preceded it. Among the results were the personality cult, an extensive and absolutist centralization, lack of room for any except a “criminal” opposition, the terror and the police state, and an all-powerful state police—even when complete security for the Socialist power had been won internally.25

By defending the original integrity of the 1917 revolution against later Stalinist degeneration, Bloch strangely found himself close to Trotsky, whom he had once reviled. C. WALTER BENJAMIN A recurring theme in Walter Benjamin’s work is that humanity can only be delivered from evil through a final apocalyptic event. He saw the Russian Revolution and communism as forces in this coming Armageddon. In Critique of Violence (1921), Benjamin called Bolshevism and anarchism

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forms of messianic “divine violence” that would break “this cycle maintained by mythic forms of law, on the suspension of law with all the forces on which it depends as they depend on it, finally therefore on the abolition of state power, a new historical epoch is founded.”26 Communist divine violence would shatter the old world in a single blow and institute a new kingdom on earth. Despite his early sympathies for Bolshevism, it was not until 1924 that Benjamin began to seriously study Marxism. While staying on the Italian island of Capri, he was joined by Ernst Bloch and met the Latvian Bolshevik Asja Lācis. She suggested that he read Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (1923).27 Lācis became not only one of Benjamin’s intellectual mentors, but his lover as well. When Benjamin learned that she was an acquaintance of Bertolt Brecht, he asked for an introduction. Nothing happened. It would only be several years later that Benjamin finally met Brecht and they discovered common political ground. In the following year, Benjamin continued his studies of Marxism. Among the works he read was Trotsky’s Where Is England Going? Benjamin seriously considered joining the German Communist Party and traveling to Moscow to see the Soviet Union firsthand. In 1926, his enthusiasm for joining the KPD cooled somewhat. He suspected that if the party learned about his anarchist sympathies, then they would quickly kick him out.28 While Benjamin never joined the KPD, he did travel to the Soviet Union, staying there from December 1926 until February 1927. During his time in Moscow, Benjamin observed that public concerns seemed to overshadow private lives: “Everything is in the process of being built or rebuilt and almost every moment poses very critical questions. The tensions of public life— which in large part have an almost theological character—are so great that, to an unimaginable degree, they seal off everything private.”29 Benjamin came away less than impressed by what he saw in the USSR. He believed that the death of Lenin was also the end of the revolution’s heroic era. Benjamin was saddened that the Soviet Union had lost its revolutionary élan by embracing a producerist ideology with its obsessions of industrialization: For Bolsheviks, mourning for Lenin means also mourning for heroic Communism. The few years since its passing are, for Russian consciousness, a long time. Lenin’s activity so accelerated the course of events in his era that he is receding swiftly into the past; his image is quickly growing remote. Nevertheless, in the optic of history—opposite in this to that of space—movement into the distance means enlargement. Today other orders are in force than those of Lenin’s time, admittedly slogans that he himself suggested. Now it is made clear to every Communist that the revolutionary work of this hour is not conflict, not civil war, but canal construction, electrification, and factory building. The revolutionary



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nature of true technology is emphasized ever more clearly. Like everything else, this (with reason) is done in Lenin’s name.30

At the time of Benjamin’s visit, the struggle between Trotsky and Stalin was reaching its height. Some of Benjamin’s criticisms of Soviet foreign policy echoed those of the Trotskyist Opposition. He linked Stalin’s advocacy of socialism in one country to a retreat from Bolshevism’s program of international revolution and the deadening of political life: In its foreign policy the government is pursuing peace in order to enter into commercial treaties with imperialist states; domestically, however, it is above all trying to bring about a suspension of militant communism, to usher in a period free of class conflict, to de-politicize the life of its citizens as much as possible. . . . An attempt is being made to arrest the dynamic of revolutionary progress in the life of the state—one has entered, like it or not, a period of restoration while nonetheless wanting to store up the revolutionary energy of the youth like electricity in a battery.31

Even though Benjamin’s enthusiasm for the Soviet Union decreased after his visit, he still believed that revolution was around the corner. The Great Depression seemed to confirm that capitalism was entering its death throes. In April 1931, he wrote to Gerhard Scholem about the possibilities for a “German Bolshevist revolution. . . . It is instead something that corresponds to the circumstances.”32 A few months later, Benjamin predicted that the revolution was imminent: “I consider it very doubtful that we will have to wait longer than fall for the start of civil war.”33 However, the Nazi victory dashed Benjamin’s hope of a Soviet Germany. His already desperate financial situation was made even worse by exile. In October 1935, he wrote to Horkheimer asking for help: “My situation is as difficult as any financial position that does not involve debts can possibly be. In saying this, I do not mean to, ascribe the slightest credit to myself, but only to say that any help you give me will produce immediate relief.”34 Considering his precarious position and the menace of fascism, it was only natural that Benjamin looked to the Soviet Union for rescue. In “The Author as Producer” (1934), he praised Soviet socialism for reviving literature. The following year, Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” deplored how fascists turned politics into a meaningless spectacle. He openly supported the communist mobilization of artists and intellectuals for the anti-fascist struggle: Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance

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to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values. . . . This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.35

Despite his rapprochement with the Soviet Union, Benjamin still followed Trotsky’s writings. Even in his pro-Soviet “Author as a Producer,” Trotsky was approvingly quoted.36 In 1932, Benjamin wrote to Gretel Adorno about his excitement upon reading Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution and My Life: “I was otherwise totally immersed in things Russian for fourteen days; I have just read Trotsky’s history of the February Revolution and am about to finish reading his autobiography. I think it has been years since I have consumed anything with such breathless excitement.”37 Benjamin found that he had difficulty comprehending Soviet developments. Shortly after the first show trial, he wrote to Horkheimer that he could not understand it: “I am naturally following events in Russia very closely. And it seems to me that I am not the only one who is at the end of his rope.”38 In exile, Benjamin spent a great deal of time with Brecht where they discussed the Soviet Union. Both men followed Trotsky’s work to help them make sense of Stalinism. According to Benjamin: “Brecht was following the developments in Russia, as well as Trotsky’s writings. To him, they were proof that there was reason for suspicion—a justified suspicion demanding a skeptical view of Russian affairs.”39 Brecht noted the degeneration of the revolution was a fact but told Benjamin that they still needed to support the USSR: [Brecht said “in] Russia, a dictatorship rules over the proletariat. So long as this dictatorship is still bringing practical benefits to the proletariat-that is, so long as it contributes to the balancing out between proletariat and farmers, with an emphasis on proletarian interests—we should not give up on it.” Several days later, Brecht spoke of a “workers’ monarchy”—and I drew an analogy between such an organism and the grotesque freaks of nature which, in the shape of horned fish or other monsters, are brought to light from out of the deep sea.40

Benjamin agreed with Brecht that the Soviet Union was worth supporting on anti-fascist grounds. In a letter to Horkheimer, Benjamin explained his agreement with Brecht: We have up to now been able to view the Soviet Union as a power that does not determine its foreign policy according to imperialist interests-hence as an



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anti-imperialist power. We continue to do so, at least for now, because-despite the gravest possible reservations-we still view the Soviet Union as the agent of our interests in a coming war, as well as in the delaying of this war; I assume that this corresponds to your sense of the situation. That this agent is the costliest imaginable, in that we have to pay for it with sacrifices diminishing the interests that matter most to us as producers, Brecht would never think of disputing.41

However, Benjamin believed that political isolation had taken its toll on Brecht’s cultural work. He noted that Brecht’s poetic praise for the Soviet Union resembled the propagandistic dishonesty of National Socialism: Blücher points out very rightly that certain passages in the Lesebuch für Städtebewohner are no more than formulations of the methods of the GPU. This confirms, from a point of view opposite to my own, what I call the prophetic character of these poems. The fact is that in the verses I am referring to, we can indeed see the procedures in which the worst elements of the Communist party resonate with the most unscrupulous ones of National Socialism. . . . It is possible that contact with revolutionary workers could have prevented Brecht from poetically transfiguring the dangerous and momentous errors into which GPU practices had led the workers’ movement.42

As time passed, Benjamin grew doubtful about whether the Soviet Union was truly interested in fighting fascism. He observed that in Spain, the Loyalist struggle against Franco was being hamstrung by Stalin: “As for me, to put it bluntly, I hardly know anymore where to get an idea of sensible suffering and dying . . . revolutionary thought in Spain [is] being compromised by the Machiavellianism of the Russian leadership and the indigenous leadership’s worship of Mammon.”43 In line with his earlier anti-parliamentarism, Benjamin was skeptical about the popular front in France. He complained to Fritz Lieb that it was a right-wing policy: “If, however, you want to continue to advance your view of the politics of the People’s Front, take a look at the French leftist press: all of the leftists cling only to the fetish of the ‘leftist’ majority and it does not bother them that this majority pursues a politics with which the rightists would provoke revolts.”44 While Benjamin believed that the struggle against fascism required compromises in order to prevail, nothing prepared him for the shock of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. For Benjamin, this was nothing less than a betrayal of the anti-fascist cause by Stalin. His final work, Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940) marked his final break with the Soviet Union. Benjamin’s work was grounded in pessimism since World War II seemed to falsify all philosophies of progress. Like Adorno and Horkheimer, Benjamin criticized the Enlightenment, but there was a crucial difference between them. While the former two sank into quietism, Benjamin looked for divine intervention.

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Benjamin rejected both social democracy and Stalinist communism with their ideologies of progress. When it came to the social democrats, Benjamin noted that they saw progress as just the ever-accumulation of votes, which produced opportunism and a fetish for legality. This vision of progress paralyzed their revolutionary will, ending in social democracy’s disastrous defeat of 1933. Stalinism was also drenched in the same Marxist-Enlightenment philosophy of progress. Soviet progress bred subservience in communists, leaving them unprepared for Stalin’s betrayal: It has the intention, at a moment wherein the politicians in whom the opponents of Fascism had placed their hopes have been knocked supine, and have sealed their downfall by the betrayal of their own cause, of freeing the political child of the world from the nets in which they have ensnared it. The consideration starts from the assumption that the stubborn faith in progress of these politicians, their trust in their “base in the masses” and finally their servile subordination into an uncontrollable apparatus have been three sides of the same thing.45

For Benjamin, progress was a “storm” that led to disaster and fascism. He said that socialists should abandon any Enlightenment ideas of progress. Instead, the socialist revolution should be viewed as a “messianic zero-hour” that rescued the proletariat from calamity and would settle accounts with oppressors for all time.46 Benjamin’s final work represented his unanswered prayer for deliverance. D. BERTOLT BRECHT More than any other Western Marxist, the German playwright Bertolt Brecht embodied the anguish that came from supporting Stalinism. In the name of anti-fascism, he backed the Soviet Union and remained silent about Stalin’s crimes. Yet Brecht’s own independence of mind meant he was truly torn about the high price of historical necessity. As one of the rising stars of avant-garde theater in Weimar Germany, Brecht explored working-class themes in his plays such as The Threepenny Opera. While he had sympathized with the revolutionary left since his teens, Brecht did not begin reading Marx until 1926. Now, Brecht said, that he finally understood his own work: “When I read Marx’s Capital I understood my plays. Naturally I want to see this book widely circulated. It wasn’t of course that I found I had unconsciously written a whole pile of Marxist plays; but this man Marx was the only spectator for my plays I’d ever come across.”47 To learn more about Marxism, Brecht sought out teachers such as the philosopher Karl Korsch. A former member of the Communist Party, Korsch was



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the author of Marxism and Philosophy (1923), one of the founding texts of Western Marxism. Brecht eagerly listened to Korsch’s lectures on the “Great Method” (or dialectical materialism). The two remained lifelong friends, with Brecht telling Korsch in 1945: “you are my teacher for life.”48 While Korsch kept his distance from the KPD and the Soviet Union, Brecht gravitated toward both. The catalyst for this turn was Berlin’s “Bloody May Day” of 1929 when social democratic police killed thirty-two protesters at a communist-led demonstration. Brecht was at an apartment near KPD headquarters and witnessed the massacre from a window. Fritz Sternberg, who was there, remembered Brecht’s stunned reaction: “When Brecht heard the shots and saw that people were being hit, he turned white in the face in a way that I’d never seen him before in my life. I think it was not least this experience that drove him ever more strongly towards the Communists.”49 While Brecht never joined the KPD, the event solidified his support for communism. Afterward, Brecht ridiculed the social democrats who placed their hopes in legality and reform. He believed that their defense of the unreformable Weimar Republic paved the way for fascism. Brecht claimed that bourgeois democracy was a facade that only protected the property of a few and that the only way to uproot capitalism was through force: Warn us not to oppose White terror with Red. Day after day, we said, our newspaper has written against individual acts of terror But also day after day it has written: we shall prevail Only if we make a united Red Front. Comrades, acknowledge now that the “lesser evil” With which for years you have been kept out of any sort of struggle Will very soon come to mean tolerance of the Nazis.50

As early as 1927, Brecht was a firm supporter of Stalin against Trotsky. In the Me-Ti, Brecht said that “socialism in one country” was the most practical course for the Soviet Union. Me-Ti is a book about the challenges of the socialist movement in the form of a Chinese allegory: To-tsi declared it impossible to create order in one country. Ni-en set about creating it. To-tsi always found this and that was missing, Ni-en provided it. To-tsi didn’t think it possible to create order unless simultaneously in all countries. Ni-en thought it possible to create order in all countries if it was created in one. To-tsi planned for an upheaval in all countries and then for creating order in all countries. Ni-en began to create order in his country and knew it would cause upheaval in all countries. As a student of Ka-meh, Ni-en believed in the importance of the economy, of industry, in the firm organization of the largest

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number on the basis of a new economic order in one country for an upheaval in all countries.51

Even though Brecht had taken sides with Stalin, he still held Trotsky in high regard. As Benjamin recalled in 1931: “The conversation turned to Trotsky; Brecht maintained there were good reasons for thinking that Trotsky was the greatest living European writer.”52 As shown in the Benjamin section, Brecht closely followed Trotsky’s work in exile. For most of his life, Brecht never expressed any public criticisms toward Stalin. He believed in the absolute necessity of a common front with the KPD and the Soviet Union. To that end, Brecht refused to fire on his own side. As his biographer Stephen Parker noted: “However, already in 1928 Brecht was at pains not to divulge differences in public which the real political enemy could exploit. To the frustration of those many enemies, throughout his life Brecht would make every effort to maintain a loyal front with his political allies despite their differences.”53 Until Hitler’s ascension to power, Brecht believed that the KPD would create a Soviet Germany. After being forced into exile, he soberly recognized the enormity of defeat. Brecht realized that a long period of struggle lay ahead and that it was even more essential to maintain a solid front with the Communists. As he told the Soviet writer Sergei Tretiakov in October 1933: The time for spectacular proclamations, protests etc. is over for the moment. What is needed now is patient, persistent, painstaking educational work as well as study. Among other things, we (Kläber, myself and a few others) have tried to set up an archive for the study of Fascism. Of course it’s all very difficult. I keep hearing that I’ve become a Fascist or Trotskyist or Buddhist or God knows what.54

Brecht’s desire for anti-fascist unity seemed to become a reality in 1935 when the Comintern adopted the popular front. Brecht supported the KPD’s effort to create the Volksfront by writing plays, poems, and songs. For example, the song “Einheitsfrontlied” with lyrics written by Brecht and its melody composed by Hanns Eisler, was one of the most famous anthems of the German labor movement and international volunteers in the Spanish Civil War: And because the prole is a prole No one else can set him free. It’s the work of the working class alone To fight for liberty. By the left, two, three! By the left, two, three! Comrade, there’s a place for you



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In the ranks of the Workers’ United Front For you’re a worker too.‌‌‌‌‌55

Yet Brecht’s ideas on culture, particularly epic theater, were at odds with the Soviet orthodoxy of “socialist realism.” He often found himself clashing with cultural critics such as Georg Lukács. Brecht also disagreed with the Comintern’s new understandings of fascism. The popular front declared that fascism was only the policy of the most reactionary elements of finance capital and not capitalism itself. This definition meant communists could pursue alliances with not only social democrats, but “anti-fascist” and progressive sections of the capitalist class. Brecht’s view of fascism was predicated on understanding its links to capitalism. For him, an anti-fascist strategy required anticapitalism: “Any proclamation against fascism which refrains from dealing with the social relations from which this arose as a natural necessity is lacking in sincerity. Those who do not want to give up the private ownership of the means of production, far from getting rid of fascism, have need of its services.”56 Brecht sincerely advocated unity with social democrats to fight fascism, but he expected that communists would be the leading force. Communist leadership was necessary to ensure that a revolutionary program would be pursued. In the popular front, communists were moderating their goals to appeal to social democrats. Brecht believed that this was a mistake since reformists were incapable of defeating fascism: Social Democracy has no vision of the future. . . . The only match for Fascist ideals are socialist ideals, the genuinely socialist ones. You do not win by hiding your good qualities. . . . Because Social Democracy always backs away from the Communists, when they propagate socialist ideals, denouncing them as Utopian and as a danger to the working and middle classes; because Social Democracy itself thus produces a fear of Communism and, with it, of socialism too!57

Even though Brecht was uneasy with the popular front, it was the Great Terror that truly tormented him. He helplessly watched as German émigrés were caught up in the madness. Fellow writers such as Heinrich Meyer were arrested and shot in 1937. Brecht’s friend Asja Lācis and his former lover Carola Neher were both arrested as well. Brecht tried to help Neher, writing to the fellow traveler and writer Lion Feuchtwanger. However, he made sure to buttress his appeal to Feuchtwanger by restating his absolute loyalty to the Soviet Union: “Incidentally, please treat this request of mine confidentially, because I neither want to sow distrust of the Soviet Union nor give certain people a chance of accusing me of doing so.”58

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While Brecht was concerned about the fate of his friends, he remained publicly supportive of the purges. As an editor of the émigré paper Das Wort, Brecht published essays by writers such as Willi Bredel and Martin Andersen Nexø that supported the Moscow Trials. When Feuchtwanger wrote Moscow 1937, an apologia for the purges, Brecht applauded it as a wonderful book: “I think your ‘Die Russia’ is the best thing to have appeared on the subject in Europe.”59 In private, Brecht wrote an unpublished essay, “On the Moscow Trials” in 1938 where he defended the trials for wiping out fascist traitors: The trials have demonstrated with total clarity, even in the minds of convinced opponents of the Soviet Union and of their governments, that there is an active conspiracy against the regime, and that these nests of conspirators have not only committed acts of sabotage internally, but have also had dealings with Fascist diplomats regarding the attitude of their governments to a possible change of regime in the Union. Their politics was grounded in defeatism and had the spread of defeatism as its object.60

In another unpublished work “On My Attitude to the Soviet Union,” Brecht condemned unnamed critics of the USSR which likely included Trotsky. He said that their criticisms of Stalin weakened the struggle against fascism. Brecht believed that their anti-Stalinism was so ferocious that they would not support the Soviet Union in war if it meant Stalin would emerge as the victor.61 Is it possible that Brecht had some lingering doubts about the validity of the Moscow Trials? A partial answer can be gleaned from Brecht’s visit to the philosopher Sidney Hook in New York City in 1936 which took place after the first trial. Hook asked Brecht whether the murder of innocent comrades was acceptable to him. Brecht responded: “As for them, the more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.”62 On the surface, this declaration seems like Merleau-Ponty’s argument that the defendants were objectively guilty regardless of their subjective intentions. However, the philosopher Slavoj Žižek offers an alternative and anti-Stalinist reading of Brecht: “it can be read as its opposite, in a radically anti-Stalinist way: if they were in a position to plot and execute the execution of Stalin and his entourage, and were ‘innocent’ (that is, they did not grasp the opportunity), they effectively deserved to die for failing to rid us of Stalin.”63 Yet this reinterpretation does not align with the majority of Brecht’s public or private statements in support of Stalin or the trials. Brecht’s overall defense of Stalin and the purges did not mean he was not troubled by developments in the Soviet Union. He asked: does the struggle against a cruel reality demand the use of even greater cruelty to overthrow



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it? In a poem, “To those born after” (1939) he pondered this question of ends and means: And yet we know: Hatred, even of meanness Makes you ugly. Anger, even at injustice Makes your voice hoarse. Oh, we Who wanted to prepare the land for friendliness Could not ourselves be friendly. You, however, when the time comes When mankind is a helper unto mankind Think on us With forbearance.64

Stalinist crimes may be murderous and cruel, but Brecht thought that they were the price humanity had to pay to reach communism. His poem asked future generations in a liberated world to be generous in their judgment of what was historically necessary to arrive at that future. Brecht’s play Life of Galileo (1938) served as a veiled allegory of the purges and the Soviet Union. Set in the sixteenth century, the play follows the life of the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, who was tried by the Roman Catholic Church for proving that the earth revolved around the sun. In the end, Galileo accepts the Church’s judgment that the earth was the center of the universe. Yet he supports his daughter when she smuggles his scientific studies out of Italy. When she praises her father’s actions as heroic, Galileo insists his motives were not noble, but based upon self-interest. He does not believe that humanity was mature enough for the truth, so he recanted because he lacked the courage of his convictions: As a scientist, I had an almost unique opportunity. In my day astronomy emerged into the market place. At that particular time, had one put up a fight, it could have had wide repercussions. I have come to believe that I was never in real danger, for some years I was as strong as the authorities, and I surrendered my knowledge to the powers that be, to use it, no, not to use it, abuse it, as it suits their ends. I have betrayed my profession. Any man who does what I have done must not be tolerated in the ranks of science.65

Brecht’s Galileo acts as a stand-in for Bukharin, since both capitulated to higher authorities out of self-interest. This also made Stalin into a stand-in for the Catholic Church since both were opposed to independent thinking. As Benjamin noted: “Brecht speaks of his profound hatred of clerics—an antipathy inherited from his grandmother. He makes it clear that those who

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have appropriated and used Marx’s theoretical doctrines will always form a clerical camarilla.”66 Korsch noted that Galileo showed Brecht’s doubts about Stalinism: “Although people seldom organise their private lives according to the principles of their general convictions, after this depiction of Galileo I cannot think that Brecht will continue to be so faithful to the line.”67 Korsch expected an imminent break between Brecht and the KPD. Yet Brecht’s play was not an anti-Stalinist work, but in certain ways it was a dramatic presentation of Merleau-Ponty’s argument about objective guilt and subjective innocence. Galileo did not set out to oppose the establishment, but his opposition inevitably ended up challenging the Church. As Brecht said: The play shows the contemporary victory of authority, not the victory of the priesthood. It corresponds to the historical truth in that the Galileo of the play never turns directly against the church. . . . Casting the church as the embodiment of authority in this theatrical trial of the persecutors of the champions of free research certainly does not help to get the church acquitted. But it would be highly dangerous, particularly nowadays, to treat the matter like Galileo’s fight for freedom of research as a religious one; for thereby attention would be most unhappily deflected from present-day reactionary authorities of a totally unecclesiastical kind.68

These remarks by Brecht are similar to Bukharin’s final speech at his trial: I said, and I now repeat, that I was a leader and not a cog in the counter-revolutionary affairs. It follows from this, as will be clear to everybody, that there were many specific things which I could not have known, and which I actually did not know, but that this does not relieve me of responsibility.69

Brecht acknowledged that Bukharin may have spoken the truth, but humanity was not ready to hear it. Since his time had not come, Bukharin like Galileo, willingly submitted to authority and paid a harsh price. This was a dilemma of historical necessity that Brecht recognized, but could see no escape from. As Deutscher notes, Bukharin and Brecht’s Galileo both went “down on [their] knees before the Inquisition and doing this from an ‘historic necessity,’ because of the people’s spiritual and political immaturity.”70 In discussions on the USSR, Benjamin realized that Brecht was torn. On the one hand, Brecht believed that the trials were legitimate: “There’s no doubt that on the other side, in Russia itself, certain criminal cliques are at work. Every so often, this becomes apparent from their horrendous crimes.”71 On the other hand, Brecht said that the Soviet Union had lost its way and was no longer advancing toward communism: “‘The state must vanish.’ Who says this? The state.’ (By this, he can mean only the Soviet Union.) Brecht, looking cunning and shifty, steps in front of the armchair I’m sitting in and,



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pretending to be ‘the state,’ says, with a sideways leer at an imaginary client: ‘I know—I’m supposed to vanish.’”72 Brecht even repeated Trotsky’s criticisms about the impossibility of building socialism in one country, but believed that Soviet deformities such as the cult of personality were inevitable due to the unfavorable international situation: The socialist economy doesn’t need war, and that’s why it can’t stand war. The “love of peace” felt by the “Russian people” expresses this, and only this. There can be no socialist economy in any single country. The Russian proletariat was, by necessity, dealt a severe setback by rearmament—and, what’s more, was thrown back to long-superseded stages of historical development. Monarchy, among others. In Russia, personal authority reigns supreme. Obviously, only idiots could deny this.73

Whatever Brecht’s criticisms of the Soviet Union, he rejected any comparison to Nazi Germany. In 1935, he scolded Bernard von Brentano for doing just that: “How can you call the Bolsheviks fascists? Do fascists abolish the private ownership of the means of production? Do fascists establish and maintain the dictatorship of the proletariat?”74 Brecht’s contradictory view of Stalin was evidenced in his poem, “The farmer’s address to his ox” a satire about a Soviet monarchy and its relationship with the peasantry: O great ox, divine puller of the plough Deign to plough straight! Preserve the furrows Please, from confusion! You Go before us, our leader, giddyup! We bent down low to cut your fodder Deign now to consume it, dearest provider! Don’t trouble yourself While eating, about the furrows, just eat! For your barn, O protector of the family We dragged, groaning, the timber, we Sleep in the damp, you in the dry. Yesterday You coughed, beloved pacesetter. We were beside ourselves. You’re not going to Peg out, are you, before the sowing, you dog?75

While Stalin was purposely not named, Brecht told Benjamin that the poem was meant as a tribute to the General Secretary. Yet Brecht’s poem was filled with irony since he recognized the price of historical necessity. As Benjamin noted: “But Stalin wasn’t dead yet. And Brecht himself was not entitled to offer a different, more enthusiastic tribute; he was sitting in exile waiting for

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the Red Army.”76 For all his crimes, Brecht saw Stalin as the only hope for liberating his homeland from Hitler. Like other émigrés, Brecht was stunned by the Nazi-Soviet Pact and remained unwell for days afterward. Once Brecht composed himself, he justified the pact as a necessary measure for the Soviet Union to rearm itself. Yet he understood that many communists would see it as a sellout: the russo-german pact created much confusion among the proletariat everywhere. . . . the [Soviet] union will in the eyes of the proletariat of the world bear the terrible stigma of aiding and abetting Fascism, the wildest element in capitalism and the most hostile to the workers. i don’t think more can be said than that the [Soviet] union saved its skin at the cost of leaving the world proletariat without any solutions, hope or solidarity.77

As war drew closer to him, Brecht left Europe for America. His departure came just days before the start of Operation Barbarossa. Now that the USSR was fighting, this was Brecht’s war. In the United States, Brecht did what he could for the war effort. He cowrote the screenplay for Fritz Lang’s film Hangmen Also Die! (1942) about the assassination of SS officer Reinhard Heydrich by anti-fascist partisans in Prague. Brecht also joined the National Committee for a Free Germany formed by exiled communists and Wehrmacht POWs in the USSR. Brecht’s radical politics and public sympathy for the Soviet Union meant he was under constant surveillance by the FBI. Once the Cold War began, the blacklist made it impossible for him to remain in the United States. After testifying in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, Brecht returned to Europe. In 1949, he was welcomed by the German Democratic Republic (DDR), where he set up his theater company, the Berliner Ensemble. Even though Brecht may be the only person who ever emigrated to East Germany for artistic freedom, his works were still heavily scrutinized by the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED). Like his time in Moscow, the SED demanded that Brecht conform to the dictates of socialist realism. Brecht genuinely listened to the party’s criticisms, but he was often frustrated by their cultural ignorance. Brecht thought that the SED’s fear of those outside its control was genuine since many Germans were still influenced by bourgeois and Nazi ideas. Brecht believed that a new democratic culture was necessary to truly denazify Germany. However, the party’s heavy-handedness made that increasingly difficult to achieve. Furthermore, living conditions in East Germany remained abysmal, which served to breed anger toward the SED and socialism.



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In June 1953, these frustrations finally boiled over into popular revolt. In East Berlin, a strike by construction workers grew into an armed uprising. It took intervention by the Red Army to fully suppress the revolt. A few days after the tanks rolled in, Brecht publicly rallied to the SED: On the morning of 17 June, when it became clear that the workers’ demonstrations were being used for the purposes of war-mongering, I expressed my commitment to the Socialist Unity Party. I hope now that the provocateurs are being isolated and their lines of communication cut. At the same time, however, I hope that the workers who demonstrated out of justified dissatisfaction will not be equated with the provocateurs, so that the great debate concerning the mistakes made on all sides, which is so urgently needed, will not be rendered impossible from the outset.78

Brecht makes it clear in his statement that he distinguished between the workers’ genuine demands and anti-communist agitators. He hoped that the party would satisfy those demands and only go after the guilty. Brecht recognized that the SED’s divorce from the people had created the conditions for the uprising. Later, in his poem “The Solution,” Brecht satirized the government’s response: After the uprising of 17 June On the orders of the Secretary of the Writers’ Union Leaflets were distributed in the Stalinallee Which read: that the people Had forfeited the government’s trust And only by working twice as hard Could they win it back. But would it not Be simpler if the government Dissolved the people and Elected another one?79

The Berlin uprising had occurred just a few months after Stalin’s death. When the General Secretary died, Brecht eulogized him as the personification of the communist ideal for people across the world: “The oppressed people of five continents, those who have already liberated themselves, and all those who are fighting for world peace, must have felt their hearts miss a beat when they heard that Stalin was dead. He was the embodiment of their hopes. But the intellectual and material weapons which he produced remain, and with them the method to produce new ones.”80 Until the end of his life in 1956, Brecht wrestled with Stalinism. After Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, he wrote “On the Criticism of Stalin” recognizing the need for Marxist criticism of Stalin. When it came to Stalin’s methods,

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Brecht still said that they were historically necessary since capitalism could only be overcome with barbarism. Yet he realized that Stalin’s means contradicted the end goal of communism. Now that Stalin was dead, Brecht hoped that Stalinism had outlived its usefulness. He was optimistic that the Chinese Revolution would renew the promise of communism that had been so tainted by Stalinism: “The second time around (in China) it will already be somewhat easier, and the same applies to less backward countries, where the original accumulation of capital is already more advanced.”81 Brecht was not a mindless follower of Stalinism. As a great Marxist writer, he expressed Stalinism’s promises, betrayals, and cynicism more lyrically than any party resolution ever could. Brecht accepted Stalinism’s logic of historical necessity, but he was not blind to the cost. While Stalinism burdened Brecht, in the end he simply could see no other alternative. E. HERBERT MARCUSE In contrast to other Western Marxists who were silent, if not outright supportive, of the Soviet Union, Herbert Marcuse was never attracted to Stalinism. However, he shared the Frankfurt School’s general pessimism about the prospects for socialist revolution, believing that the Western working class was hopelessly bought off. Never giving up on revolution, Marcuse searched in vain for “substitute proletarians” to realize communism. Marcuse also has the unique distinction of being one of the few Western Marxists who participated in an actual revolution. After serving in the German army in World War I, he was radicalized and joined the Social Democratic Party (SPD). He was a member of the soldiers’ councils that covered the country after the Kaiser’s overthrow in 1918. Marcuse resigned his membership in the SPD in disgust after they approved the murders of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg: “In 1917 to 1918 I was a member of the Social Democratic Party, I resigned from it after the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and from then on I have criticized this party’s politics. . . . The reason was rather that it worked in alliance with reactionary, destructive, and repressive forces.”82 While he maintained his left-wing politics, Marcuse never joined another socialist organization. He admired the Soviet Union until Lenin’s death in 1924, but he considered Stalin to be the gravedigger of the revolution.83 Marcuse focused on academic research, particularly the study of philosophy, where his teachers included Martin Heidegger. Marcuse was especially interested in the Hegelian roots of Marxism and wrote one of the earliest studies of Marx’s previously unpublished Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in 1932.84



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Shortly after joining the Frankfurt School in 1932, Hitler came to power, and Marcuse left for American exile. In the United States, Marcuse was one of the leading lights of the Frankfurt School. Working closely with Horkheimer, he came to doubt the historical mission of the working class. In his essay “The Struggle against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State” (1934), Marcuse said: It was not with Hegel’s death but only now that the Fall of the Titans of German philosophy occurs. At that time, in the nineteenth century, its decisive achievements were preserved in a new form in scientific social theory and the critique of political economy. Today the fate of the labor movement, in which the heritage of this philosophy was preserved, is clouded with uncertainty.85

As the Soviet Union sank into Stalinism and World War II approached, Marcuse wondered if socialism could save the world from barbarism: “What, however, if the development outlined by the theory does not occur? What if the forces that were to bring about the transformation are suppressed and appear to be defeated?”86 During these years, Marcuse was more directly engaged with Marxist theory than either Adorno or Horkheimer. In 1941, he published Reason and Revolution, where he discussed Hegel’s ideas and their influence on both Marx and Lenin. In contrast to Stalinist orthodoxy that claimed Hegel was the philosopher of aristocratic reaction and fascism, Marcuse defended him as an Enlightenment thinker: “Hegel’s philosophy was an integral part of the culture which authoritarianism had to overcome. It is therefore no accident that the National Socialist assault on Hegel begins with the repudiation of his political theory.”87 In the epilogue of Reason and Revolution written in 1954, Marcuse claimed that the working class had lost its revolutionary potential, becoming integrated into capitalism: “But then the development of capitalist productivity stopped the development of revolutionary consciousness. Technological progress multiplied the needs and satisfactions, while its utilization made the needs as well as their satisfactions repressive: they themselves sustain submission and domination.”88 A decade later in The One-Dimensional Man (1964), Marcuse would fully develop these ideas on working-class integration. When the United States entered World War II, Marcuse and several Frankfurt School alumni joined the Office for Strategic Services (OSS). Years later, Marcuse was condemned by radicals for working with a forerunner of the CIA, but remained unapologetic about his involvement: “If critics reproach me for that, it only shows the ignorance of these people who seem to have forgotten that the war then was a war against fascism and that, consequently, I haven’t the slightest reason for being ashamed of having assisted

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in it.”89 Following the war, Marcuse continued his government service in the State Department as a political analyst. He said that the Allies should support the German labor movement as part of the denazification process. In 1947, Marcuse returned to Germany where he met Heidegger and the two exchanged a series of letters. After Heidegger refused to apologize for supporting Hitler and compared the Allied expulsion of Germans from eastern Europe to the Holocaust, Marcuse was irate: Even further: how is it possible to equate the torture, the maiming, and the annihilation of millions of men with the forcible relocation of population groups who suffered none of these outrages (apart perhaps from several exceptional instances)? From a contemporary perspective, there seems already to be a night and day difference in humanity and inhumanity in the difference between Nazi concentration camps and the deportations and internments of the postwar years.90

Following these words, Marcuse ended all further communication with Heidegger. Until 1951, Marcuse worked in the State Department, writing reports on communism. When he left, McCarthyism was at its height, and government agencies were being purged of suspected radicals. Marcuse did not believe he suffered any persecution due to his politics.91 He returned to academia, continuing research and writing for the remainder of his life. After Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, Marcuse wrote Soviet Marxism (1958), his appraisal of the USSR, stating that it was not socialist in the sense envisioned by Marx and Engels. He said that the Soviet Union was ruled by a noncapitalist bureaucracy.92 Marcuse listed several reasons why this bureaucracy was not a new ruling class. First: the party and state bureaucracies competed with one another to maintain their own specific interests. Second: the system of terror kept any faction from becoming hegemonic and squeezed others out. Third: all factions of the bureaucracy had a vested interest in rapidly developing the means of production. Therefore, the planned economy helped to overcome any conflicting interests within the bureaucracy. Marcuse said an identity existed between the bureaucracy and the interests of Soviet society, albeit in “hypostatized” form.93 In regards to the future of the Soviet Union, Marcuse shared Isaac Deutscher’s optimism about the prospects of de-Stalinization. He said that the intervention in Hungary would not stop the process of gradual reform: The Eastern European events were likely to slow down and perhaps even reverse de-Stalinization in some fields; particularly in international strategy, a considerable “hardening” has become apparent. However, if our analysis is correct, the fundamental trend will continue and reassert itself throughout such reversals. With respect to internal Soviet developments, this means at present continuation



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of “collective leadership,” decline in the power of the secret police, decentralization, legal reforms, relaxation in censorship, liberalization in cultural life.94

When it came to its foreign policy, Marcuse believed that socialism in one country was the only realistic choice for the USSR. In line with his earlier views, he argued that the Western working class could not save the Soviet Union because it had lost its revolutionary potential. Since revolution in the West was not possible, this left no alternative except socialism in one country: Has not Marxian theory then lost the mass basis required for its realization? And is not the connection between theory and reality also lost, unless the former redefines itself by redefining the latter? These questions seem to have driven Leninist theory toward a reevaluation of contemporary capitalist development, which has become the theoretical foundation for the doctrine of “socialism in one country.”95

As a result, the Soviet Union operated under the assumption of permanent capitalist stabilization. Since the Western Communist Parties followed the Soviet lead, they readily accepted the role of legal opposition parties instead of revolutionary vanguards. Marcuse believed that the sorry fate of the supposedly revolutionary Communist Parties proved how deep the working class was integrated into the capitalist West. As he wrote in the One-Dimensional Man: If they have agreed to work within the framework of the established system, it is not merely on tactical grounds and as short-range strategy, but because their social base has been weakened and their objectives altered by the transformation of the capitalist system (as have the objectives of the Soviet Union which has endorsed this change in policy). These national Communist parties play the historical role of legal opposition parties “condemned” to be non-radical. They testify to the depth and scope of capitalist integration, and to the conditions which make the qualitative difference of conflicting interests appear as quantitative differences within the established society.96

Unlike the working class, Marcuse said that students, racial minorities, and other outsiders were not incorporated into capitalism, but “exist outside the democratic process; their life is the most immediate and the most real need for ending intolerable conditions and institutions. Thus their opposition is revolutionary even if their consciousness is not.”97 Marcuse looked to these substitute proletariats to lead revolution in the West. In the 1960s, large swaths of the New Left looked to Marcuse for inspiration. Student protesters held up banners with the words “Marx, Mao, Marcuse.” Some of his students, such as Angela Davis, were prominent in the

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various protest movements. Marcuse himself welcomed this radicalism and the struggle against the Vietnam War. This was in marked contrast to others in the Frankfurt School who were downright hostile to the students. Horkheimer had become a bitter anti-communist who supported the Vietnam War in order to halt China. Adorno’s initial sympathy dissipated since he believed that student militancy was a sign of red fascism. In January 1969, Adorno called the police to remove protesters from his classroom so he could continue a lecture. Marcuse chastised Adorno for refusing to side with student radicals: “And I would despair about myself (us) if I (we) would appear to be on the side of a world that supports mass murder in Vietnam, or says nothing about it, and which makes a hell of any realms that are outside the reach of its own repressive power.”98 In the end, Marcuse’s “Great Refusal” ran aground once sixties radicalism ebbed. Marcuse admitted that this was always a possibility: “The critical theory of society possesses no concepts which could bridge the gap between the present and its future; holding no promise and showing no success, it remains negative. Thus it wants to remain loyal to those who, without hope, have given and give their life to the Great Refusal.”99 Marcuse’s theory of working-class integration into bourgeois society left him in a cul-de-sac without a social agent for revolution. He could only wait in desperate hope for a spontaneous and libidinal revolt to end capitalism. F. GEORG LUKÁCS Among Western Marxists, Georg Lukács symbolizes the “good Thermidorian,” who willingly made his peace with Stalinism. Like Brecht, Lukács saw Stalinism as the only realistic alternative if the Soviet Union was going to build socialism and defeat fascism. However, Lukács chafed under Stalinist censorship and repression. It was only in 1956 and his last years that Lukács indulged forlorn hopes that the Soviet Union would quietly reform and remove the heritage of Stalinism. The Russian Revolution stirred the romantic imagination of the young Lukács, who believed that the bourgeois order was facing imminent destruction. In 1918, he joined the Hungarian Communist Party (HCP) as one of its founding members. The following year, Lukács served as Commissar of Education and Culture in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic.100 After the collapse of Soviet Hungary, Lukács risked his life conducting underground work for the HCP. His revolutionary dreams remained undimmed, but also romantic. As an editor of the leftist journal Kommunismus, Lukács’s messianic communism did not go unnoticed by the Comintern. An article he wrote on



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anti-parliamentarism was harshly criticized by Lenin as “very Left-wing, and very poor. . . . It gives no concrete analysis of precise and definite historical situations; it takes no account of what is most essential.”101 Lukács accepted Lenin’s criticisms as valid, stating later: “I at once saw the force of this criticism and it compelled me to revise my historical perspectives and to adjust them more subtly and less directly to the exigencies of day-to-day tactics.”102 Even as Lukács conformed to the early Comintern’s “revolutionary realism,” his writings still argued that proletarian revolution lay on the immediate horizon. In History and Class Consciousness (1923), Lukács attempted to provide a philosophical basis for Bolshevism by claiming that the proletariat was the identical subject-object of history. This was a spiritualization of material struggle where proletariat Geist replaced Hegelian Geist. History and Class Consciousness alongside Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy were both deemed heretical by Moscow. Grigory Zinoviev, president of the Communist International, denounced both Lukács and Korsch at the Fifth Congress in 1924: “If a few more of these professors come and dish out their Marxist theories, then the cause will be in a bad way. We cannot, in our Communist International, allow theoretical revisionism of this kind to go unpunished.”103 As late as 1926, Lukács defended his work in the unfinished manuscript Tailism and the Dialectic. However, he finally repudiated History and Class Consciousness after reading Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in 1930. According to Lukács’s 1967 preface, he attempted to “out-Hegel Hegel” and “objectively to surpass the Master himself” by saying the proletariat was the identical subject-object of history.104 While History and Class Consciousness was condemned by both Lukács and the Comintern, it enjoyed a subterranean existence as one of the founding texts of Western Marxism, influencing Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and all the major figures of the Frankfurt School. After the final defeat of the German Revolution and the death of Lenin, the Soviet Union announced the new orthodoxy of socialism in one country. Lukács saw the wisdom of Stalin’s position and rationalized this Thermidorian ethos in “Moses Hess and the Problem of Idealist Dialectics” (1926). Here, he defended Hegel’s embrace of Thermidor as “magnificent realism” since he disdained all utopias.105 According to Lukács, Hegel’s realism was closer to historical materialism since he rejected the abstract and moralistic utopianism of Fichte, Hess, von Cieszowski, and the Young Hegelians: one of the most important achievements of Hegelian philosophy, one of the points in which it contained the possibility of being developed further into materialist dialectics, would nevertheless have been lost in doing so. That possibility is, namely, the methodological possibility of acknowledging and

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recognizing the social reality of the present in its reality and yet still reacting to it critically—not moralistically— ‌‌‌‌critically, but in the sense of practical-critical activity. In Hegel, admittedly, no more than the possibility existed. But it proved to be decisive for the development of socialist theory that, methodologically, Marx took over directly from Hegel at this point, purging Hegel’s method of its idealistic inconsistencies and inaccuracies, “setting it on its feet” and, no matter how much he owes to Feuerbach’s encouragement, rejecting the Feuerbachian “improvement” on Hegel.106

In Lukács’s Aesopian language, the Thermidorian “realism” of Hegel is linked to Stalin and socialism in one country, while “abstract utopianism” is identified with Trotsky and international revolution. Lukács’s identification with the Stalinist Thermidor is made clearer in his 1935 essay, “Hölderlin’s Hyperion” where he argues Hegel recognized that Thermidor and Napoleon were just as necessary to the French Revolution as Robespierre and the Terror: The world historical significance of Hegel’s accommodation consists precisely in the fact that he grasped . . . the revolutionary development of the bourgeoisie as a unitary process, one in which the revolutionary Terror as well as Thermidor and Napoleon were only necessary phases. The heroic period of the revolutionary bourgeoisie becomes in Hegel—just as antiquity does—something irretrievably past, but a past which was absolutely necessary for the emergence of the unheroic prose of the present considered to be progressive; for the emergence of advanced bourgeois society with its economic and social contradictions.107

Lukács favorably contrasts Hegel’s acceptance of the Thermidor to the intransigence found in Friedrich Hölderlin: To be brief, Hegel comes to terms with the post-Thermidorian epoch and the close of the revolutionary period of bourgeois development, and he builds up his philosophy precisely on an understanding of this new turning-point in world history. Hölderlin makes no compromise with the post-Thermidorian reality; he remains faithful to the old revolutionary ideal of renovating polis democracy and is broken by a reality which had no place for his ideals, not even on the level of poetry and thought.108

It is arguable that these are coded observations where Lukács viewed Hölderlin as akin to Trotsky since neither man can reconcile themselves to the new Thermidorian reality. Lukács believed that he was in a similar position to Hegel and must accommodate himself to the powers that be. As he told Victor Serge in the early 1930s: “Above all . . . don’t be silly and get yourself deported for nothing, just for the pleasure of voting defiantly. Believe me, insults are not very important to us. Marxist revolutionaries need patience



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and courage; they do not need pride. The times are bad, and we are at a dark crossroads. Let us reserve our strength: history will summon us in its time.”109 In deference to Comintern orthodoxy, Lukács abandoned his own program inside the HCP. For the better part of a decade, he had been involved in factional struggles inside the party with its leader Béla Kun. When Lukács put forward his Blum Theses (1928–1929) as a new strategy, he found himself out of step with Kun and the Communist International’s Third Period. Rather than fight for his position, Lukács made a cynical self-criticism. He refused to play the role of an oppositionist since it would make him politically ineffectual: “I was indeed firmly convinced that I was in the right but I knew also— e.g., from the fate that had befallen Karl Korsch—that to be expelled from the Party meant that it would no longer be possible to participate actively in the struggle against Fascism.”110 Lukács accepted the Stalinist Thermidor, but this decision effectively ended his active political involvement in the HCP. Lukács believed that the Comintern’s Third Period line was a form of destructive sectarianism with its conflation of social democracy and fascism: “This put an end to all prospects of a United Front on the left. Although I was on Stalin’s side on the central issue of Russia, I was deeply repelled by his attitude here.”111 Later, Lukács welcomed the adoption of the popular front, where he defended bourgeois culture from the danger of fascism. As Isaac Deutscher observed: “He elevated the Popular Front from the level of tactics to that of ideology: he projected its principle into philosophy, literary history and aesthetic criticism.”112 In the 1930s, Lukács lived in the Soviet Union, where his greatest struggle was staying alive. Many of his Hungarian comrades such as Béla Kun were executed during the purges. His stepson Ferenc Jánossy was arrested and attempted suicide. Lukács himself was arrested as a potential spy after the Nazi invasion in 1941. He was luckier than most and freed after the timely intervention of Comintern President George Dimitrov and HCP leader Mátyás Rákosi. During these years, Lukács engaged in his own form of philosophical resistance, writing The Young Hegel (1938). Like Marcuse, Lukács saw Hegel as the philosophical heir to the French Revolution and the Enlightenment. According to Lukács’s student István Mészáros The Young Hegel proved his anti-Stalinism: But precisely the book, The Young Hegel, shows that it is quite nonsense to say that he simply reconciled himself with Stalinism, because that book was written explicitly against a Stalinist line on Hegel. Stalin’s line on Hegel was that it is an aristocratic reaction against the French Revolution, and Lukács demonstrates that it is an enthusiastic embracing of the French Revolution. In fact there

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couldn’t be even a dream of publishing it in the Soviet Union at the time when Stalin’s line prevailed against Hegel.113

This goes a bit too far since Lukács did not openly express his anti-Stalinism. His philosophical conscience was certainly troubled by his compromise with Soviet orthodoxy, hence why Lukács was willing to quietly criticize Stalin on Hegel. After World War II, Lukács followed up his defense of Hegel with The Destruction of Reason (1954) where he saw National Socialism emerging from the long history of German irrationalism that had opposed the French Revolution. While he does not paint a straight philosophical line to Hitler, Lukács argues that the choice of philosophy is not without its consequences: “It will be our task to bring to light all the intellectual spade-work done on behalf of the ‘National Socialist outlook,’ however far removed (on the face of it) from Hitlerism it may be and however little (subjectively) it may cherish such intentions. It is one of this book’s basic theses that there is no such thing as an ‘innocent’ philosophy. Such a thing has never existed, and especially not in relation to our stated problem. This is so in precisely the philosophical sense: to side either with or against reason decides at the same time the character of a philosophy as such and its role in social developments.”114 The Destruction of Reason is not only a towering work of intellectual history, but it declares the necessity of Marxists upholding the radical Enlightenment. Whenever possible before 1956, Lukács refrained from publicly commenting on Stalinist repression. Later, he admitted to viewing the Moscow Trials through the prism of the French Revolution: “The trial of Danton during the French Revolution had also involved many legal irregularities. And if Stalin used the same weapons against Trotsky as Robespierre had used against Danton, this cannot be judged according to current conditions since at the time the crucial question was on which side America would intervene in the war.”115 Lukács said this analogy could only be taken so far because Danton died a true believer in the revolution, while Bukharin did not: “Danton was never a traitor and never lost faith in the republic, as Robespierre claimed. The same could not so clearly have been said of the accused in the Stalin trials.”116 During World War II, Lukács believed that the Soviet Union represented the forces of Enlightenment humanism over fascist reaction: “And the fascist criminals know with certainty that their most dangerous and implacable enemy is precisely socialist democracy. This is a life-and-death struggle. The outcome of this struggle is beyond doubt. Culture will defeat barbarism.”117 He had no doubt that the USSR would prevail. Following the war, Lukács returned home to Hungary for the first time in over twenty years and there became a member of the Academy of Sciences.



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Lukács was optimistic that the new Hungarian People’s Republic would create a culture of people’s democracy. By 1949, anti-Titoist purges meant the rigid enforcement of Stalinist orthodoxy throughout Eastern Europe, including in Hungary. Lukács was now hounded by party ideologues such as László Rudas and József Révai for his cultural tolerance, which were derided as symptoms of “revisionism,” and “aiding imperialism.” Due to the crackdown, Lukács feared for his life: “I had thought that in the wake of the Rajk affair (in 1949) my own life and freedom were at stake and that I should not take any great risk on purely literary issues.”118 Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization gave Lukács hope that there was now a chance for liberalization. Lukács discarded his Aesopian language and openly demanded a true settling of accounts with Stalinism. He said that condemning the cult of personality did not go far enough, but it was necessary to look at the social conditions that allowed Stalinism to grow: “For thinking men who are truly devoted to the cause of progress, the problem inevitably arose out of the social genesis of this evolutionary stage, a problem which Togliatti first formulated precisely, when he said that it was necessary to bring to light the social conditions in which the ‘cult of the personality’ was born and consolidated.” 119 Yet Lukács still claimed that Stalinism was historically necessary. As he said in 1962: Since the revolutionary wave which had been unleashed in 1917 had faded away without instituting a stable dictatorship in any other country, it was necessary to confront with resolution the problem of building socialism in one (backward) country. It is in this period that Stalin revealed himself a remarkable and far-sighted statesman. His forceful defence of the new Leninist theory of the possibility of a socialist society in one country against attacks mainly by Trotsky represented, as one cannot help recognizing today, the salvation of Soviet development. . . . What today we consider despotic and anti-democratic in the Stalinian period, has a very close strategic relationship with Trotsky’s fundamental ideas. A socialist society led by Trotsky would have been at least as little democratic as Stalin’s, with the difference that strategically it would have oriented itself through the dilemma: a catastrophic politics or capitulation, instead of the—substantially accurate—thesis of Stalin, asserting the possibility of socialism in one country. (The personal impressions which I formed on the basis of my meetings with Trotsky in 1921 convinced me that, as an individual, he was drawn towards the ‘personality cult’ even more than Stalin.) . . . With all its errors, Stalin’s industrialization was able to create the conditions and technological requirements for winning the war against Hitler’s Germany.120

What Lukács advocated was a contradictory de-Stalinization. Since he considered Thermidor to be an integral part of a revolutionary process, he

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condemned Stalinism for the dual “leftist” crimes of “economic subjectivism” and “revolutionary romanticism.”121 In one bizarre statement, he even compared Stalin’s mistakes to those of Rosa Luxemburg!122 While Lukács believed that the victims of the purges should be absolved of all guilt, he did not think that their ideas should be rehabilitated. As he said: “This applies above all to Trotsky, who was the principal theoretical exponent of the thesis that the construction of socialism in a single country is impossible. History has long ago refuted his theory.”123 Ultimately, Lukács’s criticism of Stalinism was to remove its worst aspects while keeping the basic system intact. In 1956, Lukács found himself swept up in something beyond a mere reform campaign. After the Secret Speech, people in Hungary spoke freely for the first time in years. Emboldened students and intellectuals now clamored for wide-ranging liberalization. Lukács supported this movement: The fact is that I think of 1956 as a great movement. It was a spontaneous movement which stood in need of a certain ideology. I declared my willingness to contribute towards formulating this in a series of lectures. For example, I attempted to clarify whether our relationships with other countries had changed; whether, and on what conditions, collaboration and coexistence were now an actual possibility. So I had ideological intentions of that sort, but no other intentions at all.124

In October 1956, a popular revolution led to the installation of the reformist communist Imre Nagy as prime minister. The new Hungarian government disbanded the secret police and promised a multiparty system. Nagy even planned to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. For the first time in decades, Lukács returned to active political life and joined Nagy’s government as Minister of Culture, ironically the same position he had once held in the 1919 Soviet Republic. Overall, he was on the side of Nagy, but found his program too vague. Lukács was opposed to Hungary withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact since this would provoke a Soviet invasion: “I was quite simply in favour of Hungary’s membership of the Warsaw Pact. But I also took the view that we ought not to give the Russians an excuse to intervene in Hungarian affairs. This consideration could not be ignored.”125 That is exactly what happened after Nagy announced that Hungary was leaving the Warsaw Pact in November. The Soviets sent troops into Hungary that ended the revolution. A new government was installed, led by the pro-Soviet János Kádár. Nagy, Lukács, and other members of the revolutionary government were arrested and sent to Romania. His jailers demanded that Lukács testify against Nagy: “My interrogators said to me that they knew I was no follower of Imre Nagy and so there was no reason why I should not testify against him. I told them that as soon as the two of us, Imre Nagy



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and myself, were free to walk around Budapest, I would be happy to make public my opinion of all of Nagy’s activities. But I was not free to express an opinion about my fellow-prisoners.”126 Unlike Nagy, Lukács managed to avoid execution. In 1957, he was allowed to return to Hungary and eventually was readmitted to the party. Whatever his criticisms of Nagy, Lukács never publicly renounced his role in the 1956 revolution. Throughout his last years, Lukács largely focused on his literary and philosophical studies. Yet he did not stay completely silent on political events. During the Sino-Soviet split, Lukács loyally supported the Soviet Union. In the late 1960s, he took a left turn and welcomed the student movement as an indication of the crisis of capitalism. When the Warsaw Pact crushed Alexander Dubček’s reformist Czechoslovak government in 1968, Lukács was enraged. He wrote to György Aczél, a member of the Hungarian Party’s Central Committee, threatening a return to public polemics: I cannot agree with the solution of the Czechoslovak problem and with the position assumed in it by the MSzMP [the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party]. Consequently, I must withdraw from the public role I played in the last few years. I hope that developments in Hungary will not lead to such a situation in which administrative measures against true Hungarian Marxists would force me again into the intellectual internment of the last decade.127

The suppression of the Prague Spring spurred Lukács to write On the Process of Democratization (1968), his own program for socialist renewal. He argued that authentic de-Stalinization required “the genuine activation of the masses, the surmounting of its apathy is impossible without a renaissance of the Leninist position.”128 By Leninism, Lukács meant a return to the ideals of 1917 with its program of Soviet democracy. However, there was uncertainty in Lukács about how to achieve this. He doubted that the ruling bureaucracies in either the USSR or Eastern Europe could function as agents of reform: “I have never yet seen a reform carried out by bureaucrats. . . . I do not think there can be a bureaucratic change and, what is more, I do not really think there is any such intention . . . they want to maintain the bureaucratic balance we have today.”129 Yet Lukács’s overarching perspective meant that he could not find any other agent for reform except the “good Thermidorians” in the bureaucracy. According to Mészáros: “Thus in his ‘political testament’ he could only recommend the authorization of ‘ad hoc organizations,’ for strictly limited periods and for the realization of pathetically narrow objectives, as a way of instituting socialist democracy.”130 Even this modest program ended up being too much for the Hungarian party. After his death in 1971, On the Process of Democratization was quietly buried. It was only published in 1988 as the winds of change reached

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Hungary. Now leading members of the party such as Rezső Nyers hastened to rally around Lukács’s program: “I fully agree with György Lukács, though I did not accept his views for a long time—and when I have to choose a past, I am thinking in Lukács’s spirit.”131 Yet it was too late for the Hungarian “good Thermidorians” to think in “Lukács’s spirit.” The time for reform, if it had ever truly existed at all, had already passed. G. ANTONIO GRAMSCI Out of all the Western Marxists under discussion, Antonio Gramsci’s thoughts on Stalinism are the most unclear. This is not helped due in part to the “open,” cryptic, and unfinished nature of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. This left Gramsci’s work open to being claimed by those with politics very far from his.132 However, a patient effort can provide insight into Gramsci’s thoughts on Stalinism. Unlike other Western Marxists, Gramsci had a long political relationship with Trotsky. This went back to 1922, when Gramsci attended the Fourth Congress of the Comintern, which was devoted to the united front. Yet the Italian Communist Party (PCI) found itself at odds with this line. Under the leadership of Amadeo Bordiga, the PCI rejected the united front. This had major consequences in Italy since Bordiga’s sectarianism meant that the PCI refused to form a united front to stop Mussolini’s seizure of power in October 1922. The Comintern wanted a new PCI leadership that would pursue the united front. Trotsky looked to Gramsci as a potential candidate for leadership. In the run-up to the congress, Trotsky and Gramsci discussed the dangers of fascism at length. Trotsky came away impressed with Gramsci’s intelligence and political acumen. As he said later: “Italian comrades inform me that, with the sole exception of Gramsci, the Communist Party would not even allow for the possibility of the fascists’ seizing power.”133 At this point, however, Gramsci agreed with Bordiga on opposing the united front. At the congress itself, Gramsci and the PCI remained adamant in their opposition and this caused Trotsky to demand for the Italians to submit to discipline: This is the ne plus ultra of disagreement between the P.C.I. and the communist international anything further would mean open rupture . . . Gramsci is demanding a privilege of intransigence for Italy. On the question of the united front you made a bloc with France and Spain. The others have now recognised that they were wrong, but you refuse to do so. . . . You continue to repeat the same error on every issue.134



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Despite the pressure, Gramsci and the Italian delegation refused to renounce their views, but they did agree to abide by the Comintern’s decisions. This was largely a verbal concession since Bordiga was in charge, and he continued to resist applying the united front. However, Gramsci believed in the importance of disciplined action and considered the PCI duty-bound to accept all decisions of the Comintern. While Trotsky was correct that Gramsci was open to a different line, Bordiga’s leadership of the PCI remained uncontested. For Gramsci to successfully challenge Bordiga, he would need to win over a majority in the party while maintaining unity. This would prove to be a delicate balancing act to say the least. This period saw Gramsci collaborate closely with Trotsky. In September 1922, he wrote an essay on Italian futurism that was included in Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution.135 Gramsci also shared Trotsky’s worries about the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union. He wrote to Palmiro Togliatti in February 1924: In the recent polemic which has broken out in Russia, it is clear that Trotsky and the opposition in general, in view of the prolonged absence of Lenin from the leadership of the party, have been greatly preoccupied about the danger of a return to the old mentality, which would be damaging to the revolution. Demanding a greater intervention of proletarian elements in the life of the party and a diminution of the powers of the bureaucracy, they want basically to ensure the socialist and proletarian character of the revolution. and to prevent a gradual transition to that democratic dictatorship—carapace for a developing capitalism—which was still the programme of Zinoviev and Co. in November 1917.136

After 1924, Gramsci pulled away from Trotsky for two interrelated reasons. First, he was appointed general secretary of the PCI in August. Now Gramsci had the responsibility of creating a tightly organized and unified Communist Party to effectively combat fascism. This meant he had to obey the decisions of the Communist International. Openly taking sides in the dispute between Trotsky and the CPSU would only jeopardize Gramsci’s goals. Second: there was Bordiga. At the Comintern’s Fifth Congress in June 1924, Gramsci supported the new policy of “Bolshevization.” This imposed the Soviet party model on the various sections of the International. It was Gramsci’s hope that Bolshevization would weaken Bordiga’s influence inside the PCI. By 1925, Bordiga was openly defending Trotsky in the PCI and the Comintern. While Gramsci was aware of the ideological differences between Trotsky and Bordiga, he saw both as factionalists who threatened party unity: What has occurred recently inside the Russian party must serve as valuable experience for us. Trotsky’s attitude, initially, can be compared to comrade Bordiga’s at present. . . . This shows that opposition—even kept within the

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limits of a formal discipline—on the part of exceptional personalities in the workers movement can not merely hamper the development of the revolutionary situation, but can put in danger the very conquests of the revolution.137

When Trotsky accepted the Russian party’s discipline in 1925, Gramsci hailed this act. He noted Trotsky’s immense abilities, but believed that no one should be able to put themselves above the party: as expected, as a seasoned militant, a disciplined soldier of the revolution, Trotsky has returned to the ranks. Having accepted the judgment of the majority that his political conceptions were mistaken, Trotsky has submitted to party discipline . . . individuals, no matter how great their value and merits, are always subordinate to the party, the party is never subordinated to individuals, even if they are exceptional like Trotsky.138

Gramsci and Trotsky still maintained a political relationship, and they spent extended periods together in March and April 1925 discussing international affairs. At the PCI’s Lyons Congress in January 1926, Bordiga was decisively routed. Gramsci had finally secured his position and won his coveted party unity. He triumphantly told the Italian Central Committee: The loyalty of all the elements of the party towards the Central Committee must become not just a purely organizational and disciplinary fact, but a real principle of revolutionary ethics. It is necessary to infuse in the membership as a whole so rooted a conviction of this necessity that factional initiatives and, in general, any attempt to disrupt the cohesion of the party will meet with a spontaneous and immediate reaction at the base that will stifle them at birth. . . . The party does not intend to allow any more playing at factionalism and indiscipline. The party wishes to achieve the maximum degree of collective leadership, and will not allow any individual—whatever his personal merits—to counterpose himself to the party.139

However, Gramsci’s factional struggle with Bordiga was mild compared to what was occurring inside the CPSU between Stalin and the Joint Opposition of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. Gramsci was worried about discord in the Soviet Party since he believed it would have disastrous consequences for both the Soviet Union and the Communist International. Even though the PCI had agreed not to intervene in the CPSU’s affairs, Gramsci believed that he must speak up. In October 1926, Gramsci wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the CPSU about the struggle against Trotsky. He affirmed the PCI’s overall support for Stalin: “Now we declare that we consider basically correct the



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political line of the majority of the Central Committee of the CPSU.”140 Yet Gramsci condemned Stalin’s methods for imposing party unity, saying they were bureaucratic and forced. He voiced fears that a split in the CPSU would reverberate throughout the international and would only benefit the bourgeoisie. When it came to the Opposition, Gramsci said that they had greatly assisted the international class struggle: “Comrades Zinoviev, Trotsky, and Kamenev have contributed powerfully to educating us for the revolution; they have at times corrected us with great force and severity; they have been among our masters.”141 Despite this praise, Gramsci said the Opposition was infused with “social democracy and syndicalism which has hitherto prevented the Western proletariat from organizing itself as a leading class.”142 He argued this caused the Opposition to act with a narrow “corporate spirit” that refused to sacrifice the immediate interests of the proletariat to maintain its alliance with the peasantry. As a result, Gramsci believed that Trotsky and the Opposition did not understand the long-term interests of the working class. After Gramsci finished his letter, he gave instructions for Togliatti to deliver it to the CPSU Central Committee. However, Togliatti supported Stalin without any of Gramsci’s reservations. He wrote back to Gramsci that he privileged party unity and refused to question the CPSU’s leadership: “The basic defect of the letter lies in its point of departure. The fact of the split that has taken place in the leading group of the Union’s communist Party is put in the foreground, and the problem of the correctness or otherwise of the line being followed by the majority of the Central Committee is only confronted at a secondary level.”143 Togliatti also accused Gramsci of being overly pessimistic about conditions in Russia, saying that he did not really know what was going on. For Togliatti, unquestioning obedience to the CPSU was the most prudent course of action. Gramsci was angered by Togliatti’s reply, believing it was permeated with a bureaucratic spirit. He replied, clarifying his position by foregrounding the larger unity of the Communist International over Togliatti’s view that privileged the parochial concerns of the CPSU: “The question of unity, not only of the Russian party but also of the Leninist nucleus, is therefore a question of the greatest importance in the international field. It is from the mass point of view, the most important question in this historical period of intensified contradictory process towards unity.”144 Gramsci supported unity won by principled and honest means, believing that unprincipled methods gave only the surface appearance of unity. Neither Gramsci nor Togliatti ever questioned the correctness of Stalin’s program. Their disagreement lay over whether to support Stalin’s bureaucratic methods of inner-party struggle or not. While Gramsci’s own struggles in the PCI had often been rancorous, he had avoided most of the cynicism,

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bureaucratic discipline, and character assassination that characterized Stalin’s campaign against Trotsky. Eventually, Togliatti showed Gramsci’s letter to Bukharin, who refused to present it to the CPSU Central Committee. The Comintern believed that the situation in the PCI needed to be dealt with. To that end, they dispatched Jules Humbert-Droz to Italy, where he met with the Party’s Central Committee. Gramsci was too closely watched by the fascist police to attend this meeting. In early November 1926, the PCI condemned the Trotskyist Opposition, but refrained from endorsing Stalin’s methods of struggle.145 How Gramsci would have responded to this decision is a moot point since he was arrested on November 9. At his trial, the prosecutor stated: “For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning.”146 Gramsci was to spend the rest of his life in Mussolini’s jails, where his health and body were progressively destroyed. At a prison on the island of Ustica, Gramsci was reunited with Bordiga. Despite their political disagreements, the two men resumed their friendship and undertook the political education of their fellow inmates. Bordiga directed the “Scientific section” and Gramsci the “Literature and History section.” Bordiga was concerned about Gramsci’s worsening health and wanted to help his comrade escape. This plan proved abortive when Bordiga was transferred away. In the outside world, Togliatti took over leadership of the PCI. After the Comintern adopted the Third Period line that revolution was around the corner, Togliatti dutifully followed suit. Party members such as Alfonso Leonetti, Paolo Ravazzoli, and Pietro Tress who opposed this line were swiftly expelled. From prison, Gramsci told his brother and party member Gennaro that he was opposed to both the Third Period and the expulsions. Gennaro kept that knowledge a secret when he met with Togliatti: “Had I told a different story . . . not even Nino [Gramsci] would have been saved from expulsion.”147 In contrast to the PCI, Gramsci advocated a constituent assembly as a transitional phase, eventually culminating in the dictatorship of the proletariat. Gramsci’s whole strategy from the Lyon Theses to the concept of hegemony hinged on developing a united front as opposed to the sectarianism of the Third Period. Even if Gramsci rejected Trotsky’s politics, in his advocacy of transitional demands and the united front, there was something “Trotskyist” about his anti-fascist strategy.148 Gramsci’s opposition to the Third Period became an open secret in the PCI. Once other communist prisoners learned about Gramsci’s position, he was ostracized. Word of Gramsci’s dissension leaked out to the PCI abroad. In March 1931, Umberto Terracini wrote to Togliatti about Gramsci: “The rumor that Antonio radically disagrees with the line of the party is current



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and growing stronger in our groups in prison, with repercussions you can imagine.”149 Togliatti filed away these reports, and Gramsci was only spoken of as a heroic martyr to the anti-fascist struggle. While Gramsci was honored by the party and campaigns were waged for his release, his writings were not reprinted. One party member appealed to Togliatti, demanding him to “do everything possible to make Antonio better known to the party and the world.”150 During his imprisonment, Gramsci’s mind remained active even as his body suffered. In The Prison Notebooks, he wrote thousands of pages about everything from the role of intellectuals, Jacobinism, Dante’s Inferno, Machiavelli, to the problems of revolution in the West. However, Gramsci’s works present a bit of a puzzle for any interpreter. He wrote in a cryptic language to conceal his true meaning from the fascist censors. Moreover, Gramsci had great difficulty in getting accurate news about the Soviet Union. Considering the unfinished nature of The Notebooks and his lack of reliable sources, it is difficult to make any final judgments about Gramsci’s views on Stalinism during his prison years. This does not mean it is impossible to decipher Gramsci’s thoughts on Stalinism. A clue is given in one passage where he describes the Soviet Union as a totalitarian society. It must be noted that Gramsci’s usage of totalitarianism was not the same as the Cold War counter-Enlightenment. He uses totalitarianism in a more neutral way to describe something as “all-embracing or unifying” where the ruling party is the “bearer of a new culture.”151 According to Gramsci, totalitarianism in a modern state is when the dominant class ends the autonomy of subordinate groups, which are then reborn in new forms that are incorporated into the state’s activity. For him, totalitarianism can have a progressive or reactionary function depending upon whether it advances or obstructs the creation of a “new culture.” To clarify Gramsci’s meaning of totalitarianism, it can be said that a reactionary variety was located in Fascist Italy and a progressive one was found in the Soviet Union. Since Gramsci considers Stalinism to be a progressive force, he defends its methods as historically necessary: The war of position demands enormous sacrifices by infinite masses of people. So an unprecedented concentration of hegemony is necessary, and hence a more “interventionist” government, which will take the offensive more openly against the oppositionists and organise permanently the “impossibility” of internal disintegration—with controls of every kind, political, administrative, etc., reinforcement of the hegemonic “positions” of the dominant group, etc.152

Gramsci is not unaware of the high price of historical necessity. In a quote from Marx, Gramsci warns that such methods take a toll on those using

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them: “A resistance too long prolonged in a besieged camp is demoralising in itself. It implies suffering, fatigue, loss of rest, illness and the continual presence not of the acute danger which tempers but of the chronic danger which destroys.”153 Elsewhere in a note dedicated to “black parliamentarism,” Gramsci reflected on Stalin’s destruction of inner-party democracy. He observed that in bourgeois democracies, that actual power was exercised outside of parliament by extra-legal forces known as a “black parliament.” This showed that democracy would only be formal under the rule of the bourgeoisie, who held unelected and extra-parliamentary power. In the Soviet Union, which Gramsci called a “new absolutism,” he said that “black parliamentarism” played a progressive role: “Theoretically the important thing is to show that between the old defeated absolutism of the constitutional regimes and the new absolutism there is an essential difference, which means that it is not possible to speak of a regression; not only this, but also to show that such ‘black parliamentarism’ is a function of present historical necessities, is ‘a progress’ in its way, that the return to traditional ‘parliamentarism’ would be an anti-historical regression, since even where this ‘functions’ publicly, the effective parliamentarism is the ‘black’ one.”154 Since the Soviet Union has moved beyond the parliamentarism of liberal democracy, its “black parliamentarism” means the political exclusion of capitalist forces by the dictatorship of the proletariat. This socialist “black parliamentarism” was something Gramsci considered correct and progressive in contrast to capitalism. Yet his analysis of “black parliamentarism” also discussed its later developments in the USSR. Gramsci refers to the defeat of the Trotskyist Opposition as the elimination of the black parliament: “Black” parliamentarism appears to be a theme which should be developed quite extensively; it also offers an opportunity to define the political concepts which constitute the “parliamentary” conception. (Comparisons with other countries, in this respect, are interesting: for example, is not the liquidation of Leone Davidovi [Trotsky] an episode of the liquidation “also” of the “black” parliamentarism which existed after the abolition of the “legal” parliament?) Real fact and legal fact. System of forces in unstable equilibrium which find on the parliamentary terrain the “legal” terrain of their “more economic” equilibrium; and abolition of this legal terrain, because it becomes a source of organisation and of reawakening of latent and slumbering social forces. Hence this abolition is a symptom (and prediction) of intensifications of struggles and not vice versa.155

In this case, Gramsci says that Trotsky’s defeat coincided with the end of the New Economic Policy. He likens the downfall of the Trotskyist Opposition to removing a thermometer to improve the weather. This does not change the weather but makes someone more vulnerable to it: “When a struggle can be



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resolved legally, it is certainly not dangerous; it becomes so precisely when the legal equilibrium is recognised to be impossible. (Which does not mean that by abolishing the barometer one can abolish bad weather.)”156 In other words, the dissolution of the Trotskyist Opposition ended up hurting the Soviet Union. Gramsci’s notes on bureaucratic centralism can be read in part as a coded criticism of Stalinist organizational patterns. According to Gramsci: “When the party is progressive it functions ‘democratically’ (democratic centralism); when the party is regressive it functions ‘bureaucratically’ (bureaucratic centralism). The party in this second case is a simple, unthinking executor.”157 Gramsci argues that a progressive party such as a Communist Party must be democratic and involve the active participation of its members. This must be done even in difficult times when “this provokes an appearance of break up and tumult.”158 However, regressive parties do the contrary by acting bureaucratically and imposing unity upon their members. Gramsci claims that this is both damaging and artificial. He says that genuine party democracy resembles the commotion of an orchestra setup: “An orchestra in rehearsal, each instrument playing for itself, gives the impression of the most dreadful cacophony. And yet these rehearsals are necessary for the orchestra to live as a single ‘instrument.’” 159 While Stalinism is only indirectly criticized, Stalin himself is rarely mentioned by name in The Notebooks. In one substantive remark, Gramsci does talk about Stalin, saying that he was a practical politician who understood Russian reality and the Bolshevik theory of hegemony. However, Gramsci says that Trotsky was an abstract internationalist who lacked Stalin’s sense of realism: To be sure, the line of development is towards internationalism, but the point of departure is “national”-and it is from this point of departure that one must begin. Yet the perspective is international and cannot be otherwise. Consequently, it is necessary to study accurately the combination of national forces which the international class [the proletariat] will have to lead and develop, in accordance with the international perspective and directives [i.e. those of the Comintern]. The leading class is in fact only such if it accurately interprets this combination—of which it is itself a component and precisely as such is able to give the movement a certain direction, within certain perspectives. It is on this point, in my opinion, that the fundamental disagreement between Leo Davidovitch [Trotsky] and Vissarionovitch [Stalin] as interpreter of the majority movement [Bolshevism] really hinges. The accusations of nationalism are inept if they refer to the nucleus of the question. If one studies the majoritarians’ [Bolsheviks’] struggle from 1902 up to 1917, one can see that its originality consisted in purging internationalism of every vague and purely ideological (in a pejorative sense) element, to give it a realistic political content. A class that is international in

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character has in as much as it guides social strata which are narrowly national (intellectuals), and indeed frequently even less than national: particularistic and municipalistic (the peasants)—to “nationalize” itself in a certain sense.160

In contrast to Stalin, Trotsky himself is mentioned quite frequently in The Notebooks. From the moment he was able to get books delivered to him, Gramsci asked for works by Trotsky. He managed to obtain a copy of Trotsky’s autobiography My Life, where he denounced Trotsky’s egoism: “A great historian, a great revolutionary, but he is an egotist, he sees himself at the centre of all events, he has no sense of the Party.”161 Overall, Gramsci’s discussion of Trotsky in The Notebooks closely resembles Stalinist caricatures as opposed to any honest engagement. When it came to the theory of permanent revolution, Gramsci completely mischaracterizes it as advocating simultaneous revolution everywhere: 1. in the ‌‌first phase, nobody believed that they ought to make a start-that is to say, they believed that by making a start they would find themselves isolated; they waited for everybody to move together, and nobody in the meantime moved or organised the movement; 2. the second phase is perhaps worse, because what is being awaited is an anachronistic and anti-natural form of “Napoleonism” (since not all historical phases repeat themselves in the same form).162

In other pa‌‌ssages, Gramsci said that Trotsky’s permanent revolution was a form of spontaneism akin to the syndicalist and Luxemburgist idea of a general strike. At one point, Gramsci describes Trotsky’s position on the united front as the opposite of what he actually advocated. In Comintern debates, Gramsci says that Trotsky was a theorist of “frontal attack” when “it only leads to defeats.”163 In contrast to Trotsky’s “war of maneuver,” Gramsci said that Lenin recognized the necessity for a different strategy in the West: “Ilitch understood that a change was necessary from the war of manoeuvre applied victoriously in the East in 1917 to a war of position which was the only form possible in the West . . . This is what the formula of the ‘United Front seems to me to mean.’”164 It is true that Lenin did support the united front, but so did Trotsky. Gramsci seemingly forgot that it was Trotsky who pleaded with him to support the united front back in 1922! As Perry Anderson observed: “Gramsci’s confusion was here virtually total.”165 This is not necessarily the final word on Trotsky in Gramsci’s work. Considering that The Notebooks were coded, it is entirely possible that Trotsky acts as a stand-in to criticize Stalin’s collectivization campaign and the Third Period’s “war of maneuver.” This argument is defended by



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Emanuele Saccarelli in his work on Trotsky and Gramsci: “This policy, in turn, was seen as creating the conditions both for a Bonapartist degeneration and for the demise of the Soviet Union as the propulsive factor in the international revolution. This was the real political content of Gramsci’s complaints against Trotsky, who was used as a sort of convenient shorthand for the ultraleftism imposed by Stalin in the third period.”166 Ultimately, Saccarelli’s interpretation of Gramsci on Stalinism is not plausible. Gramsci’s criticisms of Trotsky are consistent with his overall politics after 1924, where he was a loyal supporter of both the Soviet Union and the Comintern. However, just because Gramsci was a loyalist did not mean he was uncritical. He truly deplored Stalinism’s bureaucratic manipulations and its construction of artificial unity in the Communist Party. It is impossible to determine what Gramsci’s final verdict on Stalinism would have been. What can be said is that Gramsci’s analysis of Stalinism, like other subjects covered in The Prison Notebooks, remained a work in progress. H. ERIC HOBSBAWM Like millions of other communists who came of age during the Great Depression, the British historian Eric Hobsbawm looked to the Soviet Union as the wave of the future. Until 1956, he accepted Stalinism without question. To his dying day, Hobsbawm held on to a nostalgic attachment to the Soviet Union. Born in Alexandria in 1917, Hobsbawm’s early childhood was spent in Vienna. In 1931, the fourteen-year-old Hobsbawm moved to Berlin, where it was impossible to ignore the economic crash, political polarization, and mass unemployment. As he wrote in his memoirs: “But the world economic crisis was like a volcano, generating political eruptions. That is what we could not escape, because it dominated our skyline, like the occasionally smoking cones of the real volcanoes which tower over their cities—Vesuvius, Etna, Mont Pelée. Eruption was in the air we breathed.”167 The Weimar Republic seemed destined for collapse, and the only question seemed to be what would replace it: communism or Nazism? The Jewish and left-leaning Hobsbawm naturally joined the Communist Party. On January 25, 1933, he took part in the KPD’s last legal march in Berlin. Five days later, Hitler was proclaimed Chancellor. That formative experience in Germany forever shaped Hobsbawm: “The months in Berlin made me a lifelong communist.”168 Afterward, Hobsbawm moved to Britain, where he continued his education. In 1936, he officially joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). He viewed the recent adoption of the popular front as a welcome change from the “suicidal idiocy” of the Third Period. Hereafter, the popular

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front became the lodestar of Hobsbawm’s politics: “Politically, having actually joined a Communist Party in 1936, I belong to the era of anti-fascist unity and the Popular Front. It continues to determine my strategic thinking in politics to this day.”169 Later that year, Hobsbawm was in Paris for Bastille Day. This was no ordinary celebration since Léon Blum’s popular front government had just come to power, so the streets were filled with hundreds of thousands of workers. To Hobsbawm, this sight was akin to a religious experience: “For young revolutionaries of my generation mass demonstrations were the equivalent of papal masses for devout Catholics . . . It was one of the rare days when my mind was on autopilot. I only felt and experienced.”170 Mere days later, the Spanish Civil War erupted and became the defining moment for his generation: “What Spain meant to liberals and those on the Left who lived through the 1930s, is now difficult to remember, though for many of us the survivors, now all past the Biblical life-span, it remains the only political cause which, even in retrospect, appears as pure and compelling as it did in 1936.”171 In fact, many of Hobsbawm’s comrades, such as the poet John Cornford, volunteered for the International Brigades and gave their lives in Spain. As a dedicated communist, Hobsbawm accepted Soviet orthodoxy on all matters. To understand Marxist philosophy, he eagerly read Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938). Hobsbawm did not question the verdicts of the Moscow Trials. He wrote to his cousin that it was necessary for the USSR to root out traitors: Consider: the following facts are fairly well established: the accused are people who have, at various times in the past, been in violent disagreement with the Party Line, have at various times been expelled from the party and deposed from their positions . . . Second, Trotsky had for the last five years or more consistently advocated the overthrow of the USSR as a nonsocialist and anti-revolutionary body . . . Third, the accusations are not intrinsically impossible; that the Trotskyists should wreck seems clear (Kirov) that they should be willing to cede USSR territory is not impossible: perhaps they wanted in the end to double-cross Hitler and Japan, perhaps they just thought it a necessary if regrettable concession.172

While he later considered the purges to be a fit of madness, Hobsbawm believed that communists had no choice except to stand with Stalin. The USSR was the only force that could defeat Hitler, and anti-fascists had to just accept what they were doing: “Consequently, whatever Stalin did, even if you didn’t like it, even if you hated it, this was a price which had to be paid.”173



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Hobsbawm considered World War II not as a struggle between capitalism and communism, but between Enlightenment and reaction. He saw the Allied war effort as a people’s war, viewing the Jacobins, levée en masse, and the Terror as examples for anti-fascists to emulate: The Terror has been slandered and maligned ever since the fall of Robespierre. We, who are engaged in total war, can judge it with greater insight. But to get the true perspective, we must learn to see it, not only through the eyes of fighters for freedom of 1943, but through those of the common soldiers who, barefoot and starving, saved their country because it was a good country to save. For them the Terror was not a nightmare, but the dawn of life.174

After the war, Hobsbawm pursued his academic career and taught history at Birkbeck College. Inside the CPGB, he was one of the founders of the Communist Party Historians Group. In its ranks, the Historians Group included esteemed historians such as Christopher Hill, Victor Kiernan, Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, Raphael Samuel, E. P. Thompson, A. L. Morton, and Brian Pearce. These historians pioneered Marxist approaches in British history, the transition to capitalism, class formation, and popular struggles. According to Hobsbawm, they were largely free from the limitations of adhering to the party line: “On the whole we did not feel any sense of constraint, of certain matters being off-limits, nor did we feel that the Party tried to interfere with or distort our work as communist historians.”175 As a historian, Hobsbawm produced valuable and lasting scholarship, but his work internalized a great deal of Stalinist orthodoxy. This becomes very apparent whenever he wrote on events after 1917. For most of his career, Hobsbawm deliberately shied away from writing extensively about the Soviet Union, lest it bring up difficult questions: “I knew that if I had, I would have had to have written things that would have been difficult for a communist to say without affecting my political activity and the feelings of my comrades.”176 His loyalty to the Soviet Union was not severely shaken until 1956. Hobsbawm found Khrushchev’s words impossible to ignore. Almost overnight, Stalin was transformed from the paragon of communism into a despotic mass murderer. In the CPGB, the bulk of the membership were traumatized at this sudden loss of faith. As he remembered: “For more than a year, British communists lived on the edge of the political equivalent of a collective nervous breakdown.”177 Hobsbawm was torn between the two poles of party internal reform and loyalty to the USSR. He joined with the Historians Group and called for democratization of the party and an inquiry into its past. This sparked an angry reaction from General Secretary John Gollan, who compared Hobsbawm to

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Trotsky. However, in the midst of this internal struggle, Hobsbawm publicly defended the Soviet invasion of Hungary in the pages of The Daily Worker: First, that the movement against the old Hungarian government and the Russian occupation was a wide popular movement, however misguided. Second, that the fault for creating the situation in which the Hungarian Workers’ Party was isolated from, and partly hated by, the people lay with the policy of the USSR as well as of the Hungarian Workers’ Party. Third, that the suppression of a popular movement, however wrong-headed, by a foreign army is at best a tragic necessity and must be recognised as such. While approving, with a heavy heart, of what is now happening in Hungary, we should therefore also say frankly that we think the USSR should withdraw its troops from the country as soon as this is possible.178

These twin blows of 1956 took their toll on the CPGB and the party ended up losing more than a quarter of its membership, including most of the Historians Group. However, Hobsbawm was not among this exodus, and he stayed in the party until its final dissolution in 1991. His most fundamental reason for staying was that there was nowhere else for him to go. One person who encouraged Hobsbawm to remain was Isaac Deutscher, who told him: “Whatever you do, don’t leave the Communist Party. I let myself be expelled in 1932 and have regretted it ever since.”179 A second reason is that Hobsbawm was repulsed at the thought of finding himself among ex-communists turned fanatical anti-communists. Third: he was determined to succeed in academia as both a historian and a communist. Finally: Hobsbawm was emotionally bound to the Soviet Union and could not easily sever those ties: “For someone who joined the movement where I came from and when I did, it was quite simply more difficult to break with the Party than for those who came later and from elsewhere.”180 So Hobsbawm stayed in the Communist Party, but his remaining tenure involved little disciplined political involvement. The shattering of Stalinist hegemony after 1956 in the West meant that space was opened on the political left for all sorts of marginalized and heretical ideas. Hobsbawm welcomed the 1960s with its influx of radicalism. However, he did not quite understand it since the young radicals spoke a language he could not grasp. After the failures of his generation, Hobsbawm had grown pessimistic about the chances of socialist revolution: “We, or at least congenitally pessimistic middle-aged reds such as myself, already bearing the scars of half a lifetime of disappointment, could not share the almost cosmic optimism of the young, as they felt themselves to be ‘caught in that maelstrom of international rebellion.’”181



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After 1956, Hobsbawm considered himself a spiritual member of the Italian Communist Party. He viewed the large Italian party to be more intellectually open than the small CPGB: “Unlike in Britain, in Italy it was still worth joining the Party after 1956.”182 Another attraction of the PCI was that it was founded by Antonio Gramsci, whom Hobsbawm considered one of the greatest Marxists of the twentieth century. However, the Gramsci he embraced was not a Leninist, but the patron saint of social democratic Eurocommunism promoted by the PCI. After Prague Spring, Hobsbawm became one of the advocates for Eurocommunism inside the CPGB and pushed for greater independence from the Soviet Union. In 1978, he delivered a lecture “The Forward March of Labour Halted?” that represented a Eurocommunist challenge to key elements of the party’s Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. He argued that changes in the working class meant it could no longer play the leading role in a socialist revolution. Instead, the party should support new social movements and incorporate them into a renewed popular front. As he said: “I argued that the apparently irresistible though not continuous rise of the British labour movement in the first half of the century seemed to have come to a halt. It could not now necessarily be expected to realize the historic destiny once predicted for it, if only because the modern economy had changed, relatively diminished and divided the industrial proletariat.”183 Hobsbawm’s lecture was directed just as much to the Labour Party, whom he hoped to rescue from the “sectarians” of the Militant Tendency. During the 1980s, he supported Neil Kinnock as leader of the Labour Party. After Kinnock took over its leadership, he proceeded to purge the Militant Tendency. Hobsbawm cheered this event for ensuring that the party’s “future was safe.”184 Later, Hobsbawm abhorred the rise of Tony Blair’s Third Way “New Labour,” even though he had laid the ideological foundation for it by cheering on the expulsion of the left. By the late 1980s, Hobsbawm had few hopes left for socialism. He had never been attracted to Mao and considered the Shining Path to be repulsive. He supported the Soviet Union more as a counterweight to the United States than as an inspiring example of socialism. When Gorbachev came to power, he was excited about the possibilities of fundamental reforms. After the Cold War ended, Hobsbawm praised Gorbachev for his role: “Like so many in the West I shall go on thinking of him with unalloyed gratitude and moral approval.”185 After the Soviet Union collapsed, Hobsbawm said that the whole experiment had failure built into it: “Looking back we can see that the original justification for the decision to establish socialist power in Russia disappeared when ‘proletarian revolution’ failed to conquer Germany.”186 However, he

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never quite let go of his youthful hopes in the Soviet Union and communism. As he told Michael Ignatieff in 1994: Ignatieff: In 1934, millions of people are dying in the Soviet experiment. If you had known that, would it have made a difference to you at that time? To your commitment? To being a Communist? Hobsbawm: . . . Probably not. Ignatieff: Why? Hobsbawm: Because in a period in which, as you might imagine, mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal, the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing. . . . The sacrifices were enormous; they were excessive by almost any standard and excessively great. But I’m looking back at it now and I’m saying that because it turns out that the Soviet Union was not the beginning of the world revolution. Had it been, I’m not sure. Ignatieff: What that comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified? Hobsbawm: Yes.187

Deep down, Hobsbawm still believed that if Stalinism had led to communism, then all crimes of historical necessity would have been justified. I. LOUIS ALTHUSSER Committed to the French Communist Party, the philosopher Louis Althusser accepted the party’s claim to lead the working class. However, he believed that its embrace of humanism threatened the scientific foundations of Marxism. Never willing to attack the party openly, Althusser engaged in an indirect critique. To challenge the party’s ideology, Althusser worked with the tools at his disposal, most notably Maoism. Yet his role as an internal critic was fatally compromised because he refused to break party discipline since he ultimately shared a great deal of the PCF’s Stalinist politics. When Althusser joined the PCF in 1948, it was the high point of the party’s influence in France. This was also the era of high Stalinism when Soviet cultural ideologue Andrei Zhdanov said that the world was divided into the two camps of capitalism and socialism. The division between the two camps



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included everything from biology to literature which all bore different class characters. Althusser said: “[The PCF] leadership was ‘more royalist than the king’ or, in other words, than Stalin (who later placed less emphasis on linguistic definitions) by fiercely and publicly defending the concept of ‘two sciences,’ bourgeois and proletarian.”188 Like other communist intellectuals, Althusser was alienated by the suffocating atmosphere inside the party, but unlike many he stayed. Since the party’s politics were seemingly impervious to change, Althusser thought that his only option lay in what he would later call “the class struggle in theory” or theoretical struggle. However, he admitted to the Italian communist Maria Antonietta Macciocchi that there was a gap between his revolutionary theory and the party’s actions: “there is a contradiction between what I write and the political situation—between the theory which I seek to advance and the strategy of the Communist parties.”189 During the 1950s, Althusser stayed quiet and acquiesced to party discipline. In 1956, he cautiously greeted Khrushchev’s Secret Speech for loosening the bonds of intellectual conformity within the French Communist Party. While he welcomed free inquiry into Marxism, Althusser believed that the party’s intellectual life was still heavily dogmatic. This Stalinism needed to be overcome if Marxism was going to advance. In the preface to For Marx, Althusser defined the tasks that lay ahead: “And also because the end of Stalinist dogmatism has not completely dissipated them [issues of Stalinism] as mere circumstantial reflexes; they are still our problems. . . . What the end of dogmatism has restored to us is the right to assess exactly what we have, to give both our wealth and our poverty their true names, to think and pose our problems in the open, and to undertake in rigour a true investigation.”190 Much work still needed to be done to restore Marxist science. In other areas, Althusser was dismayed at de-Stalinization for opening the door to right-wing ideas in the communist movement. In place of the inevitable struggle between two camps, Khrushchev promoted the line of peaceful coexistence and the peaceful transition to socialism. French Communists quickly adopted both positions. This did not mean much of a change for the PCF, since they had long been pursuing an analogous strategy since the popular front. Althusser argued that the Secret Speech was a right-wing critique of Stalin since it attributed all errors to the “cult of personality” and declared that socialism was basically sound. This meant that the real problems that led to Stalinism were superficially wiped away: Now this pseudo-concept [cult of personality], the circumstances of whose solemn and dramatic pronouncement are well known, did indeed expose certain practices: “abuses,” “errors,” and in certain cases “crimes.” But it explained

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nothing of their conditions, of their causes, in short of their internal determination, and therefore of their forms. Yet since it claimed to explain what in fact it did not explain, this pseudo-concept could only mislead those whom it was supposed to instruct. Must we be even more explicit? To reduce the grave events of thirty years of Soviet and Communist history to this pseudo-explanation by the “cult” was not and could not have been a simple mistake, an oversight of an intellectual hostile to the practice of divine worship: it was, as we all know, a political act of responsible leaders, a certain one-sided way of putting forward the problems, not of what is vulgarly called “Stalinism,” but of what must, I think, be called (unless one objects to thinking about it) by the name of a concept: provisionally, the “Stalinian” deviation.191

If the communist movement was to overcome the mistakes of Stalinism, then a “left-wing” critique of Stalin was needed. In order to arrive at one, Althusser said it was necessary to look deeper into the contradictions of socialism itself. As he said later: I would never have written anything were it not for the Twentieth Congress and Khrushchev’s critique of Stalinism and the subsequent liberalization. But I would never have written these books if I had not seen this affair as a bungled de-Stalinization, a right-wing de-Stalinization which instead of analyses offered us only incantations; which instead of Marxist concepts had available only the poverty of bourgeois ideology. My target was therefore clear: these humanist ravings, these feeble dissertations on liberty, labour or alienation which were the effects of all this among French party intellectuals. And my aim was equally clear: to make a start on the first left-wing critique of Stalinism, a critique that would make it possible to reflect not only on Khrushchev and Stalin but also on Prague and Lin Piao; that would above all help put some substance back into the revolutionary project here in the West. . . . For me philosophy is something of a battlefield.192

Althusser saw other worrying signs in de-Stalinization with its embrace of theoretical humanism. In the late 1950s, the USSR promoted socialist humanism, a return to Hegel, and the ideas of the young Marx. Althusser said that these concepts served as a convenient way to smuggle social democratic and revisionist ideas into the communist movement: Here we see Communists following the Social-Democrats and even religious thinkers (who used to have an almost guaranteed monopoly in these things) in the practice of exploiting the works of Marx’s youth in order to draw out of them an ideology of Man, Liberty, Alienation, Transcendence, etc.—without asking whether the system of these notions was idealist or materialist, whether this ideology was petty-bourgeois or proletarian.193



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Contrary to the PCF and the USSR, Althusser claimed that humanism could not provide a viable scientific basis for Marxism. He said that it was the mission of theoreticians such as himself to offer that scientific basis and return the party to its proper revolutionary path. His former student Jacques Rancière said Althusser wanted to use his theory to transform the PCF: “Althusser’s theoretical and political project . . . is staked on the bet that it is possible to effect a political transformation inside the Communist Party through a theoretical investigation aimed at restoring Marx’s thought.”194 The PCF shifted to Marxist humanism without much protest. Roger Garaudy made an almost seamless transition from a Stalinist Inquisitor to a zealous defender of the new humanist faith. Internal life in the party remained just as tightly controlled as in the Stalin years with dissidents such as Althusser being closely watched. In 1962, Althusser’s essay “Contradiction and Overdetermination” with its anti-Hegelian themes was condemned by Garaudy as “theoretically and politically dangerous.”195 The following year, Althusser made a self-criticism for his leftism and accepted the PCF’s political leadership. However, he did not disavow his ideas and criticized the party for its theoretical pragmatism. Yet Althusser’s theoretical struggle remained cautious since he was careful to avoid expulsion: “In fact I never took up a position where I risked being expelled.”196 The party considered Althusser suspect not only for his anti-humanism, but due to his pro-Chinese sympathies. By the early 1960s, the socialist camp unraveled when the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China formally split. In the bitter exchange of polemics, the Chinese condemned the Soviets for “revisionism.” Many of these Chinese criticisms echoed those of Althusser and other leftists inside the PCF. The PCF’s student wing, Union des étudiants communistes (UEC) contained Maoist sympathizers. Many of them, such as Robert Linhart and Jacques Rancière, were students of Althusser. In 1966, the PCF cracked down and expelled at least six hundred from the UEC. The Maoists regrouped and formed Union des jeunesses communistes marxistes-léninistes [UJC (ml)] with Pierre Victor, Dominique Lecourt, Robert Linhart, and Jacques Rancière among its members. Althusser remained quiet about the expulsions and stayed inside the PCF. Like his students, Althusser found the Cultural Revolution with its advocacy of ideological struggle very attractive. In November/December 1966, he authored an anonymous article for the UJC’s Cahiers Marxistes-Léniniste praising the Cultural Revolution. Althusser said this was an unprecedented historical event that every Marxist needed to study closely since it concerned the future of socialism:

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In socialist countries, after the more or less complete socialist transformation of the property of the means of production, there is still this question that remains: what road is to be taken? Is it necessary to go all the way to the end of the socialist revolution and gradually pass over into communism? Or, to the contrary, stop halfway and go backwards toward capitalism? This question is being posed to us in a particular acute manner.197

Althusser argued that the Cultural Revolution proved that creating a socialist economic base did not mean a socialist superstructure would naturally follow. A conscious ideological struggle by the masses was needed to revolutionize the superstructure and remove bourgeois survivals. Only then could society continue its march toward socialism: “It is, then, in the ideological sphere that the crossroads is located. The future depends on the ideological. It is in the ideological class struggle that the fate (progress or regression) of a socialist country is played out.”198 If this ideological struggle failed, then there was the danger of capitalist restoration. He concluded that the Chinese Revolution offered a genuine “left-wing critique” of Stalinism. As Althusser wrote in Essays on Self-Criticism: the only historically existing (left) “critique” of the fundamentals of the “Stalinian deviation” to be found—and which, moreover, is contemporary with this very deviation, and thus for the most part precedes the Twentieth Congress—is a concrete critique, one which exists in the facts, in the struggle, in the line, in the practices, their principles and their forms, of the Chinese Revolution. A silent critique, which speaks through its actions, the result of the political and ideological struggles of the Revolution, from the Long March to the Cultural Revolution and its results.199

Althusser used these Maoist insights to develop his own criticism of Stalinism. Unlike Khrushchev, Althusser said that Stalin needed to be upheld: “Stalin cannot be reduced to the deviation which we have linked to his name; even less can this be done with the Third International which he came in the thirties to dominate. He had other historical merits.”200 Among the merits of Stalin that Althusser recognized was successfully constructing socialism in one country and defeating Hitler in World War II. Althusser said that the source of Stalin’s deviations lay in his economism with its nearly exclusive focus on developing the productive forces. According to Althusser, economism had a long history since it was the dominant ideological tendency in the Second International. Under Stalin, there was a revival of economism in the USSR, which Althusser called “the posthumous revenge of the Second International.”201 While the Five-Year Plans did develop industry, they failed to revolutionize the superstructure. This meant bourgeois ideology was reproduced in the USSR. Stalin failed to



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recognize this in 1936 when he declared that class struggle and antagonistic contradictions had ended in the Soviet Union. In line with Mao, Althusser claimed that the class struggle continued under socialism and that a reversion to capitalism was still a danger. Althusser concluded that Moscow’s response to the Prague Spring was the “proof” that the Soviet Union was on the road back to capitalism. Initially, he stayed quiet when the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia since the PCF supported the action. Ironically, his old adversary Roger Garaudy was expelled from the party for openly opposing the invasion. Four years later, Althusser broke his silence and stated that “The national mass movement of the Czech people . . . merits the respect and support of all Communists.”202 In the 1970s, he became even more outspoken about the survivals of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. In his introduction to Dominique Lecourt’s Proletarian Science? The Case of Lysenko, Althusser said: “the repressive system of the Stalin period, including the camps, remains in existence, as do the basic practices of that period regarding social, political and cultural life.”203 For all its insights, Althusser’s understanding of the USSR was too indulgent of Maoism. By rejecting economism, Althusser ended up downplaying the role of economic factors altogether. Like the Red Guards, he argued that the ultimate criteria for determining whether a society is socialist or capitalist depends upon whether or not it followed the correct political line as opposed to the nature of its economic base. This meant Althusser’s whole understanding of Stalinism had a decidedly voluntarist and idealist bent. Yet Althusser remained unwilling to express any criticism of the French Communist Party. While his students said that the “capitalist roaders” were located inside the Communist Party, Althusser remained a member. In his response to the 1968 protests, Althusser showed that he remained trapped within the ideological confines of the PCF. In May, student protests set off a general strike of more than ten million workers that posed a revolutionary challenge to the French bourgeoisie. Instead of acting as a proletarian vanguard, the PCF stood on the far right of the movement as guardians of order and respectability. According to David Caute: “The [French] Communist Party was profoundly Gaullist, devoted to ‘order,’ to authority, to transmitting commands from above, to the cult of personality, to channeling popular aspirations into tidy ‘agreements.’”204 In the end, the PCF used their immense power to defuse the general strike. Althusser was hospitalized for the duration of the protests, so he did not participate. It was only in 1969 that he offered an analysis of the May events in a lengthy letter to Macciocchi. Althusser appeared to offer a more positive assessment of the student movement than the PCF, since he ranked it alongside the Resistance. He noted that the PCF had lost contact with the students

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due to the Algerian War and Maoist agitators, but was unable to explain why this happened, merely saying “we must get to the bottom of things.”205 Althusser found it “too simplistic” to say that the Communist Party betrayed the students.206 Instead, he claimed that the protests had failed because the student movement was unable to fuse with the working-class movement. Althusser painted a portrait of two opposed groups who could not meet. On the one side was the working class who were motivated by bread-and-butter issues. On the other side were the petty-bourgeois students, who were driven by anarchism, Maoism, and Trotskyism. Somehow, the encounter between them did not occur. Althusser passes over in silence how the PCF kept the two groups apart. Ironically, Althusser says that it is the task of the Communists to bring about this fusion. Rancière concluded that Althusser’s absolution of the PCF showed that he represented a “philosophy of order.”207 Despite his defense of the PCF, Althusser remained uneasy inside it. When the party abandoned “the dictatorship of the proletariat” at its Twenty-Second Congress in 1976, he warned that it would reappear like a hydra whenever “we come to speak of the state and socialism.”208 However, Althusser did not disavow this new line since it would allow the party to build a new popular front. These hopes seemed close to realization in 1978 when the Common Program, a platform uniting the Socialists and Communists, seemed all but certain to win a legislative majority. At the last minute, the PCF broke the alliance and party militants were left demoralized. In the acrimonious fallout, the Socialists won more votes than the Communists for the first time in decades. The PCF denied any responsibility for the disaster. In response, Althusser wrote “What Must Change in the Party,” where he blamed the debacle on the party’s residual Stalinism. In a slight overstatement, Perry Anderson called this article “the most violent oppositional charter ever published within a party in the post-war history of Western Communism.”209 Indeed, Althusser offered a fierce and powerful challenge to the PCF. He stated that the party strangled all discussion within its ranks by maintaining a top-down structure to ensure passivity and the unquestioned authority of the leadership. Althusser said that the party’s apparatus was nothing more than a “machine for dominating.”210 He denounced the PCF for abandoning the democratic promises of the Twenty-Second Congress by showing its true Stalinist face: The leadership may imagine that the Twenty-Second Congress was a Fountain of Youth that washed away the bad memories of the past. But people have a long memory, and blackmailing talk about anti-communism no longer cuts any ice at all! . . . It is all very well to be heir to the October Revolution, and to preserve the memory of Stalingrad. But what of the massacre and deportation of recalcitrant peasants baptized as kulaks? What of the crushing of the middle



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classes, the Gulag Archipelago, the repression that still goes on twenty-five years after Stalin’s death? When the only guarantees offered are words that are immediately contradicted in the only possible field of verification, namely the internal practices of the Party, then it is clear that the “buffer” also lies within the Party itself.211

As proof of the PCF’s Stalinism, Althusser pointed to its long history, where the party had persecuted, slandered, and broke anyone who got in its way: There were real “Moscow trials” right here in France. The death sentences were missing, but you can also make a man die of dishonour, by torturing him with the charge of being a “police-agent,” “crook” or “traitor”; by forcing all his old comrades-in-arms to condemn, shun and calumniate him, renouncing their own past. That happened in France, between 1948 and 1965.212

While it may have been a decade too late, Althusser finally condemned the PCF for its role in betraying the students in 1968. Now, he called upon the party to leave its Stalinist fortress and enter a new era. This was the most open criticism that Althusser ever directed against the PCF. His points cut deep and spoke long-buried truths. However, Althusser’s critique offered no strategy beyond returning to the spirit of the 1936 popular front.213 He even praised Maurice Thorez, the longtime Stalinist general secretary of the PCF. Despite everything, Althusser still could not break with the sacred cows of Stalinism. In the end, the PCF weathered the storm and kept its apparatus intact. Althusser threw up his arms and stayed in the party because he had no other place to go: the fact of having joined the Party—in 1948—is not a biographical accident for me: it was the absolute precondition for being able to be a political activist. . . . The fact of being in the Party has given my philosophical writings a political significance. If I left it, that would be finished.214

Althusser’s active political life ended two years later in a horrific tragedy, when under the influence of mental illness, he strangled to death his wife, Hélène. After spending time in an asylum, Althusser lived quietly in seclusion until his death in 1990. If Louis Althusser was a Stalinist, then not every Stalinist was Louis Althusser. His writings on Marxist science were far more interesting than the Stalinist hacks who criticized him. Yet his theoretical struggle failed since Althusser indulged Maoist voluntarism far too much while his own loyalty to the PCF apparatus destroyed his political integrity.

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J. JEAN-PAUL SARTRE During Jean-Paul Sartre’s lifetime, the French left was dominated by the weight of the Communist Party. At times attracted to and repelled by the party, Sartre could not escape the long shadow cast by Stalinism on political life. More than any other Western Marxist, Sartre made the most comprehensive effort to understand Stalinism in his unfinished Critique of Dialectical Reason. In the end, Sartre’s project failed, and he concluded that the demands of historical necessity inexorably led to Stalinism. At the young age of twelve, Sartre expressed sympathy for the Russian Revolution in an act of rebellion against his bourgeois stepfather. This foreshadowed a lifetime as a supporter of revolution. In the 1920s, while attending the École normale supérieure, Sartre first encountered members of the PCF. This was during the party’s most revolutionary days, when it actively supported Abd el-Krim, a Moroccan leader in the Rif War and welcomed the defeat of French imperialism. While Sartre never considered joining the PCF, his close friend Paul Nizan did. He was impressed with Nizan’s commitment to Marxism, describing it as all-embracing: “Nizan made Marxism into his second nature, or, if you prefer, his Reason. . . . He placed everything within Marxism: physical and metaphysical, the passion both to act and to reclaim his acts, his cynicism and his eschatological dreams. Man was his future.”215 Nizan did not share Sartre’s existentialist philosophy, viewed it as too individualistic and “entirely unconcerned with moral problems.”216 In 1938, Nizan wrote Le Cheval de Troie [The Trojan Horse] where one of the characters who became a fascist was based upon Sartre. According to Beauvoir, Nizan denied that this character was modeled on Sartre: “Nizan declared, nonchalantly but firmly, that his actual model had been Brice Parain. Sartre said cheerfully that he didn’t believe a word of it.”217 In 1929, Sartre had grown skeptical about the Russian Revolution, viewing it as a “technological culture.”218 He did follow Trotsky’s work with interest though. Beauvoir remembered: “We had the very highest opinion of Trotsky, and the idea of ‘permanent revolution’ suited our anarchist tendencies far better than that of constructing a socialist regime inside one single country.”219 Inside Sartre’s circle of friends were many Trotskyists and sympathizers such as Colette Audry, Aimé Patri, and Michel Collinet. However, Sartre was no more inclined to join the Trotskyists than the PCF. According to Beauvoir: “But both in the Trotskyite party and the various other dissident groups we encountered the same ideological dogmatism as we did in the Communist Party proper; the only difference was that we had no faith in their effectiveness.”220



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Throughout the 1930s, Sartre abstained from active political engagement. While he viewed himself as a man of the left, he did not even vote for the popular front in 1936. When the Moscow Trials occurred, Sartre and Beauvoir were bewildered by the confessions. They went to Nizan to make sense of it for them: “Even Nizan, who had spent a blissful year in Russia, was deeply disconcerted. We had a long discussion with him at the Mahieu, and although ordinarily he was always highly circumspect about expressing his opinions, he did not conceal the fact that he was worried.”221 Both Sartre and Beauvoir followed the Spanish Civil War with passionate interest. Many of their friends, such as the anarchist Fernando Gerassi, volunteered to fight for the Republic. While Sartre was a dedicated anti-fascist, he had no intention of getting politically involved. As he told Fernando Gerassi’s son John: “What could I do in 1936? Fight in Spain, with my eyes? Join the Communist Party? There were too many nasty factors involved to do that.”222 Instead, he watched events at a distance with pessimistic sympathy. Audry, who met with leaders of the POUM, excitedly told Sartre and Beauvoir about the revolution unfolding. After the POUM was suppressed, Sartre was skeptical about the rationalizations used by the Communists. According to Beauvoir: “Was it true that the Stalinists had ‘assassinated the Revolution,’ or should we rather believe that it was the Anarchists who played in with Franco’s rebels?”223 His doubts about the Moscow Trials and Spain aside, Sartre looked to the Soviet Union as the main bulwark against Nazi Germany. When the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed, Sartre’s opinion of the USSR cooled decidedly. Beauvoir believed that the Pact proved that the Trotskyists were right: “This treaty proved, in the most brutal way, that Colette Audry and the Trotskyites and every left-wing opposition group were right, after all: that Russia had become an imperialist power like any other, obstinately pursuing her own selfish interests. Stalin didn’t give a damn for the proletariat of Europe.”224 For many Communists, the Pact was a shocking betrayal of the anti-fascist cause. Few felt this more than Nizan. Just weeks before the Pact was signed, Sartre and Beauvoir met Nizan, who was still optimistic that war would be averted: “He talked about the war, thought that we would escape it. I instantly made a mental translation: ‘The Political Bureau is very optimistic, its spokesman declares that the negotiations with the USSR are going to be successful: By fall, he says, the Nazis will be on their knees.’”225 This was the last time Sartre saw Nizan. Once the war began, Nizan resigned from the PCF in disgust. He enlisted in the French Army and died a year later at Dunkirk. In response to Nizan’s resignation, the Communist Party did everything possible to destroy his reputation. He was called a liar and a police spy. His work was buried and forgotten. Even after the war, these slanders were repeated by Communist intellectuals such as Louis Aragon and Henri

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Lefebvre. Sartre never forgot how the PCF smeared Nizan. In 1960, the rerelease of Nizan’s novel Aden, Arabie gave Sartre the opportunity to rehabilitate his friend: “He issued a call to arms, to hatred. Class against class. With a patient and mortal enemy there can be no compromise: kill or be killed, there is nothing in between. . . . I considered him the perfect communist.”226 For Sartre, the nonrevolutionary PCF would never measure up to the standard set by Nizan. During the war, Sartre was drafted into the army, but did very little actual fighting. After the fall of France, he was captured by the Germans but was eventually released. In early 1941, Sartre formed an underground resistance group Socialisme et Liberté, composed largely of students and teachers. In addition to Sartre and Beauvoir, the organization counted Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Dominique Desanti, and Jean Kanapa among its members. Socialisme et Liberté also maintained contacts with Trotskyists such as Raymond Marrot, Louis Rigaudias, and David Rousset. Sartre even reached out to the Communists—who were still not actively resisting—but they were not interested. The PCF viewed Socialisme et Liberté as a potential threat and wondered if Sartre was a spy. Considering the group’s small size (fifty members) and eclectic politics, the members of Socialisme et Liberté spent more time writing pamphlets than engaged in active resistance.227 However, the German invasion of the USSR changed the landscape of the resistance overnight. The Communist Party threw itself into the armed struggle and quickly became the dominant force in the French Resistance. Socialisme et Liberté was completely overshadowed and disbanded by the autumn. For the remainder of the war, Sartre did not participate in another Resistance group or fight with the armed Maquis. As the war continued, Sartre grew to appreciate the brave and dedicated resistance fighters in the Communist Party. However, he noted the PCF did not use its immense prestige to work toward the revolutionary seizure of power. When France was liberated in 1944, the Communists obeyed Stalin’s orders and surrendered their arms to de Gaulle. As Sartre later concluded: “When a so-called revolutionary party with five million armed members or followers refuses to seize power, it can no longer claim to be revolutionary. By 1947, every Frenchman knew that the CP had become a traditional party in a bourgeois state, reformist perhaps, revolutionary certainly not.”228 After the Liberation, Sartre founded Les Temps Modernes, which quickly became one of the foremost political and intellectual journals in France. Among its editorial board were some of France’s most distinguished minds such as Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Aron, Michel Leiris, Albert Ollivier, and Jean Paulhan. While Les Temps Modernes was firmly on the left and rejected anti-communism, the journal itself was independent of the Communists. While the party allowed no dissident voices, Sartre made sure that Les Temps



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Modernes welcomed contributors from the anti-Stalinist left such as Claude Lefort and Victor Serge.229 As the preeminent philosopher of existentialism, Sartre was an intellectual celebrity. That made him into one of the principal targets of the Communists. In 1946, Henri Lefebvre devoted a book to attacking existentialism. Even the Soviet Union viewed Sartre as a formidable adversary. Leningrad party chief Andrei Zhdanov gave a speech where he attacked Sartre and Les Temps Modernes by name as “pimps and depraved criminals” who “are still capable of poisoning the consciousness of the masses.”230 Sartre’s existentialism did offer a challenge to the PCF and Marxism. However, this was not their only point of contention. Sartre also criticized the party from the left. He questioned its subordination to Moscow, reformist domestic role, and its tacit support for the colonial war in Indochina.231 Despite these Communist attacks on him, Sartre extended an open hand. He believed it was necessary to collaborate with the Communists since they commanded the bulk of the working class: Unhappily, these men, to whom we must speak, are separated from us by an iron curtain in our own country; they will not hear a word that we shall say to them. The majority of the proletariat, straight-jacketed by a single party, encircled by a propaganda which isolates it, forms a closed society without doors or windows. There is only one way of access, a very narrow one, the Communist Party.232

Yet Sartre did not believe that the Communists were interested in honest dialogue. He said that anyone who did not unquestionably support them was considered an enemy: And generally it is enough to skim through a piece of Communist writing to pick out at random a hundred conservative procedures: persuasion by repetition, by intimidation, by veiled threats, by forceful and scornful assertion, by cryptic allusions to demonstrations that are not forthcoming, by exhibiting so complete and superb a conviction that, from the very start, it places itself above all debate, casts its spell, and ends by becoming contagious; the opponent is never answered; he is discredited; he belongs to the police, to the Intelligence Service; he’s a fascist. As for proofs, they are never given, because they are terrible and implicate too many people. If you insist upon knowing them, you are told to stop right there and to take someone’s word for the accusation. “Don’t force us to bring them out; you’ll be sorry if you do.” In short, the Communist intellectual adopts the attitude of the staff which condemned Dreyfuss [sic] on secret evidence. . . . For the Stalinist a Trotskyist is an incarnation of evil, like the Jew for Maurras. Everything that comes from him is necessarily bad.233

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Relations between Sartre and the Communists deteriorated further as the divisions in the Cold War hardened. In 1947, the PCF was driven out of the French government due to American pressure. Sartre did not believe in supporting either the United States or the Soviet Union. Instead, Sartre, Rousset, and other members of the non-Stalinist left formed the Rassemblement démocratique révolutionnaire (RDR) as a “third force” independent of the two blocs. As Sartre said in December 1948: “To refuse to choose between the USSR and the US does not mean yielding first to the one, then to the other, letting ourselves be tossed about between them. It means making a positive choice: that of Europe, socialism and ourselves.”234 Despite its early promise, the RDR rapidly fell apart. The organization lacked a clear program, and its members ranged from reformists to revolutionaries. The RDR remained small and never attracted much support from the working class, who remained loyal to the Communists. When the RDR moved in a pro-American direction, Sartre resigned in protest in October 1949. As he told John Gerassi later, the RDR was a “colossal mistake.”235 Ultimately, there was no political space in France for a third force. The Cold War demanded that one take sides. The battle lines of the Cold War were on full display during the Kravchenko trial. This centered around Victor Kravchenko, a Soviet defector, whose book I Choose Freedom (1947) detailed the gulag system and sold a million copies in France. Beauvoir read Kravchenko and described the book as “gripping” and suggested that Les Temps Modernes publish excerpts.236 However, the PCF said I Choose Freedom was a forgery. In response, Kravchenko took the party to trial for libel in 1949. This event was a sensation and later dubbed as the “trial of the century.” Soviet officials were flown into France to denounce Kravchenko, while former gulag inmates defended his account. Kravchenko ended up winning, but the amount of money he received was reduced to a pittance on appeal. To all concerned, the trial was considered a moral victory for the Communists. Inspired by Kravchenko, Sartre’s former RDR comrade Rousset published an appeal condemning Soviet gulags in the right-wing paper Le Figaro. While Les Temps Modernes had denounced the camps in its pages, Sartre believed Rousset had gone too far by reaching out to anti-communists as allies. In January 1950, Les Temps Modernes published “The USSR and the camps” by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in response to the controversy. While the article was primarily written by Merleau-Ponty, Sartre approved every single word. They began by acknowledging the truth about the existence of concentration camps in the Soviet Union: What we are saying is that there is no socialism when one out of every twenty citizens is in a camp. It is no good answering here that every revolution has its



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traitors, or that insurrection does not bring an end to class struggle, or that the USSR could not defend itself against the enemy within, or that Russia could not begin industrializing without violence. . . . If there are ten million concentration camp inmates—while at the other end of the Soviet hierarchy salaries and standard of living are fifteen to twenty times higher than those of free workers—then quantity changes into quality. The whole system swerves and changes meaning; and in spite of nationalization of the means of production, and even though private exploitation of man by man and unemployment are impossible in the U.S.S.R., we wonder what reasons we still have to speak of socialism in relation to it.237

While they recognized that Rousset was telling the truth about the gulag, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty refused to take his side. He had chosen to publish in the right-wing press, which hypocritically ignored similar camps in Greece and Spain. Furthermore, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty did not agree with Rousset’s argument that the gulag proved an identity between fascism and communism: If we conclude from this that communism is fascism, we fully gratify, after the event, the wish of fascism, which has always been to hide the crisis of capitalism and the humane inspiration of Marxism. No Nazi was ever burdened with ideas such as the recognition of man by man, internationalism, classless society. It is true that these ideas find only an unfaithful bearer in today’s communism, and that they act more as its decor than its motive force. The fact remains that they are still part of it.238

They concluded that the Soviet Union, despite its deformities, remained on the side of the working class: “Whatever the nature of the present Soviet society may be, the U.S.S.R. is on the whole situated, in the balance of powers, on the side of those who are struggling against the forms of exploitation known to us.”239 To side against the socialist camp was to side with the bourgeoisie. A few months later, the outbreak of the Korean War brought widespread fears that France would soon be overrun by the Red Army. Beauvoir recalled a tense conversation between Sartre and Camus on the subject: “Have you thought about what will happen to you when the Russians get here?” [Camus] asked Sartre, and then added with a great deal of emotion: “You mustn’t stay!” “And do you expect to leave?” asked Sartre. “Oh, I’ll do what I did during the German occupation.” It was Loustanau-Lacau, always one for secret societies, who started the idea of “armed and clandestine resistance”; but we no longer argued freely with Camus. He was too quickly carried away by anger, or at least by vehemence. Sartre’s only objection was that he would never accept having to fight the proletariat. “You mustn’t let the proletariat become a mystique,” Camus answered sharply; and he complained of the French workers’

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indifference to the Soviet labour camps. “They’ve got enough trouble without worrying about what’s going on in Siberia,” was Sartre’s reply. “All right,” said Camus, “but all the same, they haven’t exactly earned the Legion of Honor!” Strange words: Camus, like Sartre, had refused the Legion of Honor, which their friends in power had wanted to give them in 1945. We felt a great distance between us. Yet it was with real warmth that he urged Sartre: “You must leave. If you stay it won’t be only your life they’ll take, but your honor as well. They’ll cart you off to a camp and you’ll die. Then they’ll say you’re still alive, and they’ll use your name to preach resignation and submission and treason; and people will believe them.”240

Events escalated, and Sartre rapidly dropped any remaining pretension to political neutrality. In December 1951, he supported the PCF’s campaign against the court-martial of Henri Martin, a sailor who refused to fight in Indochina. The following month, the American general Matthew Ridgway arrived in France to assume command of NATO forces, which sparked protests from the Communist Party. These demonstrations were violently put down by the police. In the aftermath, PCF leader Jacques Duclos was arrested and charged with espionage. The only proof offered in court were homing pigeons that Duclos kept in his garden. The Ridgway Riots were Sartre’s defining moment in becoming a Communist Party fellow traveler: These sordid, childish tricks turned my stomach. There may have been more ignoble ones, but none more revelatory. An anti-Communist is a rat. I couldn’t see any way out of that one, and I never will. People may find me very naive, and for that matter, I had seen other examples of this kind of thing which hadn’t affected me. But after ten years of ruminating, I had come to the breaking point, and only needed that one straw. In the language of the Church, this was my conversion . . . When I precipitously returned to Paris, I had to write or suffocate. Day and night, I wrote the first part of Les Communists et la Paix.241

Published in July 1952, The Communists and the Peace was Sartre’s most overtly pro-communist work. Even though he believed it was necessary to defend the party from anti-communists, he consciously wrote it as a fellow traveler. Sartre’s main argument centers around the relationship between the party and the working class. Due to state repression and exploitation at the workplace, workers were kept atomized and at the mercy of capital. These weaknesses were clearly on display during the Ridgway Riots when the proletariat was largely absent. Yet Sartre argued that the working class still had untapped revolutionary potential:



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The French worker maintains a rather exceptional intransigence. Perhaps he doesn’t know what Revolution is: but what can you call this irreconcilable violence, this contempt for opportunism, this Jacobin tradition, this catastrophism which puts its hope in a violent upheaval rather than in indefinite progressive steps?242

Sartre claimed that the proletariat could only act as a class through a party. In order for the proletariat to realize its true potential, it needed the Communist Party. In effect, Sartre said that the Communist Party was the incarnation of the French proletariat: That the bourgeoisie should triumph is normal; but I address myself once again to all those who claim to be Marxists and anti-communists at the same time and who rejoice today because the working class “is in the process of detaching itself from the C.P.” I remind them of these words of Marx which they have read, reread and commented on a hundred times: “The proletariat can act as a class only by shaping itself into a distinct political party,” and I ask them to come to their own conclusions: whatever they think of the “Stalinists,” even if they think the masses are mistaken or deluded, what maintained their cohesion, what assured the efficacy of their action, if not the C.P. itself? The “proletariat shaped into a distinct political party”—what is it in France today if not the totality of the workers organized by the C.P.? If the working class wants to detach itself from the Party, it has only one means at its disposal: to crumble into dust.243

Not only did the working class represent the future, but only the Communist Party could speak and act in its name. This meant communist actions— whether strikes, demonstrations, or election campaigns—all served the historical interests of the proletariat. Therefore, it was impossible to support the working class and oppose the communist party. According to Sartre, left-wing critics of the PCF such as Lefort and Trotskyists like E. Germain (pseudonym of Ernest Mandel) found themselves outside both the working class and history: “You, who are not situated in history, who are lost in your dreaming lucidity, you emerge from it suddenly and you look at your hero from without.”244 Furthermore, Sartre defended the PCF’s support for the Soviet Union, since it represented the future of socialism: historically the proletariat’s chance, its “example” and the source of “the power of revolutionary penetration” is the U.S.S.R. Moreover, the Soviet Union is in itself a historic value to be defended, since it is the first State that without yet achieving socialism “contains its premises.” For these two reasons, the revolutionary who lives in our epoch, and whose task is to prepare for the Revolution with the means at hand and in his historical situation, without losing himself in

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the apocalyptic hopes which will ultimately turn him away from action, must indissolubly associate the Soviet cause with that of the proletariat.245

Almost right away, The Communists and the Peace came under heavy criticism from a host of left-wing critics. Ernest Mandel offered the most substantive response from the Fourth International. He said Sartre’s polemic worshipped accomplished facts; since he identified himself with the existing reality this meant apologetics for Stalinist bureaucrats, blind faith, and opportunism. This fatalism meant that Sartre “considers that an objective situation can evolve in only a single direction,” when in fact “there are historical periods in which an objective situation can evolve in two diametrically opposed directions.”246 Mandel argued that if a communist party is going to succeed, then it needs a correct leadership, which in turn requires the active participation of the working class. None of this existed in Sartre’s conception of party and class. Ultimately, Mandel said that Sartre made a case for the proletariat submitting to the counterrevolutionary PCF apparatus. Merleau-Ponty offered his own response to The Communists and the Peace in Adventures of the Dialectic with an entire chapter devoted to criticizing Sartre’s “ultra-bolshevism.” According to Merleau-Ponty, Sartre’s Marxism lacked a historical framework or any understanding of the dialectic, which left the working class without any concrete grounding in material reality: “The proletariat is suspended above history, it is not caught in the fabric, it cannot be explained, it is cause of itself, as are all ideas.”247 Since Sartre cannot comprehend the mediations between the workers and their environment, he is only left with his existentialist and individualistic theory of subjectivity. Merleau-Ponty argues that this is just pure voluntarism: “praxis is thus the vertiginous freedom, the magic power that is ours to act and to make ourselves whatever we want.”248 Merleau-Ponty says that Sartre’s role as a fellow traveler of the PCF prevented him from criticizing the party or taking action in the world: Today, as yesterday, commitment is action at a distance, politics by proxy, a way of putting ourselves right with the world rather than entering it; and, rather than an art of intervention, it is an art of circumscribing, of preventing, intervention. There is thus no change in Sartre in relation to himself, and today, in a different world, he draws new consequences from the same philosophical intuition.249

This was a retreat from Sartre’s earlier position in What is Literature? As Merleau-Ponty put it: “Yesterday literature was the consciousness of the revolutionary society; today it is the Party which plays this role.”250 Thus, Merleau-Ponty argued that The Communists and the Peace was not advocating a philosophy of commitment since consciousness is identified



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with the party. This meant that fellow travelers like Sartre were left playing inactive roles in history. A true philosophy of commitment would begin by asking whether proletarian revolution is possible in France today and undertaking an analysis of the Soviet Union. Merleau-Ponty claimed Sartre is unable to do this since he believed that consciousness stood above history: Ultimately it is perhaps the notion of consciousness as a pure power of signifying, as a centrifugal movement without opacity or inertia, which casts history and the social outside, into the signified, reducing them to a series of instantaneous views, subordinating doing to seeing, and finally reducing action to “demonstration” or “sympathy”—reducing doing to showing or seeing done.251

Sartre never directly replied to Merleau-Ponty’s criticism. However, Beauvoir (with Sartre’s support) wrote “Merleau-Ponty and Pseudo-Sartreanism,” where she accused Merleau-Ponty of deliberately misunderstanding Sartre and misattributing positions to him. For example, a great deal of Beauvoir’s essay consists of refuting claims that Sartre was an extreme subjectivist: “Sartre’s philosophy has never been a philosophy of the subject.”252 She argues that Sartrean existentialism holds that consciousness is partly created by the world. To make this point, Beauvoir quotes from Being and Nothingness: “In my world there exist objective meanings which are immediately given to me as not having been brought to light [mises au jour] by me.”253 Beauvoir says that Merleau-Ponty willfully ignored the limitations that Sartre placed on his own theory of freedom, which was not an act of “absolute creation,” but was limited by the historical situation.254 In other words, Sartre says there are objective structures that limit individual praxis. Beauvoir’s reply not only engages with Merleau-Ponty, but argues for the portions of Sartre’s existentialism that are compatible with a larger philosophy of history. This proved to be a crucial stepping stone to Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. While the PCF did not agree with every single line of The Communists and the Peace, they recognized that France’s most famous intellectual was siding with them. This was an incredible gain for the party. The fierce polemics between Sartre and the Communists that characterized the early postwar years were forgotten. Sartre became a fixture at communist events in France. In 1954, Sartre made his first visit to the USSR and published a series of uncritical articles praising Soviet life (and ignoring the gulag). That same year, Sartre became vice president of the France-USSR Association. While he gained a new audience, Sartre’s work suffered during his fellow-traveling years. Among the casualties was the play Dirty Hands (1948). This was a story about a communist intellectual (Hugo), who is instructed to assassinate a party leader (Hoederer), whom the party considered a traitor. Hugo doubts his mission and believes that the party should not

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taint itself by summarily executing someone. Despite these doubts, Hugo ends up killing Hoederer in a fit of jealous rage after seeing him embrace his wife, Jessica. Later, the party rehabilitates Hoederer, and he is commemorated as a hero. A major question in Dirty Hands is the tension between purity and the necessity of dirtying one’s hands for the greater good. As Hoederer says repeating St. Just: “Well, I have dirty hands. Right up to the elbows. I’ve plunged them in the filth and blood. But what do you hope? Do you think you’ll govern innocently?”255 One of Sartre’s inspirations for Dirty Hands was the assassination of Trotsky. According to Beauvoir: “The subject had been suggested to him by the assassination of Trotsky. I had known one of Trotsky’s ex-secretaries in New York; he told me that the murderer, having managed to get himself hired as Trotsky’s secretary, had lived for a long time by his victim’s side, in a house fanatically well guarded.”256 The PCF and many critics considered the play to be anti-communist for its cynical portrayal of communists. In 1952, when Sartre was attending the USSR-sponsored World Peace Congress in Vienna, Dirty Hands was scheduled to be performed. Sartre preemptively decided to forbid the performance and said all future productions should only happen when they were approved by the local Communist Party.257 Sartre effectively agreed to banning his own work. Sartre’s fellow traveling ended abruptly in 1956 with the Khrushchev Report and the Hungarian Revolution. In a series of articles later published as The Ghost of Stalin, Sartre unambiguously condemned the Soviet invasion. He pointed out how flimsy the arguments were in defense of the USSR’s actions. He noted that the Communists said fascists had taken over Budapest, so it was necessary for Soviet tanks to intervene. He compared these excuses to the anti-communist worldview of James Burnham, since both believed that the contented masses were easily manipulated by outside agitators: Those who come to speak to us, eyes bulging, about the diabolical power of the fascists, I must compare to Mr. Burnham, the well-known specialist on anticommunism. I had quite a laugh reading his books. He showed prosperous workers, tied to the employers by a community of interests, by a reciprocity of respect; it was happiness. Then, suddenly, issuing forth from hell, a handful of Communists appeared, and incited discord everywhere. Nothing more was needed to throw a happy people into despair. I’ve found these same arguments from Communist writers: the only difference is that they didn’t make me laugh.258

Sartre was opposed to both the Communist and anti-communist accounts of the Hungarian Revolution as either a fascist putsch or a popular uprising. He ended up occupying a “centrist” position that was equidistant from the two: “Even the Communists admit today that it was not a question of a simple



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fascist putsch; only the Trotskyists hold that the entire insurrection had a progressive character. The truth lies somewhere between these two equally gratuitous and schematic affirmations. Somewhere, but where?”259 What that answer was, Sartre did not know. When it came to the Soviet Union, Sartre’s position was equally muddled. He appeared to adopt the orthodox Trotskyist position that the ruling bureaucracy was not an exploiting class: “It is absurd to pretend that this bureaucracy exploits the proletariat and that it is a class, or then words no longer have meaning.”260 He was fully aware of the immense cost of Stalinism, but believed the USSR remained socialist despite it: “Socialism in a single country,” or Stalinism, does not constitute a deviation from socialism: it is the long way around which is imposed on it by circumstances. The rhythm and evolution of this defensive construction are not determined by the consideration alone of Soviet resources and needs but also by the relations of the U.S.S.R. with the capitalist world, in a word, by circumstances external to socialization which oblige it constantly to compromise its principles.261

Contrary to C. L. R. James, who said “Sartre is a complete Trotskyite,” the arguments in The Ghost of Stalin did not align with Trotsky. Rather, Sartre’s position dovetailed closely with Communists such as Lukács and Hobsbawm, who defended Stalinism on the grounds of historical necessity.262 Sartre’s assessment of the French Communist Party was not all that different from those of its internal reformers, since he believed that the party could still be salvaged: Our program is clear: through and beyond a hundred contradictions, internal struggles, massacres, de-Stalinization is in process; it is the only effective policy which serves, in the present moment, socialism, peace, the rapprochement of the workers’ parties: with our resources as intellectuals, read by intellectuals, we will try to help in the de-Stalinization of the French Party.263

He did not advance a revolutionary program, but merely said that the PCF should renew its commitment to the popular front: “Only a Popular Front can save our country.”264 When it came to colonialism, Sartre found himself quite distant from the PCF. He condemned the party’s moderation on the ongoing Algerian War and its refusal to lead the workers in militant antiwar actions: “The workers are disgusted by the Algerian war but they are left without instructions, without marching orders. The C.P. harvests what it has sown: when it needs the masses, it no longer finds them.”265 Even though Sartre’s response to 1956 was marked by equal parts of boldness, confusion, and trepidation, he had finally stepped out of the PCF’s

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straitjacket. Now that Sartre was no longer bound by Communist dogmatism, he felt free to develop his own Marxism. The first fruit of his labors was Search for a Method (1957), where Sartre proclaimed: “Far from being exhausted Marxism is still very young, almost in its infancy; it has scarcely begun to develop. It remains, therefore, the philosophy of our time. We cannot go beyond it because we have not gone beyond the circumstances which engendered it.”266 Sartre argued that in both the USSR and France, Marxism had lost its critical spirit when it was subordinated to the needs of the party. In contrast to Stalinism, Sartre advocated an open Marxism that would embrace the freedom of the individual. Furthermore, he wished to revive Marxism as a critical method and a philosophy of revolutionary action. These efforts to revitalize Marxism and make history intelligible culminated in the magisterial two-volume work, Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960 and 1985).267 In the first volume, Sartre explained that human history was dominated by the struggle against scarcity: “But to say that our History is a history of men is equivalent to saying that it is born and developed within the permanent framework of a field of tension produced by scarcity.”268 He argued that the struggle of human beings to overcome scarcity led to the development of the division of labor, the struggle between classes, etc. Sartre said that this struggle against scarcity meant that other people will always be viewed as the enemy, since they want to gain control of scarce resources: “thus man is objectively constituted as non-human, and this non-humanity is expressed in praxis by the perception of evil as the structure of the Other.”269 Throughout the Critique, Sartre attempted to move beyond his earlier individualism and explain the historical basis for collective action. To that end, he makes an important distinction between a series and a group. He says that a series is composed of people who are gathered together, but with each of them pursuing their own individual goals without regard for anyone else. An example of a series would be shoppers at a mall or a line at a bus stop. While a series is a plurality of solitudes, a group possesses a shared collective purpose. Examples of a group can be the masses storming the Bastille or workers on strike. Sartre says that to overcome scarcity, a series must develop into a fused group such as a revolutionary party. To stay together, a fused group must institutionalize itself, even at the cost of its original revolutionary ardor. Institutionalization reaches its highest form in the state, which rules through violence and manipulation with the fused group reduced back to seriality and passivity. This leads Sartre to conclude that the democratic rule of the working class is impossible: “And the reason why the dictatorship of the proletariat (as a real exercise of power through the totalisation of the working class) never occurred is that the very idea is absurd, being a bastard compromise between the active, sovereign group and passive seriality.”270



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In the unfinished second volume, Sartre proceeded to deal with “real history” notably the fate of the Russian Revolution. According to Sartre, Marxism was designed for the working class of industrial Europe, but found its way to backward Russia where it was forced to adapt itself to new circumstances. The Bolshevik Revolution created a division between the successful Soviet Republic and the impotent Western proletariat: “the proletarian Revolution in the USSR, instead of being a factor in the liberation and emancipation of Europe’s working-class masses—as it should have been—was achieved at the cost of plunging them into relative impotence.”271 This was a situation unforeseen by classical Marxism and what emerged “was first and foremost that of a monstrosity: an underdeveloped country passing without transition from the feudal order to socialist forms of production and ownership.”272 The Russian Revolution posed a sharp contradiction between the universal and the particular in Marxism. This came out clearly in the struggle between Trotsky and Stalin during the 1920s. According to Sartre, Trotsky viewed Marxism as an “abstract universal” and claimed that the USSR could only survive by spreading revolution to the capitalist West: “In a single dialectical movement, the Revolution had to be perpetually intensified by transcending its own objectives (radicalization) and progressively extended to the entire universe (universalization).”273 At the other end, Stalin represented a “practical particularism” since he believed in constructing socialism in one country: “His task was to adapt directives to the concrete situation and the real men who would do the work.”274 Sartre said that between universalism and particularity or Trotsky and Stalin lay a choice: “It was necessary to choose between disintegration and deviation of the Revolution.”275 In the end, Sartre sided with Stalin’s detour, arguing that under him the USSR consolidated its gains and aided the international proletariat: Stalin himself, despite innumerable acts of treachery, did still help the Chinese, Spanish, etc. to the extent he believed possible without provoking armed intervention by the West; while Trotsky himself, in exile, entrusted the proletariats of the entire world with the task of defending the USSR in the event of its coming under attack, because—despite everything—the foundations of socialism did exist there.276

However, Sartre claimed that Stalin was an “iron-fisted opportunist” who would “compromise on everything, in order to preserve that fundamental basis” of the revolution.277 The threat from abroad meant that the goal of the revolution was industrialization and collectivization at a rapid pace. The need to quickly develop the economy meant there was no time to gradually educate the masses, so Stalin resorted to coercion: “It was through the struggle against the peasants that the dictatorship was to be radicalized, everywhere and in

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all sectors, as Terror. It was on the basis of that Terror—which necessitated a consolidated power—that the improvised hierarchy was gradually to become ossified.”278 Stalin ended up creating a new bureaucratic apparatus that ruled over the proletariat through terror. While Sartre sought to exorcise the ghost of Stalin in Critique of Dialectical Reason, he ended up making the case for Stalinism’s inevitability. The failure of Sartre’s Marxism can be found in his ahistorical understanding of scarcity since he believes that humanity is permanently dominated by it. Sartre manages to take the traits of humanity under capitalism and transforms them into ahistorical absolutes. According to István Mészáros, when Sartre claims that scarcity can never be overcome, he forgets history itself: Scarcity must therefore be understood in its appropriate historical context, as parasitic on human history, and not as the postulated ground and pessimistically hypostatized causal foundation of history. To say with Sartre that history is “born and developed within the permanent framework of a field of tension produced by scarcity” can only absolutize the relative and relativize the absolute. For, in the latter sense, the just quoted Sartrean assertion subordinates to the hopeless vicissitudes of demonically magnified and likewise interiorized scarcity the absolute imperative of instituting a viable alternative to the established mode of social metabolic reproduction at the present critical juncture of history. By contrast, in the framework adopted by Sartre, the gloom of insuperably absolutized anti-historical scarcity as the ground of historical intelligibility, wedded to the earlier quoted perverse reciprocity between “myself and the Other in me,” is overwhelming.279

Furthermore, Sartre accepts the existentialist and individualist premise that humanity will always see the “other” as the enemy. This means that Sartre was pessimistic about the success of any collective group being able to overthrow capitalism. While he recognizes the need for a fused group, he appeals to the individual. As Mészáros says, Sartre looks to “the only historical subject he can appeal to and try to enlist for the fights he is engaged in is the isolated particular individual.”280 This means Sartre lacks a rational basis for solidarity and proletarian revolution, leaving him with only moral appeals to an isolated monad. These existentialist ontological categories mean that Sartre is forced to conclude that a world of freedom is unlikely to be created. Ultimately, in the case of Sartre’s Critique, his endeavor to find reason in history ends up justifying any Stalinist irrationalism as a cosmic inevitability. Yet Sartre felt that he was still obligated to struggle against injustice. The Critique was written in the shadow of the Algerian War when Sartre and the Communists were on opposing sides. The Communists saw themselves as French communists and defenders of the republican tradition. Originally, the PCF had even voted in favor of sending French troops into Algiers. For



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Sartre, the brutality of the Algerian War showed the hypocrisy of France’s official humanist and universalist proclamations of liberté, égalité, and fraternité when measured against the reality of colonialism. As Sartre eloquently said in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth: First, we must face that unexpected revelation, the strip-tease of our humanism. There you can see it, quite naked, and it’s not a pretty sight. It was nothing but an ideology of lies, a perfect justification for pillage; its honeyed words, its affectation of sensibility were only alibis for our aggressions. A fine sight they are too, the believers in non-violence, saying that they are neither executioners nor victims. Very well then; if you’re not victims when the government which you’ve voted for, when the army in which your younger brothers are serving without hesitation or remorse have undertaken race murder, you are, without a shadow of doubt, executioners. And if you chose to be victims and to risk being put in prison for a day or two, you are simply choosing to pull your irons out of the fire. But you will not be able to pull them out; they’ll have to stay there till the end. Try to understand this at any rate: if violence began this very evening and if exploitation and oppression had never existed on the earth, perhaps the slogans of non-violence might end the quarrel. But if the whole regime, even your non-violent ideas, are conditioned by a thousand-year-old oppression, your passivity serves only to place you in the ranks of the oppressors.281

During the 1960s, Sartre’s attention was largely focused on struggles in the Third World. He welcomed the Cuban Revolution and traveled to Cuba to meet Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. After Guevara’s death in 1967, Sartre hailed him as “not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age.”282 Sartre was also a dedicated opponent of the Vietnam War. In 1966, he and Beauvoir joined the Russell Tribunal composed of Bertrand Russell, Isaac Deutscher, Stokely Carmichael, and others who stated that the United States was committing war crimes and genocide in Vietnam. When France erupted into revolt in 1968, Sartre welcomed the movement. He rebuked those standing against the students, especially the Communist Party: “In particular, as long as the French Communist Party is the largest conservative party in France, and as long as it has the confidence of the workers, it will be impossible to make the free revolution that was missed in May.”283 Sartre was also a supporter of Prague Spring and denounced the Warsaw Pact invasion as an act of Soviet imperialism. Reflecting on Czechoslovakia, he rejected the argument that Stalinism was a historical necessity: “it is impossible to reach socialism by starting from Stalinism, for one will never reach anything except something whose instrument has been Stalinism.”284 In place of Stalinist historical necessity, Sartre embraced an anarchist ethos of revolt. This was evidenced by his support for the French Maoists. Sartre

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admitted that he knew very little about Maoism or the Cultural Revolution. What he found attractive in Maoism was its revolutionary voluntarism: “Violence, spontaneity, morality: for the Maoists these are the three immediate characteristics of revolutionary action.”285 By 1975, Sartre abandoned any identification with Marxism, favoring libertarian socialism instead. In the end, Sartre’s Marxism could not rationally sustain any revolutionary optimism, leaving him with nothing beyond pure faith: It is impossible to find a rational basis for revolutionary optimism, since what is is the present reality. And how can we lay the foundations for the future reality? Nothing allows me to do it. I am sure of one thing—that we must make a radical politics. But I am not sure that it will succeed, and there faith enters in.286

Jean-Paul Sartre spent his life earnestly dealing with questions of political engagement. He struggled with the relation between freedom and responsibility, ends and means, and the meaning of Stalinism and socialism. He hoped to unfreeze Marxism from Stalinism, but he concluded that the goal of human freedom would end in the Dialectics of Saturn. Ultimately, Sartre had no choice except to reject the Marxist idea of reason in history. NOTES 1. Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (New York: Verso, 1976), 96. 2. Bertolt Brecht, Journals 1934–1955 (New York: Routledge, 1996), 230. Uncapitalized in the original. 3. Quoted in Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923–1950 (London: Heinemann, 1973), 14. 4. Quoted in Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 162. 5. Quoted in Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 226. 6. Quoted in Detlev Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 303–4. Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge and Oxford, 1999), 252. 7. Quoted in Wiggershaus 1995, 162. 8. Ibid. Apparently, Adorno’s silence on Soviet politics even carried over into his dreams. In October 1944, Adorno dreamt he was at a party where Trotsky was present, and Adorno wanted to speak to him, but was told that “one should not talk politics.” Theodor W. Adorno, Dream Notes (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 31. 9. Adorno and Benjamin 1999, 267.



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10. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “Towards a New Manifesto,” New Left Review 65 (September–October 2010): 49. 11. Ibid., 41. Interestingly in 1956, Adorno says he wants to develop a “Leninist Manifesto,” stating: “Thinking in their [the Russians’] writings is more reified than in the most advanced bourgeois thought. I have always wanted to rectify that and develop a theory that remains faithful to Marx, Engels and Lenin, while keeping up with culture at its most advanced.” Ibid., 59. 12. Max Horkheimer, “The Jews and Europe,” in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner (New York: Routledge, 1989), 78. 13. See Wiggershaus 1995, 257. In 1946, Horkheimer praised the Soviet Union as being free of anti-Semitism: “At present the only country where there does not seem to be any kind of anti-Semitism is Russia. This has a very obvious reason. Not only has Russia passed laws against anti-Semitism, but it really enforces them; and the penalties are very severe.” See Max Horkheimer, “Sociological Background of the Psychoanalytic Approach,” in Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease, ed. E. Simmel (New York: International Universities Press, 1946), 3. 14. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (New York: Verso, 2005), 113. 15. Ibid., 55. 16. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), xiv. Enzo Traverso follows Adorno and Horkheimer (along with Benjamin) in criticizing Marxist orthodoxy on the Enlightenment and embracing romantic anti-capitalism. In his writing on fascism, Traverso upholds The Dialectic of Enlightenment’s argument that instrumental reason was responsible for fascism. See Enzo Traverso, Understanding the Nazi Genocide: Marxism after Auschwitz (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 74–75; Traverso 2017, 275–76. Drawing as much on Arendt as Adorno, Traverso blamed modernity for the Holocaust. He also considered communism and Stalinism to be instrumental reason gone wild. See Enzo Traverso, Revolution: An Intellectual History (New York: Verso, 2021), 76–77 and 443–44. Strangely, Traverso wrote the introduction to a recent rerelease of Lukács’s Destruction of Reason, a work that defends the Enlightenment against fascist irrationalism. Traverso explicitly rejects Lukács’s defense of Marxism, the Enlightenment, and progress, arguing instead for embracing romantic anti-capitalism and the jargon of postmodernity. See Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (New York: Verso, 2021), lviii. 17. Jay 1973, 259. 18. Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 242. For Bloch’s changing position on utopia and Bolshevism, see Domenico Losurdo, “History of the Communist Movement: Failure, Betrayal, or Learning Process?” Nature, Society, and Thought 16, no. 1 (January 2003): 46–47. 19. Ernst Bloch, “A Jubilee for Renegades,” New German Critique 4 (Winter 1975): 24. 20. Ernst Bloch, “Discussing Expressionism,” in Aesthetics and Politics (London: New Left Books, 1977), 15.

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21. Bloch 1975, 18. 22. Quoted in Oskar Negt and Zach Zipes, “Bloch, the German Philosopher of the October Revolution,” New German Critique 4 (Winter 1975): 6. 23. Vincent Geoghegan, Ernst Bloch (New York: Routledge, 1995), 19. Two other members of the Frankfurt School, Karl Wittfogel and Henryk Grossman, defended the trials. Geoghegan argues that it was likely Bloch who made the remark about the Institute members being swine. 24. Jan Robert Bloch and Caspers Rubin, “How Can We Understand the Bends in the Upright Gait?” New German Critique 45 (Autumn 1988): 26. Bloch said during the Stalin years that Marxism had become “nothing more than a connection between quotations.” See Cat Moir, Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism: Ontology, Epistemology, Politics (Boston: Brill, 2020), 127. For Bloch’s sympathy for Gomułka, see Michael Landmann, “Talking with Ernst Bloch: Korčula, 1968,” Telos 25 (1975): 177. 25. Ernst Bloch, On Karl Marx (New York: Verso, 2018), 163–64. 26. “On Violence,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 251–52. 27. “To Gerhard Scholem September 16, 1924,” in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 246–51. 28. “To Gerhard Scholem [ca. May 20–25, 1925],” in ibid. 268; “To Gerhard Scholem January 14, 1926,” in ibid. 288; “To Gerhard Scholem May 29, 1926,” in ibid., 300. 29. “To Jula Radt December 26, 1926,” in ibid., 310. 30. “Moscow,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2: Part 1: 1927– 1930, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999a), 45. 31. Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 53. 32. “To Gerhard Scholem April 17, 1931,” in Benjamin 1994, 377. 33. “To Gerhard Scholem July 20, 1931,” in ibid., 381. 34. “To Max Horkheimer October 16, 1935,” in ibid., 508–9. 35. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 3: 1935–1938, ed. Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 120–22. 36. Although Trotsky’s name was later removed. See “Author as Producer,” in Benjamin 1999b, 781. 37. “To Gretel Adorno Spring 1932,” in Benjamin 1994, 393. 38. “To Max Horkheimer August 31, 1936,” in ibid., 533. 39. “Diary Entries, 1938,” in Benjamin 2002, 338. 40. Ibid., 340. 41. Erdmut Wizisla, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: The Story of a Friendship (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 63–64.



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42. “Note on Brecht,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 4: 1938–1940, ed. Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 159. 43. “To Karl Thieme—March 27, 1938,” in Benjamin 1994, 553. 44. “To Fritz Lieb—July 9, 1937,” in ibid., 542. 45. “On the Concept of History,” in Benjamin 2003, 393. 46. Ibid., 396. [translated differently]. For commentary on Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, see Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ (New York: Verso, 2006) and Doug Enaa Greene, “Benjamin, Blanqui and the Apocalypse,” Red Wedge, September 13, 2016. http:​//​www​ .redwedgemagazine​.com​/online​-issue​/benjamin​-blanqui​-and​-the​-apocalypse0. 47. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre (London: Methuen, 1974), 23–24. 48. Quoted in Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), 24. For background on Korsch, see Doug Enaa Greene,” Karl Korsch’s Philosophical Bolshevism,” LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal. http:​ //​links​.org​.au​/karl​-korsch​-philosophical​-bolshevism; See also Stephen Parker, Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 254 and Bertolt Brecht, Bertolt Brecht’s Me-ti Book of Interventions in the Flow of Things (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 48. At the beginning of the Cold War, Korsch believed it was necessary to critically support the Soviet Union against the United States. See “Karl Korsch to Bertolt Brecht, April 18, 1947,” in Karl Korsch: Revolutionary Theory, ed. Douglas Kellner (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977), 289. 49. Quoted in Parker 2014, 262. 50. Bertolt Brecht, “As the Fascists grew ever stronger in Germany . . .” in The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht, ed. David Constantine (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), 443–44. 51. Brecht 2016, 143. Brecht uses the following abbreviations: To-tsi = Trotsky, Ni-en = Stalin, Ka-meh = Marx. He describes Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution on ibid. 138–39. 52. Benjamin 1999b, 477. See also Wizisla 2009, 28–30. While living in California in 1942, Brecht read Trotsky’s book on Lenin “with great pleasure.” See Brecht 1996, 273. 53. Parker 2014, 254. 54. Quoted in ibid., 318–19. 55. “Resolution,” in Brecht 2019, 672. 56. Quoted in Jean-Michel Palmier, Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America (New York: Verso, 2006), 403. 57. Bertolt Brecht, “Why are the Petty Bourgeoisie and Even the Proletariat Threatening to Turn to Fascism?” in Brecht on Art and Politics, ed. Tom Kuhn and Steve Giles (New York: Methuen, 2003), 192. For Comintern orthodoxy on fascism, see George Dimitrov, The Fascist Offensive and the Unity of the Working Class (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2020). 58. Quoted in Brecht 2003, 124. However, Brecht wrote to the Soviet authorities on behalf of other victims: “Brecht wrote more letters on behalf of other victims of this ‘rough’ Soviet justice. He appealed to the banker Max Warburg and to Jewish help

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groups to come to the rescue of his friend Hermann Borchardt, who had been teaching history and philosophy in Minsk.” See Parker 2014, 362. 59. Bertolt Brecht, “To Lion Feuchtwanger August 1937,” in Bertolt Brecht Letters 1913–1956, ed. John Willett (New York: Routledge, 1990), 261. 60. “On the Moscow Trials,” in Brecht 2003, 184. 61. See “On My Attitude to the Soviet Union” ibid., 182–83. 62. Sidney Hook, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 492–93. 63. Žižek 2008, 88. 64. “To those born after,” in Brecht 2019, 736. 65. Bertolt Brecht, Galileo (New York: Grove Press, 1966), 123–24. 66. “Diary Entries,” in Benjamin 2002, 336. 67. Quoted in Parker 2014, 394. 68. Quoted in ibid., 392–93. 69. Quoted in Tucker and Cohen 1965, 657–58. 70. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929–1940 (New York: Verso, 2003c), 300. 71. “Diary Entries,” in Benjamin 2002, 338. 72. Ibid., 336. 73. Ibid., 337. 74. “To Bernard von Brentano January 1935,” in Brecht 1990, 194. 75. “The farmer’s address to his ox,” in Brecht 2019, 699. “Diary Entries,” in Benjamin 2002, 338. 76. “Diary Entries,” in Benjamin 2002, 338. 77. Brecht 1996, 34–35. Lowercase in the original. 78. Quoted in Parker 2014, 569. 79. “The Solution,” in Brecht 2019, 1013. 80. “On the Death of Stalin,” in Brecht 2003, 324. 81. “On the Criticism of Stalin,” in ibid., 341. For more about the influence of Maoism on Brecht, see Anthony Squiers, “Contradiction and Coriolanus: A Philosophical Analysis of Mao Tse Tung’s Influence on Bertolt Brecht,” Philosophy and Literature 37, no. 1 (April 2013): 239–46. 82. Herbert Marcuse, “The Problem of Violence and the Radical Opposition,” in The Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse Volume III: The New Left and the 1960s, ed. Douglas Kellner (New York: Routledge, 2005), 71. 83. Herbert Marcuse, “Marxism and Revolution in an Era of Counterrevolution,” in The Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse Volume VI: Marxism, Revolution and Utopia, ed. Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce (New York: Routledge, 2014), 429. 84. See Herbert Marcuse, “The Foundations of Historical Materialism,” in The Essential Marcuse: Selected Writings of Philosopher and Social Critic Herbert Marcuse, ed. Andrew Feenberg and William Leiss (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007), 72–114. 85. Herbert Marcuse, “The Struggle against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State,” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (London: MayFly Books, 2009), 30. 86. “Philosophy and critical theory,” in ibid., 105.



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87. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (London: Routledge, 1955), 411. In Nazi-occupied France, the philosopher Jean Hyppolite taught an anti-fascist reading of Hegel: Beginning in 1941, Hyppolite taught the “premiere preparatoire” at the Paris Lycées Henri IV and Louis-le-Grand. He elaborated his commentary on the Phenomenology, which was to become Genesis and Structure, in common with his students in Khagne during the war and the Nazi occupation. His anti-Fascist readings of Hegel, and statements such as that for Hegel, “insofar as we seek the Universal, we are all Jews,” marked many of the students. John Heckman, “Hyppolite and the Hegel Revival in France,” Telos 16 (1973): 135. 88. Marcuse 1955, 437. 89. Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 149. As the Cold War ramped up, Marcuse wrote a lengthy and detailed report on world communism for the State Department in 1949. See Herbert Marcuse, “The Potentials of World Communism,” in Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort, ed. Raffaele Laudani (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 591–610. 90. Herbert Marcuse and Martin Heidegger, “An Exchange of Letters,” in The Heidegger Controversy. A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 164. 91. See “Introduction” in The Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse Volume I: Technology, War and Fascism, ed. Douglas Kellner (New York: Routledge, 1998), 27. 92. Herbert Marcuse, Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 109–10. 93. Ibid., 124. 94. Ibid., 174. Even after Brezhnev halted Khrushchev’s reforms, Marcuse continued to believe that the Soviet system was reformable: “I recognize that the socialist base of these countries contains the possibility of development toward liberalization and ultimately toward a free society.” See “Marcuse Defines his New Left Line,” in Marcuse 2005, 116. However, he condemned the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, as “one of the most reprehensible acts in the history of Socialism” Ibid., 104. 95. Marcuse 1958, 41. 96. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (New York: Routledge, 2002), 23. 97. Ibid., 260. See also Herbert Marcuse, “An Essay on Liberation,” Marxists Internet Archive. https:​//​www​.marxists​.org​/reference​/archive​/marcuse​/works​/1969​/ essay​-liberation​htm and Herbert Marcuse, Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 85. 98. Quoted in Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (New York: Verso, 2016), 346. On Marcuse’s thoughts about being compared to Marx and Mao, see “Interview with Marcuse,” in Marcuse 2005, 133. For more on Adorno and students see ibid., 341–48. On Horkheimer and the Vietnam War, see Peter M. R.

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Stirk, Max Horkheimer: A New Introduction (Boston: Barnes & Noble Books, 1992), 179–80. 99. Marcuse 2002, 261. For a lengthy Marxist-Leninist criticism of Marcuse, see Jack Woddis, New Theories of Revolution: A Commentary on the Views of Frantz Fanon, Régis Debray and Herbert Marcuse (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 279–394. The analysis of Marcuse in this section draws heavily upon István Mészáros, The Power of Ideology (New York: Zed Books, 2005), 129–45. 100. For background on Lukács’s activities in Soviet Hungary, see Doug Enaa Greene, “Lenin’s Boys: A Short History of Soviet Hungary,” Cosmonaut, August 21, 2020. https:​//​cosmonaut​.blog​/2020​/08​/21​/lenins​-boys​-a​-short​-history​-of​-soviet​ -hungary​/. 101. V. I. Lenin, “Kommunismus,” in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 31 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), 165 (henceforth LCW). See also Georg Lukács, “The Question of Parliamentarism,” in Tactics and Ethics, 1919–1929: The Questions of Parliamentarianism and Other Essays (New York: Verso, 2014), 53–63. 102. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), xiv. 103. Quoted in István Mészáros, Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995), 389. 104. Lukács 1971, xxiii. 105. “Moses Hess and the Problems of Idealist Dialectics,” in Lukács 2014, 188. 106. Ibid., 203. This section draws heavily on Michael Löwy, Georg Lukács: From Romanticism to Bolshevism (London: New Left Books, 1979), 194–96. See also Lukács 1971, xxviii. 107. Georg Lukács, Goethe and His Age (London: Merlin Books, 1968), 138–39. Harrison Fluss says that Žižek also uses a similar method to Lukács in criticizing Trotsky as a utopian dreamer and justifying the “realism” of Stalinist Thermidorianism. While Žižek praises Lenin and Trotsky’s fight against Stalinism, he is unable to comprehend the problem of Stalinism or able to understand how the program of the Left Opposition represented a genuine alternative. See Harrison Fluss, “The Prophet Avec Lacan,” Historical Materialism. https:​//​www​.historicalmaterialism​.org​/book​ -review​/prophet​-avec​-lacan. 108. Lukács 1968, 137–38. 109. Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (New York: New York Review Books, 2012), 226. 110. Lukács 1971, xxx. For background see Paul Le Blanc, “Spider and Fly: The Leninist Philosophy of Georg Lukács,” Historical Materialism 21, no. 2 (2013): 47–75. 111. Lukács 1971, xxviii–xxix. 112. Isaac Deutscher, “György Lukács and ‘Critical Realism,’” in Marxism in Our Time (Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1971a), 291. 113. Peter Osborne, ed., A Critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals (New York: Routledge, 1996), 50. It was not until after Stalin’s death that The Young Hegel was printed in the Eastern Bloc.



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114. Lukács 2021, 5. For a defense of Marxism and the Radical Enlightenment, see the six-part series by Doug Greene and Harrison Fluss. In particular, see Doug Enaa Greene and Harrison Fluss, “Enlightenment Betrayed: Jonathan Israel, Marxism, and the Enlightenment Legacy,” Left Voice, July 14, 2020. https:​//​www​.leftvoice​ .org​/enlightenment​-betrayed​-jonathan​-israel​-marxism​-and​-the​-enlightenment​-legacy​ /; Doug Enaa Greene and Harrison Fluss, “Marx and the Communist Enlightenment,” Left Voice, August 4, 2020. https:​//​www​.leftvoice​.org​/marx​-and​-the​-communist​ -enlightenment​/; Doug Enaa Greene and Harrison Fluss, “Enlightenment Betrayed,” Left Voice, August 16, 2020. https:​//​www​.leftvoice​.org​/enlightenment​-betrayed​/; In addition, see Harrison Fluss and Landon Frim, “Reason is Red: Why Marxism Needs a Philosophy,” Spectre Journal, August 29, 2022. https:​//​spectrejournal​.com​/reason​ -is​-red​/. 115. Georg Lukács, Record of a Life: An Autobiographical Sketch (New York: Verso, 1983), 19. In a polemic with Simone de Beauvoir in 1947, Lukács claimed that the trials “increased the chances of a Russian victory at Stalingrad.” Quoted in Löwy 1979, 206. 116. Lukács 1983, 107. In 1967 postscript to Lenin, Lukács compared to Trotsky to Danton: “Even the great orators of the workers’ revolution, such as Lassalle and Trotsky, have certain Dantonesque features.” Georg Lukács, Lenin: A Study of the Unity of His Thought (New York: Verso, 2009), 90. 117. Georg Lukács, The Struggle of Humanism and Barbarism (1943). Marxists Internet Archive. https:​//​www​.marxists​.org​/archive​/Lukács​/works​/1943​/humanism​ -barbarism​/index​.htm. 118. Lukács 1983, 113. See also Georg Lukács, The Culture of People’s Democracy Hungarian Essays on Literature, Art, and Democratic Transition, 1945–1948 (Boston: Brill, 2013). 119. Georg Lukács, “Reflections on the Cult of Stalin,” in Marxism and Human Liberation, ed. E. San Juan Jr. (New York: Delta Book, 1973), 62. Isaac Deutscher categorized Palmiro Togliatti as located on the “right” of the International Communist Movement. See Isaac Deutscher, “Three Currents in Communism,” in Ironies of History: Essays on Contemporary Communism (Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1971a), 69. 120. Quoted in Mészáros 1995, 508. 121. Löwy 1979, 206. 122. “In the meantime, in Hungary and other countries, events have occurred which demand a rethinking of certain problems connected with Stalin’s legacy. In the bourgeois world (and, in some instances, in the socialist countries) this reaction has taken the form of a revision of the theories of Marx and Lenin. It is no doubt correct to see in revisionism the main danger facing Marxism-Leninism at present. But we will be helpless in the face of this danger unless we are prepared to submit Stalin’s own dogmatism, and that of the Stalinist period, to the most relentless criticism. We must demonstrate the underlying pattern common to both, and the similarity of method. And we must isolate those elements in both which are contradictory to Marxism-Leninism. Only on the basis of such criticism, as with Rosa Luxemburg’s complex legacy, can Stalin’s positive achievements be seen in perspective.” See Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (London: Merlin Books, 1963), 10.

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123. “Reflections on the Cult of Stalin,” in Lukács 1973, 64. 124. Lukács 1983, 129. 125. Ibid. 130. 126. Ibid. 132–33. While defying his jailers in Romania, Adorno wrote a critical review of Lukács’s The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. While acknowledging that “Lukács’s personal integrity is above all suspicion,” Adorno also said in a taste of irony, “that here is a man who is desperately tugging at his chains.” See Adorno in Bloch, et. all 1977, 175. 127. Quoted in Mészáros 1995, 412. For his opinions on the student movement. “The Twin Crises” in Lukács 1973, 321. 128. Georg Lukács, The Process of Democratization (Albany: State University of New York, 1991), 166. 129. Quoted in Löwy 1979, 211. 130. Mészáros 1995, 414. 131. Quoted in ibid., 283. 132. It is beyond the scope of this work to look at how revisionists and opportunists have misunderstood Gramsci. To learn more about Gramsci’s communist politics, see Doug Enaa Greene, “Gramsci for Communists,” LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal, June 22, 2015. http:​//​links​.org​.au​/node​/4474. 133. Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971), 191. See also Frank Rosengarten, The Revolutionary Marxism of Antonio Gramsci (Boston: Brill, 2014), 25. 134. Quoted in Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), lii. 135. See ibid., lviii and Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921– 1929 (New York: Verso, 2003b), 411. 136. Antonio Gramsci, “Gramsci to Togliatti, Terracini and others (9 February 1924),” in Selections from Political Writings (1921–1926) (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1978), 192. When Gramsci was in Vienna with Victor Serge, he voiced doubts about the flush of new recruits into the Soviet Party. Known as the Lenin Levy, these were inexperienced workers whom the bureaucracy welcomed into the Communist Party after Lenin’s death. According to Gramsci: “How much were these proletarians worth, if they had had to wait for the death of Vladimir Ilyich before coming to the Party?” See Serge 2012, 219. 137. “Gramsci’s Intervention at the Como Conference,” in Gramsci 1978, 252–53. 138. Rosengarten 2014, 36. 139. “The Party’s First Five Years,” in Gramsci 1978, 387–90. 140. “On the Situation in the Bolshevik Party,” in ibid. 430. 141. Ibid., 432. 142. Ibid. 143. Ibid., 433. 144. Ibid., 437–38. 145. E. H. Carr, Foundations of a Planned Economy 1926–1929: Volume 3, no. 2‌‌‌‌‌ (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 537. 146. Gramsci 1971, lxxxix.



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147. Giuseppe Fiori, Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary (New York: Verso, 1970), 253. 148. See Alistair Davidson, Antonio Gramsci: An Intellectual Biography (Boston: Brill, 2017), 268–69. 149. Paolo Spriano, Antonio Gramsci and the Party: The Prison Years (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1979), 71. 150. See also ibid., 129, and Emanuele Saccarelli, Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism: The Political Theory and Practice of Opposition (New York: Routledge, 2008), 32. 151. Gramsci 1971, 147 and 265. 152. Ibid., 238–39. 153. Ibid., 239. Gramsci is quoting Marx’s essay The Eastern Question written on 14 September 1855. 154. Ibid., 255. 155. Ibid., 256. 156. Ibid., 256–57. This analysis on “black parliamentarism” follows Saccarelli closely, see Saccarelli 2008, 81–82. Gramsci was informed of the arrest of Zinoviev and Kamenev in 1935 but refrained from making any judgment on them. Although he did note that their confessions should not be taken as proof of guilt. See Spriano 1979, 97–98. 157. Gramsci 1971, 155. 158. Antonio Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916–1935 (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 244. 159. Ibid., 245. 160. Gramsci 1971, 240–41. 161. Quoted in Rosengarten 2014, 39. 162. Gramsci 1971, 241. 163. Ibid., 238. 164. Ibid., 237–38. 165. Perry Anderson, The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci (New York: Verso, 2020), 137. 166. Saccarelli 2008, 84. However, Gramsci also condemned Trotsky’s views on the militarization of labor as a form of “Bonapartism.” See Gramsci 1971, 301. Gramsci did not accept the accusation that Trotsky was a fascist agent. And the claim that he called Trotsky “the whore of fascism” was a falsehood created by Togliatti. See Spriano 1979, 139. 167. Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2002), 47. 168. Ibid., 56. 169. Ibid., 68 and 218. 170. Ibid., 323. 171. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914– 1991 (London: Little, Brown, 1994), 160. In line with the popular front and collective security, Hobsbawm believed it was necessary to roll back the Spanish Revolution. See Eric Hobsbawm, “In the Era of Anti-Fascism 1929–45,” in How to Change

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the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 274. 172. Quoted in Richard J. Evans, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 149. 173. Eric Hobsbawm, “Eric Hobsbawm Speaks on His New Memoir,” UCLA. https:​//​web​.international​.ucla​.edu​/asia​/article​/7315. 174. Quoted in Evans 2019, 225. 175. Maurice Cornforth, ed., Rebels and Their Causes: Essays in Honour of A.L. Morton (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1978), 30. 176. Eric Hobsbawm, The New Century (London, Little, Brown, 2000), 158–59. The Age of Extremes is the major exception to this. 177. Hobsbawm 2002, 206. 178. Quoted in Evans 2019, 343. For the Trotsky remark, see ibid. 345–47. 179. Hobsbawm 2002, 202. 180. Ibid., 218. 181. Ibid., 254. 182. Ibid., 353. 183. Ibid. 264; Eric Hobsbawm, “The Forward March of Labour Halted?” Marxism Today (September 1978): 279–86. Bryan Palmer says that Hobsbawm’s analysis was meant to develop a popular front to defeat the onslaught of Thatcherism and neoliberalism, but it inevitably failed: “And so the old popular frontist went to the table, shook the dice in his fist and—dropped a snake eyes.” See Bryan Palmer, “Hobsbawm’s Politics: The Forward March of the Popular Front Halted,” in Marxism and Historical Practice: Interventions and Appreciations Volume II (Brill: Boston, 2015), 271. 184. Hobsbawm 2002, 268. Kinnock considered Hobsbawm to be his favorite Marxist. See Evans 2019, 517. 185. Hobsbawm 2002, 279. 186. Hobsbawm 1994, 379. 187. Eric Hobsbawm, “The Late Show - Eric Hobsbawm - Age of Extremes (24 October 1994),” tw19751, Interview. [accessed November 12, 2021]. https:​//​www​ .youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=Nnd2Pu9NNPw​&t​=911s. 188. Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir (New York: The New Press, 1993), 196. 189. Quoted in Gregory Elliott, Althusser: The Detour of Theory (Boston: Brill, 2006), 215. 190. Louis Althusser, For Marx (New York: Verso, 2005), 30. This line from Althusser was paraphrased in the Godard pro-Maoist film La Chinoise (1967). For more on that movie, see Doug Enaa Greene and Shalon van Tine, “A Fight on Two Fronts: On Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise,” Cosmonaut, August 28, 2019. https:​//​ cosmonaut​.blog​/2019​/08​/28​/a​-fight​-on​-two​-fronts​-on​-jean​-luc​-godards​-la​-chinoise​/. 191. Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism (London: New Left Books, 1976), 80–81. 192. Louis Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists (New York: Verso, 2012), xviii.



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193. Althusser 1996, 76. Losurdo takes issue with Althusser’s anti-humanism and the whole idea of an epistemological break in Marx: The continuity in Marx’s development is clear, and what Althusser described as an epistemological break is simply the transition to a discourse in which moral condemnation of the reifying processes inherent in bourgeois society, and of its anti-humanism, is expressed more concisely and elliptically. See Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History (New York: Palgrave, 2016a), 82. 194. Jacques Rancière, Althusser’s Lesson (New York: Continuum, 2011), 24. 195. Althusser 2005, 169 and Elliott 2006, 19–20. 196. Althusser 1993, 199 and Elliott 2006, 194. 197. Louis Althusser, “Althusser in 1966: Cultural Revolution, Party, State and Conjuncture,” Kasama Project, April 19, 2010. https:​//​mikeely​.wordpress​.com​/2010​ /04​/19​/althusser​-on​-the​-cultural​-revolution​/; Doug Enaa Greene, “Louis Althusser and the Chinese Cultural Revolution,” The Blanquist, December 31, 2017. http:​//​ blanquist​.blogspot​.com​/2017​/12​/louis​-althusser​-and​-chinese​-cultural​.html. 198. Althusser, “Althusser in 1966.” 199. Althusser 1976, 92. Other radicals such as Macciocchi saw Maoism as a genuine anti-Stalinist movement: Two other points seem to me essential for the history of the Marxist-Leninist workers’ movement. The first is that the Chinese have offered concrete and sustained criticism of Stalinist policy and have constantly followed a policy which is different from, and often in opposition to, the one which Stalin attempted to impose upon Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Revolution. History has taken it upon itself to show the serious errors of this Stalinist line. The second point is that Chinese critique of Stalinism is from the left (a concept which Althusser elaborates in an as yet unpublished text), whereas all Western criticism, including that of certain leftist or Trotskyite groups, is from the right. See Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, Daily Life in Revolutionary China (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 486–87. Italics in the original. See also Rossana Rossanda, “Mao’s Marxism,” Socialist Register 8 (1971): 53–80. Althusser’s writings also provided inspiration to the work of the Maoist Charles Bettelheim, who wrote an extensive study of the USSR in the mid-1970s: La Transition vers l’économie socialiste and Calcul économique et formes de propriété. These two books also bear the marks of two great social and political experiences — the Chinese and Cuban revolutions, which I have followed closely since 1958 and 1960, respectively — and also of the revival of Marxist thought in France. This revival has been connected especially with the increasingly widespread influence of Mao Tse-tung’s ideas and has been affected by the

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break made by L. Althusser and his associates with the economistic interpretation of Marx’s Capital. See Charles Bettelheim, Class Struggles in the USSR: The First Period 1917–1923 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), 48. Althusser himself praised Bettelheim’s work in his introduction to Dominique Lecourt, Proletarian Science? The Case of Lysenko (London: New Left Books, 1977), 8. See also Doug Enaa Greene, “Charles Bettelheim and the Socialist Road,” LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal, July 7, 2016. http:​//​links​.org​.au​/node​/4745. 200. Althusser 1976, 91. See also Elliot 2006, 238–39. 201. Althusser 1976, 90. See also Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism (New York: Verso Books, 2014), 215. Some followers of Althusser such as Philip Corrigan, Harvie Ramsay, and Derek Sayer argue that it was not just Stalin, but all Bolsheviks, including Lenin and Trotsky who suffered from an “economist” deviation that advocated developing the productive forces. They claim that only Mao escaped this Bolshevik problematic. In particular see Philip Corrigan, Harvie Ramsay, and Derek Sayer, Socialist Construction and Marxist Theory: Bolshevism and Its Critique (London: MacMillan Press Ltd, 1978); Philip Corrigan, Harvie Ramsay, and Derek Sayer, For Mao: Essays in Historical Materialism (London: MacMillian Press Ltd, 1979). 202. Althusser 1976, 77. In 1976, Althusser declared his support for striking Polish workers and the Workers Defense Committee in Poland. See Perry Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism (New York: Verso, 1980), 111. 203. Lecourt 1977, 12. In the late 1970s, Althusser even signed an appealing for the rehabilitation of Bukharin. See Richard Day, ed., N. I. Bukharin: Selected Writings on the State and the Transition to Socialism (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1982), xxi. 204. David Caute, The Year of the Barricades: A Journey Through 1968 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 250. For the best book on May 1968, see Daniel Singer, Prelude to Revolution: France in May 1968 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017). 205. Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi, Letters from inside the Italian Communist Party to Louis Althusser (London: New Left Books, 1973), 317. 206. Ibid., 309. 207. Rancière 2011, 71. This echoes Edward Thompson’s claim that “In short, Althusserianism is Stalinism reduced to the paradigm of Theory. It is Stalinism at last, theorised as ideology.” See Edward P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory (London: Merlin Press, 1978), 182. 208. Louis Althusser, “On the Twenty-Second Congress of the French Communist Party,” New Left Review 104 (July–August 1977): 10. See also Louis Althusser, “The Historic Significance of the 22nd Congress,” in Étienne Balibar, On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (London: Verso, 1977), 193–212. 209. Anderson 1980, 113. See also Ernest Mandel’s discussion of Althusser’s essay: “Mandel on Althusser, Party and Class,” Marxists Internet Archive. https:​//​ www​.marxists​.org​/archive​/mandel​/1982​/xx​/althusser​ htm. 210. Louis Althusser, “What Must Change in the Party,” New Left Review 109 (May–June 1978): 26.



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211. Ibid., 38. 212. Ibid., 39. 213. Ibid., 28 and 42. Althusser himself was not uncritical of the popular front experience. See Althusser 2014, 223. 214. Quoted in Elliott 2006, 291. 215. “Paul Nizan,” in Sartre 1965, 158–59. 216. Quoted in John Gerassi, Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of His Century, Volume 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 120. 217. Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life (New York: Penguin, 1965), 236. 218. Ibid., 33. 219. Ibid., 135. 220. Ibid. 221. Ibid., 288. For popular front see Jean-Paul Sartre and John Gerassi, Talking with Sartre: Conversations and Debates (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 86. 222. Quoted in Gerassi 1989, 134. 223. Beauvoir 1965, 356. 224. Ibid., 374. 225. Paul Nizan, Aden, Arabie (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 11–12 and 51. 226. Ibid., 50. 227. Ian Birchall, Sartre Against Stalinism (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 36–40. See also Ian Birchall, “Sartre and Gauchisme,” European Studies 19, no. 1 (March 1989): 21–53. 228. Quoted in John Gerassi, “The Comintern, the Fronts, and the CPUSA,” in New Studies in the Politics and Culture of US Communism, ed. Michael E. Brown, Randy Martin, Frank Rosengarten and George Snedeker (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993), 84. Beauvoir argues that both she and Sartre saw the goal of the resistance as restoring democracy, not fighting for socialism. See Beauvoir 1965, 536–37. 229. Birchall 2004, 112–15. 230. Andrei Zhdanov, “On Literature, Music and Philosophy,” Marxists Internet Archive. https:​//​www​.marxists​.org​/subject​/art​/lit​_crit​/zhdanov​/lit​-music​-philosophy​ .htm. 231. Birchall 2004, 52–53. 232. Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 253. 233. Ibid., 257. In “Materialism and Revolution” Sartre said that Trotskyists were not objectively police agents. See Jean-Paul Sartre, The Aftermath of War (New York: Seagull, 2008a), 185–87. 234. Quoted in Birchall 2004, 100. See also Ian Birchall, “Neither Washington nor Moscow? The rise and fall of the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire,” Journal of European Studies vol. 29, issue 4 (Dec. 1999): 365–404. 235. Sartre and Gerassi 2009, 152. 236. Simone de Beauvoir, Letters to Sartre (New York: Little Brown, 1990), 445–46.

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237. Merleau-Ponty 1964, 264–65. See also Sartre 1965, 264. 238. Merleau-Ponty 1964, 268. 239. Ibid., 269. 240. Beauvoir 1977, 231–32. 241. Sartre 1965, 287–88. 242. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Communists and the Peace (New York: George Braziller, 1968a), 85. 243. Ibid., 88. 244. Ibid., 295. 245. Ibid., 12. 246. Ernest Mandel, “Ernest Mandel—Letter to Jean-Paul Sartre. A Reply to ‘The Communists and Peace,’” IIRE International Institute for Research and Education. https:​//​www​.iire​.org​/node​/962. 247. Merleau-Ponty 1973, 169. 248. Ibid., 132. 249. Ibid., 193. 250. Ibid. 158. 251. Ibid. 198. 252. “Merleau-Ponty and Pseudo-Sartreanism,” in Beauvoir 2021, 207. Sartre himself identified with Beauvoir’s reply in Sartre 1965, 318. 253. “Merleau-Ponty and Pseudo-Sartreanism,” in Beauvoir 2021, 211. 254. Ibid., 226 and 231. I also draw upon Ronald Aronson, “Vicissitudes of the Dialectic: From Merleau-Ponty’s Adventures of the Dialectic to Sartre’s Second Critique,” in The Debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, ed. Jon Stewart (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 249–50 and Kevin Gray, “Beauvoir Contra Merleau-Ponty: How Simone de Beauvoir’s Defense of Sartre Prefigured “The Critique of Dialectical Reason,” Simone de Beauvoir Studies vol. 23 (2006–2007): 75–81. 255. Jean-Paul Sartre, Dirty Hands (New York: Vintage, 1989), 218. 256. Beauvoir 1977, 149. See Birchall 2004, 85. The secretary in question was the jazz musician Bernard Wolfe who was not present when Trotsky was assassinated. 257. Ronald Aronson, Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 167. 258. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Ghost of Stalin (New York: George Braziller, 1968b), 14. 259. Ibid., 22. 260. Ibid., 71. 261. Ibid., 78. 262. C. L. R. James, “10 February 1957 letter,” in The C.L.R. James Reader, ed. Anna Grimshaw (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992), 267–68. 263. Sartre 1968b, 142. 264. Ibid., 128. 265. Ibid., 135. 266. Sartre 1968c, xxxiv. 267. The second volume was published posthumously in French in 1985 with an English translation appearing in 1991.



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268. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Critique of Dialectical Reason Volume I: Theory of Practical Ensembles (New York: Verso, 2004), 125. 269. Ibid., 132. 270. Ibid., 662. 271. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Critique of Dialectical Reason Volume II: The Intelligibility of History (New York: Verso, 2006), 105. See also Ronald Aronson, “Sartre and the Dialectic: The Purposes of Critique II,” Yale French Studies (1985): 96. 272. Sartre 2006, 107. 273. Ibid., 100. 274. Ibid. 275. Ibid., 129. 276. Ibid., 106. 277. Ibid., 101. 278. Ibid., 176. 279. István Mészáros, The Work of Sartre: Search for Freedom and the Challenge of History (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012), 248. 280. Ibid. 281. Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 24–25. 282. Quoted in Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Grove Press, 1997), 446. 283. Jean-Paul Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism (New York: Verso, 2008b), 60. Beauvoir recalled that Sartre had not expected the protests of May 1968. See Simone de Beauvoir, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 371. 284. Quoted in Birchall 2004, 213. For his remarks on Soviet imperialism, see Sartre 2008b, 119. 285. For his positive view of French Maoism, see Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Maoists in France,” in Sartre in the Seventies: Interviews and Essays (London: Andre Deutch, 1978), 162–71. However, Sartre was still in dialogue with Trotskyists, even if he rejected their approach to elections. In 1973, he argued that the Trotskyist Ligue communiste révolutionnaire should fuse with the Maoists. See Birchall 1989, 44. Sartre admitted that he did not know much about Maoism: “I regard myself as very inadequately informed about the Cultural Revolution.” See Sartre 2008b, 57. 286. “Self-Portrait at Seventy,” in Sartre 1978, 84–85.

Chapter Six

From Proletarian Jacobinism to Stalinist Thermidor

A. PROLETARIAN JACOBINISM As already discussed, the international communist movement viewed Stalinism in vulgar Hegelian terms as the realization of reason in history. Napoleon riding on horseback was replaced by Stalin in a tank as the world-spirit. Yet there were communists, such as Leon Trotsky, who did not see Stalinism as the natural evolution of Bolshevism, but as historically unnecessary. To explain how Stalinism overcame Bolshevism, Trotsky sought answers in the fate of the French Revolution.1 Trotsky was not alone in turning to 1789 for theoretical inspiration. A long history of Russian radicals from Alexander Herzen to Pyotr Tkachev looked to the French Revolution, Jacobinism, and the Enlightenment. Western socialists also looked at Russia through the prism of the French Revolution. Surveying czarist Russia in 1885, Friedrich Engels happily observed: What I know, or believe I know, of the situation in Russia leads me to think that that country is nearing its 1789. Revolution is bound to break out some time or other; it may break out any day. In conditions such as these the country is like a charged mine, all that is needed is to apply the match. . . . In a place where the situation is so tense, where revolutionary elements have accumulated to such a degree, where the economic situation of the vast mass of the people becomes daily more impossible, where every degree of social development is represented, from the primitive commune to modern big industry and high finance, and where all these contradictions are forcibly pent up by an unheard-of despotism—a despotism increasingly unacceptable to a younger generation in which are combined the nation’s intelligence and dignity—in such a place 1789, once launched, will before long be followed by 1793.2 205

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For Engels, the Romanov dynasty was in a similar state to the French Bourbons. The Russian Empire was a mass of contradictions as dying feudalism clashed with the emergent powers of capitalism. The Russian ancien régime was too intransigent and incapable of fundamental reforms. Below the czar, the peasantry, workers, and the bourgeoisie all found themselves in opposition. The first generation of Russian Marxists agreed with Engels that Russia would follow in the footsteps of the French Revolution. They eagerly expected to play the parts of Robespierre, Marat, Saint-Just, and Danton in this forthcoming revolution. The father of Russian Marxism, Georgi Plekhanov, seemed to be an early contender for the role of Robespierre. He believed that a Russian 1789 was on the near horizon. However, Plekhanov did not think the Russian bourgeoisie possessed the same heroism and revolutionary fervor as its French ancestors. He said that the Russian bourgeoisie was too weak and cowardly to lead the struggle against czarism. That task fell to the urban proletariat. Just as the Jacobins were not merely a faction of the radical bourgeoisie, but led the sansculottes and peasantry, Plekhanov believed that the proletariat must play a similar role by leading all the oppressed against the Romanovs. As Plekhanov declared at the centenary of the French Revolution in 1889: “the revolutionary movement in Russia will triumph only as a working-class movement or else it will never triumph!”3 For the working class to play this historical role, Plekhanov said they needed a political organization modeled on the Jacobins. In 1900, Plekhanov, Lenin, and Julius Martov set up the journal Iskra to provide the ideological nucleus for this proletarian Jacobin party. At the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party held in 1903, supporters of Iskra commanded an overwhelming majority. Their speeches at the congress were filled with Jacobin intransigence. At one point, Plekhanov said: “Every democratic principle must be considered not by itself, abstractly, but in relation to that which may be called the fundamental principle of democracy, namely salus populi suprema lex. Translated into the language of the revolutionist, this means that the success of the revolution is the highest law.”4 A split developed at the congress between the “hards” led by Lenin and the “softs” led by Martov. This split would later be consummated in the creation of separate parties known to history as the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. In the course of the Russian Revolution, these two factions would prove analogous to the earlier division in France between the Jacobins and the Girondists. As Trotsky wrote later: “Already in the days of Iskra, Plekhanov wrote that in the world socialist movement two different tendencies were developing and it was an open question whether the revolutionary struggles of the twentieth century might lead to a break between the Social Democratic ‘Mountain’ and the Social Democratic Gironde.”5 For a brief moment, Plekhanov found

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himself in the ranks of Lenin’s “hards,” but he did not stay long. As he said: “I cannot fire against my own comrades. Better a bullet in the brain than a split . . . There are times when even the autocracy has to give in.”6 Ultimately, Plekhanov lacked the fortitude needed to play Robespierre’s part. Almost right away, Lenin’s opponents accused him of possessing Jacobin and dictatorial tendencies. Speaking of Lenin, Plekhanov declared: “Of such stuff the Robespierres are made.”7 The Menshevik leader Alexander Potresov said something similar: “Lenin alone embodied the phenomenon, rare everywhere but especially in Russia, of a man of iron will, inexhaustible energy, combining a fanatical faith in the movement, in the cause, with an equal faith in himself.”8 The Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg accused Lenin of creating a centralized Jacobin-Blanquist organization that was alien to the tradition of social democracy: “Such centralism is a mechanical transposition of the organisational principles of Blanquism into the mass movement of the socialist working class.”9 Yet it was the young Leon Trotsky, then close to Menshevism, who was the loudest in his condemnation of “Maximilien Lenin.” In Our Political Tasks, Trotsky said that social democracy and Jacobinism were diametrically opposed. He prophesized that Lenin’s Jacobin party would end up stifling internal democracy by creating a dictatorship: “In the internal politics of the Party these methods lead, as shall be seen below, to the Party organisation ‘substituting’ itself for the Party, the Central Committee substituting itself for the Party organisation, and finally the dictator substituting himself for the Central Committee.”10 Lenin himself did not hide his admiration for Jacobinism. He considered the epithet to be a badge of honor that all revolutionaries should aspire to. Responding to their polemics, Lenin said the “softs” were Girondin opportunists who would betray the revolution: These “dreadful words”—Jacobinism and the rest—are expressive of opportunism and nothing else. A Jacobin who wholly identifies himself with the organisation of the proletariat—a proletariat conscious of its class interests—is a revolutionary Social-Democrat. A Girondist who sighs after professors and high-school students, who is afraid of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and who yearns for the absolute value of democratic demands is an opportunist.11

However, Lenin viewed Bolshevism not as a mere repetition of Jacobinism, but its continuation in the shape of Proletarian Jacobinism. He argued for a dialectical development and deepening of Jacobinism’s rational characteristics. Therefore, he rejected Jacobin elitism and voluntarism as irrational and outmoded, but took what was rational in Jacobinism, namely the need for revolutionary theory, leadership, mass mobilization, organization, discipline,

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and—if need be—terror. These characteristics formed the basis of Lenin’s Proletarian Jacobinism that would challenge the czarist autocracy.12 When the 1905 revolution began, Russian social democrats looked back to 1789 for lessons on strategy and tactics. The Mensheviks, particularly Plekhanov and Martov, argued that a bourgeois revolution was the immediate task in Russia. They followed the French model literally, claiming that since the bourgeoisie was the leading force in the revolution, that the workers should not raise any radical demands to frighten them. Lenin accused the “Girondists of contemporary Russian Social-Democracy” of acting like the “representatives of the liberal bourgeoisie, [who] wish to settle accounts with the autocracy gently, in a reformist way.”13 Lenin also saw the parallels between the two revolutions. He agreed with the Mensheviks that Russia was facing its bourgeois revolution, but argued that it was the working class who would play the leading role, not the bourgeoisie. The capitalists were too tied up materially and politically with the czar and scared of organizing the proletariat. Therefore, it fell to the workers to remove czarism in a revolutionary way: “If the revolution gains a decisive victory—then we shall settle accounts with tsarism in the Jacobin, or, if you like, in the plebeian way.”14 Lenin noticed another Russian similarity to the French Revolution in that social democrats were divided between moderates and radicals: By our parallel we merely want to explain that the representatives of the progressive class of the twentieth century, the proletariat, i.e., the Social-Democrats, are divided into two wings (the opportunist and the revolutionary) similar to those into which the representatives of the progressive class of the eighteenth century, the bourgeoisie, were divided, i.e., the Girondists and the Jacobins.15

Lastly, there was Trotsky, who was in agreement with both Lenin and Martov that 1905 was Russia’s bourgeois revolution. Trotsky agreed with Lenin that the working class needed to lead the future struggle for power. However, Trotsky diverged from both the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks by stating the forthcoming revolution would not stop halfway with bourgeois-democracy, but would go further and institute socialist measures. Since the stages of the revolution would proceed from one to the other without interruption, Trotsky said that Russia would undergo a permanent revolution. Alexander Parvus, Trotsky’s co-thinker, believed that the socialist revolution would complete the work begun in 1789: “Political revolution is the foundation of the programme of Social Democrats in all countries—the proletarian revolution that will complete the cycle of revolutions that began with the Great French Revolution.”16

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The storms of 1905 led Trotsky to soften his unremitting hostility to Jacobinism. Like Lenin, he recognized that the opportunists slurred revolutionary social democrats as Jacobins. Trotsky noted that now the cowardly bourgeoisie was frightened of its own Jacobin heritage: Bourgeois hatred of revolution, its hatred towards the masses, hatred of the force and grandeur of the history that is made in the streets, is concentrated in one cry of indignation and fear –Jacobinism! . . . The proletariat, however radically it may have, in practice, broken with the revolutionary traditions of the bourgeoisie, nevertheless preserves them, as a sacred heritage of great passions, heroism and initiative, and its heart beats in sympathy with the speeches and acts of the Jacobin Convention.17

Trotsky accepted that the proletariat and socialism were the rightful heirs to the Jacobin legacy. Twelve years later in 1917, all the camps of the left again looked to the French Revolution as a source of guidance and legitimacy. It seemed that all the actors of that year were ready to don the costumes of 1789 and 1793. Yet the bourgeoisie could no longer play the part of the Jacobins in a proletarian revolution. The supposedly liberal bourgeois Cadets were closer to the Bourbons than the Mountain. The Bolsheviks eagerly put on the Phrygian caps and saw a future revolutionary government following the precedent set by the Committee of Public Safety. As Lenin said: “It is natural for the bourgeoisie to hate Jacobinism. It is natural for the petty bourgeoisie to dread it. The class-conscious workers and working people generally put their trust in the transfer of power to the revolutionary, oppressed class for that is the essence of Jacobinism, the only way out of the present crisis, and the only remedy for economic dislocation and the war.”18 If Lenin was stepping into Robespierre’s shoes, then Trotsky was playing multiple roles. At the Modern Circus, where mass meetings were held, his mesmerizing oratory with its uncompromising revolutionary fire recalled the thundering voices of Marat and Danton. Like Danton, Trotsky found his place beside Lenin-Robespierre. At the First Congress of Soviets in June, Plekhanov claimed for himself the part of Danton by advocating a revolutionary war against Germany. Trotsky chided him as unworthy of the mantle. Deutscher noted that Plekhanov was left uncast in the revolutionary drama: “Little did the sick veteran imagine that it was his younger and much snubbed opponent who was destined for the role of the Russian Danton, destined to make the Russian armies ‘drink the sap of revolution.’”19 As in 1905, the Mensheviks refused to support Jacobin measures for fear of terrifying the bourgeoisie. Rather, they found themselves supporting the liberal Provisional Government and restraining radical actions by the workers.

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Trotsky condemned the Mensheviks for their cowardice and said that they were now in the camp of the counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie: Robespierre, to whom it was not given to acquaint himself with the ideas of Plekhanov, upset all the laws of Sociology, and, instead of shaking hands with the Girondists, he cut off their heads. This was cruel, there is no denying it. But this cruelty did not prevent the French Revolution from becoming Great, within the limits of its bourgeois character. . . . Instead of making the power in its hands the organ for the realization of the essential demands of History, our fraudulent democracy deferentially passed on all real power to the counter revolutionary, military-imperialist clique, and Tseretelli, at the Moscow Conference, even boasted that the Soviets had not surrendered their power under pressure, not after a courageous fight and defeat, but voluntarily, as an evidence of political “self-effacement.” The gentleness of the calf, holding its neck for the butcher’s knife, is not the quality which is going to conquer new worlds.20

Like Lenin, Trotsky understood that the Proletarian Jacobinism of 1917 would not follow the same pattern as its bourgeois ancestor. The age of bourgeois ascendency had passed. The proletariat was now mounting the stage of history. The vision of Proletarian Jacobinism was not the Republic of Virtue, but the Communist Age of Reason. In addition to Jacobinism, the specter of Bonaparte haunted 1917. The moderate socialists recoiled from Jacobinism in part because they believed it would be followed by terror and a Bonapartist dictatorship that would end the revolution. Yet this restoration of law and order was precisely what the Russian bourgeoisie wanted. They searched for a dashing and charismatic figure to play Bonaparte. Among the contenders was the leader of the Provisional Government, Alexander Kerensky. After first imitating the oratory of Marat, Kerensky began dressing in a military tunic and passionately calling for the defense of the revolution against foreign invaders. As Trotsky noted, Kerensky was ill-suited to play Napoleon: “While lacking the force of Bonapartism, Kerenskyism had all its vices. It lifted itself above the nation only to demoralize the nation with its own impotence.”21 A more promising audition for Bonaparte came from General Lavr Kornilov, who appeared to the elite as a savior on horseback. In August and September 1917, Kornilov launched a coup to restore stability. This coup collapsed almost immediately as the soldiers fraternized with revolutionaries. As Trotsky said about Kornilov: “if this was Bonaparte, it was but a pale shadow of him.”22 Despite several auditions, the part of Bonaparte remained uncast in 1917. After taking power in October, the Bolsheviks had brief hopes that they would not need to resort to Terror. Lenin remarked: “Ours is not the French revolutionary terror which guillotined unarmed people, and I hope we shall not go so far.”23 However, the Bolsheviks found themselves in almost the

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same position as the Jacobins. The new Soviet Republic faced civil war, foreign invasion, peasant uprisings, and economic collapse. Lenin and Trotsky understood that the survival of the revolution required Jacobin measures. To lead the new organ of terror known as the Cheka, the Bolsheviks looked for someone in their ranks who was beyond reproach. As Lenin said: “We must find a staunch proletarian Jacobin.”24 They decided that the former Polish noble and political prisoner, Feliks Dzerzhinsky would head the Cheka. Cut in the Jacobin mold, Dzerzhinsky was an advocate of mass terror against enemies of the revolution: We stand for organized terror—this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of Soviet power and of the new order of life. Among such enemies are our political opponents as well as bandits, swindlers, speculators, and other criminals who undermine the foundations of socialist power. In dealing with such persons we show no mercy. We terrorize the enemies of Soviet power in order to suppress crime at its roots.25

Dzerzhinsky was not the only advocate for terror. All the Bolsheviks saw the Red Terror as essential to combat the very real threat of the White Terror. Harkening back to the Incorruptible or Robespierre himself, Trotsky said that the Red Terror was an expression of popular will needed to suppress the bourgeoisie. In Terrorism and Communism (1920), Trotsky told Karl Kautsky and the Girondins of international social democracy: “You do not understand this, holy men? We shall explain to you. The terror of Tsarism was directed against the proletariat. The gendarmerie of Tsarism throttled the workers who were fighting for the Socialist order. Our Extraordinary Commissions shoot landlords, capitalists, and generals who are striving to restore the capitalist order. Do you grasp this . . . distinction? Yes? For us Communists it is quite sufficient.”26 Neither Robespierre nor Saint-Just could have defended the necessity of terror any better than Trotsky. As the founder of the Red Army, Trotsky called upon its soldiers to revive the traditions of Jacobinism as the way to victory: I have referred to the French revolution. Yes, comrades, we need to revive the traditions of that revolution, to the full. Remember how the Jacobins in France spoke, even while the war was still going on, about complete victory, and how the Girondins screamed at them: ‘You talk about what you are going to do after victory: have you then made a pact with victory?’ One of the Jacobins replied: ‘We have made a pact with death.’ The working class cannot be defeated. We are sons of the working class: we have made our pact with death and, therefore, with victory!27

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Like the Revolutionary Armies of the First Republic, the Red Army used a levée en masse to conscript peasants and workers into its service. To ensure the loyalty of the czarist officers recruited by the Red Army, a system of commissars modeled on the French représentant en mission was created. In the end, Trotsky was correct that the Jacobin model helped to ensure the final victory of the Red Army. The Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary opponents of Soviet power warned that Bolshevik methods would lead to the same bloody end as Jacobinism. Martov said the expulsion of the Cadet Party from the Constituent Assembly was the first step on the road to Bonapartism: “Had Danton and Robespierre lived to see that moment when, out of a series of ‘surgical operations’ performed on the Convention and later on the Legislative Assembly, Bonapartism emerged, they might perhaps have bequeathed the advice to Larin not to copy slavishly all the ‘primitives’ of previous revolutions.”28 A year later, Martov declared that the soviets were not heirs to the Paris Commune of 1871, but the Jacobin Terror: “If in their quest for historic analogies, Lenin, Trotsky and Radek had shown a greater knowledge of the past, they would not have tried to tie the genealogy of the Soviets to the Commune of 1871 but to the Paris Commune of 1793–94 which was a center of revolutionary energy and power very similar to the institution of their own time.”29 Naturally, Martov saw soviet power ending with the same tyranny that consumed the Commune of 1793. Abroad, supporters of the Bolsheviks considered them worthy heirs to Robespierre and Jacobinism. In The Russian Revolution (1918), Rosa Luxemburg celebrated Bolshevik daring and courage: “The Bolsheviks are the historic heirs of the English Levellers and the French Jacobins,” they were the “first, those who went ahead as an example to the proletariat of the world; they are still the only ones up to now who can cry with Hutten: ‘I have dared!’”30 Despite her overall solidarity with the Russian Revolution, Luxemburg was not an uncritical supporter. Her support for the Bolsheviks did not prevent Luxemburg from harshly criticizing what she considered to be mistaken and dangerous in Soviet policies. She took issue with the Bolsheviks on their support for national self-determination, land to the tiller, their dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, and curtailment of socialist democracy. On the matter of socialist democracy, Luxemburg said that it required the rule of the working class and not a small elite group in its place: Lenin and Trotsky, on the other hand, decide in favor of dictatorship in contradistinction to democracy, and thereby, in favor of the dictatorship of a handful of persons, that is, in favor of dictatorship on the bourgeois model. . . . [The working class] should and must at once undertake socialist measures in the most

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energetic, unyielding and unhesitant fashion, in other words, exercise a dictatorship, but a dictatorship of the class, not of a party or of a clique-dictatorship of the class, that means in the broadest public form on the basis of the most active, unlimited participation of the mass of the people, of unlimited democracy.”31

Luxemburg warned that socialism could not be instituted by decree, but needed the active participation of the working class in its construction. If democratic freedoms were rolled back, then this would freeze the working class out of political life in favor of minority rule: Without a free and untrammeled press, without the unlimited right of association and assemblage, the rule of the broad masses of the people is entirely unthinkable. . . . Freedom only for supporters of the government, only for the members of one party—however numerous they may be—is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.32

However, Luxemburg recognized that the Bolsheviks were caught in an impossible situation of building socialism in a backward country as they fought off counterrevolutionary armies without any rescue by the Western proletariat. Shortly after the Russian Revolution, she wrote to Luise Kautsky: are you glad about the Russians? Of course they will not be able to maintain themselves in this witches’ Sabbath—not because the statistics show that they are too backward as your clever husband has worked out, but because Social Democracy in the highly developed West consists of a pack of piteous cowards who are prepared to look on quietly and let Russia bleed to death. But such an end is better than “living on for the fatherland”; it is an act of world historical significance whose traces will not be extinguished for aeons.33

Rosa Luxemburg was aware of the material conditions under which the Bolsheviks acted and how they adapted to those pressures. However, she feared that they were rationalizing too many concessions and giving ground too quickly: It would be demanding something superhuman from Lenin and his comrades if we should expect of them that under such circumstances they should conjure forth the finest democracy, the most exemplary dictatorship of the proletariat and a flourishing socialist economy. By their determined revolutionary stand, their exemplary strength in action, and their unbreakable loyalty to international socialism, they have contributed whatever could possibly be contributed under such devilishly hard conditions. The danger begins only when they make a virtue of necessity and want to freeze into a complete theoretical system all the tactics forced upon them by these fatal circumstances, and want to recommend them to the international proletariat as a model of socialist tactics.34

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Yet considering the desperate straits of the Soviet Republic, how could the Bolsheviks not have done otherwise? Voting the Bolsheviks out of power took on a different meaning in civil war conditions. When the Bolsheviks in Baku stepped down, they were subsequently shot by the counterrevolution.35 The only alternative to the Bolsheviks was not an idealized socialist democracy, but a victorious White counterrevolution. As the historian William Chamberlin observed, “the alternative to Bolshevism, had it failed to survive the ordeal of civil war . . . would not have been Chernov, opening a Constituent Assembly . . . but a military dictator, a Kolchak or a Denikin, riding into Moscow on a white horse.”36 Material circumstances dictated that the Bolsheviks use emergency measures and terror since the only other option was the triumph of White reactionaries. Ultimately, it was Proletarian Jacobinism that allowed the Soviet Republic to survive, albeit at a great cost. Luxemburg did not believe that German communists had to follow the example of Proletarian Jacobinism. In late December 1918, at the founding convention of the Communist Party of Germany, Luxemburg said that the socialist revolution did not need terror: “The proletarian revolution requires no terror for its aims; it hates and despises killing. It does not need these weapons because it does not combat individuals but institutions, because it does not enter the arena with naïve illusions whose disappointment it would seek to revenge.”37 Yet the reality of revolutionary struggle caused changes in Luxemburg’s ideas. Now, she counterposed workers’ councils to the German equivalent of the Russian Constituent Assembly as the only true form of democracy: “What was considered equality and democracy until now: parliaments, national assemblies, equal ballots, was a pack of lies! Full power in the hands of the working masses, as a weapon for smashing capitalism to pieces—this is the only true equality, this is the only true democracy!”38 These words could easily have been written by Lenin or Trotsky. In early 1919, Rosa Luxemburg was murdered by the white terror at the behest of the German Girondin Gustav Noske. Unfortunately, she never had the opportunity to learn that a German socialist revolution required Proletarian Jacobinism with its own Robespierre. When the French Communist Party was founded at the Congress of Tours in December 1920, the delegates clearly saw Bolshevism as Proletarian Jacobinism. Marcel Cachin said: “[The Bolsheviks] know the French Revolution better than we do.”39 Albert Mathiez, who joined the PCF, was a historian of the French Revolution and a fervent admirer of Robespierre. He saw the continuity between Jacobinism and Bolshevism: History never repeats itself exactly. But the resemblances our analysis has brought out between the great crises of 1793 and 1917 are neither superficial

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nor fortuitous. The Russian revolutionaries willingly and knowingly imitate the French revolutionaries. They are animated by the same spirit. They move about amidst the same problems in an analogous atmosphere. The times are different. Civilization has advanced over the past century and a quarter. But Russia owes more to its backwards state than is ordinarily believed for its resemblance to the agricultural and illiterate France of the end of the 18th century.40

In Spain, the syndicalist turned communist Andrés Nin spoke of Bolshevism in words that echoed Plekhanov’s earlier Jacobinism: The Russian Communist Party is the only guarantor of the Revolution; and just as the Jacobins saw themselves obliged to guillotine the Hébertists even though they represented a tendency to the Left, just as we ourselves have eliminated those who constituted an obstacle to the realization of the objectives we pursued, so our Russian comrades see themselves inevitably obliged to smother implacably every attempt to break their power. It is not only their right but their duty. The health of the Revolution is the supreme law.41

The foundation of the Communist International in March 1919 ensured that the principles of Proletarian Jacobinism were spread to all corners of the world. However, not all the defenders of the Russian Revolution looked at the Bolsheviks as latter-day Jacobins. Antonio Gramsci, then a journalist in Turin, believed that the Bolsheviks were free of any Jacobin taint. He saw Lenin as the heir to Gracchus Babeuf: “In the socialist revolution, Lenin has not met the fate of Babeuf. He has been able to convert his thought into a meaningful historical force. He has released energies that will never die.”42 Moreover, Gramsci said a communist party modeled on the Jacobin club would be a “collection of dogmatists [and] little Machiavellis” that cynically “makes use of the masses.”43 It was only during Gramsci’s years in prison that he changed his mind on both Machiavelli and Robespierre. In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci saw the Communist Party as a Modern Prince that would pursue a Jacobin strategy for hegemony. In his reassessment of classical Jacobinism, Gramsci said: “The Jacobins, consequently, were the only party of the revolution in progress, in as much as they not only represented the immediate needs and aspirations of the actual physical individuals who constituted the French bourgeoisie, but they also represented the revolutionary movement as a whole, as an integral historical development.”44 Ultimately, Gramsci’s own Proletarian Jacobinism owed as much to Robespierre as it did to Machiavelli.45 It cannot be underestimated that all Russian Marxists, especially the Bolsheviks, saw the French Revolution as the model for revolutionary politics. The experience of 1789 was a constant reference point in the revolutions

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of both 1905 and 1917. The Jacobins showed the necessity of a disciplined organization and revolutionary government. However, Lenin and Trotsky understood that Proletarian Jacobinism was not a simple continuation of the past, but a new and higher development. The bourgeois revolution led by the Jacobins could not fulfill the promises of liberté, égalité, and fraternité. But it was the mission of Proletarian Jacobins to realize the universalist vision of the Enlightenment by ending class society and creating communism. B. TROTSKY’S ALTERNATIVE TO STALINISM In early 1921, the Bolsheviks had emerged triumphant in the civil war. Yet Russia was ruined with the economy in utter collapse. The Bolsheviks could not count on any international aid to rebuild since the revolution had been defeated in Germany, Hungary, and elsewhere. The Soviet Republic was alone and the Bolsheviks faced the unenviable task of building socialism in conditions of isolation and backwardness. The immediate danger for the Bolsheviks was that they would not survive their victory. A great deal of support for the Soviets had evaporated. The peasantry, who had backed the Red Army during the civil war, was no longer willing to tolerate the grain requisitions of War Communism. As a result, thousands of peasant insurgents in the Tambov region bitterly fought the Red Army. Most ominously at the naval base of Kronstadt, once a stronghold of Bolshevism, the sailors rose in revolt, demanding a “third revolution.” Trotsky said that the Kronstadt Mutiny represented the clear danger of a counterrevolutionary Thermidor: Of all prior counterrevolutionary movements in the Soviet Union, the nearest type to Thermidor was the Kronstadt uprising of March 1921. . . . It was a rebellion of the peasantry, hurt, discontented, and impatient with the proletarian dictatorship. Had the petty bourgeoisie triumphed, on the very next day it would have shown itself to be bankrupt, and in its place would have come the big bourgeoisie itself.46

Lenin also saw the specter of Thermidor at Kronstadt. To forestall it, he recognized that the Bolsheviks needed to retreat: “This is Thermidor. But we shant let ourselves be guillotined. We shall make a Thermidor ourselves.”47 Lenin was talking about concessions and a temporary retreat to market relations to regain revolutionary ground later, not a literal counterrevolutionary restoration. Under Lenin’s guidance, War Communism was swiftly replaced by the semi-market New Economic Policy.

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While the Bolsheviks gained a breathing space with the NEP, this did not mean they had ended the possibility of Thermidor. The NEP brought new challenges. Now rich peasants or kulaks, who had previously been held in check, gained immense influence throughout the countryside. In the cities, a new bourgeoisie known as NEP-men emerged as industry and trade recovered. Inside the working class, the enthusiastic Jacobinism of the civil war years slackened as a less unheroic mood set in. As Grigory Zinoviev observed: “It is useless to deny that many militants are mortally weary. They have to attend ‘Saturdays’ twice or four times a month, out of working hours; excessive mental strain is demanded; their families live in difficult conditions; they are sent here to-day and there to-morrow by the Party or by chance; the result is inevitably psychological exhaustion.”48 There was also the danger of Thermidor from the Bolshevik party itself. The civil war’s decimation of the working class and the atrophy of the soviets meant that power was now concentrated in the ruling party. By the 1920s, the Bolshevik party was one of the few institutions that could hold the country together. Power was increasingly centralized around Stalin, the party’s general secretary and head of the expanding bureaucratic apparatus. Early on, Lenin feared that the party’s apparatus was saturated with czarist authoritarianism and Great-Russian chauvinism. These symptoms appeared in Stalin himself in his frayed relations with Georgian Communists.49 Lenin worried that if this bureaucratic power was allowed to grow, then it would mean Thermidor. By the end of his active political life in 1922–1923, Lenin identified Stalin as the representative of this bureaucratic danger and demanded his removal from the post of general secretary: Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealings among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc.50

However, Lenin did not believe that removing a single person, even if it was Stalin, would be enough to stop Thermidor. A far more reaching solution was needed to regenerate the revolution. Lenin laid out the first steps for this strategy in his final writings, later known as his “Testament.” Lenin recognized that the isolation and backwardness of Russia placed immense burdens in the way of creating a truly socialist society. The lack of culture and advanced industry was the soil that allowed the bureaucratic cancer to gnaw away at socialism. To overcome this difficulty, Lenin advocated a “cultural

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revolution,” where the masses would master bourgeois culture in order to rid themselves of feudal habits and customs: “For a start, we should be satisfied with real bourgeois culture; for a start we should be glad to dispense with the crude types of pre-bourgeois culture, i.e., bureaucratic culture or serf culture, etc. In matters of culture, haste and sweeping measures are most harmful.”51 Lenin recognized that successfully completing this cultural revolution would take years, if not decades, but it was necessary to begin now. He considered this cultural transformation a prerequisite to make the working class fit to rule. In addition to a cultural revolution, Lenin said that the social weight of the proletariat in Soviet Russia must be increased so it could lead society. To create the material preconditions for socialism, he advocated the industrialization and electrification of the country. Industrialization would also allow the state to support the formation of cooperatives in the countryside. Lenin said that the combination of cooperatives and the cultural revolution would give the peasants a stake in the construction of socialism: Now we are entitled to say that for us the mere growth of cooperation . . . is identical with the growth of socialism, and at the same time we have to admit that there has been a radical modification in our whole outlook on socialism. The radical modification is this; formerly we placed, and had to place, the main emphasis on the political struggle, on revolution, on winning political power, etc. Now the emphasis is changing and shifting to peaceful, organizational, “cultural” work. I should say that emphasis is shifting to educational work, were it not for our international relations, were it not for the fact that we have to fight for our position on a worldscale.52

Lenin insisted that the cooperative movement must be wholly voluntary. While it would take time to convince the peasantry, in the end this effort would solidify the worker-peasant alliance and ensure the victory of socialism. However, Lenin did not believe that socialism could be created in an isolated Russia. For the moment, he argued that Russia could only take the first steps on the road to socialism. Yet Lenin did not doubt that the tempo of the world revolution would pick up again: In the last analysis, the outcome of the struggle will be determined by the fact that Russia, India, China, etc., account for the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe. And during the past few years it is this majority that has been drawn into the struggle for emancipation with extraordinary rapidity, so that in this respect there cannot be the slightest doubt what the final outcome of the world struggle will be. In this sense, the complete victory of socialism is fully and absolutely assured.53

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Regrettably, Lenin was not able to implement his new program. He suffered a series of strokes that relegated him to the sidelines of political life. When Lenin died in January 1924, Thermidor had grown even more menacing to the revolution. After the defeat of the German October in 1923, it seemed to many in the party that Russia was facing a long-term period of isolation. Breaking with Bolshevik orthodoxy on internationalism, Stalin advanced the theory of socialism in one country. Stalin argued that it was necessary for Russia to construct socialism without waiting for an international revolution. Many communists found this idea very appealing. They were exhausted and longed for security. It also stoked latent national pride, promising an almost messianic mission for Russia in leading the international working class to socialism. Socialism in one country also became Stalin’s bludgeon that he used against Trotsky. On the surface Stalin appeared to have faith in the people and their ability to build socialism while Trotsky was portrayed as a defeatist. As Stalin said in 1926: Well, as the victory of the revolution in the West is rather late in coming, nothing remains for us to do, apparently, but to loaf around. The congress held, and said so in its resolution on the report of the Central Committee, that these views of the opposition implied disbelief in victory over our capitalists. . . . But from the support of the workers of the West to the victory of the revolution in the West is a long, long way. . . . The opposition, however, affirms that we cannot finish off our capitalists by our own efforts. That is the difference between us.54

In contrast to Stalin’s “realism,” Trotsky was painted as an abstract cosmopolitan dreamer who could not understand the practical needs of the moment. Moreover, Trotsky’s opposition to the party line on socialism in one country allowed Stalin to depict him as a splitter who endangered the party and the revolution. It is in Stalin that one finds the source for all arguments repeated later by Bloch, Brecht, Lukács, Hobsbawm, Sartre, and others that socialism in one country was the only viable option for the Soviet Union. Yet an analysis of Trotsky’s actual program reveals a different picture. Its contents show that Trotsky did not argue for the USSR to simply wait with folded arms for deliverance from the international revolution. While Trotsky’s ideas underwent changes over time, they were based on a consistent, realistic, and unified strategy to achieve socialism. Ernest Mandel listed the following core elements of Trotsky’s program: Accelerated industrialization creating the basis for gradual mechanization of agriculture; accelerated differentiation of the peasantry not in favour but at the expense of the rich peasants; accelerated turn towards increased political

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activity of the poor in city and countryside, and therefore accelerated democratization—these were the consistent elements of Trotsky’s programme.55

Like Lenin, Trotsky said that the construction of socialism could only happen by increasing the overall social weight of the working class in the USSR. This was the rationale behind his calls for industrialization and creating a planned economy: “We demanded acceleration of industrialization because it is the only way to secure a leading position for the cities in relation to the countryside, and thus in the dictatorship of the proletariat.”56 The expansion of industry would not only improve living standards, but increase the number of workers in Soviet society. Furthermore, Trotsky shared Lenin’s belief in the necessity of a cultural revolution. This would raise the cultural level of the masses, so they became fit to rule and would not reproduce systems of oppression and domination under a socialist veneer. Trotsky knew that the battle against backward ideas could not occur in a vacuum. It must be carried out in conjunction with uprooting the material conditions that engendered them. Hence, he argued that a cultural revolution required industrialization and developing the productive forces: even the slightest successes in the sphere of morals, by raising the cultural level of the working man and woman, enhance our capacity for rationalizing production, and promoting socialist accumulation. This again gives us the possibility of making fresh conquests in the sphere of morals. Thus a dialectical dependence exists between the two spheres.57

Trotsky argued that the Soviet Union was threatened by the bureaucracy, which wanted to keep the masses away from power. If socialism was going to be a reality, then the power of the bureaucrats needed to be reduced. For Trotsky, the dictatorship of the proletariat could only become a reality once the workers were in firm democratic control of the soviets, trade unions, and the party. 58 Trotsky believed that without the timely development of industry then major problems loomed in the countryside due to the “scissors crisis.” While the NEP had restored production, it had caused a major economic imbalance. Agricultural production had increased to a higher degree than industrial production. This meant peasants could only sell grain in the towns at very high prices. This also increased the power of the kulaks at the expense of the urban proletariat. Trotsky said that if the scissors crisis was not dealt with then the kulaks would blackmail the towns: “The smychka [worker-peasant alliance] is threatened at this moment by the lag in industry, on the one hand, and by the growth of the kulak, on the other.”59 To forestall a crisis, Trotsky

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demanded measures against the kulaks, but the Stalin-Bukharin leadership downplayed this danger. Eventually, the scissors crisis culminated in the grain strike of 1927–1928 when Stalin was compelled to use emergency measures against the kulaks. A year later, Stalin eliminated the kulaks by forcibly collectivizing agriculture.60 Arguably, Trotsky’s program for agriculture could have staved off, or at least made less severe, the grain strike and the resurgence of class warfare in the countryside. He had repeatedly warned that unless the demands of the village were met, then the peasantry would turn against the working class. To satisfy their consumer demands, Trotsky said it was necessary to draw upon the reserves of the world market to fill the gaps in Soviet industry. According to Richard Day, Trotsky’s plan involved a system of comparative coefficients which would compare the efficiency of Soviet production in terms of price and quality with that of other countries. These coefficients would then serve as a guide both to the import plan and new investments. Domestic production would be rationalized and standardized in order to lengthen runs and reduce costs. In the meantime he urged that “commodity intervention” be undertaken in those areas where the coefficient was least satisfactory. Inexpensive foreign goods were to be sold in the Soviet market the profits being used to subsidize retail prices of the corresponding domestic commodity. The proposal for commodity intervention was designed to provide a short-run solution to the scissors. Trotsky’s longer-run intention was to use the grain thus brought to market in order to finance the import of new industrial equipment.61

Trotsky cautioned that any links with the world market must be conditional, otherwise the Soviet Union would be transformed into a dependency of imperialism. Yet in the short to medium term, Trotsky believed that this system of coefficients would solve the scissors crisis and secure the worker-peasant alliance. While Trotsky did not envision a future for individual peasant farms, he did not advocate the immediate collectivization of agriculture. He said that collectivization could only occur once the material base for it was created: The growth of land-renting must be offset by a more rapid development of collective farming. It is necessary systematically and from year to year to subsidize largely the efforts of the poor peasants to organize in collectives. At the same time, we must give more systematic help to poor peasants not included in the collectives, by freeing them entirely from taxation, by a corresponding land policy, by credits for agricultural implements, and by bringing them into the agricultural co-operatives.62

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Going forward, Trotsky believed that the party should heavily tax the kulaks while encouraging strictly voluntary measures such as the development of cooperatives. As a matter of principle, both Trotsky and his supporters ruled out the forced collectivization of agriculture. For example, the economist Evgeny Preobrazhensky, who was an ally of Trotsky, was accused by Bukharin of supporting the methods of primitive capitalist accumulation in the Soviet countryside. However, this was a distortion of what Preobrazhensky said in his major theoretical work, The New Economics: Let us now dwell upon the methods of primitive accumulation which we have enumerated, based mainly on plundering of small-scale production and non-economic pressure upon it, and let us see how matters stand in this connection in the period of primitive socialist accumulation. As regard colonial plundering, a socialist state, carrying out a policy of equality between nationalities and voluntary entry by them into one kind or another of union of nations, repudiates on principle all the forcible methods of capital in this sphere. This source of primitive accumulation is closed to it from the very start and forever.63

When it came to the international revolution, Trotsky argued that socialism in one country was premised on ignoring conditions in the rest of the world. However, Russia could not just pretend that imperialism did not exist. At the Fifteen Party Conference in November 1926, Trotsky mocked Bukharin’s claims that Russia could abstract itself from the international situation: Just listen to this: “Whether we can work toward socialism, and establish it, if we abstract this question from the international factors.” If we accomplish this “abstraction,” then of course the rest is easy. But we cannot. That is the whole point. [Laughter.] It is possible to walk naked in the streets of Moscow in January, if we can abstract ourselves from the weather and the police. [Laughter.] But I am afraid that this abstraction would fail, both with respect to weather and to police, were we to make the attempt.64

In the final analysis, the Soviet Union could only hold out, but it could not create socialism on its own. Therefore, the Communist International had an obligation to promote revolutionary leaderships in every section and to seize all opportunities to advance the international revolution. For Trotsky, one of the main drawbacks of socialism in one country was the tacit subordination of communist parties to the needs of Soviet diplomacy. This hamstrung their ability to act as revolutionary vanguards. The mistaken policies of the Comintern had already contributed to defeats in Britain, China, and elsewhere

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which further isolated the USSR. In the end, Trotsky believed that socialism in one country jeopardized both the Soviet Union and the world revolution. While the objective conditions to implement Trotsky’s program did exist, this is not to deny that he made subjective errors. He was often hesitant, too conciliatory, and unable to construct needed political alliances. Nor did Trotsky fight in an uncompromising manner for his program. For example, Trotsky did not act decisively against Stalin at the Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923. In inner-party struggle, Trotsky tied his hands in advance by accepting the 1921 ban on factions and refusing to operate outside of official circles. This meant Trotsky fought on terrain where Stalin had the political advantage. Other subjective conditions weighed against Trotsky as well: namely that Soviet workers were too passive and atomized, leaving them unable to fight for the Left Opposition program. Trotsky did not believe that the Soviet proletariat’s passivity was fixed for a long period of time. A change in either the international situation or the relation of forces inside the Soviet Union could radically change the balance. This meant that correct intervention by the Communist Party could act as a brake upon bureaucratic degeneration and reawaken the proletariat. Ultimately, this did not occur. However, this outcome was not inevitable since Lenin and Trotsky offered a practical communist program to slow down, if not halt, Stalinism altogether. C. THE STALINIST THERMIDOR? As already shown, the Bolsheviks looked to the French Revolution just as much for examples to avoid as to emulate. In their ranks, the Bolsheviks anxiously searched for someone who could be a potential Napoleon, who would bury the revolution and turn the instruments of terror against them. Lenin saw this danger in the bureaucratic forces centered around Stalin. Yet the rest of the party considered Stalin as an unlikely contender to usurp the revolution. Instead, eyes turned toward Trotsky as the most likely candidate to don Napoleon’s costume. Outwardly, Trotsky and Napoleon shared a great deal in common. Both were charismatic, popular, and brilliant military commanders. Trotsky’s command of the Red Army gave him the power to carry out a coup d’état and become the Soviet First Consul. His Napoleonic stature made it appear safer for the party to be run by a collective leadership. Therefore, Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev formed a troika to keep Trotsky away from power. Inside the party itself, the troika spread rumors about Trotsky’s Bonapartist ambitions. The French Communist Alfred Rosmer remembered hearing these whispers in Moscow: “Trotsky thinks he is Bonaparte, Trotsky wants to

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play at being Bonaparte.”65 However, these tales were without foundation. Trotsky recognized the politburo’s supremacy over the Red Army. When the inner-party struggle escalated, Trotsky refused to use the Red Army to carry out a coup d’état. When Trotsky was forced to resign his post as Commissar of War in 1925, he did so without any protest. In retrospect, Trotsky believed that he could have used the Red Army to seize power, but he knew this would have been a fatal setback to the revolution. More than his enemies, Trotsky recognized what Bonapartism meant. Instead, Trotsky intended to carry out the struggle against the bureaucracy by using the political means of Bolshevism to awaken the working class: There is no doubt that it would have been possible to carry out a military coup d’etat against the faction of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin, etc., without any difficulty and without even the shedding of any blood; but the result of such a coup d’etat would have been to accelerate the rhythm of this very bureaucratization and Bonapartism against which the Left Opposition had engaged in struggle. The task of the Bolshevik-Leninists was by its very essence not to rely on the military bureaucracy against that of the party but to rely on the proletarian vanguard and through it on the popular masses, and to master the bureaucracy in its entirety, to purge it of its alien elements, to ensure the vigilant control of the workers over it, and to set its policy back on the rails of revolutionary internationalism.66

In the dramatis personae of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky adamantly rejected the part of Napoleon. Yet the danger of the revolution backsliding remained. Oppositionist Bolsheviks saw in the NEP and the ballooning party bureaucracy the possibility of capitalist restoration. This raised the question of whether the Communist Party itself was now counterrevolutionary. Should the Left Oppositionists then use the analogies of Thermidor and Bonapartism to describe the current situation? Trotsky argued that the analogy of Thermidor was perfectly valid: To deny the danger of bourgeois restoration for the dictatorship of the proletariat in a backward country under capitalist encirclement is inconceivable. Only a Menshevik or a genuine capitulator who understands neither the international nor the internal resources of our revolution could speak of the inevitability of a Thermidor . . . The analogy with Thermidor makes the same kind of sense. It teaches a great deal. Thermidor is a special form of counterrevolution carried out on the installment plan through several installments, and making use, in the first stage, of elements of the same ruling party-by regrouping them and counterposing some to others.67

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Trotsky argued that the Thermidorian danger came from Bukharin and the party’s right wing, which drew its strength from non-proletarian elements such as the kulaks, the NEP-men, and the bureaucratic apparatus. Yet Thermidor had not been consummated since the basic institutions of the October Revolution remained in place. Until that changed, Trotsky believed that Thermidor was not an accomplished fact. Others in the party also saw the Thermidorian danger. After the troika broke up, Zinoviev concluded that the revolution was degenerating. In October 1925, Petr Zalutskii, a member of Zinoviev’s Leningrad Opposition, described the “state capitalist” regime in the USSR and the Thermidorian degeneration of the Communist Party. Stalin and Bukharin were outraged at Zalutskii’s remarks, and he was swiftly expelled from the party.68 Judging by their response to Zalutskii, Bukharin and Stalin found that even mentioning the possibility of Thermidor was tantamount to treason. Bukharin condemned all talk of Thermidor by the Opposition as a “slander.”69 In 1927, a supporter of Bukharin named Dmitrii Maretskii wrote an article in Pravda directed against the Opposition where he summarily dismissed any talk of a Thermidor, stating that “all analogies, from a Marxist point of view, [were] nonsensical, absurd, and illiterate.”70 Knowing the French precedent, even Stalin, at that time, recoiled from using fratricidal violence inside the Bolshevik Party. When Zinoviev and Kamenev had demanded using punitive measures against Trotsky, Stalin rejected them: “We have not agreed with Zinoviev and Kamenev, because we have known that a policy of chopping off [heads] is fraught with great dangers. . . . The method of chopping off and blood-letting - and they did demand blood—is dangerous and infectious. You chop off one head to-day, another one to-morrow, still another one the day after-what in the end will be left of the party?”71 Later, Stalin accused the opposition of lying about Thermidor and advocating civil war: “Of course, it is ludicrous to speak of Thermidor tendencies of the Central Committee. I will say more: it is nonsense. I don’t think that the opposition itself believes that nonsense, but it needs it as a bogey. For if the opposition really believed that, then, of course, it should have declared open war on our Party and on our Central Committee; but it assures us that it wants peace in the Party.”72 Like Trotsky, Stalin clearly understood the stakes of the debate over a Soviet Thermidor. The opposition believed that if the party leadership was Thermidorian, then it was unfit to defend the USSR against foreign invasion. Trotsky claimed this with his invocation of Georges Clemenceau, who took over leadership of the French war effort in 1917, ultimately leading the country to victory. In September 1927, Trotsky argued that the opposition was willing to do the same in the Soviet Union. They would remove the party’s leadership and conduct a war in a rigorous manner to victory: “Our war will be a socialist war.

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It can be led only by leaning for support upon the idealism of the proletariat and the lower strata of the peasantry, only by holding in a vise the bourgeoiskulak and the Thermidorian elements of the country.”73 Stalin believed that Trotsky’s Clemenceau Thesis was traitorous and a sign of the opposition’s underlying Menshevism: The opposition says that we are in a state of Thermidor degeneration. What does that mean? It means that we have not got the dictatorship of the proletariat, that both our economics and our politics are a failure and are going backwards, that we are not moving towards socialism, but towards capitalism. . . . It is on this that Trotsky’s well-known thesis about Clemenceau is based. If the government has degenerated, or is degenerating, is it worth while sparing, defending, upholding it? Clearly, it is not worth while. . . . Clearly, there is nothing Leninist in this “line.” It is Menshevism of the purest water. The opposition has slipped into Menshevism.74

By 1926–1927, the struggle between Stalin and the opposition had shifted from verbal and printed polemics to physical attacks. In what could be considered a Soviet parallel to the repression of the Jacobins during the French Thermidor, the party majority had its own jeunesse dorée who assaulted the opposition.75 The Soviet jeunesse dorée shouted down opposition speakers and refused to admit its members to party meetings. Most notoriously, they used anti-Semitic slurs against Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. Trotsky appealed to Bukharin as a fellow party comrade to put a halt to this anti-Jewish agitation: I think that you and I—two members of the Politburo have after all a few things in common, enough to calmly and conscientiously verify: (1) whether it is possible that in our party, in Moscow, in a workers’ cell, propaganda is being conducted with impunity which is vile and slanderous, on the one hand, and anti-Semitic, on the other; and (2) whether honest workers are afraid to question or verify or try to refute any stupidity, lest they be driven into the street with their families.76

In response to Trotsky’s appeal, Bukharin threw up his hands in ignorance, and the Politburo let the matter pass. As their confrontation with Stalin escalated, Trotsky and the opposition arguably found themselves stepping into the role of Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of Equals. As Victor Serge noted: “We are babouvistes who still have our heads on our shoulders.”77 If the Opposition were in fact Babuovists, then there was no possibility of averting Thermidor and only a new revolution was possible. Trotsky refused to accept this and was not willing to commit to being the Soviet Babeuf.

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The struggle came to a head on November 7, 1927, the tenth anniversary of the revolution. At official commemorations, the opposition attempted to raise banners with their own slogans. They called for actions against the kulaks, NEP-men, and the bureaucrats. The police forcibly dispersed the Oppositionist demonstrators. Mere days later, Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Communist Party. In protest against Trotsky’s expulsion, Soviet diplomat and oppositionist Adolf Joffe, who was suffering a terminal illness, committed suicide. Joffe left a farewell letter addressed to Trotsky where he expressed solidarity with the defeated oppositionists. He said that Trotsky’s defeat was the Soviet Thermidor. In his final words, Joffe noted Trotsky’s earlier weaknesses, but said that his program was historically correct and he must still fight for it: I should like to say that the great significance of the historical fact of the exclusion from the Party of yourself and Zinoviev, which must inevitably be looked upon as the beginning of the Thermidorian period of our revolution. . . . I have never doubted that the way pointed out by you was the right way, and you know that I have been going the same way as you for more than twenty years, since the beginning of the “permanent revolution.” But I have always been of opinion that you lack the inflexibility and firmness of Lenin, that determination to stick to the path recognised as right, even if wholly isolated, trusting in a future majority and a future recognition of the entire rectitude of your way. Politically you have always been right, ever since 1905. And I have repeatedly told you that I heard with my own ears how Lenin admitted that you and not he was right in 1905. In the face of death men do not lie; and I repeat the same again. But you have often renounced your own truth in favour of an agreement, a compromise which you over-estimated. That was a mistake. I repeat, politically you were right. And now more than ever. Once the Party will come to recognise this, and history will appreciate it as it deserves.78

For the opposition, Joffe’s death was a terrible blow. A funeral was held for him in Moscow on November 19 where thousands of workers came to pay their respects. Trotsky gave the eulogy, which was his last public speech on Soviet soil. The Fifteenth Party Congress in December acted as a final epilogue to the opposition’s struggle. In a moment of triumph, Stalin had oppositionists purged en masse from the party. Trotsky, Zinoviev, and other leaders were sent into distant internal exile. Even though Stalin had emerged victorious,

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the question still remained: had Thermidor finally defeated the Russian Revolution? D. CHRISTIAN RAKOVSKY Despite their political defeat, the Oppositionists stayed active. In their ranks were many of the finest theoreticians and writers of the Bolshevik Party, who now turned to the pen during this period of involuntary idleness. A lively correspondence ensured that these exiles were not alone and were able to exchange ideas with their fellow comrades. One topic above all dominated their discussions: the Thermidorian degeneration of the Soviet Union. At the heart of this debate was the former Soviet ambassador to France, Christian Rakovsky. Like Trotsky, Rakovsky was immersed in the history of the French Revolution. Among his most prized possessions was a signed copy of François Victor Alphonse Aulard’s Histoire politique de la Révolution française. This interest was not antiquarian since Rakovsky believed that 1789 held contemporary relevance: “We should remember these historical examples [of the French Revolution] well. For us, they possess a living modernity.”79 Unsurprisingly, Rakovsky turned to the French Revolution to explain the Russian Revolution’s fate. In “The Professional Dangers of Power,” Rakovsky argued that the Third Estate was composed of diverse classes, who were united in their opposition to the ancien régime. However, victory over the Bourbons meant that the former cohesion of the Third Estate disintegrated. Some members of the bourgeoisie now assumed political and administrative positions in the new state. Over the course of the revolution, power was increasingly concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. Ultimately, the Jacobins found themselves divorced from the sansculottes and did not trust them to exercise power. Robespierre ended up liquidating groups on the left such as the Enragés and Hébertistes. Rakovsky concluded that by sapping popular initiative, Robespierre paved the way for Thermidor: “Thus the Robespierre régime, instead of developing the revolutionary activities of the masses, already oppressed by the economic crisis and even more by the shortage of food, aggravated the situation and facilitated the work of the anti-democratic forces.”80 Rakovsky argued that a similar process happened in the Russian Revolution. The workers had conquered power in 1917, but only a section of it was prepared to rule. This section filled the administration of the party, state, and the Red Army. This new bureaucracy ended up becoming separated from the great mass of the proletariat. This led Rakovsky to a general conclusion that the danger of bureaucratization existed in every proletarian revolution,

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even in an advanced country, due to the differentiated nature of the working class itself: When a class takes power, one of its parts becomes the agent of that power. Thus arises bureaucracy. In a socialist state, where capitalist accumulation is forbidden by members of the directing party, this differentiation begins as a functional one; it later becomes a social one. I am thinking here of the social position of a communist who has at his disposal a car, a nice apartment, regular holidays, and receiving the maximum salary authorized by the party; a position which differs from that of the communist working in the coal mines and receiving a salary of fifty or sixty rubles per month. As regards workers and employees, you know that they are divided into eighteen different categories.81

Rakovsky’s analysis left him pessimistic about the future of the opposition. He claimed that the working class was too corrupted by the bureaucracy to act as an agent of change. Now he believed that only the bureaucracy held any political initiative in Soviet society. As Deutscher observed, Rakovsky’s conclusion was that the opposition “could only hope to work for the future mainly in the field of ideas” away from the centers of power.82 This was a program of political paralysis. Trotsky differed from Rakovsky on several points. He argued that bureaucratization was mainly due to economic backwardness, the weak social weight of the proletariat, and capitalist encirclement as opposed to a more universal law. Nor did Trotsky share Rakovsky’s political hopelessness. Despite these differences, Trotsky found Rakovsky’s analysis to be unequaled. In The Revolution Betrayed, he wrote the following: “Christian Rakovsky . . . [wrote] a brief inquiry into the Soviet bureaucracy, which we have quoted above several times, for it still remains the best that has been written on this subject.”83 In the end, Trotsky incorporated large portions of Rakovsky’s analysis of bureaucratization into his mature theory of Stalinism. E. THE REVOLUTION BETRAYED The question of whether or not the Soviet Thermidor had come to pass confronted the exiled oppositionists when Stalin launched his “left turn” in 1928– 1929. After years of defending the NEP, Stalin broke with Bukharin and launched the Five-Year Plan to industrialize and create a planned economy. Moreover, Stalin violently turned against the kulaks by collectivizing agriculture. After being slandered as “super industrializers” by Stalin, this appeared to be a tacit vindication of the Opposition’s program. Perhaps, socialism still remained alive in the USSR?

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At first most of the exiles stayed true to their program, but by the end of 1929, the majority had capitulated to Stalin. From a total of eight thousand, they were reduced to less than a thousand with Trotsky and Rakovsky as the only prominent members who remained unbowed. Trotsky was contemptuous of these capitulations, stating: “Some of the isolated and weaker elements do not withstand this pressure. But the majority of the capitulations are obviously simulated. Broken and exhausted, they sign what they do not believe.”84 No doubt, Trotsky considered these capitulators to be like the former Jacobins who cynically made their peace with the Thermidorian Directory. Trotsky did not agree with the capitulators that Stalin was adopting the opposition’s program. He considered Stalin to be a centrist, who vacillated between left and right-wings of the party: “Predominance in the party, and therefore in the country too, is in the hands of the Stalin faction, which has all the features of centrism-moreover, centrism in a period of retrogression, not upsurge. That means slight zigzags to the left, and deep zigzags to the right.”85 For Trotsky, the main danger of Thermidor remained with Bukharin and the forces on the party’s right. It was the kulak’s grain strike that created a national emergency which caused Stalin to break with Bukharin. Trotsky believed that pressure from the left caused Stalin to move against Bukharin and the kulaks: “Stalin found himself driven, simultaneously with the crushing of the Left Opposition, to plagiarize partially from its program in all fields, to direct his fire to the Right.”86 Ultimately, Stalin’s “left turn” did not cause Trotsky to abandon his use of Thermidor. As he told the Italian Left Communists, he found historical analogies to be a useful analytical tool: To judge the correctness or erroneousness of a historical analogy it is necessary to clearly define its content and its limits. Not to resort to analogies with the revolutions of the past epochs would mean simply to reject the historical experience of mankind. The present day is always different from the day that has passed. Yet it is impossible to learn from yesterday in any other way except by the method of analogy.87

In debates with Hugo Urbahns of the German-based Leninbund in 1929, Trotsky offered his own definition of Thermidor: “It indicates the direct transfer of power into the hands of a different class, after which the revolutionary class cannot regain power except through an armed uprising.”88 However, Trotsky argued that the analogy did not mean an identity of phases in the two revolutions. For example, he did not consider his own defeat to be the equivalent to the guillotining of Robespierre: “Urbahns says: The crushing of the Opposition and the deportation of Trotsky is equivalent to the guillotining of Robespierre’s group. The broad historical analogy is superseded here

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by an arbitrary and cheap comparison of a personal and episodic character.”89 Focusing on the tragic fate of revolutionaries was to miss the deeper social processes that Trotsky considered essential to understanding Thermidor. Trotsky believed it was necessary to refine the Thermidor analogy by taking into account the class differences between the revolutions in France and Russia. He noted that the Russian Revolution was far vaster in its social transformation than the French Revolution: The Russian Revolution of the Twentieth Century is incomparably broader and deeper than the French Revolution of the Eighteenth Century. The revolutionary class on which the October Revolution rests is far bigger numerically, far more homogeneous, compact and resolute than the urban plebeians of France. The leadership of the October Revolution in all its tendencies is far more experienced and perspicacious than the leading groups of the French Revolution were or could be. Finally, the political, economic, social and cultural changes accomplished by the Bolshevik dictatorship are far more deep-going than the changes accomplished by the Jacobins.90

Furthermore, the differences between the two revolutions extended to their degeneration. In France, the Jacobins and sansculottes had been violently overthrown. In Russia, Trotsky argued that while the Communist Party had degenerated, it remained in power, and the institutions of the proletarian state were still intact: “The means of production, once the property of the capitalists, remain to this very day in the hands of the Soviet state. The land is nationalized. The exploiting elements are still excluded from the soviets and from the army. The monopoly of foreign trade remains a bulwark against the economic intervention of capitalism. All these are not trifles.”91 Trotsky argued that while the Soviet bureaucracy was a parasitic growth on the Soviet state, it had not become a new exploiting class. If the Opposition’s defeat meant Thermidor, then this had happened peacefully without a civil war. Trotsky said this was ludicrous since it turned Thermidor into an argument for reverse reformism: “how then can any one assume or believe that power can pass from the hands of the Russian proletariat into the hands of the bourgeoisie in a peaceful, tranquil, imperceptible, bureaucratic manner? Such a conception of Thermidor is nothing else but inverted reformism.”92 For now, Trotsky said that no genuine counterrevolution had occurred in the USSR since there was no violent overturn. Yet Trotsky believed that the danger of Thermidor and Bonapartism remained in the Soviet Union. He speculated on the possible agents who could carry it out. Trotsky viewed Stalin as a centrist “arbiter” between different classes. However, he did not consider Stalin to be a conscious agent of counterrevolution, but only a “preparation for Bonapartism.”93 At other times,

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Trotsky wondered if the Red Army would step in and take power away from the party. As he concluded: “There will be no shortage of Bonapartes.”94 Trotsky speculated that in the case of the USSR the historical analogy would break down and the stages of Thermidor and Bonapartism would merge together. He found this plausible since the analogies were not simply abstract concepts, but were being used to analyze processes in motion: In this analysis of the processes of Thermidorean degeneration in the party, the Opposition was far from saying that the counterrevolutionary overturn, were it to occur, would necessarily have to assume the form of Thermidor, that is, of a more or less lasting domination by the bourgeoisified Bolsheviks with the formal retention of the Soviet system, similar to the retention of the Convention by the Thermidoreans. History never repeats itself, particularly when there is such a profound difference in the class base.95

Understanding the dynamics of a living phenomenon such as Stalinism meant that Marxists could not subjectively and mechanically apply Thermidor, but must use it as a tool to reveal the USSR’s real laws of motion. In the early part of his exile, Trotsky’s understanding of the Soviet Thermidor remained open. He viewed it as an event which had not yet occurred. As a result, the strategic line of the Opposition remained one of reform not revolution. Nevertheless, Trotsky changed his mind in 1933 after Hitler took power in Germany. He blamed the Communist International’s Third Period line of “social fascism” for facilitating the triumph of Nazism. The destruction of the world’s largest Communist Party outside of the USSR without a struggle caused him to conclude that the Comintern was politically bankrupt. For Trotsky, the defeat in Germany was a historical test comparable to the failure of the Second International in 1914. Now Trotsky said it was necessary for revolutionaries to create a new international: “Only the creation of the Marxist International, completely independent of the Stalinist bureaucracy and counterposed politically to it, can save the USSR from collapse by binding its destiny with the destiny of the world proletarian revolution.”96 In addition, Trotsky abandoned his hopes of reforming the Soviet Communist Party. He announced that the Opposition would need to form a second party and overthrow Stalin: “To speak now of the ‘reform’ of the CPSU would mean to look backward and not forward, to soothe one’s mind with empty formulas. In the USSR, it is necessary to build a Bolshevik party again.”97 In breaking completely with the possibility of reform, it appeared that Trotsky was now playing the role of the Soviet Babeuf. His conclusions that the USSR and the Comintern were now unreformable led Trotsky to revise his views on Thermidor. Trotsky’s new understanding was formalized in the 1935 essay “The Workers’ State, Thermidor and

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Bonapartism.” In what could be considered a self-criticism of his earlier views, Trotsky said: “Nevertheless, today we can and must admit that the analogy of Thermidor served to becloud rather than to clarify the question.”98 Trotsky argued that the French Thermidor was not a counterrevolution in the social sense since it had not gone from capitalism back to feudalism. In France, the basic conquests of the bourgeois revolution remained secure. What Thermidor did represent was a shift from Jacobin radicals to the more affluent and conservative sectors of the bourgeoisie: “The overturn of the Ninth Thermidor did not liquidate the basic conquests of the bourgeois revolution, but it did transfer the power into the hands of the more moderate and conservative Jacobins, the better-to-do elements of bourgeois society.”99 Trotsky concluded that the French Thermidor was a political reversal, but not a social or economic one. Following this analogy, Trotsky said that the Soviet Thermidor had already begun with the political defeat of the Left Opposition: Socially the proletariat is more homogeneous than the bourgeoisie, but it contains within itself an entire series of strata that become manifest with exceptional clarity following the conquest of power, during the period when the bureaucracy and a workers’ aristocracy connected with it begin to take form. The smashing of the Left Opposition implied in the most direct and immediate sense the transfer of power from the hands of the revolutionary vanguard into the hands of the more conservative elements among the bureaucracy and the upper crust of the working class. The year 1924—that was the beginning of the Soviet Thermidor.100

For Trotsky, not only had the Soviet Thermidor already come to pass, but the country was now under Bonapartist rule. He said that Stalin was analogous to Napoleon since he consolidated the revolution against forces both on the left and right: Carrying the policies of Thermidor further, Napoleon waged a struggle not only against the feudal world but also against the “rabble” and the democratic circles of the petty and middle bourgeoisie; in this way he concentrated the fruits of the regime born out of the revolution in the hands of the new bourgeois aristocracy. Stalin guards the conquests of the October Revolution not only against the feudal-bourgeois counterrevolution but also against the claims of the toilers, their impatience and their dissatisfaction; he crushes the left wing that expresses the ordered historical and progressive tendencies of the unprivileged working masses; he creates a new aristocracy by means of an extreme differentiation in wages, privileges, ranks, etc. Leaning for support upon the topmost layer of the new social hierarchy against the lowest—sometimes vice versa—Stalin has attained the complete concentration of power in his own hands. What else should this regime be called if not Soviet Bonapartism?101

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While Stalin defended the revolution’s gains against imperialism, Trotsky said that he represented the interests of the bureaucracy that had usurped political power from the working class. Yet Soviet Bonapartism was an inherently unstable form of rule, since it balanced itself between different classes. Its continued existence meant that the gains of October were endangered. To save socialism, Trotsky said that the working class must overthrow the bureaucracy. In the following year, Trotsky’s analysis of the USSR and Stalinism was fleshed out in The Revolution Betrayed. Contrary to the declarations of Stalin, Trotsky argued that the Soviet Union while a workers’ state was not actually a socialist society. In line with Marxist orthodoxy, Trotsky said that socialism required abundance, not the situation of want, inequality, and poverty that prevailed in the USSR. Trotsky concluded that Russia was neither socialist nor capitalist, but a society in transition between the two: “It would be truer, therefore, to name the present Soviet regime in all its contradictoriness, not a socialist regime, but a preparatory regime transitional from capitalism to socialism.”102 Trotsky argued that the transitional nature of the Soviet Union was due to the material situation of backwardness, isolation, and scarcity. These conditions were only exacerbated by the revolution and civil war that left Russia utterly devastated: “The collapse of the productive forces surpassed anything of the kind that history had ever seen. The country, and the government with it, were at the very edge of the abyss.”103 During the civil war, the bulk of the working class was reduced to impotence while many of its most active members were absorbed into the Red Army and the party-state bureaucracy. While the revolution succeeded, it was alone without any immediate hope of rescue from the international proletariat. Trotsky said that these material conditions nurtured the growth of the bureaucracy: The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against all. When there is enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there is little goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy. It “knows” who is to get something and who has to wait.104

It is interesting to note that in The Revolution Betrayed that Trotsky accepted Rakovsky’s argument about the inherent dangers of bureaucratization in a socialist revolution. He observed that even a socialist United States would not immediately be able to introduce a society of abundance: “A socialist state even in America, on the basis of the most advanced capitalism, could

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not immediately provide everyone with as much as he needs, and would therefore be compelled to spur everyone to produce as much as possible”105 While Trotsky agrees with Rakovsky that the prospect of Thermidor exists in every socialist revolution, he says that its possibility was more pronounced in underdeveloped countries: The tendencies of bureaucratism, which strangles the workers’ movement in capitalist countries, would everywhere show themselves even after a proletarian revolution. But it is perfectly obvious that the poorer the society which issues from a revolution, the sterner and more naked would be the expression of this “law,” the more crude would be the forms assumed by bureaucratism, and the more dangerous would it become for socialist development.106

While the possibility of Thermidor may be ever-present in socialism, Trotsky concluded that different material circumstances determined the chances of its likelihood. Under the conditions of scarcity, it was impossible for the Soviet state to simply “wither away.” Instead, the state grew stronger in order to protect the privileges of the bureaucracy from the workers and peasants. However, the bureaucracy’s position as the guardian of state property meant it played a contradictory role in the USSR. On the one hand, it protected and expanded state property with the Five-Year Plan. On the other hand, the bureaucracy fostered material and social inequality. Due to this contradiction, the socialist elements in Soviet society declined while bourgeois elements gained ground. While deploring the growth of inequality, Trotsky readily acknowledged that the bureaucracy’s efforts in industrialization were very impressive: Gigantic achievement in industry, enormously promising beginnings in agriculture, an extraordinary growth of the old industrial cities and a building of new ones, a rapid increase of the numbers of workers, a rise in cultural level and cultural demands—such are the indubitable results of the October revolution, in which the prophets of the old world tried to see the grave of human civilization. With the bourgeois economists we have no longer anything to quarrel over. Socialism has demonstrated its right to victory, not on the pages of Das Kapital, but in an industrial arena comprising a sixth part of the earth’s surface—not in the language of dialectics, but in the language of steel, cement and electricity.107

Since the bureaucracy did not want to endanger its privileges by supporting revolutions abroad, they had to revise the Bolshevik internationalist program with the ideology of socialism in one country. According to Trotsky: “The ‘theory’ of socialism in one country, first announced in the autumn of 1924, already signalized an effort to liberate Soviet foreign policy from the program of international revolution.”108 In practice, socialism in one country

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meant that the interests of the USSR took precedence over those of the world revolution. As a result, the Comintern was transformed into an instrument of Soviet foreign policy: “At the present time, the Communist International is a completely submissive apparatus in the service of Soviet foreign policy, ready at any time for any zigzag whatever.”109 The Comintern’s shifts wavered between the left sectarianism of the Third Period and the right opportunism of the popular front. In both cases, the result was disaster for the working class. Ultimately, Trotsky argued that the Stalinist bureaucracy acted as a roadblock to the world revolution. Yet no matter how willing Stalin was to curtail revolutions in Spain or China, this would not satisfy the imperialist powers. They considered the Soviet Union to be an existential threat to capitalism since it rested on different property relations. In an analogy to France, Trotsky noted that monarchist Europe feared Napoleon not because he was an emperor but because he defended bourgeois property: The evolution of the Soviet bureaucracy is of interest to the world bourgeoisie in the last analysis from the point of view of possible changes in the forms of property. Napoleon I, after radically abandoning the traditions of Jacobinism, donning the crown, and restoring the Catholic cult, remained nevertheless an object of hatred to the whole of ruling semi-feudal Europe, because he continued to defend the new property system created by the revolution. Until the monopoly of foreign trade is broken and the rights of capital restored, the Soviet Union, in spite of all the services of its ruling stratum, remains in the eyes of the bourgeoisie of the whole world an irreconcilable enemy, and German National Socialism a friend, if not today, at least of tomorrow.110

No matter what concessions he made, the bourgeoisie would always see Stalin as a fire-breathing Proletarian Jacobin. Trotsky concluded that the Stalinist bureaucracy was a parasitic caste, not a new exploiting class. The bureaucracy lacked traits found in other ruling classes. For instance, it did not own the means of production and could not pass them down to their children: The attempt to represent the Soviet bureaucracy as a class of “state capitalists” will obviously not withstand criticism. The bureaucracy has neither stocks nor bonds. It is recruited, supplemented and renewed in the manner of an administrative hierarchy, independently of any special property relations of its own. The individual bureaucrat cannot transmit to his heirs his rights in the exploitation of the state apparatus. The bureaucracy enjoys its privileges under the form of an abuse of power. It conceals its income; it pretends that as a special social group it does not even exist. Its appropriation of a vast share of the national income has the character of social parasitism.111

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However, Trotsky said that the Soviet bureaucracy, like other Bonapartist states, was a regime of crisis. Stalinism defended its claims to state property against restorationist sections in the bureaucracy, resulting in periodic purges to prevent the crystallization of a new class. The bureaucracy also curtailed soviet democracy, which would lead to a full counterrevolution unless the working class intervened: “Bonapartism is one of the political weapons of the capitalist regime in its critical period. Stalinism is a variety of the same system, but upon the basis of a workers’ state torn by the antagonism between an organized and armed Soviet aristocracy and the unarmed toiling masses.”112 In order to solidify itself into a ruling class, the bureaucracy must expropriate the proletariat not just politically, but economically by converting national property into private property. Trotsky warned that if the bureaucracy was successful, then this would mean the restoration of capitalism: But the very fact of its appropriation of political power in a country where the principal means of production are in the hands of the state, creates a new and hitherto unknown relation between the bureaucracy and the riches of the nation. The means of production belong to the state. But the state, so to speak, “belongs” to the bureaucracy. If these as yet wholly new relations should solidify, become the norm and be legalized, whether with or without resistance from the workers, they would, in the long run, lead to a complete liquidation of the social conquests of the proletarian revolution.113

While the bureaucracy had usurped the revolution, they had not yet overthrown it. For Trotsky, the restoration of capitalism was not a foregone conclusion since the future depended on a clash between different social forces. The Soviet proletariat could step onto the stage of history once again and overthrow the bureaucracy. Yet Trotsky said that a future revolution in the USSR would not be a social one, but a political one since the workers would not denationalize industry or dismantle the planned economy: “The overthrow of the Bonapartist caste will, of course, have deep social consequences, but in itself it will be confined within the limits of political revolution.”114 Trotsky envisioned that this political revolution would bring sweeping changes by restoring soviet democracy, internationalism, and egalitarianism. In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky focused more on the social dynamics of the USSR without looking too closely at Stalin himself as a historical actor. Later in his unfinished Stalin, Trotsky took the opportunity to examine the life of the general secretary. He observed that Stalin’s rise to the center of power in the Soviet Union was quite exceptional since he was a mediocrity compared to other major figures in the Bolshevik Party. During the prerevolutionary era, Stalin was a loyal committeeman in the underground party who was instinctively afraid of mass struggle: “Lack of confidence

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in the masses, as well as in individuals, is the basis of his nature.”115 While Stalin was not a natural revolutionary or leader, Trotsky noted that he was well suited to play the part of a bureaucratic administrator. For Stalin to play the role of a Soviet Bonaparte required the emergence of an unprecedented situation. Trotsky said this moment appeared in the aftermath of the civil war as the bureaucracy became the leading force in soviet life: “When the masses abandon the field of public life and return to their living quarters, retreating, confused, frustrated and exhausted, into the four walls of their homes, then a vacuum is created. This vacuum is filled by a new bureaucracy.”116 The historical conditions that prevailed in the USSR meant someone with a limited vision was needed. Material circumstances determined that Stalin would play this part. As Trotsky observed: “Helvétius once said that every epoch in society requires its own great persons, but when it does not find any, it invents them.”117 It took time for Stalin to grow into a dictator because he was unaware of the historical role he was carrying out. Due to Stalin’s lack of historical foresight, he genuinely believed that he was serving the interests of the revolution. Thus, it was easy for Stalin to dismiss all charges of Thermidor from Trotsky and the Left Opposition. So narrow was Stalin’s perspective that Trotsky believed the general secretary would have recoiled in horror upon seeing his own future: If at that time anyone would have shown Stalin his own future role he would have turned away from himself in disgust. . . . If Stalin could have foreseen at the very beginning where his fight against Trotskyism would lead, he undoubtedly would have stopped short, in spite of the prospect of victory over all his opponents. But he did not foresee anything. . . . The absence of a creative imagination, the inability to generalise and to foresee, killed the revolutionist in Stalin when he took over the helm on his own. But the very same traits, backed by his authority as a former revolutionist, enabled him to camouflage the rise of the Thermidorian bureaucracy.118

In contrast to Koestler’s Rubashov, who saw “Number One” as representing the all-knowing force of historical necessity, Trotsky viewed the general secretary as the unwitting and ruthless agent of Thermidorian betrayal. Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism broke sharply with the Cold War counterEnlightenment, the Moscow-line Communists, and other Western Marxists who all accepted the revolutionary disguise of Stalinism while ignoring its Thermidorian content. Superficially, it could be observed that Stalinists were Marxists due to their slogans and party membership. However, Trotsky noted that the material content of those slogans and the actions of the Soviet Party represented a break with communism. As Trotsky observed about the purges:

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The present purge draws between Bolshevism and Stalinism not simply a bloody line but a whole river of blood. The annihilation of the entire old generation of Bolsheviks, an important part of the middle generation, which participated in the civil war, and that part of the youth which took seriously the Bolshevik traditions, shows not only a political but a thoroughly physical incompatibility between Bolshevism and Stalinism. How can this be ignored?119

However, Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism was not without its flaws. The greatest weakness was that Trotsky underestimated the bureaucracy’s staying power. He expected that the Soviet Union would either be defeated in World War II or that the bureaucracy would be overthrown when the revolution spread to the West.120 Trotsky did not consider a third option that Stalinism would emerge from the war victorious and strengthened. In a negative sense, Trotsky’s analysis was proved correct. He predicted that unless the working class led a political revolution against Stalinism, then capitalism would be restored. The bureaucracy ended up doing such a thorough job of atomizing the Soviet working class that they were unable to resist the final counterrevolution under Gorbachev and Yeltsin in 1991. Trotsky concluded that the Soviet Thermidor was not a simple repetition of the French one. Using a historical materialist analysis, Trotsky explained that Stalinism emerged from the defeat of the world revolution and isolation of the USSR. While Stalinism was a political counter-revolution that usurped the rule of the working class, it was not a social counterrevolution that restored capitalism. This outcome could only be averted if the working class overthrew the bureaucracy and reestablished soviet democracy. Trotsky’s Proletarian Jacobin approach stayed clear of the pitfalls of Stalinism and the counter-Enlightenment. Unlike the Stalinists, Trotsky refused to apologize for the bureaucracy’s crimes as the fulfillment of historical necessity. Nor did he offer any comfort to anti-communists since Trotsky did not view the USSR as a frozen totalitarian society. He recognized that it remained anti-capitalist and that the working class had a historical duty to defend the Soviet Union from imperialism. In the end, Trotsky offered a powerful Marxist analysis against the Dialectics of Saturn. It still serves as a basis for understanding Stalinism today and central to any future renewal of Marxism. NOTES 1. As Pierre Broué notes, Trotsky was well-read on the French Revolution:

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Trotsky did not devote any of his works specifically to the French Revolution, which is a pity. However, he did study it closely. He knew the works of Alphonse Aulard, including his collection, Documents for the history of the Jacobin Society. He knew Michelet’s History of France and Jean Jaurès’sSocialist History, for which he owed to a special admiration. Throughout the vicissitudes of his political life he did not cease to keep abreast of the latest scientific work in the field. He knew the work of Mathiez and appreciated its importance. He made use of the first of the works of Georges Lefebvre to reach the wider public. Pierre Broué, “Trotsky and the French Revolution,” Cahiers Leon Trotsky 30 (June 1987). https:​//​www​.marxists​.org​/archive​/broue​/1987​/Trotsky​%20and​%20French​ %20Revolution​.pdf. 2. “Engels to Vera Zasulich - 23 April 1885,” in MECW, vol. 47, 280. 3. Georgi Plekhanov, “Speech at the International Workers’ Socialist Congress in Paris, July 1889,” in Plekhanov: Selected Philosophical Works, Volume I (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1961), 454. On the concept of hegemony in Russian Marxism, See Anderson 2020, 61–62. On Plekhanov’s Jacobinism, see Samuel H. Baron, Plekhanov: The Father of Russian Marxism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1963), 213–14; Robert Mayer, “Lenin and the Jacobin Identity in Russia,” Studies in East European Thought 51, no. 2 (June 1999): 140. See also Doug Enaa Greene, “Georgi Plekhanov: Tragedy of a forerunner,” LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal. July 28, 2016. http:​//​links​.org​.au​/node​/4773. 4. Quoted in Tony Cliff, Building the Party: Lenin 1893–1914 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2002), 91. 5. Leon Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence, trans. Alan Woods (London: Wellred Books, 2016), 784. 6. Baron 1963, 246. 7. Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 53 After the 1903 Congress, Martov bitterly referred to Lenin as “Robespierre.” See Israel Getzler, Martov: A Biography of a Russian Social Democrat (London: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 88. 8. Quoted in Pipes 1990, 348. 9. Rosa Luxemburg, “Organizational Question of Russian Social Democracy,” in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, ed. Mary-Alice Waters (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 118. 10. Leon Trotsky, Our Political Tasks (London: New Park Publications, 1979a), 77. 11. “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back,” in LCW, vol. 7, 381. 12. According to Victor Serge: “Lenin’s ‘proletarian Jacobinism,’ with its disinterestedness, its discipline in both thought and action, was grafted upon the psychology of cadres whose character had been formed under the old regime—that is to say, in the course of the struggle against despotism.” Serge 2012, 156. See also Souvarine 1939, 121–22 on the oscillations in Lenin between Jacobinism and German Social-Democracy. For more on Proletarian Jacobinism from Marx to Lenin, see Joseph Seymour’s series on “Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition,”  Young Spartacist. https:​//​www​.marxists​.org​/history​/etol​/newspape​/youngspart​

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-sl​/index​htm; Greene and Fluss, “The Jacobin Enlightenment.”; Greene, “Lessons of the Commune.” 13. “Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution,” in LCW, vol. 9, 58. 14. Ibid. In other discussions about tactics and the 1905 Revolution, Lenin called Engels a “true Jacobin of Social-Democracy.” See “On the Provisional Revolutionary Government,” in LCW, vol. 8, 478. 15. “Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution,” in LCW, vol. 9, 60. 16. Alexander Parvus, “Our Tasks,” in Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record, ed. Richard Day and Daniel Gaido (Boston: Brill, 2009), 488. 17. Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution & Results and Prospects (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1978a), 54. 18. “Can ‘Jacobinism’ Frighten the Working Class?” in LCW, vol. 25, 122. 19. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879–1921 (New York: Verso, 2003a), 267. 20. Leon Trotsky, “What Next?” Marxists Internet Archive. https:​//​www​marxists​ .org​/archive​/trotsky​/1917​/next​/ch05​ htm. 21. Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution Volume II: The Attempted Counterrevolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1937), 157. 22. Quoted in Dmitry Shlapentokh, The Counter-Revolution in Revolution: Images of Thermidor and Napoleon at the Time of Russian Revolution and Civil War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 64. 23. Quoted in Eric Hobsbawm, Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 49. 24. Quoted in George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 22. 25. Lennard D. Gerson, The Secret Police in Lenin’s Russia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976), 135–36. At the time, Victor Serge said: “The success of a revolution requires the implacable severity of a Dzerzhinsky.” See Victor Serge, Revolution in Danger: Writings from Russia 1919–1921 (Chicago: Haymarket, 2011a), 102. 26. Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky (New York: Verso, 2007), 59. 27. Leon Trotsky, “The Socialist Fatherland in Danger,” Marxists Internet Archive. https:​//​www​ marxists​.org​/archive​/trotsky​/1918​/military​/ch32​.htm. 28. Quoted in Getzler 1967, 173. 29. Julius Martov, “Decomposition or Conquest of the State,” Marxists Internet Archive. https:​//​www​.marxists​.org​/archive​/martov​/1921​/xx​/decomp​.htm. 30. “The Russian Revolution,” in Luxemburg 1970, 376 and 395. 31. Ibid., 393. 32. Ibid., 389. 33. Quoted in Paul Frölich, Rosa Luxemburg: Ideas in Action (Chicago: Haymarket, 2010), 239. Luise Kautsky was the wife of Karl Kautsky. 34. “The Russian Revolution,” in Luxemburg 1970, 394.

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35. In particular, see Ronald Grigor Suny, The Baku Commune 1917–1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). 36. William Henry Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution 1917–1921: Volume One (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1935), 371. Years later, Trotsky speculated that if the Bolsheviks had not taken power, then fascism would have emerged in Russia before Italy: “Had the Bolsheviks not seized power, the world would have had a Russian name for Fascism five years before the March on Rome.” See Trotsky 2016, 599. 37. Rosa Luxemburg, “What Does the Spartacus League Want? in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, ed. Peter Hudis & Kevin B. Anderson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), 352. 38. Rosa Luxemburg, “Constituent Assembly or Council Government?” Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. https:​//​www​.rosalux​.de​/stiftung​/historisches​-zentrum​/rosa​ -luxemburg​/constituent​-assembly​-or​-council​-government; For a brief overview of Luxemburg’s evolving views on the Russian Revolution see Nathaniel Flakin, “Was Rosa Luxemburg an Opponent of the Russian Revolution?” Left Voice, January 15, 2021. https:​//​www​.leftvoice​.org​/was​-rosa​-luxemburg​-an​-opponent​-of​-the​-russian​ -revolution​/. 39. Quoted in Hobsbawm 1990, 45. 40. Albert Mathiez, “Bolshevism and Jacobinism,” Marxists Internet Archive. https:​ //​www​.marxists​.org​/history​/france​/revolution​/mathiez​/1920​/bolshevism​-jacobinism​ .htm. 41. Quoted in Gerald H. Meaker, The Revolutionary Left in Spain, 1914–1923 (Stanford: University of Stanford Press, 1974), 423. 42. Antonio Gramsci, “The Russian Maximalists,” in Selections from Political Writings (1910–1920) (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1977), 32. 43. “Two Revolutions” in ibid., 309. 44. Gramsci 1971, 78. 45. Hannah Arendt also linked Machiavelli to the French Revolution: [Machiavelli] certainly was not the father of political science or political theory, but it is difficult to deny that one may well see in him the spiritual father of revolution. Not only do we find in him already this conscious, passionate effort to revive the spirit and the institutions of Roman antiquity which then became so characteristic of eighteenth-century political thought; even more important in this context is his famous insistence on the role of violence in the realm of politics which has never ceased to shock his readers, but which we also find in the words and deeds of the men of the French Revolution. See Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1990), 37. 46. Leon Trotsky, “The Danger of Thermidor,” in Writings of Leon Trotsky [1932– 1933] (New York: Pathfinder 1972b), 76–77. 47. Serge 2012, 152. Serge on Kronstadt is discussed later. 48. Quoted in Souvarine 1939, 317.

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49. For Stalin and the Georgian Affair see Lewin 2005, 43–64. 50. “Letters to the Congress,” in LCW 36, 596. For more on Lenin’s last struggle against Stalin, see Lewin 2005a. 51. “Better Fewer, But Better,” in LCW 33, 487. 52. “On Co-operation,” in LCW 33, 474. 53. Ibid., 500. See also Lewin 2005a, 109–10. 54. “The Possibility of Building Socialism in our Country,” in Stalin Collected Works, Vol. 8 (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1953), 101–3. (henceforth SCW) 55. Ernest Mandel, “Trotsky’s Marxism: A Rejoinder,” New Left Review 56 (July–August 1969): 78. For additional background on Trotsky’s program, see Ernest Mandel, Trotsky As Alternative (New York: Verso, 1995), 59–66; Ernest Mandel, “Trotsky’s Marxism: an Anti-Critique,” New Left Review 47 (January–February 1968): 32–51; Vadim Z. Rogovin, Was There an Alternative? 1923–1927 Trotskyism: A Look Back Through the Years (Oak Park: Mehring Books, 2021); Deutscher 2003b; Kunal Chattopadhyay, The Marxism of Leon Trotsky (Kolkata: Progress Publishers, 2006); Doug Enaa Greene, “The Chimes at Midnight: Trotskyism in the USSR 1926–1938,” LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal, October 13, 2017. http:​//​links​.org​.au​/chimes​-at​-midnight​-trotskyism​-ussr​-1926–1938; Doug Enaa Greene, “Leon Trotsky and Cultural Revolution,” Cosmonaut, May 12, 2019. https:​//​ cosmonaut​.blog​/2019​/05​/12​/leon​-trotsky​-and​-cultural​-revolution​/. 56. Leon Trotsky, “The New Course in the Soviet Economy,” in Writings of Leon Trotsky [1930] (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1975b), 115. 57. Leon Trotsky, “Habit and Custom,” in Problems of Everyday Life (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973b), 30. 58. In particular see “The Platform of the Opposition: The Party Crisis and How to Overcome It,” in The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1926–27) (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1980), 440–41.Trotsky’s views on bureaucracy in the CPSU and his proposals on restoring inner-party democracy during this period are covered well by Paul Le Blanc, Leon Trotsky and the Organizational Principles of the Revolutionary Party, (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), 26–40. 59. Leon Trotsky, The Third International After Lenin (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970b), 270. 60. For some background on the inadequacies of Bukharin, see my “Bukharin: The Favorite of the Whole Party,” LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal, February 13, 2015. http:​//​links​.org​.au​/node​/4291. 61. Richard B. Day, “Leon Trotsky on the problems of the smychka and forced collectivization,” Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory 13, no. 1 (1982): 59–60. Richard Day has postulated that if Trotsky’s proposals had been implemented as early as 1925–1926, then “the final collapse of the smychka and forced collectivization might not have occurred. There can be little doubt that the principal error of the party leadership was to commit excessive resources to heavy industry during the period of goods famine.” See Richard B. Day, Leon Trotsky and the Politics of Economic Isolation (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1973), 65. However, the policy

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of import-dependency would have run into difficulties with the onset of the Great Depression when the conditions of trade turned against the USSR. 62. “The Platform of the Opposition: The Party Crisis and How to Overcome It,” in Trotsky 1980, 418. 63. Evgeny Preobrazhensky, The New Economics (London, Oxford University Press, 1965), 88. 64. “Speech to the Fifteenth Conference,” in Trotsky 1980, 201. 65. Alfred Rosmer, Moscow Under Lenin (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 207. 66. Leon Trotsky, “How Did Stalin Defeat the Opposition?” in Writings of Leon Trotsky [1935–1936] (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1977), 176. In his autobiography, Trotsky said that the ruling triumvirate came to believe their own invented fantasies that he was a potential Bonaparte: Next to the traditions of the October revolution, the epigones feared most the traditions of the civil war and my connection with the army. I yielded up the military post without a fight, with even a sense of relief, since I was thereby wresting from my opponents’ hands their weapon of insinuation concerning my military intentions. The epigones had first invented these fantasies to justify their acts, and then began almost to believe them. See Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at Biography (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970a), 518. 67. “Thermidor,” in Trotsky 1980, 332 and 336. 68. See E. H. Carr, Socialism in One Country 1924–1926 Volume II (London: Macmillan, 1959), 112–14. See also Jay Bergman, The French Revolutionary Tradition in Russian and Soviet Politics, Political Thought, and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 255–59; Robert V Daniels, Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 255–56. For background on Zinoviev, see Lars T. Lih, “Zinoviev: The populist Leninist,” in Martov and Zinoviev: Head to Head at Halle, ed. Ben Lewis and Lars T. Lih (London: November Publications, 2011), 39–59. Zalutskii himself was later arrested during the purges and executed in 1937. 69. Jay Bergman, “The Perils of Historical Analogy: Leon Trotsky on the French Revolution,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48, no. 1 (January–March 1987): 83. 70. Quoted in Bergman 2019, 263. 71. Quoted in Deutscher 1966, 347. 72. “With Reference to the Opposition’s ‘Declaration’ of August 8, 1927,” in SCW, vol. 10, 93. 73. “The Clemenceau thesis and the party regime,” in Trotsky 1980, 511–12. 74. “The Fifteenth Congress of the C.P.S.U.(B.), December 2–19, 1927,” in SCW, vol. 10, 351–52. For more context on the war danger and the Clemenceau Thesis, see Daniels 1960, 285–87. 75. The jeunesse dorée or gilded youth were affluent young men who physically attacked Jacobins after the Thermidor. According to Ian Birchall, they were

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precursors to later right-wing paramilitary squads: “It would be anachronistic to describe the jeunesse dorée as fascists, but in some ways they do prefigure the fascist street-gangs of the twentieth century.” Ian Birchall, The Spectre of Babeuf (London: Palgrave, 1997), 48. 76.“Three Letters to Bukharin,” in Trotsky 1980, 55. 77. Quoted in Birchall 1997, 107. 78. Adolf Joffe, “Letter to Leon Trotsky,” Marxists Internet Archive. https:​//​www​ .marxists​.org​/archive​/joffe​/1927​/letter​.htm Emphasis is Joffe’s. 79. Christian Rakovsky, “A New Era of Soviet Development,” in Christian Rakovsky: Selected Writings on Opposition in the USSR 1923–1930, ed. Gus Fagan (London: Allison and Busby, 1980), 102. 80. “The Professional Dangers of Power,” in Rakovsky 1980, 128. 81. Ibid., 125–26. 82. Deutscher 2003c, 368. Rakovsky was one of the last members of the Opposition to capitulate to Stalin, doing so in 1934. This cut Trotsky off from any remaining supporters in the Soviet Union. Rakovsky’s return to grace was short-lived though. After serving as Soviet ambassador to Japan, he was arrested again in 1937 and was one of the defendants in the last purge trial of March 1938. Unlike most of his codefendants, Rakovsky was not executed, but sentenced to twenty years of hard labor. He ended up being summarily executed a few months after the German invasion of the USSR. See Leon Trotsky, Trotsky’s Diary in Exile 1935 (London: Faber and Faber, 1958), 53; Leon Trotsky, “The Meaning of Rakovsky ‘s Surrender,” in Writings of Leon Trotsky [1933–1934] (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1975b), 277. 83. Trotsky 1972a, 101. See also Thomas M. Twiss, Trotsky and the Problem of Soviet Bureaucracy (Boston: Brill, 2014), 238–43. 84. “Open Letter to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: The State of the Party and the Tasks of the Left Opposition,” Trotsky 1975b, 146. 85. “At a New Stage” in Trotsky 1980, 629. 86. “Defense of the Soviet Republic and the Opposition” in Writings of Leon Trotsky [1929] (New York: Pathfinder Books, 1975a), 280. For the reasons Trotsky did not ally with Bukharin at the end of the 1920s, see Vadim Z. Rogovin, Bolsheviks Against Stalinism 1928–1933: Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition (Oak Park: Mehring Books, 2019), 79 and 89–90. 87. “Letter to the Italian Left Communists,” in Trotsky 1975a, 322. 88. “Defense of the Soviet Republic and the Opposition” in Trotsky 1975a, 279. 89. Ibid., 283. 90. Ibid., 283–84. 91. Ibid., 284. 92. Ibid. 93. “Toward Capitalism or Socialism?” in Trotsky 1975b, 206. 94. Leon Trotsky, “The Danger of Bonapartism,” in The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1928–1929) (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1981), 347. 95. Leon Trotsky, “Thermidor and Bonapartism,” in Writings of Leon Trotsky [1930–1931] (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973d), 91. 96. “It is Necessary to Build Communist Parties Anew,” in Trotsky 1972b, 310.

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97. “It Is Impossible to Remain in the Same ‘International’ with Stalin, Manuilsky, Lozovsky and Company,” in Trotsky 1975b, 20. 98. Leon Trotsky, “The Workers’ State, Thermidor and Bonapartism,” in Writings of Leon Trotsky [1934–1935] (New York: Pathfinder Press, 2002), 242. 99. Ibid. 249. 100. Ibid. 101. Ibid., 257–58. 102. Trotsky 1972a, 47. 103. Ibid., 22. 104. Ibid., 112. 105. Ibid., 53. 106. Ibid., 55. 107. Ibid., 8. 108. Ibid., 186. Stalin first formulated the idea of socialism in one country in the autumn of 1924. In the first edition of his Foundations of Leninism, Stalin had declared socialism in one country was impossible. This was revised in subsequent editions. See Deutscher 1966, 281–83. However, Bukharin also deserves credit as the coauthor of the theory of socialism in one country, advancing it first in April 1924. See Cohen 1980, 184. 109. Trotsky 1972a, 186–87. In particular, see Leon Trotsky, Whither France? (New York: Merit, 1968) and Leon Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution (1931–39) (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973c). 110. Trotsky 1972a, 197. 111. Ibid., 250. 112. Ibid., 278. 113. Ibid., 249. 114. Ibid., 288. For Trotsky’s program of political revolution, see ibid., 289–90. As both Deutscher and Mandel note, this was similar to Trotsky’s earlier program in the 1920s, but now contained new demands for elections and multiparty Soviet democracy. See Deutscher 2003c, 252 and Ernest Mandel, Trotsky: A Study in the Dynamic of His Thought (London: New Left Books, 1979), 124–26. 115. Trotsky 2016, 68. This work uses the most recent version of Trotsky’s Stalin that removes politically dubious changes and insertions by the original editor and incorporates previously unpublished material. For reviews of Trotsky’s Stalin, see “Trotsky on Stalin,” in Deutscher 1969, 78–90; John G. Wright, “Trotsky’s Biography of Stalin—The Meaning of the Attacks Upon It,” Marxists Internet Archive. https:​ //​www​ marxists​.org​/history​/etol​/writers​/wright​/1946​/05​/stalbiog​ html; Max Shachtman, “Trotsky’s Stalin: A Critical Evaluation,” Marxists Internet Archive. https:​//​ www​.marxists​.org​/archive​/shachtma​/1946​/10​/trotsky​-stalin​ html. 116. Trotsky 2016, 494. 117. Ibid., 606. 118. Ibid., 534 and 614. Trotsky’s characterization echoes that given by Khrushchev in the Secret Speech: “Stalin was convinced that [these things he did] were necessary . . . He saw this from the position of the interest of the working class, of the interest of the labouring people, of the interests of the victory of Socialism and

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Communism. We cannot say that these were the deeds of a giddy despot. . . . In this lies the whole tragedy!” Nikita Khrushchev, “Speech to 20th Congress of the C.P.S.U.,” Marxists Internet Archive. https:​//​www​ marxists​.org​/archive​/khrushchev​ /1956​/02​/24​.htm. 119. Leon Trotsky, “Stalinism and Bolshevism,” in Writings of Leon Trotsky [1936–1937] (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1978b), 423. 120. Trotsky 1972a, 227.

Chapter Seven

Stalinism as Thermidor Western Retreat and Eastern Reconciliation

A. VICTOR SERGE Within the ranks of the Fourth International, a rejection of Trotsky’s position on the Soviet Union resulted not only in theoretical confusion, but also had practical implications. An early example occurred near the end of Trotsky’s life involving a polemic inside the American-based Socialist Workers Party (SWP). In 1939, after the Soviet Union invaded Finland and Poland, some SWP members, notably Max Shachtman and James Burnham, insisted that this was an act of imperialism. They claimed that the USSR was no longer a workers’ state, but was now ruled by a new bureaucratic class. Both Shachtman and Burnham found that Trotsky’s position on the USSR was too close to Stalinism and even apologetic for it.‌‌ However, Trotsky’s position on the USSR did not flow from any sentimental attachment, but from an objective study of its internal dynamics. He argued that the Soviet Union remained a workers’ state, albeit degenerated, since it still rested on collective property relations. For Trotsky, imperialism was still the main enemy, so the proletariat must defend the Soviet Union in any conflict with the former. When it came to Shachtman and Burnham’s claims that the Soviet Union was a bureaucratic collectivist state, Trotsky believed that this smacked more of moralism, empiricism, and adapting to anti-communist moods than one based on a materialist approach.1 Eventually, Shachtman and Burnham left the SWP and adopted the position of the Cold War counter-Enlightenment. What Shachtman and Burnham represented was a “Western retreat” within the Fourth International. Another example of this position can be found in Victor Serge. Serge did a better job of explaining his own departure from 249

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revolutionary Marxism than Shachtman and Burnham. Since his journey was cut short by an untimely death, Serge was still working through all the uncertainties and reservations of the path that he was on. The Belgian-born child of Russian exiles, Victor Serge spent his early years as an anarchist agitator and journalist. Like others of his generation, Serge was shocked by the support of many anarchists and socialists for World War I. However, the Russian Revolution renewed his hopes in an anticapitalist future. Making his way to Soviet Russia in 1919, Serge served in a machine gun battery defending Petrograd from the Whites and worked as a translator for the Comintern. After the end of the civil war, Serge was dismayed at the authoritarian and bureaucratic tendencies that appeared in Russia, fearing that they would destroy the revolution. Serge was pessimistic that a regeneration of the revolution’s libertarian spirit could come from inside the Communist Party. Instead, his eyes turned to the Western proletariat as the only power capable of saving the Russian Revolution. Serge went abroad to work for the Comintern as a journalist. He found himself in Germany during the tumultuous year of 1923 when the Communist Party made an abortive effort to take power. The KPD’s failure ensured the prolonged isolation of the Soviet Union. When the Comintern searched for scapegoats inside the KPD for the defeat, Serge became even more disheartened about developments in Russia: “But now the ECCI, solicitous above all for its own prestige, condemns the ‘opportunism’ and inefficiency of the two leaders of the KPD, Brandler and Thalheimer, who have been so incompetent in managing the German Revolution. But they did not dare move a finger without referring the matter to the Executive!”2 Once more, Serge went abroad. This time, he found himself in Vienna, where he befriended both Georg Lukács and Antonio Gramsci. In 1925, Serge returned to the Soviet Union, where he immediately found himself within the ranks of the Left Opposition. Despite his fervent support, Serge considered the Left Opposition to be involved in a quixotic venture. Still, he maintained that even if the odds were against them, the Left Opposition must fight if there was just the slimmest likelihood to save the revolution: “As far as I was concerned everything was summed up in one conviction: even if there were only one chance in a hundred for the regeneration of the Revolution and its workers’ democracy, that chance had to be taken at all costs.”3 Ultimately, Trotsky’s defeat in 1927 only confirmed Serge’s foreboding that the USSR was facing its Thermidor. After being expelled from the Communist Party, Serge was arrested in 1928. During his time in prison, he nearly died. After recovering, Serge made the fateful decision to devote his life to writing to preserve the truth of the revolutionary movement from Stalinist falsifications. Over the next



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several years, he wrote a history of the revolution, Year One of the Russian Revolution (1930) and three novels Men in Prison (1930), Birth of Our Power (1931), and Conquered City (1932).4 His works were banned in the USSR, but they were published abroad in France. This not only ensured Serge’s literary reputation among French intellectuals, but likely saved his life. In 1933, Serge was arrested once more by the Soviet police. This time, he was charged with conspiring with Trotsky. Serge refused to sign any documents presented to him. He recalled later that his time in prison gave him unique insights into the police methods employed later in the Moscow Trials: “If I have lingered so long in describing my examination this is because it was a great help later on, along with what I know from other sources, in enabling me to understand how the great Trials were fabricated.”5 After eighty-five days in solitary confinement, the charges were dropped, and Serge was sent into internal exile. Serge spent the following three years at Orenburg with other exiled oppositionists. He fictionalized these experiences in his novel Midnight in the Century (1939). In the novel, Serge described how the opposition viewed the twin triumphs of Hitler and Stalin as symbolizing “midnight in the century” that would only end in disaster: There are singular congruencies between the two dictatorships. Stalin gave Hitler his strength by driving the middle classes away from Communism with the nightmare of forced collectivization, famine, and terror against the technicians. Hitler, by making Europe abandon the hope of socialism, will strengthen Stalin. These grave-diggers were born to understand each other. Enemies and brothers. In Germany, one is burying an aborted democracy, the child of an aborted revolution. In Russia, the other is burying a victorious revolution born of a weak proletariat and left on its own by the rest of the world. Both of them are leading those they serve—the bourgeoisie in Germany, the bureaucracy here at home—toward a catastrophe.6

Still, Serge remained hopeful that the possibility remained to rejuvenate the revolution. He noted that a new working class had been created by the Five-Year Plan. However, it would take time for these workers to gain consciousness and organize themselves. For now, it seemed little could be done by the opposition except to defend their ideas and program. As Serge languished in Orenburg, protests mounted in France against his imprisonment. His cause was championed by a diverse array of syndicalists, ex-communists, and left intellectuals such as Magdeleine Paz, Marcel Martinet, Luc Durtain, Léon Werth, Boris Souvarine, and Jacques Mesnil. By contrast, the Communist Party defended Serge’s incarceration. Louis Aragon stated that he was lucky to be shown mercy: “the Soviet government showed

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far too much indulgence by not shooting him on the spot.”7 Despite the best efforts of the PCF, L’Affaire Victor Serge would not go away. The high point of the Serge scandal occurred in 1935 at the International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture. This anti-fascist event was attended by luminaries of the French left such as Paul Nizan, Romain Rolland, André Gide, Henri Barbusse, André Malraux, and Louis Aragon. From Russia were Mikhail Koltsov, Ilya Ehrenburg, Boris Pasternak, and Isaac Babel. Other prominent guests included Bertolt Brecht, Mike Gold, and Aldous Huxley. Serge’s supporters were also in the audience. One, Gaëtano Salvemini, managed to speak up on his behalf. This puzzled the Soviet delegates, who either feigned ignorance or stayed quiet. These protests were not in vain though. Rolland lobbied quietly behind the scenes with Maxim Gorky and Stalin for Serge’s release. Later, Serge was appreciative of Rolland’s efforts, but angered since he continued to support Stalin: “Perhaps he knew his own impotence, but why did he refuse to at least liberate his conscience? At age seventy the author of Jean-Christophe allowed himself to be covered with the blood spilled by a tyranny of which he was a faithful adulator.”8 In April 1936, Serge was granted an exit visa. He managed to leave the Soviet Union, but lost nearly all his manuscripts in the process. Denied entry into France, Serge ended up settling in Belgium. His release occurred mere months before the first Moscow Trial, leading Serge to conclude that there was no grand plan behind the purge: I am conscious of being the living proof of the unplanned character of the first trial and, at the same time, of the crazy falsity of the charges brought up in all the Trials. I had departed from the USSR in mid-April, at a time when practically all the accused were already in prison. I had worked with Zinoviev and Trotsky, I was a close acquaintance of dozens of those who were to disappear and be shot, I had been one of the leaders of the Left Opposition in Leningrad and one of its spokesmen abroad, and I had never capitulated. Would I have been allowed to leave Russia, with my skill as a writer and my firm evidence as a witness whose facts were irrefutable, if the extermination trials had been in the offing? Then too, not one mad accusation had been made against me in the whole course of the Trials, which proved that lies were being spread only about those with no means of defending themselves.9

In Belgium, Serge resumed his activity on behalf of the Trotskyist Opposition, working closely with Trotsky’s son Lev Sedov. One task he eagerly undertook was translating The Revolution Betrayed into French. Trotsky had such a high opinion of Serge’s abilities as a translator that he refused to double-check the work. In addition, Serge wrote two books, From Lenin to Stalin (1937) and



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Destiny of a Revolution (1937), which were broadly supportive of Trotsky’s outlook on the USSR. Serge worked diligently to expose the Moscow Trials as fabrications. Yet he found that the left intelligentsia in Europe was unwilling to listen. For instance, the French League for the Rights of Man, which had famously defended Alfred Dreyfus, now refused to criticize the USSR. Serge bitterly noted their cynical reasoning: “‘Russia is our ally . . .’ It was imbecilic reasoning—there is more than a hint of suicide about an international alliance that turns into moral and political servility—but it worked powerfully.”10 Serge said that the struggle against fascism could not be won with allies who mimicked it: “We are building a common front against Fascism. How can we block its path, with so many concentration camps behind us?”11 While Serge was alienated from the pro-Soviet left, he began developing differences with Trotsky on several issues. One point of contention between them was the Spanish Civil War. Serge was a supporter of the POUM, while Trotsky considered them to be centrists for participating in the popular front. According to Serge, this Marxist orthodoxy was an obstacle to solidarity with genuine Spanish revolutionaries: In my opinion we must support this party in every way, re-establish truly comradely relations with it and not demand from it an orthodoxy which it cannot have. The main thing is not to conduct any factional sectarian work there and not to aspire to lead this revolutionary organisation from outside. In this respect a number of comrades have piled up a lot of blunders, aggravated the relationship and caused a highly undesirable reaction. Whatever you may say, the POUM represents a militant unit now, which behaves on the whole very courageously and reasonably and holds out great hopes in a situation of very grave danger.12

A second point of disagreement revolved around how to assess the Russian Revolution and the origins of Stalinism. In 1938, a debate erupted between Trotsky and his American supporters such as Dwight MacDonald over the Kronstadt Uprising. MacDonald said that the Bolshevik suppression of the mutiny and their reasoning for it paved the way for the later methods and slanders of Stalinism: “I can’t see as much difference as I would like to see between Trotsky’s insistence that, because the enemies of the revolution have used the Kronstadt affair to discredit Bolshevism, therefore all who express doubts about Kronstadt are (‘objectively’ considered) allies of counter-revolution; and Vyshinsky’s insistence that the Fourth International and the Gestapo are comrades-in-arms because both oppose the Stalinist regime.”13 Since Trotsky was commander of the Red Army when Kronstadt occurred, MacDonald was implicating him as an accomplice in generating Stalinism.

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Trotsky defended his role and accused his critics of painting a romanticized portrait of Kronstadt: Your evaluation of the Kronstadt uprising of 1921 is basically incorrect. The best, most self-sacrificing sailors were completely withdrawn from Kronstadt and played an important role at the fronts and in the local soviets throughout the country. What remained was the gray mass with big pretensions (“We are from Kronstadt”), but without political education and unprepared for revolutionary sacrifice. The country was starving. The Kronstadters demanded privileges. The uprising was dictated by a desire to get privileged food rations. The sailors had cannon and battleships. All the reactionary elements, both in Russia and abroad, immediately seized upon this uprising. The White emigres demanded aid for the insurrectionists. The victory of this uprising could bring nothing but the victory of the counterrevolution, entirely independent of the ideas the sailors had in their heads.14

Serge entered this debate and agreed with MacDonald that the seeds of Stalinism were found in the Bolshevik suppression of Kronstadt: Was it right to repress movements whose underlying origins were in a working-class democracy? My own inclination is to believe that quite early on there was an abuse of “firmness,” that is of administrative and military measures in relation to the masses and the dissidents of the revolution. Experience has shown that this facilitated the installation of bureaucratic despotism.15

Trotsky was enraged and condemned Serge for standing against him: “Instead of stamping on the traitors of the revolution and falsifiers of history, you immediately spoke in their defence. Your excuse and extenuations make things no better, only worse. Our enemies get the opportunity to say, ‘Even Victor Serge, who’s only got secondary disagreements with Trotsky, recognises that . . . ,’ and so on.”16 He believed that Serge’s attitude toward Kronstadt was a sign of eclecticism, moralism, and centrism that was unsuited to the realm of revolutionary politics: “Victor Serge, who, it would seem, is trying to manufacture a sort of synthesis of anarchism, POUMism, and Marxism, has intervened very unfortunately in the polemic about Kronstadt.”17 A third point of divergence between Trotsky and Serge occurred over Their Morals and Ours (1938). This pamphlet was written by Trotsky in response to the arguments of the pragmatist John Dewey and former revolutionaries who said that Bolshevik amorality led to Stalinism. As opposed to this abstract moralism, Trotsky claimed that revolutionary morals were rooted in the concrete reality of the class struggle. This raised the question of the relationship between ends and means. For communists, the end was the liberation of



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humanity and the means used must correspond to this. For Trotsky, this stood in stark contrast to the approach of Stalinism: Permissible and obligatory are those and only those means, we answer, which unite the revolutionary proletariat, fill their hearts with irreconcilable hostility to oppression, teach them contempt for official morality and its democratic echoers, imbue them with consciousness of their own historic mission, raise their courage and spirit of self-sacrifice in the struggle. Precisely from this it flows that not all means are permissible. When we say that the end justifies the means, then for us the conclusion follows that the great revolutionary end spurns those base means and ways which set one part of the working class against other parts, or attempt to make the masses happy without their participation; or lower the faith of the masses in themselves and their organization, replacing it by worship for the “leaders.”18

Trotsky concluded that communists must understand that working-class self-emancipation is the starting point for Marxist ethics. Serge translated Their Morals and Ours into French. While he praised Trotsky’s work, he doubted its overall argument about revolutionary ethics. In a private letter, Serge told Marcel Martinet that he found Trotsky too closed-minded: It is dynamic and well thought out from a narrow-minded point of view, historically obsolete, and falsifies everything, fanatically. I think that I will not—at least at this time—treat this subject and respond to the Old Man, or if so, only minimally, in order not to play dead to his attacks . . . his intransigence has become deadly dull, tediously overbearing.19

In an unpublished essay, Serge attacked Trotsky’s conception of morality for ignoring human sentiment: When he denounces the hypocrisy of conventional morality, the (bourgeois) class spirit of church and university morality, and that of intellectual circles; when he hunts down in its lair the mediocrity of liberal idealism; when he maintains that the class struggle weighs more—much more—than human sentiment; when he legitimizes the rigors of the civil war, Trotsky is right and strikingly so, and it is comforting to hear again the voice of the intrepid militants of the Russian Revolution. But these questions, which are not only moral ones, but rather embrace all of action and thought, have [an] aspect aside from that of the class struggle: they are posed within the working class and its organizations. They are posed in relation to socialism, both as a goal and as an action. And Trotsky seems to ignore this fact.20

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Serge’s qualms about Trotsky and revolutionary morality were not expressed publicly. However, he inadvertently found himself at the center of a very open and bitter debate. The French release of Their Morals and Ours contained a blurb that attacked the book. Trotsky falsely assumed that Serge had written it. In June 1939, Trotsky wrote an addendum titled “The Moralists and Sycophants against Marxism: Peddlers of Indulgences and Their Socialist Allies, or the Cuckoo in a Strange Nest” where he fiercely attacked Serge: But inasmuch as in the present case the author happens to be on the other side of the ocean, some “friend,” apparently profiting from the publisher’s lack of information, contrived to slip into a strange nest and deposit there his little egg oh! it is of course a very tiny egg, an almost virginal egg. Who is the author of this prospectus? Victor Serge, who translated the book and who is at the same time its severest critic, can easily supply the information. I should not be surprised if it turned out that the prospectus was written . . . naturally, not by Victor Serge but by one of his disciples who imitates both his master’s ideas and his style. But, maybe after all, it is the master himself, that is, Victor Serge in his capacity of “friend” of the author?21

Trotsky concluded that Serge was a petty-bourgeois moralist and was unable to think like a Marxist revolutionary. According to Trotsky, Serge could only reason in a fragmented manner and could not comprehend the internal connection between theory and practice. As a result, Serge did not understand the reality of revolution, but instead found comfort in democratic illusions. Trotsky believed that this led to Serge’s departure from Marxism: When our “democrat” scurries from right to left, and from left to right, sowing confusion and scepticism, he imagines it to be the realization of a salutary freedom of thought. But when we evaluate from the Marxian standpoint the vacillations of a disillusioned petty-bourgeois intellectual, that seems to him an assault upon his individuality. He then enters into an alliance with all the confusionists for a crusade against our despotism and our sectarianism.22

The debate over Their Morals and Ours marked the definitive break between the two men. Serge was so devastated by what happened that he refused to comment publicly on Trotsky’s accusations. However, he was also glad to be out of the ranks of the Fourth International. Serge said that Trotsky’s insistence on orthodoxy was akin to Stalinist dogmatism and intolerance: Slandered, executed, and murdered, Trotskyism was displaying symptoms of an outlook in symmetry with that of the very Stalinism against which it had taken its stand, and by which it was being ground into powder. . . . I am well enough acquainted with the integrity of its militants to know that they, too, are unhappy with it. But it is impossible to struggle against social and psychological facts of



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this magnitude with impunity. You cannot cling to an authoritarian doctrine that belongs to the past without paying the price. I was heartbroken by it all, because it is my firm belief that the tenacity and willpower of some men can, despite all odds, break with the traditions that suffocate, and withstand the contagions that bring death. It is painful, it is difficult, but it must be possible. I abstained from any counter-polemic.23

Moreover, Serge also took his distance from Trotskyism on the Russian Question. He still agreed with the Fourth International that Bolshevism did not necessarily lead to Stalinism. He believed that there was always the possibility for different outcomes: “It is often said that the germ of Stalinism was in Bolshevism. Well, I have no objection. Only, Bolshevism also contained many other germs—a mass of other germs—and those who lived through the enthusiasm of the first years of the Revolution ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in a corpse—and which he may have carried with him since his birth—is this very sensible?”24 However, Serge contended that Bolshevism had flaws such as authoritarianism and fear of the masses. These traits facilitated the rise of Stalinism. Serge located the revolution’s degeneration with the foundation of the Cheka: “I believe that the formation of the Chekas was one of the gravest and most impermissible errors that the Bolshevik leaders committed in 1918, when plots, blockades, and interventions made them lose their heads.”25 With the Cheka, the Bolsheviks created a police-state that employed the mechanisms of an inquisition. Serge concluded that Trotskyism never truly confronted this reality, meaning that its struggle against Stalinism failed to look at the defects of Proletarian Jacobinism.26 Serge’s politics remained in transition when World War II began. For the moment, he needed to avoid being captured and executed. After the Germans invaded France, he fled south into the unoccupied zone. However, Serge found no safety since Vichy did not welcome leftists. Thanks to the help of American intellectuals such as Dwight MacDonald, John Dewey, Max Eastman, Meyer Schapiro, Herbert Solow, James Farrell, and Sidney Hook, Serge was granted an exit visa. Although he was denied entry to the United States, Serge reached the safety of Mexico. It was a bittersweet moment since Serge arrived several months after Trotsky’s assassination in August 1940, leaving him no chance at reconciling with the Old Man. Serge did make an amends of sorts with Trotsky’s widow Natalia Sedov, with the two coauthoring The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky (1947). In Mexico, Serge found himself politically isolated from the left. He was shunned by both the Communists and Trotskyists with only a few co-thinkers in a small group, Socialismo y Libertad. As a result, Serge could only watch events from afar with no way to intervene. He lived in poverty, and most

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of his writings remained unpublished. Only after his death would they find an audience. Despite his isolation, Serge continued to ponder the meaning of Stalinism, most notably in his novel The Case of Comrade Tulayev (1941), which is about a fictionalized fourth show trial. In the book, events are set in motion when a poor Soviet citizen named Kostia shoots the commissar Tulayev, whom he randomly encounters on the street. When word reaches Stalin, he naturally suspects a wide-ranging conspiracy behind the assassination. Stalin orders the arrest of the commissar’s friends, relatives, and acquaintances. The web of suspicion ends up extending all the way to Siberia and the battlefields of Republican Spain. However, the police do not find the culprit since Kostia left no clues. Strangely, the most compelling character in Tulayev is Stalin (only called “the Chief”). Serge portrays him as a man who is trapped in the system that he created. Stalin is identified with the bureaucratic machine, but finds himself doing what the machine requires. Despite the immense power of the dictatorship, nothing seems to work. Everyone appears to be lying to Stalin, even when they sing his praises. There always seem to be wreckers and spies who ruin everything. Desperately, Stalin demands arrests, trials, and executions, but it is never enough. As Stalin says in the novel: You know, brother, veterans like you, members of the old Party, must tell me the whole truth . . . the whole truth. Otherwise, who can I get it from? I need it, I sometimes feel myself stifling. Everyone lies and lies and lies! From top to bottom they all lie, it’s diabolical . . . Nauseating . . . I live on the summit of an edifice of lies—do you know that? . . . . “Certainly . . . We have had too many traitors . . . conscious or unconscious . . . no time to go into the psychology of it. . . . I’m no novelist.” A pause. “I’ll wipe out every one of them, tirelessly, mercilessly, down even to the least of the least. . . . It is hard, but it must be . . . Every one of them . . . There is the country, the future. I do what must be done. Like a machine.27

For Serge, Stalin was neither a diabolical genius nor the conscious betrayer of the revolution, but someone who genuinely believed that he was serving history: I think I presented an accurate psychological portrait of Stalin. He didn’t break faith, he changed, and history marched on: he bears the heavy burden of a mediocre and powerful personality. He believes in his mission: he sees himself as the



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savior of a revolution threatened by ideologues, the idealistic and the unrealistic (recall Napoleon’s contempt for the ideologues). He fought them as he could, with his inferiority complex, his jealousies, his terror of men superior to him and whom he couldn’t understand. He cast them from his savior’s path by the only methods he had at his disposal: terror and lies, the methods of a limited intelligence governed by suspicion and placed at the service of an immense vitality.28

Serge’s Tulayev is a devastating portrait of the Stalinist belief in historical necessity. He notes that this conception does not account for accidents or contingencies. When they occur, Stalinism can see them only as part of a cosmic grand plan. Ultimately, this leads to terror and madness. Serge’s hopes in the viability of a revolutionary alternative to Stalinism receded by the end of World War II. In the postwar era, he believed that traditional capitalism would be replaced by massive totalitarian states run by new classes of administrators and technicians. This meant that the orthodox Marxist schema of class struggle was now obsolete. Serge concluded that the old tactics inherited from Bolshevism must be abandoned by socialists: That we are well and truly being carried along by the current of an immense revolution, but that there will not be a repetition of the Russian Revolution unless as secondary episodes. That socialism must renounce the ideas of worker dictatorship and hegemony and become the representative of the large numbers of people in whom a socialist-leaning consciousness is germinating, one obscure and without a doctrinal terminology.”29

In this brave new world, proletarian revolution was off the historical agenda. Serge believed that the only hope for socialism lay in appealing to moderate and democratic demands. Since the working class was by nature reformist, socialists must accept that. Whatever Serge’s lingering nostalgia for Bolshevism and Trotskyism, he was now effectively championing social democracy. According to Serge’s biographer Suzi Weissman, he characterized the USSR as “bureaucratic totalitarian with collectivist leanings.”30 He considered this formation to be neither socialist nor capitalist, but a new form of class society. Serge explicitly drew on James Burnham’s ideas about managerial revolution to reach this conclusion. As Serge wrote in Partisan Review, he did not think that the existence of a managerial class was at odds with Marxism: Capitalist economy is going under, yielding to new types of transitional planned economies: capitalism is so hopeless that we see the counter-revolutions it incited now forced to strangle their begetter, as in Germany and Italy and tomorrow elsewhere perhaps under other forms. But this does not do away with the

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problem of socialism. It remains in the very heart of the planned economies, because of the clash of interests (material and immaterial) between the rulers and the masses. Nor should we neglect the factors of psychology and tradition. From this standpoint, the struggle bears quite different aspects, according to whether the new managerial class is the product of an anti-working class and anti-Marxist counter-revolution, respectful (in theory) of private property, wedded to the principles of authority and hierarchy, as is the case in Germany and Italy—or whether it is a class of usurpers who still invoke an ideology and tradition conflicting with its usurpation and standing for the democracy of work and the complete liberation of man. I emphasize this in order to emphasize that even from the viewpoint of the “managerial revolution” deep antagonisms exist between Nazism and Stalinism. In every case, finally, when confronted with a planned economy, we should pose the question: “Planned by whom? Planned for whom? Planned for what end?” It is on this front that socialists will fight in the future, side by side with the masses.31

Like Burnham and Orwell, Serge feared that the postwar world would be dominated by communist totalitarianism. The Red Army had survived the trials of Stalingrad and was now marching to Berlin, but Serge wondered if they would keep moving west. Looking at the predominance of Communists in the anti-Nazi resistance movements, he saw the greatest danger to socialism: “That Stalinism, which molded and nourished the armed resistance movements in France, Yugoslavia, Greece, and elsewhere, constitutes the worst danger, a mortal danger which we would be mad to aspire to fight on our own.”32 Serge viewed Communist leaders like Josef Tito and Mao Zedong to be duplicitous backstabbers, who would act like revolutionaries but transform into counterrevolutionaries as soon as the Kremlin commanded it: “I fear that we’ll soon see arising in various countries Communist-totalitarian condottieri of the Mao Zedong and Tito type, cynical and convinced, who’ll be ‘revolutionaries’ and counterrevolutionaries, or both at once, according to the orders they receive, and capable of turning about face from one day to the next.”33 Serge wrote to Dwight MacDonald warning that the Communist movement was a deadly force controlled by Moscow: “the Communist apparatus controls perfectly and mercilessly all the movements it influences. . . . This apparatus, with its functional, police, and psychological mechanisms, is an enormous new fact in history whose deadly importance has not yet been measured. You live in too free a country to imagine this.”34 In addition, Serge believed that national liberation struggles led by communist parties were simply directed by Stalinist dupes. When it came to Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh, he said: “As a Communist, Ho Chi Minh rules in the name of the Kremlin . . . And that poses to all of us—liberals, socialists, radicals alike—this question: should we sympathize with colonial revolts when their



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real meaning is the expansion of totalitarianism?”35 For Serge, the socialist left could only survive by defeating the threat of Stalinism. By the end of his life in 1947, Serge openly expressed support for conservatives, provided they were securely anti-communist. In one of his final letters, Serge wrote to André Malraux, now a Gaullist, asking for help getting his novel Les Derniers temps published. In his letter, Serge came out openly in favor of Gaullism: I wish to tell you that I judge the political position you have adopted to be courageous and probably reasonable; if I myself were in France, I should be among those socialists who support collaboration with the movement of which you are a member. The electoral victory of your movement, which I foresaw but whose magnitude surprised me, was in my opinion a great step towards the immediate safety of France.36

Defenders of Serge such as Peter Sedgwick and Weissman say that Serge did not embrace anti-communism in this letter. They argue that he wanted to mend relations with Malraux and that his words were later taken out of context. Furthermore, they claim that Serge’s support for Gaullism did not coincide with his overall politics.37 Since Serge died shortly after this letter was written, he could not provide any clarification about his views. However, there is no anomaly in Serge’s pro-Gaullism. In fact, it is perfectly in line with his anti-communism. Serge’s own personal experience seemed only a confirmation of the sinister and totalitarian nature of Stalinism. As an outspoken anti-Stalinist, Serge was physically attacked when he spoke at meetings. He suspected that the Soviet Union was plotting his assassination: “I was told last night that my assassination has been commanded and set for soon. The words of a well-known Communist were quoted: ‘I wouldn’t give a penny for V. S.’s skin.’”38 Serge also speculated that the Stalinists made sure that his work went unpublished: “In every publishing house . . . there is at least one conservative and two Stalinists, and nobody has the slightest understanding of the life of a European militant.”39 Even though Serge had effectively abandoned revolutionary Marxism in his twilight years, he always maintained a sentimental attachment to Bolshevism. As evidence of this, one need only look at “Thirty Years After the Russian Revolution,” published on the thirtieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution on November 7, 1947. In this essay, Serge defended the original ideals of the Russian Revolution against Stalinist smears. There was even a tinge of his old Trotskyism when he predicted the popular overthrow of Stalinism by the reawakened Soviet proletariat: “It is my belief that

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totalitarian regimes constitute colossal factories of revolt. And this one all the more because of its revolutionary tradition.”40 When Victor Serge died of a heart attack on November 17, 1947, his politics remained in flux. Clearly, Serge attempted to maintain a socialist perspective that was distinct from Stalinism. However, the pressures of poverty, political pessimism, and declining health took their toll on him. He found it impossible to escape the pull of emerging Cold War anti-communism. Like many other former Trotskyists such as the New York Intellectuals who abandoned a revolutionary perspective, Victor Serge retreated to the Western camp.41 B. ISAAC DEUTSCHER The “Western retreat” had its counterpart with an “eastern reconciliation” inside the ranks of Trotskyism. Early examples were Karl Radek, Evgeny Preobrazhensky, and Christian Rakovsky who all abandoned the Left Opposition and made their peace with Stalinism. In general, the “eastern” deviation gave up on a political revolution against Stalinism. They claimed that the bureaucracy was not only capable of reform, but that it served the interests of historical necessity. In effect, this meant a convergence with the camp of Stalinism. The most sophisticated representative of this current of “eastern reconciliation” can be found in the work of Isaac Deutscher. As already discussed, Deutscher was one of the great Marxist historians of the twentieth century. In 1927 at the age of twenty, Deutscher joined the illegal Communist Party of Poland (KPP). Already a talented journalist, he quickly became an editor for the party’s clandestine press and also conducted propaganda work inside the Polish army. In 1931, Deutscher traveled to the Soviet Union, where he watched the construction of a new society. While there he was offered two academic posts but turned them down. Deutscher was uneasy after seeing the results of the Five-Year Plan. These were his first doubts about the direction of the USSR under Stalin. As his longtime friend Daniel Singer said: “It would be a misgiving to claim that Deutscher perceived at once the nature of the new regime and that his reservations against Stalinism dates back to this trip. But his doubts were strengthened in an uneasy rather than triumphant mood.”42 After returning to Poland, Deutscher continued his party work. Like many communists, he anxiously watched the rise of the Nazi Party in neighboring Germany. In defiance of the Third Period line, Deutscher argued that a united front between socialists and communists was needed to fight the NSDAP. He formed a small opposition group inside the party and sounded the alarm with the article “Danger of Barbarism Over Europe.” This caused the KPP to immediately expel Deutscher from its ranks in November 1932



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for “exaggerating” the threat of Nazism. Now he was considered a dangerous renegade by the party. As his wife Tamara said: “From that day two sleuths shadowed him: one employed by the Polish police, and the other a volunteer from the Stalinist party cell.”43 As fate would have it, Deutscher had begun reading Trotsky’s Bulletin of the Opposition and he fully agreed with its criticisms of the Third Period. After leaving the KPP, Deutscher joined the small Polish Trotskyist movement and quickly became one of its leaders. When the Moscow Trials began, Deutscher was shocked when dedicated Bolsheviks were accused of high treason. Trembling with anger, he wrote The Moscow Trial, a pamphlet exposing the show trials as a product of a bureaucratic counterrevolution: “The August trial was an act of bloody vengeance of the political reaction against the revolution, a revenge of the thermidorian bureaucracy on the old party of the October Revolution.”44 Deutscher believed that Trotsky and the Left Opposition were the real targets of Stalin’s purges since they represented the unsullied banner of revolutionary Bolshevism. While Deutscher largely agreed with Trotsky on Soviet affairs, he sharply disagreed with the Old Man’s decision to launch the Fourth International in 1938. Deutscher argued that it was premature to create a new international since the workers’ movement was in a period of ebb: “The creation of every one of the earlier Internationals constituted a definite threat to bourgeois rule. . . . This will not be the case with the Fourth International. No significant section of the working class will respond to our manifesto. It is necessary to wait.”45 Deutscher did not attend the inaugural meeting that September, but he did write the theses delivered by the Polish section which argued against forming the international. Max Shachtman, who was presiding at the opening meeting, hurled abuse at the “Mensheviks” in their midst.46 Once the Poles were outvoted and the Fourth International was created, Deutscher left the Trotskyist movement. At almost the exact same moment that the Fourth International was founded, the Polish Communist Party was formally dissolved by the Comintern. A great many of the KPP’s rank-and-file and Central Committee members had emigrated to the USSR to escape persecution at home. Now they were caught up in the purges and arrested en masse as Polish spies. Some of the founders of the party, such as Adolf Warski, Henryk Walecki, and Wera Kostrzewa, were executed. Deutscher had known them personally and despite disagreements, he still believed that they were dedicated communists. As he said later: I also remember the image of Warski at the Theatre Square on 1 May 1928. He was marching in the forefront of our huge and illegal demonstration, through the hail of machine-gun fire and rifle shots with which we were greeted by the Socialist Party militia, while tens and hundreds of wounded were falling in our

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ranks, he held up his white-grey head, a high and easy target visible from afar; unyielding and unmoved, he addressed the crowd. This was the image of him I had in my mind when, some years later, it was announced from Moscow that he was a traitor, a spy and a Piłsudski agent.47

Now without a political home, Deutscher returned to journalism to make a living. In April 1939, he took a position as the London correspondent for Nasz Przeglad. The move ended up saving his life. Less than six months later, Poland was invaded by the Wehrmacht, and Deutscher’s entire family was murdered in the Holocaust. Arriving in London, he had no knowledge of English, but Deutscher proved a quick study. He ended up mastering English better than most native speakers. His prose was so eloquent that Deutscher has been favorably compared to another Polish exile, the novelist Joseph Conrad. In England, Isaac met his future wife, Tamara. He also joined the Polish army in exile. Deutscher’s Marxist convictions got him in trouble when he protested anti-Semitism in the army and was promptly sent to a punitive camp. After being released in 1942, Deutscher became a regular correspondent for the Economist. Eventually he became the journal’s expert on Soviet affairs and its chief European correspondent. During the war Deutscher began seriously reassessing his views on the Soviet Union. He was astounded by the Soviet war effort and the heroism of the Red Army. Despite the deformations of Stalinism, he claimed that the USSR remained socialist. In the struggle against Nazi barbarism, he was not neutral, but argued the international working class had a stake in the Red Army’s victory over fascism: It is a battle for the very existence of the workers’ movement and the freedom of European peoples—a freedom without which socialism cannot be achieved. Such is the objective logic of historical development. Only the blind or pretenders to the role of quislings fail to understand that logic. In the terse war communiques we socialists read not only the reports about “normal” war operations; we are also reading in them the fate of the deadly struggle between revolution and counterrevolution.48

Ultimately, the Red Army’s victory over the Third Reich caused Deutscher to reconsider the orthodox Trotskyist view of Stalinism. In his biography Stalin (1949), Deutscher said that he remained a severe critic of Stalinism, but wanted to be objective by looking at how Stalin laid the foundations for socialism. As he wrote later: “The core of Stalin’s genuine historic achievement lies in the fact that he found Russia working with the wooden plough and left her equipped with atomic piles.”49 Deutscher’s newfound defense of Stalinism meant a new appraisal of the stages of revolution. He argued that there was a law common to all revolutions



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whether in France, England, or Russia. At their outbreak, revolutions depend on mass mobilization and a wide base of popular support. After taking power, a revolutionary party must call upon the people to defend the new regime from the inevitable onslaught of the counterrevolution. In this heroic period, the bond between the people and the revolutionary party is unbreakable, meaning the masses will undertake whatever sacrifice is deemed necessary by the leaders. However, this identification between the people and the revolutionaries does not survive the trials of civil war. Both the party and masses change. Due to devastation, the original promises of the revolution cannot be fulfilled by the party. Many of the best sons of the revolution die in battle while others leave the movement in disillusionment. As popular support falls away from the revolutionary party, it must create a minority dictatorship to hold onto power. To preserve the conquests of the revolution, this dictatorship lashes out at both the extreme left (who accuse the party of betrayal) and the right (who demand a restoration). Once these twin threats are eliminated, the party proceeds to construct a new order through a revolution from above.50 Based on his understanding of the revolutionary process, Deutscher concluded that Stalin represented, not the betrayal of the Russian Revolution, but its preservation and continuation. He claimed that Stalin’s role was analogous to those of great bourgeois revolutionary leaders: “What appears to be established is that Stalin belongs to the breed of the great revolutionary despots, to which Cromwell, Robespierre, and Napoleon belonged.”51 When Stalin spread the Soviet model throughout Eastern Europe, Deutscher said that this was similar to how Napoleon’s conquests extended the ideals of the French Revolution by bayonet: The chief elements of both historic situations are similar: the social order of eastern Europe was as little capable of survival as was the feudal order in the Rhineland in Napoleon’s days; the revolutionary forces arrayed against the anachronism were too weak to remove it; then conquest and revolution merged in a movement, at once progressive and retrograde, which at last transformed the structure of society.52

Deutscher’s conclusions on the progressive nature of Stalinism meant that now he disagreed with Trotsky’s analysis of the Soviet Thermidor: defeat of the Opposition in [1923] was not in any sense an event comparable to the collapse and dissolution of the Jacobin party; it corresponded rather to the defeat of the left Jacobins which had taken place well before Thermidor. While Trotsky was writing The Revolution Betrayed the Soviet Union was on the eve of the great purge trials-in France the épurations were part and parcel of the Jacobin period; only after Robespierre’s downfall was the guillotine brought to

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a halt. Thermidor was in fact an explosion of despair with the permanent purge; and most of the Thermidorians were ex-Dantonists and ex-Hebertists who had survived the slaughter of their factions. The Russian analogy to this would have been a successful coup against Stalin carried out, after the trials of 1936–1938, by remnants of the Bukharinist and Trotskyist oppositions.53

Far from being a counterrevolution, Deutscher asserted that the Stalinist Thermidor was a necessary stage to consolidate the gains of the revolution. Deutscher’s analysis on the historical necessity of Stalinism assumes that both bourgeois and proletarian revolutions were structurally similar. In addition, he says that another force can substitute itself for either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat in the revolutionary process. For example, Deutscher observed that the classification of the English and French Revolutions as bourgeois revolutions did not depend upon the presence or leadership of the bourgeoisie itself in the overarching process: Capitalist entrepreneurs, merchants, and bankers were not conspicuous among the leaders of the Puritans or the commanders of the Ironsides, in the Jacobin Club or at the head of the crowds that stormed the Bastille or invaded the Tuileries. . . . Yet the bourgeois character of these revolutions will not appear at all mythical, if we approach them with a broader criterion and view their general impact on society. Their most substantial and enduring achievement was to sweep away the social and political institutions that had hindered the growth of bourgeois property and of the social relationships that went with it.54

Since these revolutions eventually resulted in capitalism, despite lacking direct bourgeois leadership, Deutscher says that it makes sense to consider them as bourgeois revolutions. This theory has the benefit of explaining how the Meiji Restoration and Bismarck’s unification of Germany can be considered bourgeois revolutions despite lacking any direct involvement from the bourgeoisie. However, the problem with Deutscher’s analysis does not lie in his understanding of bourgeois revolutions, which was considered compatible with the positions of more orthodox Marxist approaches provided by Alexander Callinicos and Neil Davidson. Rather, the issue with Deutscher is his conflation of bourgeois and proletarian revolutions. While a bourgeois revolution does not necessarily require a capitalist class to play a leading role, a self-conscious working class is necessary for a socialist revolution. In his critical review of Stalin, Max Shachtman pointed out these flaws in Deutscher’s understanding: The socialist revolution does not even lend itself to the kind of comparison with the bourgeois revolution that Deutscher makes.



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The emancipation of the working class, said Marx, is the task of the working class itself. To which we add explicitly what is there implicitly: “of the conscious working class.” Is this mere rhetoric, or a phrase for ceremonial occasions? It has been put to such uses. But it remains the basic scientific concept of the socialist revolution, entirely free from sentimentality and spurious idealism. . . . In other words, the economic structure that replaces capitalism can be socialist (socialistic) only if the new revolutionary regime (the state) is in the hands of the workers, only if the working class takes and retains political power. For, once capitalist ownership is destroyed, all economic decisions are necessarily political decisions—that is, decisions made by the state which now has all the economy and all the economic power in its hands. And if the working class then does not have political power, it has no power at all.55

By mixing up bourgeois and proletarian revolutions, Deutscher ends up justifying the inevitability of Thermidor in both. This means he is forced to conclude that for socialism, Stalinism is inescapable since no alternative is historically possible. Moreover, when Deutscher transforms Stalinism into a revolutionary force, it becomes possible for him to conceive of socialism coming from Red Army invasions. In effect, Deutscher abandons the Marxist contention that a socialist revolution must be based on proletarian self-emancipation.56 Yet Deutscher’s positive reevaluation of Stalinism did not mean he lost his earlier esteem for Trotsky. In his masterful three volume biography of Trotsky—The Prophet Armed (1954), The Prophet Unarmed (1959), and The Prophet Outcast (1963)—Deutscher succeeded in rescuing him from oblivion and Stalinist defamation. However, Deutscher does not see Trotsky as the Soviet Babeuf, but as its Cassandra whose prophetic warnings were ignored: “He ran so far ahead of his time that more than thirty years later much of his prediction still remains unconfirmed by events; but the truth of so much of it has since been demonstrated that few would venture to dismiss as chimerical the prophecy as a whole.”57 As a result, Deutscher sees Trotsky more as a tragic hero whose struggle against Stalinism could only end in failure. While Deutscher argues for the historical necessity of Stalinism, this does not make him an uncritical apologist for Stalin along the lines of Bloch, Garaudy, or Aragon. He readily acknowledges that Stalin’s methods were horrific and criminal: “Stalin undertook, to quote a famous saying, to drive barbarism out of Russia by barbarous means. Because of the nature of the means he employed, much of the barbarism thrown out of Russian life has crept back into it.”58 Now that Stalinism had accomplished the essential task of modernization, Deutscher believed its autocratic methods were a brake

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on the future development of socialism: “The only credit which one must and ought to give Stalinism is that it has been creating in Russia and in the countries of the Soviet orbit the material and organizational preconditions of socialism. In social psychology and culture it has fostered, on the contrary, bureaucratic rigidity and stupidity on the one hand and an almost zoological individualism on the other.”59 Now that Stalinism had outlived its usefulness, Deutscher said that reforms must be undertaken to introduce socialist democracy. Deutscher believed that this task should have rightfully fallen to Trotsky and the Left Opposition. Since Stalin had exterminated all Oppositionists, this left the USSR without any organized political force who could carry out changes from below. This meant that reform could only conceivably come from inside the top ranks of the Communist Party itself: “Such was the amorphousness of the popular mind that even after Stalin’s death no anti-Stalinist movement could spring from below, from the depth of the Soviet society; and the reform of the most anachronistic features of the Stalinist regime could be undertaken only from above, by Stalin’s former underlings and accomplices.”60 His contention that Stalinism would not survive Stalin’s death put Deutscher at odds with the theorists of totalitarianism. The Cold War counterEnlightenment fervently believed that the Stalinist dictatorship was largely omnipotent and immune to any internal change. Deutscher found totalitarianism preposterous since it froze history in place, something not unlike how Stalinism viewed the world: The whole world is supposed to be subject to dialectical change. Nothing in it is static. Everywhere rages the struggle of antagonistic elements which forms the essence of change. Everything is growth and decay. Only at the frontiers of the Stalinist realm is Dialectics refused an entry visa, apparently as a visitor suspect of un-Soviet activity. In Stalinist Russia there are and there can be no antagonistic elements, no contradictions, no processes of real change and transformation—only the harmonious evolution and perfection of society.61

Deutscher believed that his prediction about the end of Stalinism was vindicated by Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign: “[Khrushchev] has shattered the system of terroristic rule bequeathed by Stalin. [He] has also given a new impulse to the reversal of the trend that had led from the single party to the single leader, and from the monopoly of power to the monopoly of thought.”62 However, Deutscher noted the limitations of Khrushchev, who did not challenge the basis of bureaucratic rule or rehabilitate purged communists such as Trotsky: “[Khrushchev] lifted a corner of the curtain over the Stalin era, but could not raise the whole curtain. And so the moral crisis,



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opened up by Khrushchev’s revelations, remains unresolved.”63 As a result, Khrushchev’s reforms stopped partway, and socialist democracy remained out of reach. As an enthusiast for de-Stalinization, Deutscher cautioned the Eastern European working class against acting rashly and endangering this reformist process. He believed that revolts from below would inevitably lead to capitalist counterrevolution. Deutscher claimed that the Red Army was a progressive force that had saved Eastern Europe from capitalist restoration: “Eastern Europe (Hungary, Poland, and eastern Germany), however, found itself almost on the brink of bourgeois restoration at the end of the Stalin era; and only Soviet armed power (or its threat) stopped it there.”64 For Deutscher, the Cold War meant the class struggle had changed its form and was now carried out by two superpowers, who represented opposed social systems. This analysis led Deutscher to oppose the Berlin Uprising of 1953. As he told Heinrich Brandler: “It goes without saying that the workers of Berlin had their very good grievances and that the Russians and their marionettes have done everything to provoke the storm. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the effect of the Berlin revolt has been objectively counter-revolutionary and not revolutionary.”65 Deutscher argued in a similar manner during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. He recognized that widespread revulsion against the Stalinist Rákosi led directly to a popular revolt. However, Deutscher said that the Hungarian rebels were dominated by reactionaries: “Yet within this outwardly harmonious anti-Stalinist movement there were from the beginning two separate currents in actual or potential conflict with one another, and a tense and only partly open struggle went on between Communists and anti-Communists. . . . But in that wave the anti-Communist current from the beginning was much more powerful than the Communist one. “66 If the Hungarian uprising had succeeded, then it would have emboldened anticommunists around the world. Therefore, Deutscher concluded that it was a tragic necessity for the Soviet Union to send its tanks into Budapest. While Deutscher opposed violent action from below in the People’s Democracies, he did support oppositional Marxists who engaged in peaceful agitation. In the 1960s when dissident leftists were arrested in Poland, Deutscher angrily wrote to Gomułka in protest: You have not, as far as I know, jailed and put in chains any of your all too numerous and virulent anti-Communist opponents; and you deserve credit for the moderation with which you treat them. But why do you deny such treatment to your critics on the Left? Hass, Modzelewski and their friends have been brought to the courtrooms handcuffed and under heavy guard. Eye-witness accounts say that they raised their chained fists in the old Communist salute and sang the Internationale. This detail speaks eloquently about their political

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characters and loyalties. How many of your dignitaries, Wladyslaw Gomulka, would nowadays intone the Internationale of their own free will and choice?67

When Khrushchev’s reforms stalled, Deutscher looked elsewhere for inspiration. He cast an eye on the Chinese Revolution as a possible socialist alternative to the USSR. Unlike the Eastern European People’s Democracies, he noted that the People’s Republic of China was the product of an authentic popular revolution: “The very magnitude of the Chinese Revolution and its intrinsic momentum have been such that it is ludicrous to consider it as anybody’s puppet creation.”68 In fact, Deutscher noted that the triumph of the Chinese Revolution was where his analogy between the Russian and French Revolutions ended. It was Mao’s victory that ended the conditions of international isolation that had led to the emergence of Stalinism: “The victory of Chinese communism marks the end of that isolation; and it does so much more decisively than did the spread of Stalinism in Eastern Europe. Thus, one major precondition for the emergence of Stalinism now belongs to the past.”69 Yet Deutscher was candid enough to recognize that China still contained many elements of Stalinism such as the personality cult surrounding Mao. However, he believed that Maoism contained a great deal of promise since it did not repeat egregious Soviet mistakes such as the forced collectivization of agriculture: “The Chinese have been far less reckless and brutal in collectivizing farming; and for a long time far more successful. Even the rural communes do not seem to have antagonized the peasants as disastrously as Stalin’s collectivization did.”70 His hopes were further raised after Mao gave his speech “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People” in 1956. Deutscher considered this to be more meaningful and bold than Khrushchev’s tepid de-Stalinization: Mao Tse-tung’s address “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People” represents by far the most radical repudiation of Stalinism that has come out of any communist country so far. . . . Mao attempts, in effect, to redefine the whole concept of proletarian dictatorship and to restore to it the meaning which Marxists generally gave to it before the onset of the Stalin era. . . . In the USSR, socialism, the totalitarian state and the monolithic party had become identified to such an extent that Communists brought up in the Stalinist school of thought could not even imagine the one without the other. Against this, Mao holds that socialism can and indeed must dissociate itself from the totalitarian state, which is essentially alien to it, and that the Communist Party to be united and effective in action need not at all be “monolithic” in thought. This is what Khrushchev and his colleagues will not admit even now after all they have done to reform and “liberalise” post-Stalin Russia.71



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Deutscher’s hopes of a Maoist alternative to Stalinism soon receded. The failure of the Hundred Flowers campaign meant a return to monolithic orthodoxy in China. His feelings on the Sino-Soviet split were mixed. Deutscher said that the leftist positions of Mao were analogous to Trotsky and the Left Opposition in the 1920s. Yet he was dismayed that China refused to form a united front with the USSR against American imperialism. It was the Cultural Revolution that definitively ended Deutscher’s infatuation with Maoism. He considered the whole event to be nihilistic and retrograde for its xenophobia, attacks on intellectuals, and promotion of the personality cult: “All this goes to show that the ‘cultural revolution’ has been negative only, that it has had no positive content, no positive idea.”72 In his last work, The Unfinished Revolution (1967), Deutscher remained hopeful that the Soviet Union would fulfill the original promises of 1917. Now that the planned economy was in place, it was time for soviet democracy to be restored. While the revolution had created a new working class, it remained locked out of power. He believed that it was now time for workers to take charge: “If this analysis is correct then the prospect for the future may be more hopeful. An objective process of consolidation and integration is taking place in the working class, and it is accompanied by a growth of social awareness. . . . And if this happens the workers may re-enter the political stage as an independent factor, ready to challenge the bureaucracy, and ready to resume the struggle for emancipation in which they scored so stupendous a victory in 1917, but which for so long they have not been able to follow up.”73 At his death, Deutscher was optimistic that the working class would finally cast off its bureaucratic shackles and that the USSR would fulfill the socialist dream. As a historian and writer, Deutscher contributed a great deal to the revitalization of revolutionary thought in the 1960s. His biography of Trotsky introduced countless radicals to anti-Stalinist Marxism. As David Horowitz said in appreciation of Deutscher: “It was Deutscher’s unique achievement that he constructed in his exile a Marxist vision of Bolshevism and its fate, which could serve as a bridge between the tradition and achievements of the old revolutionary left and the new . . . and of restoring meaning once again to the idea of Communism.”74 Other attributes of Deutscher’s legacy were not so admirable. His advocacy of bureaucratic self-reform instead of political revolution found a receptive ear among currents inside Trotskyism. Michel Pablo, a leader of the Fourth International, concluded that the Soviet Union and other Stalinist countries were bound to endure for centuries as deformed workers’ states, so he embraced a reformist view. After the Berlin Uprising, Pablo believed his analysis was vindicated when reforms were granted by the Stalinist bureaucracy:

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In reality events will oblige them as is being demonstrated in Eastern Germany, and partly in Czechoslovakia to quicken and extend the concessions to keep the impatient masses in the other buffer-zone countries and in the USSR itself from taking the road of action. But once the concessions are broadened, the march forward toward a real liquidation of the Stalinist regime threatens to become irresistible.75

The American Trotskyist James P. Cannon said Deutscher and Pablo had shared illusions of reforming the Stalinist bureaucracy. If those ideas were carried to their logical conclusion, then this meant a renunciation of political revolution and the existence of a separate anti-Stalinist Marxist current. In effect, Cannon believed that Deutscherism was tantamount to political liquidation: Our interest in Deutscher derives from the evident fact that his theory of the self-reform of the Stalinist bureaucracy, which he tries to pass off as a modified version of Trotsky’s thinking, has made its way into the movement of the Fourth International and found camouflaged supporters there in the faction headed by Pablo. Far from originating anything themselves, the Pablo faction have simply borrowed from Deutscher. Since there is no surer way to disarm the workers’ vanguard, particularly in the Soviet Union, and to reason away the claim of the Fourth International to any historical function, this new revisionism has become problem number one for our international movement. The life of the Fourth International is at stake in the factional struggle and discussion provoked by it.76

Within the ranks of Cannon’s SWP, the Class War tendency around Sam Marcy adopted “Deutscherite” positions as well. In 1956, Marcy supported the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution by claiming that the insurgents were counterrevolutionaries. After leaving the SWP in 1959, Marcy formed the Workers’ World Party with its perspective of “global class war.” Like Deutscher, Marcy argued that the conflict between the Soviet bloc and American imperialism now superseded the class struggle internationally and within each country. For Marcy, this meant any criticism of the Soviet Union and its allies was objectively counter-revolutionary.77 While Marcy was crude in his thinking compared to Deutscher, in their analysis of the USSR they both ended up replacing Marxist class struggle with campist geopolitics. Deutscher’s ideas also influenced Perry Anderson, Fred Halliday, and Tariq Ali, who were associated with the New Left Review, a premier socialist journal in the Anglophone world. For example, Perry Anderson saw Stalinism as a revolutionary and socialist force, particularly in the Third World:



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The structures of bureaucratic power and mobilization pioneered under Stalin proved to be both more dynamic and more general a phenomenon on the international plane than Trotsky ever imagined. . . . The states they created were to be manifestly cognate (not identical: affinal) with the USSR, in their basic political system. Stalinism, in other words, proved to be not just an apparatus, but a movement—one capable not only of keeping power in a backward environment dominated by scarcity (USSR); but of actually winning power in environments that were yet more backward and destitute (China, Vietnam)—of expropriating the bourgeoisie and starting the slow work of socialist construction, even against the will of Stalin himself. Therewith, one of the equations in Trotsky’s interpretation undoubtedly fell.78

In analyzing the renewed Cold War of the 1980s, Fred Halliday viewed it through a Deutscherite lens as a struggle between socialism and capitalism. However bureaucratically deformed the Eastern Bloc, Halliday said that it represented the interests of the proletariat in the global class war. Halliday even took Deutscher’s analysis of Stalinism a step further by coming out in favor of “progressive” military juntas who led “revolutions from above.” This led Halliday—and Marcy too! – to embarrassingly applaud the pro-Soviet military dictatorship in Ethiopia.79 Finally, Tariq Ali, a former leader of the International Marxist Group in Britain, followed Deutscher in supporting reformist bureaucrats in the Soviet Communist Party. After 1985, Ali was an enthusiast for Perestroika, believing that Gorbachev would carry out Deutscher’s “revolution from above”: “Gorbachev represents a progressive, reformist current within the Soviet elite. . . . In order to preserve the Soviet Union, Gorbachev needs to complete the political revolution (which is already underway), but one based on an abolition of the whole nomenklatura system of privileges on which the power of the Soviet bureaucracy rests.”80 Unlike Deutscher, Ali lived long enough to see his ideas of bureaucratic self-reform utterly falsified by history in 1991. Victor Serge and Isaac Deutscher looked respectfully in very different directions: one to the Cold War counter-Enlightenment and anti-communism and the other to Stalinism and historical fatalism. Despite this divergence, Serge and Deutscher both found themselves in the same place. While they placed different value judgements on the Dialectics of Saturn, both believed it to be an inevitable force. In the end, Serge’s “Western retreat” and Deutscher’s “eastern reconciliation” meant a practical abandonment of revolutionary Marxism.

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NOTES 1. See Leon Trotsky, In Defense of Marxism (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973a). It is beyond the scope of this work to discuss the untenable and anti-communist nature of bureaucratic collectivism. Those interested should consult Doug Greene, A Failure of Vision: Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic Socialism (Washington: Zero Books, 2021), 192–97. For a recent work that argues in favor of Trotsky’s interpretation against the pitfalls of either Soviet apologism or third campism, see Donald Parkinson, “Carrying the Burden of Communist Man,” Cosmonaut, November 1, 2019. https:​//​cosmonaut​.blog​/2019​/11​/01​/carrying​-the​-burden​-of​-communist​-man​/; On the inconsistencies of state capitalism, see Ernest Mandel, “The Mystifications of State Capitalism,” Marxists Internet Archive. https:​//​www​ marxists​.org​/archive​/ mandel​/1970​/08​/state​-cap​ htm. 2. Serge 2012, 205. See also Serge’s reportage in Weimar Germany in 1923 in Victor Serge, Witness to the German Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011b). 3. Serge 2012, 257. 4. During this period, Serge also gathered material for Year Two of the Russian Revolution. The manuscript was seized by the secret police along with those of two novels Les Hommes perdus and La Tourmente when he left the USSR. Despite efforts, none of those works have been found. See Richard Greeman, “Victor Serge and the Novel of Revolution,” Marxists Internet Archive. http:​//​www​ marxists​.de​/culture​/ greeman​/sergenovel​ htm; Susan Weissman, Victor Serge: The Course is Set On Hope (New York: Verso, 2001), 168–71. 5. Serge 2012, 343. 6. Victor Serge, Midnight in the Century (New York: New York Review Books, 2015), 76. Walter Benjamin thought Serge’s novel had little literary value: As a matter of conscience I will note a novel by Victor Serge, Midnight in the Century. The author is of the same party as Souvarine—as you no doubt know. His book has no literary value, and holds the attention only for its picturesque descriptions of Stalinist terror. It is far below the triptych of the Soviet regime that Panait Istrati painted ten years ago. See Walter Benjamin, “1940 Survey of French Literature,” New Left Review 51 (May–June 2008): 44. 7. Richard Greeman, “The Victor Serge Affair and the French Literary Left,” Victor Serge: The Century of the Unexpected Essays on Revolution and Counter-Revolution, Revolutionary History 5, no. 3 (Autumn 1994): 147. 8. Victor Serge, Notebooks 1936–1947 (New York: New York Review Books, 2019), 508. 9. Serge 2012, 385. 10. Ibid., 387. 11. Ibid., 390. 12. “Serge to Trotsky—January 10, 1937,” in The Serge-Trotsky Papers, ed. David Cotterill (London: Pluto Press, 1994), 100.



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13. Dwight Macdonald, “Once More: Kronstadt,” Marxists Internet Archive. https:​//​www​ marxists​.org​/history​/etol​/writers​/macdonald​/1938​/04​/kronstadt​.htm; For background on Kronstadt, see Paul Avrich, Kronstadt 1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). 14. “The Questions of Wendelin Thomas,” in Trotsky 1978b, 359. See also Trotsky 2016, 368. See also Leon Trotsky, “Suggestions of a Pamphlet on Kronstadt,” Writings of Leon Trotsky [Supplement 1934–1940] (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1979b). 15. Victor Serge, “‘Ideas and Facts; Kronstadt 1921—Against the Sectarian Spirit—Bolshevism and Anarchism,’” in Cotterill 1994, 166. Earlier in 1922, Serge agreed with Trotsky that Kronstadt represented Thermidor: Let us suppose briefly that the Kronstadt mutiny had turned out to be victorious. Its results would have been immediate chaos, the terrible kindling of a civil war in which this time the party of the revolutionary proletariat and the broad peasant masses would have been locked in combat. Within a short time a handful of liberal lawyers and Tsarist generals, fortified by the sympathies of the whole bourgeois world, would have drenched their hands in the blood of the Russian people in order to pick up the abandoned power. Thermidor would have come. See Victor Serge, “The Tragic Face of Revolution,” in Cotterill 1994, 18. See also Serge 2012, 150–51. 16. “Trotsky to Serge—April 15, 1938,” in Cotterill 1994, 107–8. 17. “Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt,” in Writings of Leon Trotsky [1937–1938] (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1976), 142. See also Trotsky’s harsh words about Serge in “Petty-Bourgeois Democrats and Moralizers,” in 1979b, 872. 18. Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours (New York: Pathfinder Press, 2004), 50. 19. Quoted in Weissman 2001, 224. 20. Victor Serge, “Unpublished Manuscript on Their Morals and Ours,” Marxists Internet Archive. https:​//​www​ marxists​.org​/archive​/serge​/1940​/trotsky​-morals​.htm. 21. Trotsky 2004, 56–57. 22. Ibid., 62. 23. Serge 2012, 407. See also Cotterill 1994, 158. Trotsky’s son Lev Sedov said his father’s intransigence had grown worse as a result of political isolation: I think that all Dad’s deficiencies have not diminished as he has grown older, but under the influence of his isolation, very difficult, unprecedentedly difficult, got worse. His lack of tolerance, hot temper, inconsistency, even rudeness, his desire to humiliate, offend and even destroy have increased. It is not “personal,” it is a method and hardly good in organisation of work. Quoted in ibid., 155. 24. Victor Serge, “The Old Man and the Fourth International,” in Cotterill 1994, 200.

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25. Serge 2012, 94. See also “The Old Man and the Fourth International,” in Cotterill 1994. 181. A condemnation of the Cheka can be found in Victor Serge, Portrait de Staline (Paris: Editions Bernard Grasset, 1940), 57–58. 26. Nearly concurrently, other voices within Trotskyism were faulting Bolshevism and Proletarian Jacobinism for Stalinism. For example, Boris Souvarine’s biography of Stalin said the following: From the very beginning the Bolsheviks were obsessed by the French Revolution to which they have continued to refer, whether as an example to be followed or a precedent to be avoided. The germ of the tendency which constituted at once the strength and the weakness of Lenin’s party was already discernible—the ability to organise and to act as a disciplined army capable of carrying out orders, but always at the mercy of an error on the part of their leader and in danger of sinking into an intellectual passivity contrary to their theoretical mission as vanguard and model. See Souvarine 1939, 65. Much later, Samuel Farber in Before Stalinism would argue that Lenin’s Jacobinism helped pave the way for Stalinism. Farber claims Lenin’s “actions on freedom of the press and other democratic questions inevitably and necessarily led to a thoroughly elitist form of government” and that “the Bolsheviks firmly adopted policies that moved them a considerable distance towards what later became the Stalinist totalitarian model” ( 99 and 109). Farber claims that “Lenin’s original views on the party and society were closer to [Jacobinism] than to Stalinism. His sometimes uncritical endorsement of the Jacobins is very suggestive in this regard,” but adds “Moreover, Lenin’s ‘quasi-Jacobinism’ was also characterized by an insufferable arrogance that is, unfortunately, too often found among revolutionaries in general. This arrogance seems to be based on the attitude or belief that the truth of the revolutionary activists’ vision is sufficient guarantee of their authority to act” (213–14). Quoted in Samuel Farber, Before Stalinism: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy (New York: Verso, 1990). Italics in the original. 27. Victor Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev (New York: New York Review Books, 2004), 161 and 166. See also Richard Greeman, “The return of Comrade Tulayev: Victor Serge and the tragic vision of Stalinism,” Marxists Internet Archive. https:​//​www​ marxists​.org​/history​/etol​/newspape​/isj2​/1993​/isj2–058​/greeman​ html and Christopher Hitchens, “Pictures of an Inquisition,” Arguably (New York: Twelve, 2011), 585–94. 28. Serge 2019, 250–51. See also Serge 1940, 175 and Susan Weissman, “On Stalinism,” Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory 28, no. 1 (2000): 199. 29. Serge 2019, 436. See also ibid., 356–77. 30. Weissman 2000, 204. 31. Victor Serge, “What is Fascism?” Partisan Review 8, no. 5 (September–October 1941): 420–21. Serge did not accept Burnham’s ideas on managerial revolution whole cloth. He thought that Burnham’s abandonment of Marxism had led to major errors of analysis such as viewing the USSR as the product of a managerial



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revolution. In 1945, Serge took issue with Burnham, who argued for the continuity between Lenin and Stalin. See Serge 2019, 511–14. 32. Serge 2019, 436. 33. Ibid., 465. 34. Ibid. At other times, Serge appeared open to united fronts with communists: “We cannot adopt a purely negative attitude to the CP. We shall get nowhere if we seem more preoccupied with criticising Stalinism than with defending the working class. The reactionary danger is still there, and in practice we shall often have to act alongside the Communists.” See Victor Serge, “To René Lefeuvre,” Marxists Internet Archive. https:​//​www​.marxists​.org​/archive​/serge​/194x​/xx​/lefeuvre​.html. 35. Victor Serge, “The Communists and Vietnam,” Politics 4, no. 2 (March–April 1947): 76. 36. Quoted in Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002), 383. This letter was not included in the 2012 reissue. 37. Ibid., 383–87. Weissman says: “The letter to Malraux shocked left circles and became infamous because it appeared that Serge had changed sides in his final hour. He had not.” See Weissman 2001, 182. 38. Serge 2019, 138. Serge wrote about the attacks on him in the US-based New Leader, which was edited by Daniel Bell and connected to the Socialist Party of America. Serge’s relations with the New York Intellectuals are discussed at length in Alan Wald, “Victor Serge and the New York Anti‐Stalinist left,” Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory 28, no. 1 (2000): 99–117. 39. Quoted in Serge 2012, xxxii. For more on Serge’s last years, see Julián Gorkin, “The Last Years of Victor Serge, 1941–1947,” Victor Serge: The Century of the Unexpected Essays on Revolution and Counter-Revolution, Revolutionary History 5, no. 3 (Autumn 1994): 199–208. 40. Victor Serge, Russia Twenty Years After (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1996), 327. 41. On the deradicalization of the New York Intellectuals, see Alan Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 366–68. 42. Daniel Singer, “Armed with a Pen,” in Isaac Deutscher: The Man and His Work, ed. David Horowitz (London: Macdonald, 1971), 28. 43. Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), viii. 44. Isaac Deutscher, “The Moscow Trial,” in Marxism, Wars and Revolutions: Essays from Four Decades (London: Verso, 1984b), 6. Lowercase in the original. 45. Deutscher 2003c, 341. 46. Ibid. 47. “The Tragedy of the Polish Communist Party,” in Deutscher 1984b, 113. See also William Chase, Enemies within the Gates? The Comintern and the Stalinist Repression, 1934–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 286–89. 48. “22 June 1941,” in Deutscher 1984b, 19. 49. Isaac Deutscher, Russia after Stalin (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953), 55.

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50. Deutscher 1966, 173–75. Deutscher also expands on his comparison between the French and Russian Revolutions in “Two Revolutions,” in Deutscher 1969, 53–67 and Isaac Deutscher, The Unfinished Revolution: Russia 1917–1967 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 3–20. 51. Deutscher 1966, 565–66. 52. Ibid., 555. 53. Deutscher 2003c, 257. 54. Deutscher 1967, 22. On the consequentialist theory of bourgeois revolutions, see Alex Callinicos, “Bourgeois Revolutions and Historical Materialism,” International Socialism. www​ marxists​.org​/history​/etol​/writers​/callinicos​/1989​/xx​/bourrev​ .html; For other engagements with Deutscher’s work on bourgeois revolutions, see Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), 439–46 and Neil Davidson, “The Prophet, His Biographer, and the Watchtower: Isaac Deutscher’s Biography of Leon Trotsky,” in Holding Fast to an Image of the Past: Explorations in the Marxist Tradition (Chicago: Haymarket, 2017), 81–110. 55. Max Shachtman, “Four Portraits of Stalinism—V: A Critique of Deutscher’s Work on Stalin,” Marxists Internet Archive. https:​//​www​.marxists​.org​/archive​/ shachtma​/1950​/09​/deutscher​-stalin​ htm; While Shachtman makes valid points against Deutscher, there are problems in how he views the relationship between the proletariat and a workers’ state. He appears to imply that there can only be socialism if the entire proletariat is class conscious. This method allows him to conclude that China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc were not workers’ states. Furthermore, by this criteria Shachtman would have to dismiss the October Revolution as well, since there were workers who supported nonrevolutionary parties. The relationship between party and class is far more complicated than Shachtman makes it out to be. There certainly needs to be working-class involvement for socialism, but also a vanguard detachment of advanced workers. 56. Here it is worth recalling Trotsky’s remarks on the character of property expropriations carried out in Poland when the Red Army invaded in 1939. Trotsky said these measures were “revolutionary in character,” he noted that they were achieved in a “military-bureaucratic fashion.” What truly mattered to Trotsky was not the nationalization of property but raising the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat. He noted that so long as the USSR refused to do that, then its overall politics were a hindrance to the advancement of communism: The primary political criterion for us is not the transformation of property relations in this or another area, however important these may be in themselves, but rather the change in the consciousness and organization of the world proletariat, the raising of their capacity for defending former conquests and accomplishing new ones. From this one, and the only decisive standpoint, the politics of Moscow, taken as a whole, completely retains its reactionary character and remains the chief obstacle on the road to the world revolution.



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See Trotsky 1973a, 19. For more on the process of “structural assimilation” carried out by the USSR in Eastern Europe after World War II, see Tim Wohlforth, ‘Communists’ Against Revolution: The Theory of Structural Assimilation (London: Folrose Books, 1978). 57. Deutscher 2003b, 182. 58. Deutscher 1966, 568. 59. “Correspondence with Heinrich Brandler,” in Deutscher 1984b, 144. 60. Deutscher 2003c, 339. 61. Deutscher 1953, 14. 62. Isaac Deutscher, “Khrushchev on Stalin,” in Russia in Transition (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 48. 63. Deutscher 1967, 101. 64. Deutscher 2003b, 429. See also Deutscher 2003c, 420. 65. “Correspondence with Heinrich Brandler,” in Deutscher 1984b, 146. 66. Isaac Deutscher, “The Polish and Hungarian Revolts,” in Russia, China and the West: A Contemporary Chronicle, 1953-1966, ed. Fred Halliday (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 84. 67. “An Open Letter to Władysław Gomułka,” in Deutscher 1984b, 129. 68. “Two Revolutions,” in Deutscher 1969, 64. See also “Three Currents in Communism,” Deutscher 1971a, 73. 69. “Two Revolutions,” in Deutscher 1969, 66. 70. “Maoism—Its Origins and Outlook,” in Deutscher 1984b, 205. These remarks are particularly ironic since it was written in 1964 after the disaster of the Great Leap Forward. 71. “Mao and the Hundred Flowers,” in Deutscher 1970, 104. 72. Isaac Deutscher, “Deutscher on the Chinese ‘Cultural Revolution,’” Marxists Internet Archive. https:​//​www​ marxists​.org​/archive​/deutscher​/1966​/china​ htm; See also Deutscher 1967, 95–96 and “Meaning of the ‘Cultural Revolution’” in Deutscher 1970, 333–39. 73. Deutscher 1967, 50. 74. Quoted in Horowitz 1971, 9 and 14. Horowitz dedicated his book Empire and Revolution to Deutscher. After renouncing Marxism, Horowitz said that Deutscher had wasted his talent on a failed project and that he falsely wagered on the self-reform of the USSR. See Horowitz 1998, 96. After leaving the Trotskyist movement, Deutscher never joined another political organization. In his own words, Deutscher retreated to his “watch-tower” in order to observe events “with detachment and alertness.” See “The Ex-Communist’s Conscience,” in Deutscher 1969, 20. As Tony Cliff remarks, there really is no difference between the watchtower and political inaction: “Deutscher does not tell us what is the difference in practice between inhabiting an ivory tower and a watchtower. In both cases no action is expected.” Tony Cliff, “The End of the Road: Deutscher’s Capitulation to Stalinism,” Marxists Internet Archive. https:​//​www​ marxists​.org​/archive​/cliff​/works​/1963​/xx​/deutscher​.htm Emphasis in the original. 75. Michel Pablo, “The Post-Stalin ‘New Course,’” Marxists Internet Archive. https:​//​www​ marxists​.org​/archive​/pablo​/1953​/xx​/newcourse​ htm.

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76. James P. Cannon, “Trotsky or Deutscher? On the New Revisionism and Its Theoretical Source,” Marxists Internet Archive. https:​//​www​ marxists​.org​/archive​/ cannon​/works​/1954​/tord​.htm. 77. See Sam Marcy, “The Global Class War,” Marxists Internet Archive. https:​//​ www​.marxists​.org​/history​/etol​/writers​/marcy​/gclasswar​/index​ html. 78. Perry Anderson, “Trotsky’s Interpretation of Stalinism” in The Stalinist Legacy, edited by Tariq Ali (Chicago: Haymarket, 2013), 125–27. According to Perry Anderson: “In [New Left Review’s] case, the formative influence of Isaac Deutscher was obviously of primary importance.” See Anderson 1980, 151. For more background about the influence of Deutscher on Anderson’s thinking, see Paul Blackledge, Perry Anderson, Marxism and the New Left (London: Merlin, 2004), 3–4. 79. See Fred Halliday, The Making of the Second Cold War (London: Verso, 1983), 30. Fred Halliday edited Russia, China, and the West, a collection of Deutscher’s journalistic works on the Eastern Bloc. As Anderson observed about Halliday’s The Making of the Second Cold War: “It is fitting that the best work confronting the current Cold War should have been produced out of direct inspiration from [Deutscher’s] example.” Quoted in Deutscher 1984b, xix. On Ethiopia, see Fred Halliday and Maxine Molyneux, The Ethiopian Revolution (London: Verso, 1981), 25–38. For an exhaustive criticism of “left” apologetics for the Ethiopian military regime, see Ian Scott Horst, Like Ho Chi Minh! Like Che Guevara! The Revolutionary Left in Ethiopia, 1969–1979 (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2020). 80. Tariq Ali, Revolution from Above: Where Is the Soviet Union Going? (London, Hutchinson, 1988), xiii. In a further irony, the book was dedicated to the fervent anticommunist Boris Yeltsin. For more background on Deutscherite-influenced Marxists, see Alex Callinicos, Trotskyism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 52–54. Unlike Ali, Sam Marcy was opposed to Gorbachev and Perestroika. See Sam Marcy, “Perestroika: a Marxist Critique [1990],” Marxists Internet Archive. https:​//​ www​.marxists​.org​/history​/etol​/writers​/marcy​/perestroika​/index​ htm.

Chapter Eight

Escaping Fate

“How understand a game in which the devil cuts the cards?”1 These words of Ernst Fischer, a lifelong Austrian Marxist, speak to the incomprehensible nature of Stalinism felt by millions in the international communist movement. They dedicated their lives to revolution and a world free of exploitation and oppression, yet found themselves unable to explain the crimes, treason, and horrors that Stalinism wrought. Instead, the bloody actions of Stalinism were all rationalized as a historical stage for the working class to pass through before entering the promised communist future. This was believed by communists until such blind faith could no longer be sustained. From the anticommunist camp, Stalinism was perceived as a demonic force that was given the different names of “Judeo-Bolshevism,” Big Brother, and totalitarian reason. For them, Stalinism came as a “bolt from the blue” to enslave humanity under a hammer and sickle. Throughout this work, the various approaches to Stalinism have been viewed as distinct and mutually opposed. A surface view would conclude that there was not much in common between the “bolt from the blue” camp and historical necessitarians. After all, it cannot be denied that Stalinists and anticommunists were on opposite sides of the barricades. Yet this study reveals that these two aforementioned camps are not actually so very far apart. The Stalinist and the anticommunist share the same underlying fatalistic and ahistorical logic. Whether Stalinism appears as a savior or the Antichrist, both agree that there is no alternative to it. In the end, the Dialectic of Saturn is unavoidable and socialist revolutions must end in Stalinism. To understand Stalinism, one must avoid the dangerous reefs of both the counter-Enlightenment Scylla and the Thermidorian Charybdis. The course to safely chart through these waters is provided by Trotsky’s Marxism. While revolutions do follow similar patterns with the same actors often appearing, this does not mean that these events are mere carbon copies of one another. A bourgeois revolution does require a Thermidor, but a socialist revolution does not. The Stalinist outcome in Russia was not a fated outcome as if 281

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preordained by some god of history. Stalinism can only be claimed as inevitable by ignoring the communist roads not taken. What is the final verdict on Stalinism? The Dialectics of Saturn is not just about understanding the past, but also envisioning the future. If one accepts that all revolutions are fated to devour their own children, then our chances of liberation become impossible. Instead of the mystical fatalism of Stalinist “necessity”—and all other pseudo-Hegelian constructions—real insight into historical necessity is required. The more one understands, the more it will be possible to avoid the fate of a counterrevolutionary Saturn, and all other superstitions inherited from the horrors of the twentieth century. As Trotsky said in the darkest moments of the Show Trials, quoting Spinoza: do not cry, do not weep, but understand. NOTES 1. Ernst Fischer, An Opposing Man (London: Allen Lane, 1974), 283.

Appendix

Domenico Losurdo A Critical Assessment of Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend

The late Domenico Losurdo (1941–2018) was an Italian-born Marxist philosopher who taught at the University of Urbino. He was the author of acclaimed studies on liberalism, Kant, Marxism, Gramsci, Lukács, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Hegel. Losurdo was not simply an academic, but a dedicated activist on the communist left. Unfortunately, in line with the traditions of both the international communist movement and Western Marxism, Losurdo was also a defender of Stalinism. In a number of works, most notably Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend (2008), Losurdo claims that Stalinism was a historical necessity since it represented the politics of realism. He argues that revolutions must pass from the stages of “utopianism” to “realism” if they are to prevail. Following Hegel’s analysis of the French Revolution, Losurdo argues that this event underwent a “Dialectic of Saturn” (a term he coined) when it shifted from Jacobinism to Thermidor and Bonapartism. This passage from radical utopianism to realism was necessary because it was not enough for the revolution to destroy the Ancien Régime, but a new bourgeois one had to be constructed.1 For Losurdo, a Dialectic of Saturn does not simply apply to bourgeois revolutions. Rather, he argues that this process appears in all revolutions. In 1917, Losurdo observed that the revolution was driven forward by messianic visions of universalism represented above all by the figure of Trotsky. While this revolutionary zeal was sufficient for defeating Kerensky and the White Armies, it could not suffice when it came to constructing socialism. For Losurdo, Trotsky’s Proletarian Jacobinism needed to surrender to Stalin’s Thermidorian realism. Ultimately, this clash between the Bolshevik radicals and moderates ended in a bloody civil war: “The accusation or the 283

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suspicion of betrayal emerges at every turn of this particularly tortured revolution, driven by the government’s need to reconsider some of the original utopian motives, and in any case forced to moderate their grand ambitions given the extreme difficulties of the objective situation.”2 Thus, he concludes that Stalinism was historically necessary for socialism. And yet, Losurdo’s defense of Stalin relies not only on distorting the historical record; he also remains utterly blind to Stalinism’s Thermidorian nature and the damage it wrought to socialism. A. KHRUSHCHEV LIED? During Stalin’s lifetime, Losurdo claims that he was viewed favorably for his leadership of the Soviet Union. Admiration and respect for Stalin came not only from communists, but was found across the political spectrum. For instance, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill tipped his hat to the Generalissimo. Losurdo says that this all changed in February 1956 at the Communist Party’s Twentieth Congress. Suddenly, Nikita Khrushchev’s Secret Speech created a “black legend” that transformed Stalin from a benevolent leader into a bloodthirsty tyrant. This single act of Khrushchev shattered the prestige of international communism and gave a boost to the anticommunists arguments made by Trotsky and other reactionaries. Losurdo concludes that Khrushchev’s complete repudiation of Stalin cannot withstand honest scrutiny: “I demonstrate that this total liquidation of Stalin (on the intellectual as well as the moral side) does not stand up to historical investigation.”3 Losurdo is not the first to observe the flaws of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech. Marxists as different as Isaac Deutscher, Louis Althusser, and Georg Lukács all pointed out how superficial it was for Khrushchev to blame Stalin’s errors on the personality cult. This left unanswered exactly how the personality cult could take on such monstrous forms in the USSR. To answer that question required a Marxist analysis of how the Soviet Union itself made Stalinism possible. Yet this would have indicted the Communist Party as a whole in Stalin’s crimes. As a member of the nomenklatura, Khrushchev could not do that without destroying the legitimacy of the party. Instead, Khrushchev adopted a different course whereby he upheld the basic structure of the Soviet system while blaming Stalin alone for its excesses and errors. For example, Khrushchev does not condemn the purges as such. He has no principled objection to the repression of Trotskyists and other Oppositionists, but only faults Stalin for targeting loyal party members, i.e., other Stalinists. This moralistic and shallow method allows Khrushchev to absolve the Communist Party of any blame for Stalinism.

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If Losurdo was simply pointing out those flaws of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, then there is no reason to object. However, this is not what he is doing. Even more than Khrushchev, Losurdo cannot offer a critical balance sheet on Stalin. In place of the “black legend,” he only sees a white knight. It would not be a stretch to say that Losurdo veers into outright denial when it comes to Stalin’s crimes since he rejects the Khrushchev Report in toto. As proof, one can observe his long-standing personal and political relationship with Grover Furr. The literature professor at Montclair State University is a longtime apologist when it comes to Stalin. Furr is the author of The Murder of Sergei Kirov: History, Scholarship and the Anti-Stalin Paradigm (2013), where he employs the same methods as Vyshinsky by blaming Kirov’s murder on a Trotskyite-Zinovievite conspiracy. In a blurb for the Kirov book, Losurdo praised Furr’s research: Grover Furr moves with perfect ease with the Russian language and Russian archives. Without being intimidated by political correctness his research and documentation is precise, patient, meticulous. He has already proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that, as the title of one of his previous books states, Khrushchev Lied. Now he confronts the question of Kirov’s murder. The Soviet tragedy begins with the “Kirov Affair.” This is one more reason to reconsider it, in the light of the important novelties in the book by Grover Furr.4

In 2011, Furr wrote his work on the Secret Speech entitled Khrushchev Lied: The Evidence that Every ‘Revelation’ of Stalin’s (and Beria’s) ‘Crimes’ in Nikita Khrushchev’s Infamous ‘Secret Speech’ to the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956, Is Probably False. A mere reading of this laborious title leaves one with the (correct) impression that Furr dismisses Khrushchev out of hand. Furr uses conspiratorial logic to make his case. Losurdo not only fails to see through Furr’s charade, but even wrote the preface to the Italian edition of Khrushchev Lied! Here, he compares Furr’s rescue of Stalin from Khrushchev’s “black legend” to Babeuf’s salvaging of Robespierre’s reputation from the slanders of Thermidor: Against Stalin the dominant ideology quietly brandishes the most contradictory statements and “revelations,” as long as they are the most infamous. That is why we must salute the work of Grover Furr, who is perfectly at ease with the Russian language and archives. Without being intimidated by the “politically correct” it suggests today a sort of surreal novel no less phantasmagoric than the one invented by the Thermidorians when they accused Robespierre of having wanted to marry the daughter of Louis XVI to seize the throne of the Bourbons. Behind the “Secret Report” we glimpse a political struggle on which we need to

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investigate further; but from now on, thanks to the work of Furr, historians will be able to devote themselves to this work finally free from baseless legends.5

While Losurdo’s praise for Furr is shocking, it is worth noting the political differences between them. Compared to Losurdo, Furr is a “left” Stalinist who believes in immediately abolishing markets and instituting full communism. As a “right” Stalinist, Losurdo says that communists must forget about abolishing markets and bourgeois social relations since that is foolishly utopian. In general, Losurdo’s writing on Stalinism is poor, but it does not reach the same level of apologetics and pseudo-scholarship found in Furr. However, it does speak volumes about Losurdo’s own political and scholarly blind spots that he is willing to associate with someone like Furr. B. THE GREAT TERROR One of Losurdo’s claims is that the Bolsheviks faced continued threats from external and, most especially, internal opponents. He notes that following 1917 that the Bolsheviks fought three civil wars: the first one against the counterrevolutionary White Armies; the second against the kulaks in the collectivization of agriculture; and the last was Trotsky’s plots. Due to the Dialectic of Saturn, the inner-party struggles devolved into purges and counterrevolutionary plots to overthrow Soviet power. When it comes to the third civil war, Losurdo says that this conflict possessed all the ferocity of a religious war between true believers. He notes that this was a conflict between two Bolsheviks. On the one side was Stalin, who had to safeguard the Soviet Union by eliminating all internal threats. On the opposite side was Trotsky, the former Red Army commander, who was so convinced that Stalin betrayed the revolution that he began a civil war: “Yes, it was Trotsky who declared that the struggle against the Stalinist ‘bureaucratic oligarchy’ precluded a peaceful solution. . . . At a certain point, faced with the radical novelty of the national and international context, Trotsky was (wrongly) convinced that there had been a counter-revolution in Moscow and acted accordingly.”6 Losurdo claims that in the chaos of the purges, foreign powers such as Nazi Germany found common cause with Trotsky’s efforts to destabilize the USSR. It should come as no surprise to learn that Losurdo accepts the claims of the Moscow Trials at face value. He genuinely believes that Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, and others were guilty of conspiracy and led clandestine terrorist organizations of spies and wreckers. Losurdo says that the Oppositionists hid their subversive plans behind Aesopian language. For example, he accuses Bukharin of being two-faced when he publicly professed his loyalty to the

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party while privately plotting Stalin’s downfall: “[Bukharin] himself secretly revealed in 1936―harbored a profound ‘hatred’ toward Stalin, in fact, the sort of ‘absolute’ hatred that is reserved for a ‘demon.’ While he expressed himself like this in private, Bukharin oversaw Izvestia, the newspaper of the Soviet government. Are we dealing with obvious incoherence? Not from the point of view of the Bolshevik leader, who continued to combine legal and illegal work, with the aim of toppling a regime that he considered detestable, and who valued another of Lenin’s lessons.”7 Moreover, Losurdo claims that Trotsky was ultimately serving Nazi interests with his calls for political revolution in the USSR: While the flames of the Second World War burn ever higher, destined as well to reach the Soviet Union according to the same prediction by Trotsky, he continues making declarations and statements that are anything but reassuring. . . . It is quite understandable that the “bureaucracy” or the “oligarchy,” branded as the “principal enemy,” is convinced that the opposition, if not at the direct service of the enemy, is in any case ready from the start to follow-up its actions.8

Losurdo concludes that Stalin was correct to paint Trotsky, Bukharin, and other Oppositionists as traitors, criminals, spies, and wreckers. Their defeat in the third civil war ensured the survival of the Soviet Union. Based on his claims, Losurdo appears to believe that this third civil war was deliberately planned by Trotsky. He gives that impression by stating that Trotsky’s violent rhetoric and actions created the atmosphere that led to the assassination of Leningrad Party leader Sergei Kirov in December 1934. This event began the purges since it supposedly gave credibility to Stalin’s fears that a wide-ranging conspiracy was afoot: “Trotsky appeals to the Soviet youth, who have already started to spread fear among the members of the ruling elite, calling on them to join the new revolution that draws near. . . . As you can see, the attack against Kirov evokes the spectre of civil war among the forces that had toppled the old regime.”9 While no serious scholar believes there was a far-ranging “TrotskyiteZinovievite” conspiracy, many details surrounding Kirov’s death are still unclear. For instance, the motives of Leonid Nikolaev, Kirov’s assassin. Did he kill Kirov in a desperate protest against bureaucratic abuses as Trotsky claimed? Was Kirov killed as part of a larger plot by Stalin? Both Khrushchev and Robert Conquest have argued that Stalin planned Kirov’s death as a pretext to remove oppositionists and consolidate power in his hands. Recent studies in the Soviet archives have not turned up anything conclusive either. No proof has ever appeared to substantiate accusations that Stalin orchestrated the whole affair. Stalin’s biographer, Oleg Khlevniuk says:

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The idea that Stalin was behind Kirov’s murder has all the hallmarks of a conspiracy theory. Such theories tend to rest on the idea that if an event benefits some sinister person, he must have brought it about. They tend to deny the possibility of random occurrences and ignore the fact that chance events happen all the time. The idea that Stalin conspired to kill Kirov has received far too much attention. Even if he did have a hand in Kirov’s death, this possibility hardly changes our understanding of him or his era. In the annals of the dictator’s crimes, Kirov’s murder would have been one of the least heinous.10

Based on the current evidence, a far more likely and reasonable explanation about Kirov’s assassination was that it happened as a matter of chance (as Victor Serge insinuated in The Case of Comrade Tulayev). Contra Losurdo’s claims, history is not so well-put together that it operates according to a master plan set in motion by either Trotsky or Stalin. When it comes to the evidence of Oppositionist conspiracies against the USSR, Losurdo’s sources are dubious at best and grotesque at worst. He cites the ex-communist Ruth Fischer as evidence for Trotsky’s clandestine activities. Yet she provides no documentation and is generally considered to be an unreliable source.11 The same goes for the account of another former communist, Jules Humbert-Droz, who wrote in his memoirs that Bukharin supported individual terrorism against Stalin.12 Do serious conspirators act in such sloppy ways? Among Losurdo’s other sources for Trotsky’s collaboration with foreign powers are the Italian fascist Curzio Malaparte and Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.13 Should one truly believe fascist claims about communists without corroborating evidence? The fact is that Losurdo ignores long-standing and vocal pronouncements by Trotsky that it was necessary to defend the USSR from imperialism. Trotsky broke with his followers such as Shachtman and Burnham who refused to do that. Lastly, if a vast “Trotskyite-Nazi” conspiracy truly existed, then some physical evidence for it would surely have been found in the past eighty years in the archives of Germany or Japan. The former was actually occupied by the Red Army, who would have uncovered documentation if it existed. Yet no evidence exists because these conspiracies were completely fabricated. Instead of proof, Losurdo pieces “evidence” together from anecdotes, gossip, and rumors that amount to nothing. The only evidence that Losurdo can use are the confessions from defendants at the Moscow Trials. However, it is well-known that the Soviet judicial system employed the following methods of coercion during the Great Terror: solitary confinement, punishing the family of suspects, and torture. It is perfectly reasonable to doubt the validity of confessions when such practices are widespread. Take for instance, Nikolai Bukharin. He was not physically tortured, but his family was threatened with harm. At his trial, Bukharin did

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confess to general charges of conspiracy, but denied taking part in any specific criminal acts. Stephen Cohen, Bukharin’s biographer, explains that his strategy was meant to expose the trial as a frame-up: Bukharin’s plan, as another writer has pointed out, was to turn his trial into a counter-trial (a well-known practice of Russian revolutionaries) of the Stalinist regime, and his own indictment into an indictment of Stalin as the executioner of Bolshevism. Briefly stated, his tactic would be to make sweeping confessions that he was “politically responsible” for everything, thereby at once saving his family and underlining his symbolic role, while at the same time flatly denying or subtly disproving his complicity in any actual crime.14

This is not to say that Losurdo is completely wrong in characterizing the purges as a civil war. Kirov’s death represented an opportunity for Stalin, who took advantage of it by striking against his enemies, settling old scores, and eliminating any other suspected threats. The violence of the terror was ferocious even though one side was completely disarmed. Trotsky went so far as describing the purge as a preventive civil war by the bureaucracy to stop the formation of an organized communist opposition. Losurdo even favorably quotes the following passage from the Trotskyist historian Vadim Rogovin: “In actual fact, the Moscow Trials were not a senseless and cold-blooded crime, but Stalin’s counterblow in the sharpest of political battles.”15 Losurdo is correct to see the purges as a civil war, he just finds himself on the wrong side. As a result, Losurdo cannot see the Thermidorian logic behind the purges. The trials had all the hallmarks of a Thermidorian amalgam where contradictory forces were grouped together in criminal plots. By weaving together revolutionaries and criminals, the process of amalgamation attributed to the first group the motives of the second. Amalgams were common in France after the downfall of Robespierre when the ruling Directory condemned Jacobins and royalists as co-criminals. During the Great Terror, Stalin accused Trotskyists, Right Oppositionists, fascists, nationalists, etc., of conspiring together against Soviet power. According to Trotsky: “The Thermidoreans and Bonapartists of the Great French Revolution hounded and condemned all genuine revolutionists—the Jacobins—as ‘royalists’ and agents of Pitt’s reactionary British government. Stalin hasn’t invented anything new. He has only carried the system of political frame-up to its extreme expression. Lies, slander, persecution, false accusations, juridical comedies flow inexorably from the position of the usurping bureaucracy in Soviet society.”16 Stalin’s resort to amalgams was necessary to discredit any opponents by falsifying their motives as purely criminal and not involving principled politics. Since Trotsky was the most well-known opposition figure with a clearly defined communist program,

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using a Thermidorian amalgam was how Stalin painted him as a fascist, a criminal, and an archenemy of the Soviet Union. While Losurdo cannot see it, the Thermidorian nature of the purges was clearly recognized at the time by both communists and anticommunists. One old Bolshevik, Lev Kamenev told his NKVD interrogator: “You are now observing Thermidor in a pure form. The French Revolution taught us a good lesson, but we weren’t able to put it to use. We didn’t know how to protect our revolution from Thermidor. That is our greatest mistake, and history will condemn us for it.”17 Outside of the USSR, Tsarist émigrés celebrated the trials for riding Russia of international Jews and Bolsheviks who had ruined the Motherland. After the first trial in August 1936, the monarchist paper Vozrozhdenye dedicated the following poem to Stalin: We thank thee, Stalin! Sixteen scoundrels, Sixteen butchers of the fatherland, Have been gathered to their forefathers! Today the sky looks blue, Thou hast repaid us for the sorrows of so many years! . . . But why only sixteen? Give us forty, Give us hundreds, Thousands, Make a bridge across the Moscow river, A bridge without towers or beams, A bridge of Soviet carrion. —And add thy carcass to the rest!18

After the final show trial in March 1938, Mussolini saluted Stalin for abandoning Bolshevism: “Stalin has secretly become a Fascist. . . . Stalin has rendered a praiseworthy service to fascism by tossing out its declared enemies, however impotent they may be.”19 As part of its Thermidorian nature, the bureaucracy did not hesitate to stoke up anti-Semitism during the purges. At the first trial, ten out of sixteen defendants were Jews, at the second eight out of seventeen. In the Soviet press, Jewish-sounding names were used to describe the accused even if the figures were not known by them. For example, Bronstein not Trotsky; Radomislyski not Zinoviev; Rozenfeld not Kamenev. The bureaucracy made the cosmopolitan and urban Jews into convenient scapegoats for popular rage against the system. Trotsky noted that the Stalinist embrace of anti-Semitism was nothing less than Thermidorian: “The physical extermination of the older generation of the Bolsheviks is, for every person who can think, an incontrovertible

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expression of the Thermidorian reaction, and in its most advanced stage at that. History has never yet seen an example when the reaction following the revolutionary upsurge was not accompanied by the most unbridled chauvinistic passions, anti-Semitism among them.”20 Something ignored by Losurdo is that the preventive civil war also extended into the Communist International. In the 1930s, approximately 10,000 foreign communists lived in the Soviet Union, most escaping persecution at home. Now they found themselves consumed by the purges. The Polish Communist Party was so decimated by arrests that it was dissolved in 1938. Over eight hundred German Communists were arrested. Nine hundred members of the Yugoslav Communist Party were arrested, only forty of whom survived the gulag. Ten out of sixteen members of the first central committee of the Hungarian Communist Party were killed along with eleven out of twenty people’s commissars of the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic, including its leader Béla Kun. Communists from the Baltic states, Bulgaria, Mongolia, Japan, Korea, Italy, and Palestine were also heavily repressed during the purges. According to Vadim Rogovin, the purges inflicted more damage on Comintern cadres than losses in World War II: “Altogether, more communists from Eastern Europe were killed in the Soviet Union than died at home in their own countries during Hitler’s occupation.”21 For Losurdo, the purges had to happen since Trotsky’s revolutionary utopianism needed to be defeated by Stalin’s pragmatic realism. Yet this confuses counterrevolutionaries with revolutionaries. Contrary to Losurdo, the scale and ferocity of the purges was not the mystical Dialectic of Saturn at work, but a preventive civil war launched by the Stalinist bureaucracy to destroy a scattered opposition that remained loyal to the ideals of the October Revolution. C. TUKHACHEVSKY AND THE RED ARMY PURGES The Great Purge was not only a preemptive civil war against potential opposition inside the party and society, but also involved the decapitation of the Red Army’s officer corps. Losurdo views the Red Army purge as necessary to stop the rise of a Soviet Bonaparte, i.e., Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky.22 Yet Losurdo misses what was truly behind the Tukhachevsky Affair and the Red Army purge. These events were closely intertwined with shifts in Soviet foreign policy vis-à-vis Nazi Germany. Lastly, Losurdo fails to grasp how the military purges inflicted immense damage on the Soviet Union in the run-up to World War II. On the surface, Losurdo appears to be correct. Tukhachevsky is a more likely candidate for a military dictator than Trotsky ever was. He was a young,

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dashing, and a brilliant Red Army commander who had distinguished himself in both the Civil War and Soviet-Polish war. During the NEP, Tukhachevsky was viewed with suspicion by many in the party and was kept under close surveillance. In the 1930s, Tukhachevsky’s calls for modernization of the Red Army were condemned by Stalin as a form of “red militarism.”23 Indeed, Losurdo presents a great deal of evidence to back up the claim that a military coup was on the horizon. He argues that Stalin was rightly suspicious of plots inside the Red Army: “Was there no cause for alarm?”24 Losurdo notes that Trotsky considered Tukhachevsky to be a potential Bonapartist. When Tukhachevsky was arrested in 1937, Stalin was told that Trotsky’s Bulletin of the Opposition had announced that a military revolt was imminent. This fear precipitated the purge of the Red Army. Another piece of evidence that Losurdo uses is the account of Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš, who passed intelligence to the USSR that the Germans were working with Tukhachevsky and other officers to oust Stalin. He also cites Churchill’s account that the Red Army officers were not loyal: [Beneš] became aware that communications were passing through the Soviet Embassy in Prague between important personages in Russia and the German Government. This was a part of the so-called military and Old-Guard Communist conspiracy to overthrow Stalin and introduce a new régime based on a pro-German policy. President Beneš lost no time in communicating all he could find out to Stalin. Thereafter there followed the merciless, but perhaps not needless, military and political purge in Soviet Russia, and the series of trials. . . . Stalin was conscious of a personal debt to President Beneš; and a very strong desire to help him and his threatened country against the Nazi peril animated the Soviet Government.25

Lastly, Losurdo observes that diverse witnesses, who included Isaac Deutscher, Adolf Hitler, and the American ambassador Joseph Davies all either accepted Stalin’s version of events about the Tukhachevsky Affair or at least found them plausible.26 To make sense of the Tukhachevsky Affair requires looking at his proposals for modernizing the Red Army. He believed that the next war would be fought with mechanized forces which would utilize powerful tank formations and motorized troops. In addition, his new strategic idea of deep operations depended upon a mechanized Red Army. By deep operations, Tukhachevsky emphasized not fighting the enemy in a single decisive engagement but conducting coordinated operations against them that combined tanks, aircraft, and artillery. His innovative approach also introduced the concept of operational art which connected tactics and strategy. The overarching goal was

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to inflict a strategic defeat on the enemy’s logistical support, making their defense of the front more difficult. As Tukhachevsky said in 1923: Since it is impossible, with the extended fronts of modern times, to destroy the enemy’s army at a single blow, we are obliged to try to do this gradually by operations which will be more costly to the enemy than to ourselves. The more rapidly we pursue him, the less time we give him to organize his retreat after the battle, and the more we hasten the disintegration of his armed forces and make it impossible, or at all events difficult, for him to enter upon another general engagement. In short, a series of destructive operations conducted on logical principles and linked together by an uninterrupted pursuit may take the place of the decisive battle that was the form of engagement in the armies of the past, which fought on shorter fronts.27

After 1933, Tukhachevsky saw the immediate threat to the USSR lying in a revanchist Nazi Germany. Following Hitler’s ascension to power, Tukhachevsky advocated breaking off Red Army–Reichswehr relations immediately, but he was overruled by Stalin. On March 31, 1935, Pravda published an article by Tukhachevsky titled “The Military Plans of Today’s Germany” (originally entitled “The Military Plans of Hitler”), where he quoted heavily from Mein Kampf, detailing German plans for rearmament against Western Europe and the Soviet Union. The article caused angry protests from German officials. Tukhachevsky harshly condemned Stalin’s conciliatory attitude to Hitler, stating: Now I see that Stalin is a secret but fanatical, admirer of Hitler. I am not joking. . . . Hitler would only have to make a step in Stalin’s direction, and our leader would throw himself with open arms at the fascist. Yesterday when we were speaking privately, Stalin justified Hitler’s repressions against the Jews by saying that Hitler was clearing the path of everything that prevented him from obtaining his goal, and that from the standpoint of his ideas, Hitler was right. Hitler’s successes impresses losif Vissarionovich [Stalin] too much, and if you look closely, you will see that he copies the Führer in many ways. . . . And what is even sadder, there are people who, instead of putting him in his place, look at him with rapture and hang on his every word as if they expected to hear brilliant thoughts.28

None of this seemed to impede Tukhachevsky’s career. In November 1935, at the relatively young age of forty-two, he was named one of the five Marshals of the Soviet Union, now the highest rank in the Red Army. Tukhachevsky continued to speak out about the threat posed by Germany to the USSR. At the Central Executive Committee of the USSR held on January 15, 1936, Tukhachevsky emphatically warned about the dangers of German rearmament, whereas Stalin was far more ambiguous in his remarks.

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Days later, Tukhachevsky and Commissar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov traveled to the United Kingdom for the funeral of King George V. While there, he met with members of the British military and influential figures in the political establishment. Afterward, Tukhachevsky went to France, where he met General Gamelin, and they inspected military fortifications together. After returning to the Soviet Union, Tukhachevsky was promoted to first deputy defense commissar and made head of the Red Army’s newly formed Administration of Combat Readiness. In Germany, he was regarded as one of the most influential and dangerous figures in the Red Army. Later in 1936, Tukhachevsky spoke with General Isserson, director of the General Staff Academy and his colleague Pavel Vakulich about the Red Army and future conflicts. Tukhachevsky told them that the Soviet Union’s main enemy was the Third Reich and explained what it would take to defeat a German Blitzkrieg: As for the Blitzkrieg which is so propagandised by the Germans, this is directed towards an enemy who doesn’t want to and won’t fight it out. If the Germans meet an opponent who stands up and fights and takes the offensive himself, that would give a different aspect to things. The struggle will be bitter and protracted; by its very nature it would induce great fluctuations in the front on this or that side and in great depth. In the final resort all would depend on who had the greater moral fibre and who at the close of operations disposed of operational reserves in depth.29

By the following year, Tukhachevsky found himself embroiled in the purges. At the second show trial in January 1937, his name was ominously mentioned by Karl Radek. That spring, the NKVD began building a case against Tukhachevsky and other officers. Rumors swirled in France and Czechoslovakia that a miliary coup was imminent in the Soviet Union. Nothing seemed amiss for Tukhachevsky until May 4, when he was deemed too ill to travel to Britain as part of the Soviet delegation for the coronation of King George VI. Several weeks later, Tukhachevsky and his family were abruptly arrested. Now in custody, Tukhachevsky was tortured and confessed his involvement in a Trotskyist conspiracy acting on behalf of Germany. He was so badly beaten that bloodstains appeared on the signed confession.30 After a secret trial in June, Tukhachevsky and other senior military officers were executed. All the sources used by Losurdo claim that Tukhachevsky was actually planning a coup d’état. It may be the case that figures like Churchill and Beneš genuinely believed Stalin’s version of the Tukhachevsky Affair. However, what they accepted was an elaborate frame-up. The evidence against Tukhachevsky was fabricated by German intelligence and discreetly

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passed to the Czechs, prompting Beneš to personally inform the Soviet government.31 The Germans were counting on Stalin’s paranoia to remove the best minds in the Red Army. Yet none of this “evidence” was used at Tukhachevsky’s trial. This means that one must look elsewhere for why the military purge happened. There were other reasons for Stalin to fear Tukhachevsky and the Red Army officers. First: many officers had worked closely with Trotsky and had immense respect for him as a military commander. Yet this did not translate into political support for the Left Opposition, and no evidence exists of any clandestine contact between Trotsky and Tukhachevsky in regards to a military coup. Second: the Red Army was one of the few organized forces in the Soviet Union that could conceivably wrest power away from Stalin. Third: Tukhachevsky himself was a popular figure and an independent thinker who was often at loggerheads with Stalin on military strategy. While these three reasons likely informed Stalin’s thinking, there is a far more plausible rationale, which was the struggle over Soviet foreign policy. Throughout the 1930s, the Communist Party had no single approach to foreign policy, but there were at least two camps in contention. The first camp consisted of proponents of collective security. This involved a military alliance between the Soviet Union, Britain, and France to contain fascist aggression. The most prominent supporter of collective security was the foreign commissar, Maxim Litvinov. A second camp included Stalin and Molotov, who were open to a reproachment with Nazi Germany. Stalin’s remarks at the Seventeenth Party Congress in February 1934 were directed just as much to the advocates of collective security as Hitler: “Of course, we are far from being enthusiastic about the fascist regime in Germany. But it is not a question of fascism here, if only for the reason that fascism in Italy, for example, has not prevented the U.S.S.R. from establishing the best relations with that country.”32 Even as the USSR pursued collective security, the popular front, and intervened in the Spanish Civil War, the back-and-forth over foreign policy continued. As a committed anti-fascist, Tukhachevsky was a supporter of collective security and bound to reject any reconciliation with Nazi Germany. Along with his high-ranking position in the Red Army, that may have been reason enough for Stalin to purge him. Others inside the party who shared Tukhachevsky’s pro-Western position were also purged. Among them was Nikolai Bukharin, who feared Nazi Germany and supported collective security. As suspicion fell on Tukhachevsky, Bukharin was arrested. At his own trial, Bukharin was accused of working with Germany, Trotsky, and Tukhachevsky to overthrow Stalin. After Bukharin’s death, his widow Anna Larina said that the NKVD interrogators taunted her about Tukhachevsky’s failure to rescue her husband: “You thought that Yakir and Tukhachevsky would save your Bukharin!

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But we do good work. That’s why the commanders didn’t succeed!”33 The purge of figures like Bukharin and Tukhachevsky made it easier for Stalin to conclude a Non-Aggression Pact with Germany in 1939 without facing any organized opposition. The death of Tukhachevsky was also the catalyst for a wholesale purge of the Red Army in 1937–1938. From a total of 144,000 officers, at least 33,000 were removed from their posts. A total of 9,500 were imprisoned and another 7,000 were executed. The higher ranks were hit the hardest by the purge. Out of 767 high-ranking commanders, a minimum of 503 were imprisoned or shot. Among the 186 highest ranked officers, 154 were executed for a total of 90 percent. These included three out of the five marshals of the Soviet Union: Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Vasily Blyukher, and Aleksandr Yegorov.34 At a stroke, Stalin deprived the Red Army of its best talent. The purge also meant that Tukhachevsky’s ideas on deep operations were now viewed as heretical and his writings were destroyed. New officers were fearful of showing either resourcefulness or independence. They kept their heads down and conformed. As the historian Moshe Lewin observed, the purges ensured that the Red Army was not ready for the German invasion: “In the summer of 1941, 75 per cent of field officers and 70 per cent of political commissars had been in post for less than a year, so that the core of the army lacked the requisite experience in commanding larger units.”35 For the Germans, the results of the Red Army purge were exactly what they wanted. Joseph Goebbels speculated that Stalin must be brain damaged, and Hitler was positively gleeful. In January 1938, the German General Staff prepared a report on the Red Army’s capabilities, and noted its poor operational state: After Tukhachevsky and a number of generals had been shot in the summer of 1937, only a few people remain from the military leaders. According to all available data at the present time, the middle and senior commanders appear to be the weakest link. Independence and initiative are absent. In battle, this category of commanders adapt with difficulty to the conditions of changing circumstances and crisis situations.36

This was an apt description of the Red Army that the Germans faced three short years later. Only under fire would the Red Army relearn the theory of deep operations, which contributed greatly to the decisive victories at Stalingrad, Kursk, and Bagration. Contrary to Losurdo’s claims, the Red Army purge did not ward off a potential Bonaparte since no such threat existed. Mikhail Tukhachevsky was a dedicated soldier of the revolution, a committed anti-fascist, and a gifted

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strategist. His execution set off a snowball effect that beheaded the Red Army and nearly doomed the Soviet Union. D. COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL When it comes to how the Communist International performed, Losurdo is either silent or evades any real discussion. For instance, he says nothing about how the Third Period led to the destruction of the German Communist Party in 1933. Instead, he uses that moment to criticize Trotsky’s response of calling for a political revolution against Stalin: “Hitler’s rise to power for Trotsky doesn’t mean that unity is necessary, in the aim of confronting the enormous danger which looms, starting from Germany; it means that they can’t stop half-way in the struggle against a power, Stalinism, which had led to the defeat of the German and international proletariat.”37 Losurdo does not spend any time discussing why Trotsky reacted so harshly. From 1930 to 1933, Trotsky wrote article after article warning German Communists of the danger posed by Nazism and the need for a united front to stop them. His cries were ignored. When Hitler triumphed, the Comintern did not offer a critical balance sheet, but declared that their line had been correct all along: “Having heard Comrade Heckert’s report on the situation in Germany, the presidium of the ECCI states that the political line and the organizational policy followed by the CC of the Communist Party of Germany, with Comrade Thaelmann [sic] at its head, up to the Hitlerite coup, and at the moment when it occurred, was completely correct.”38 From that, Trotsky concluded that the Comintern and the Soviet Union had become unreformable. Yet Losurdo provides no critical reflection on those events. Regarding the adoption of the popular front in 1935, Losurdo states that the “strategy had its costs.”39 He notes that the popular front failed in its objectives since no anti-Nazi alliance was formed with Britain and France against Hitler. That is certainly true, but not the whole story by far. Losurdo completely ignores how the popular front acted as a brake on proletarian and revolutionary struggles. In the United States, the Communist Party worked tooth and nail to keep labor militancy within what was deemed acceptable to FDR and the Democratic Party. In France, the Communist Party held back the strike wave in May–June 1936 in deference to their moderate socialist allies. The most damaging results of the popular front occurred in the Spanish Civil War, during which a social revolution was restrained by the Communist Party to serve the interests of Soviet foreign policy. In Spain, there was a spillover of the purges from the USSR when radical anarchists and the POUM were deemed fifth columnists who must be eliminated. According to a Comintern directive addressed to Spanish communists: “the final destruction

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of the Trotskyists must be achieved, exposing them to the masses as a Fascist secret service carrying out provocations in the interests of Hitler and General Franco, attempting to split the Popular Front, conducting a slanderous campaign against the Soviet Union, a secret service actively aiding Fascism in Spain.”40 Not a single word on this comes from Losurdo. Losurdo is unable to adequately explain the popular front’s impact on anti-imperialist struggles. He says that communists putting anti-colonialism on the backburner was a necessary evil to achieve collective security. Yet he offers no analysis of how this compromise discredited the Communist Parties in Britain, France, and colonial countries since they supported imperial overlords instead of national liberation. For example, Losurdo is silent about the French Communist Party’s defense of the French Empire and how they condemned anti-colonial revolts as pro-fascist. Instead, Losurdo laments that the popular front “strengthened the opposition and Trotskyite agitation” in the colonies.41 In the end, Losurdo is reduced to explaining these zigzags of the Comintern as regrettable necessities because he cannot grasp their Thermidorian logic. Since Losurdo accepts Stalinist “realism” as a given, he cannot comprehend how the Comintern’s abandonment of world revolution flowed directly from the line of socialism in one country. E. NAZI-SOVIET PACT Losurdo is correct to blame the failures of collective security largely on Britain and France. The historical record shows that the British ruling class viewed Nazism positively and hoped that Hitler would save Europe from Bolshevism. The French bourgeoisie were little better. Despite the Soviet-French Pact of 1935, the military alliance proved to be a dead letter. In the 1930s, France itself was politically polarized with a large fascist movement that threatened to overturn the Third Republic. When Léon Blum’s popular front government was elected in 1936, a common saying among conservatives was “Better Hitler Than Blum.” Or as they put it more crudely: “Better Hitler than a Jew.” At the start of the Spanish Civil War, Britain and France formed the Non-Intervention Committee to stop the flow of arms to either side. This neutrality was a farce since the Non-Intervention Committee looked the other way while German and Italian aid poured into Nationalist Spain. Moreover, British conservatives favored a Nationalist victory since it would crush the reds. British and French preference for fascism over communism was readily on display at the Munich Agreement of September 1938. Even though British

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Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was willing to accommodate Hitler’s claims on the Sudetenland, he feared Germany moving against the West. To forestall this, Chamberlain offered a quid pro quo to the Führer: he encouraged Germany to move east against the Soviet Union, and Britain would not intervene. The translator at the September 23 meeting recorded the following exchange between Hitler and Chamberlain: at 2:00 in the morning Chamberlain and Hitler took leave from one another in a completely friendly tone after having had, with my assistance, an eye to eye conversation. During the meeting, with words that came from his heart, Hitler thanked Chamberlain for his efforts for peace. He remarked that the solution of the Sudeten question is the last big problem which remains to be treated. Hitler also spoke about a German-Anglo rapprochement and cooperation. It was clearly noticeable that it was important for him to have a good relation with the Englishman. He went back to his old tune: “Between us there should be no conflict,” he said to Chamberlain, “we will not stand in the way of your pursuit of your non-European interests and you may without harm let us have a free hand on the European continent in Central and South-East Europe. Sometime we will have to solve the colonial question; but this has time, and war is not to be considered in this case.” (Author’s translation)42

Chamberlain found nothing objectionable in Hitler’s remarks. Britain showed that it was willing to turn a blind eye to the Nazi conquest of Eastern Europe if it meant the destruction of the hated Soviet Union. Despite all this, there were efforts by the USSR to reach a military agreement with Britain and France that lasted into the summer of 1939. However, the Western powers were not willing to commit to any firm agreement with Stalin. The Soviets on their end were rightfully suspicious about Western good faith after Munich. The Soviet Union kept its options open and put out feelers to Germany. Only in August 1939 did the USSR finally commit to a Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler. Losurdo is correct that the Soviets reached their agreement with Hitler long after the West had already done so: thanks to the direct or passive complicity of the Western powers, inclined to direct the Third Reich’s sights and ambitions against the homeland of the October Revolution; to its east, the Soviet Union sees the pressure applied by Japan on its eastern borders. Thus emerges the danger of an invasion and war on two fronts: It’s only at this moment that Moscow begins moving toward a pact of non-aggression with Germany, noting the failure of the popular front strategy.43

By reaching a modus vivendi with Hitler, Stalin’s realpolitik was no worse than any other capitalist politician of his time. Losurdo may find it convenient

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to end discussion here, but Marxists cannot. The Pact was a huge blow for communists and anti-fascists. They found something truly repellant about the Soviet Union carving up spheres of influence with Nazi Germany under the banner of proletarian internationalism. Losurdo’s defense of Stalinist “realism” means he upholds the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as a pragmatic measure by the USSR to gain space and time. However, he does not look at what this policy meant for the cause of socialism. Losurdo largely passes over the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland, Bessarabia, and the Baltic states. Geoffrey Roberts, a historian whom Losurdo quotes favorably on Stalin’s military leadership, is not silent about what happened: “Soviet invasion of eastern Poland in 1939, 400,000 ethnic Poles were arrested, deported and/or executed; among those shot were 20,000 Polish POWs—victims of the infamous ‘Katyn massacre’ of April– May 1940. The Red Army’s occupation of the Baltic States in summer 1940 led to the deportation of several hundred thousand Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians.”44 These annexations may have created a buffer zone between the USSR and the Germans, but at what cost for socialism? The poor performance of the Red Army in its 1939–1940 Winter War with Finland is not discussed by Losurdo. True, the Winter War was a Soviet victory, but due to poor leadership and high casualties for the Red Army, it was largely seen as a symbolic victory for Finland. After the Winter War, Hitler said that the USSR was a “tenacious adversary,” but that the Red Army was “without leadership.”45 While the USSR did undertake needed military reforms after the war, the conflict severely damaged the Red Army’s reputation. There is one Soviet action during the Non-Aggression Pact that Losurdo does not mention. That is the handover to the Third Reich of at least five hundred German and Austrian anti-fascists and communists who were living in Soviet exile. Many of them later died in Nazi concentration camps. It should be emphasized that there was no provision in the Pact for extradition, but this was done freely by the USSR with no coercion from Hitler. The Nazis were delighted to receive these prisoners and asked the Soviets to send them more. Bini Adamczak describes the cynical nature of the prisoner exchange as follows: “The Nazis give the numbers, the Soviets supply the names. The anti-fascists are sacrificed not according to some overarching principle of political calculus nor as currency in an exchange but rather as a kind of gift.”46 Losurdo claims that the Pact gave Stalin the time he needed to prepare the Red Army for war. However, Stalin was gambling on a prolonged war between the Western powers and Nazi Germany. In this regard, he severely underestimated Germany’s offensive capabilities and overestimated France’s military strength. When France fell after just six weeks in May–June 1940,

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this completely upset Stalin’s calculus. Ultimately, the strategy of gaining time had failed in less than a year. The Wehrmacht victories in the West were due in no small part to Soviet shipments of needed resources to Germany. Three major economic agreements were signed in August 1939, February 1940, and January 1941 that resulted in a tenfold increase of trade between the two countries. These agreements enabled Germany to bypass the British blockade by receiving resources from the USSR. Until Operation Barbarossa, the Soviet Union accounted for the bulk of Germany’s overseas trade. Without these supplies, the Germans would not have been able to defeat France in 1940 or launch their invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. As Edward E. Ericson said in his study on Soviet and German economic relations: Without Soviet deliveries of these four major items (oil, grain, manganese, and rubber), however, Germany barely could have attacked the Soviet Union, let alone come close to victory. Germany’s stockpiles of oil, manganese, and grain would have been completely exhausted by the late summer of 1941. And Germany’s rubber supply would have run out half a year earlier. Even with more intense rationing and synthetic production, the Reich surely would have lacked the reserves necessary for a major campaign in the East along the lines of Operation Barbarossa. In other words, Hitler had been almost completely dependent on Stalin to provide him the resources he needed to attack the Soviet Union. It was no wonder that Hitler repeatedly insisted Germany fulfill the terms of the economic treaties. He could not conquer any Soviet territory until he first received enough Soviet raw materials.47

The last shipment of Soviet supplies reached Germany only hours before Barbarossa began. Despite the benefits of trade with the Soviet Union, the Germans believed that they could extract more raw materials through conquest. On balance, Hitler was the clear beneficiary of the Non-Aggression Pact. Losurdo also dismisses accusations from Khrushchev that Stalin left the USSR unprepared for war. He cites Stalin’s accelerated war preparations that included calling up reservists and fortifying the frontiers. By June 1941, nearly three million Red Army soldiers were on the western borders. However, the troops had abandoned their old fortifications for new forward positions. None of these defenses were complete by June 1941. This meant that the bulk of the Red Army was not only within striking distance of the Wehrmacht, but also dangerously exposed. The largest concentration of Red Army forces was in the southwest, where they were expecting the main German advance. Instead, the main thrust of German tanks came in the north.48 In other words, Stalin left the Red Army extremely vulnerable. When it comes to Khrushchev’s claims that repeated warnings about a German invasion were ignored, Losurdo once again rushes to Stalin’s

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defense. Hitler had always considered the Non-Aggression Pact to be a momentary truce. He believed that Judeo-Bolshevism and the Soviets were the greatest enemies of the Reich. German plans for the invasion had been approved by December 1940. Soviet intelligence was among the best in the world and its agents got wind of the plans before the New Year. Around the same time, the famed spy Richard Sorge, sent a report to the USSR about the planned invasion. As the date for the German attack grew closer, more and more reports from Soviet intelligence poured into the Kremlin. However, Stalin believed that all these reports were just provocations. Stalin was determined not to be drawn into a war and made continued efforts to appease the Germans and convince them of the Soviet Union’s peaceful intentions. In the lead-up to Operation Barbarossa, three million Wehrmacht troops— one of the largest land forces ever assembled—were amassed on the Soviet frontier. They were a force impossible to be missed. The Germans used the excuse that these troops were stationed there to stay out of range of RAF bombers. The Germans also violated Soviet borders on at least three hundred occasions, prompting diplomatic protests with no result. In one instance, a Junkers 52 transport plane went through Soviet air defenses and flew all the way to Moscow. The plane was allowed to land and was refueled by the Soviets before departing. Losurdo has nothing to say on this. The British heard about German preparations and proceeded to tell Soviet ambassador Ivan Maisky four times about them. Maisky relayed this information back to Moscow, but it had no effect. Two highly placed sources in Luftwaffe headquarters and the German economics ministry also sent back reports to the USSR detailing evidence of the coming attack. On June 21, the day before the invasion, defecting German troops said an attack was mere hours away. Zhukov and Timoshenko wanted to use this information to order a general mobilization. Still nothing happened. When German troops crossed over the frontier, Stalin expressed doubts that this was actually war: “Couldn’t this just be a provocation by German generals? . . . Hitler surely doesn’t know about this.”49 The Germans planned to destroy the bulk of Soviet forces in a series of encirclements, denying them any opportunity to retreat. On the opening day, nearly 1,200 Soviet aircraft were lost. Red Army organization, command, and discipline practically collapsed. Some Soviet units were ordered not to attack. In just a matter of days, the Wehrmacht was able to inflict devastating losses on the Red Army and advanced deep into the Soviet Union. As opposed to Losurdo’s claims, it was Stalin’s “realism” that created the conditions for the disaster of June 22.

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F. WAR LEADER Losurdo denies that Stalin was an incompetent military leader in World War II. He says the following about Khrushchev’s negative characterization: “It is clear that the portrait of Stalin drawn here is a caricature: how did the USSR manage to defeat Hitler under a leader who was both criminal and a fool?”50 In Losurdo’s view, Stalin was an exemplary statesman, full of confidence and fierce resolve, who saved the Soviet Union from annihilation. Since the Soviet Union emerged victorious in the war, and Stalin’s name is tied to that triumph, assessing his wartime leadership is complicated. However, it is still necessary to ask: was the Red Army’s victory due to Stalin or despite him? There is an important falsification about Stalin and the war that Losurdo does clear up. For example, it is not true that Stalin was despondent for days following the German invasion. From the earliest days of the invasion, he took an active part in military planning. Yet there were terrible results stemming from his involvement. In the first year, Stalin ordered constant military offensives by the Red Army against the Wehrmacht to wear down enemy resistance. As a result, he bears responsibility for the following: the military failures in 1941 that ended with the capture of millions of Soviet soldiers; the advance of the Wehrmacht to the gates of Moscow and Leningrad; and the failure to halt German offensives in July 1942. The historical verdict on Stalin’s military leadership is mixed, with some such as Geoffrey Roberts and Isaac Deutscher paying him tribute. They claim that Stalin learned from his mistakes and became a capable military commander. However, Roberts and Deutscher give Stalin too much credit. It was Red Army Generals who displayed far more tactical and strategic acumen. What Stalin did correctly was let the Red Army generals do their job. Over time, Stalin grew to trust his officers and encouraged them to take initiative on the battlefield. This stood in marked contrast to the Wehrmacht, where Hitler distrusted his generals and increasingly interfered with military planning. According to military historian David Glantz, Hitler and Stalin essentially swapped leadership styles as the war continued: As the war dragged on and Germany lost the initiative, the two heads of state traded leadership styles. Hitler became increasingly intolerant of what he considered subordinate errors and disobedience that seemed to allow victory to elude him; eventually, he introduced the Führungsoffizier (leadership officer), a sort of Nazi commissar to ensure the ideological loyalty of those subordinates. Beginning in 1942, by contrast, Stalin came to trust first a small group and eventually a much larger number of professional officers, giving them the same confidence and subordinate initiative that had characterized the German officer corps at its best.51

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As opposed to Losurdo’s praise for Stalin’s military genius, the evidence leads to a different answer. It can be claimed with justification that the purges of the Red Army were a self-inflicted wound; the Nazi-Soviet Pact was a blunder, and intelligence reports about the German military buildup were willfully ignored by Stalin. The USSR won the war, but this was more due to the heroism of the Red Army and the superiority of its planned economy than to Stalin’s leadership. Khrushchev was not wrong to claim that Stalin’s leadership made victory over the Third Reich much more difficult: In the end we survived and were victorious, and we learned from our mistakes how to command troops properly, and we smashed the enemy. But what did that cost? If what Stalin did, when he dreamed up all these “enemies of the people” and destroyed loyal military men—if that had not happened, I am convinced that our victory would have cost us many fewer lives. Our victory would have been cheaper, if it is morally permissible to use that word in view of the vast amount of blood that was shed, the human lives that were lost, the people who were forced to lay down their lives during the war. Everything would have happened at much less cost and much more easily for our people.52

G. SOVIET PATRIOTISM When it comes to Stalin’s embrace of nationalism, Losurdo heartily approves of it. He thinks that Stalin’s Soviet nationalism was perfectly compatible with proletarian internationalism. Losurdo quotes approvingly from Comintern President George Dimitrov: “It is necessary to develop a line of thought that combines wise nationalism, properly understood, with proletarian internationalism. Proletarian internationalism should be based on the nationalism of individual countries . . . between that properly understood nationalism and proletarian internationalism there can be no contradiction. Nationless cosmopolitanism, which denies national sentiment and the idea of the nation, doesn’t have anything in common with proletarian internationalism.”53 Once again, Losurdo’s embrace of Stalinist “realism” means that he cannot see how this Thermidorian policy damaged the cause of socialism. Stalin’s adoption of nationalism and retreat from internationalism began long before the war. After the upheavals of the Five-Year Plan and agricultural collectivization, Stalin saw the need for new policies aimed at restoring stability which included the revival of the traditional family, social hierarchies, and cultural conservativism. This was something that Losurdo recognized and praised as a necessary move away from “utopianism.” Among the new policies was the promotion of Great Russian nationalism. In the USSR, which

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was a multinational country that supported the equality of all nationalities, the elevation of one national group went against its avowed socialist principles. The Marxist veneer over Russian nationalism grew very thin once the war began. Stalin proclaimed that the Soviet Union was fighting a “Great Patriotic War” against the German invader. In the propaganda, there were appeals to the whole “Soviet people,” but it was the Russians who were viewed as the heart and soul of the war effort. According to a February 1942 article in Pravda: “The Great Russian people—elder brother and first among equals in a single Soviet family—lent tremendous assistance to other peoples. With its help, formerly oppressed peoples achieved their liberation, [and] economic and cultural golden age.”54 As part of the war effort, Tsarist heroes and Russian symbols were revived. Wartime nationalism included the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943 and the symbolic change of the national anthem from the Internationale to the overtly nationalist Hymn of the Soviet Union in 1944. In his novel Life and Fate, the Soviet writer Vasily Grossman clearly understood that Russian wartime nationalism was the culmination of the politics of socialism in one country: This awakening of national consciousness can be related to the tasks facing the State during the war and the years after the war: the struggle for national sovereignty and the affirmation of what is truly Russian, truly Soviet, in every area of life. These tasks, however, were not suddenly imposed on the State; they appeared when the events in the countryside, the creation of a national heavy industry and the complete change in the ruling cadres marked the triumph of a social order defined by Stalin as “Socialism in One Country.” The birthmarks of Russian social democracy were finally erased. And this process finally became manifest at a time when Stalingrad was the only beacon of freedom in the kingdom of darkness. A people’s war reached its greatest pathos at the time of the defence of Stalingrad; the logic of events was such that Stalin chose this moment to proclaim openly his ideology of State nationalism.55

In contrast, Losurdo says that this wartime patriotism did not detract from Stalin’s internationalism. As evidence, he cites the following from Stalin’s 1942 statement about the German people: Historical experience proves that Hitlers come and go, but the German people, the German state, remains. The strength of the Red Army resides in the fact that it doesn’t nurture, nor could it nurture, any hatred toward other people, and therefore couldn’t even nurture hatred for the German people; it is educated in

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the spirit of the equality of all peoples and all races, in the spirit of respect for the rights of other peoples.56

Marxists, however, should not judge any phenomenon based on mere surface rhetoric. In practice, the USSR replaced internationalism with national chauvinism. For example, Soviet propaganda described the war not as one between classes, but between nations. This meant all Germans were now dehumanized as an enemy nation. Ilya Ehrenburg’s articles in the military journal Red Star provide a grotesque example of this dehumanizing propaganda: The Germans are not human beings. From now on the word German means to us the most terrible oath. From now on the word German strikes us to the quick. We shall not speak any more. We shall not get excited. We shall kill. If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day. . . . If you cannot kill your German with a bullet, kill him with your bayonet. . . . Kill the German—that is your grandmother’s request. Kill the German—that is your child’s prayer. Kill the German—that is your motherland’s loud request. Do not miss. Do not let through. Kill.57

No doubt Losurdo would claim that Ehrenburg’s words violated the official party line, but truth be told, the political education in the Red Army encouraged this chauvinistic thinking. The tragic results of this brutalizing propaganda were on display once the Red Army entered Germany. Writers like Ehrenburg exhorted soldiers to take vengeance on the people there: “All the trenches, graves and ravines with the corpses of the innocents are advancing on Berlin. . . . As we advance through Pomerania, we have before our eyes the devastated blood-drenched countryside of Belorussia. . . . Germany, you can whirl round in circles, and howl in your deathly agony. The hour of revenge has struck!”58 There was not only widespread looting by the Red Army, but pervasive rape. When Yugoslav diplomat Milovan Djilas brought reports of this to Stalin’s attention, the General Secretary appeared unconcerned and even endorsed this brutalization: You have, of course, read Dostoevsky? Do you see what a complicated thing is man’s soul, man’s psyche? Well then, imagine a man who has fought from Stalingrad to Belgrade—over thousands of kilometres of his own devastated land, across the dead bodies of his comrades and dearest ones? How can such a man react normally? And what is so awful in his having fun with a woman, after such horrors? You have imagined the Red Army to be ideal. And it is not ideal, nor can it be . . . The important thing is that it fights Germans.59

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In February 1945, the party and army command recognized that its troops were going too far and worked actively to halt rape and looting. Ehrenburg himself was criticized for his un-Marxist views in Pravda and Red Star: “‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ is an old saying. But it must not be taken literally. If the Germans marauded, and publicly raped our women, it does not mean that we must do the same. This has never been and never shall be. Our soldiers will not allow anything like that to happen—not because of pity for the enemy, but out of a sense of their own personal dignity. . . . They understand that every breach of military discipline only weakens the victorious Red Army. . . . Our revenge is not blind. Our anger is not irrational. In an excess of blind rage one is apt to destroy a factory in conquered enemy territory—a factory that would be of value to us. Such an attitude can only play into the enemy’s hands.”60 However, the damage had already been done by then. It was not only the Germans who were viewed as an enemy nation, but also other nationalities inside the Soviet Union. After the war started, Stalin feared collaboration and as a result, two million members of minority nationalities—Volga Germans, Crimean Tartars, Chechens, and other Transcaucasian populations—were deported to Siberia. Losurdo acknowledges these deportations, but simply says that other great powers were doing the same thing. True enough, but he fails to address how Stalinist policies led to the mass deportations of nationalities. There was an added side to Soviet nationalism that wanted to present the war as a singular experience. Soviet propaganda portrayed the war as one of national survival where all nationalities in the USSR were considered equal victims of Nazism. This was not the case. For instance, many Ukrainians, who were bitterly anticommunist, actively collaborated with the Germans. Moreover, Soviet Jews were singled out for extermination. Articles discussing the Final Solution, like Vasily Grossman’s “Ukraine Without Jews,” were not allowed to be published since they challenged this dominant narrative. Following the war, Grossman worked with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to collect material about the Holocaust in The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry. Soviet authorities found the book unacceptable since it admitted there were Nazi collaborators to the genocide among Ukrainians and Lithuanians. In 1947, the Soviet edition of The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry was banned, and all copies were destroyed.61 Great Russian nationalism did not abate after the war, but mutated into a vitriolic xenophobia. The Soviet press championed the Russian people as the source of all that was good and noble in civilization. This xenophobia had noticeable anti-Semitic undertones, particularly in the campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans” launched in the late 1940s. Ostensibly, this campaign was directed against foreign and non-proletarian culture as ideologically subversive, but it proceeded to target many Jewish intellectuals as

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“alien” to Soviet life. In the midst of this campaign, fifteen members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were arrested and executed. The culmination of the anti-cosmopolitan campaign was the so-called Doctor’s Plot in 1952, when a group of predominantly Jewish doctors were accused of plotting to assassinate Soviet leaders. In a speech, Stalin linked the doctors to Jewish nationalists: “Every Jew-Nationalist is an agent of American intelligence. Jew-Nationalists think that the U.S. (where you can become rich, bourgeois, and so on) saved their nation. They feel obliged to the Americans. Among the doctors are many Jew-Nationalists.”62 The Doctor’s Plot was likely a signal for a new purge that was only stopped by Stalin’s death. Losurdo claims that the Doctor’s Plot was not a manifestation of Stalin’s anti-Semitism. In fact, he believed that Stalin’s purge of “cosmopolitanism” was needed to remove any trace of abstract universalism in Soviet life: Cosmopolitanism is an internationalism that leads to national nihilism. We also saw Stalin, on the eve of Operation Barbarossa, stress that, contrary to a “cosmopolitanism” incapable of assuming its national responsibilities, internationalism must know how to be combined with patriotism. That means that, far from being synonymous with antisemitism, the criticism of cosmopolitanism is an essential element in the struggle against Nazi-fascism (and antisemitism).63

More than the falsification of the historical record, the main problem with Losurdo’s work on Stalin is the “black legend” he constructs favoring the General Secretary. He accepts Stalin’s pseudo-Marxist “realism” and rejection of revolutionary internationalism. He ends up apologizing for its retreats and crimes as historically necessary to reach socialism. Ultimately, Losurdo’s whole perspective cannot understand the true nature of the Stalinist Thermidor. NOTES 1. For Hegel and the French Revolution, see Doug Enaa Greene and Harrison Fluss, “Hegel, Enlightenment, and Revolution.” Left Voice, July 26, 2020. https:​//​ www​.leftvoice​.org​/hegel​-enlightenment​-and​-revolution​/. 2. Domenico Losurdo, Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend, trans. David Ferreira (Morrisville, NC: Lulu, 2020b), 36. This translation of Losurdo is unofficial and often clunky, but it does convey the basic meaning of the text. When it comes to the Chinese Revolution, Losurdo views the “romantic” Mao and “realist” Deng as the counterparts respectively to Trotsky and Stalin. He argued that the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were based on the illusion that the productive forces would be increased by “relying on mobilisation and mass

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enthusiasm.” He says that Mao’s campaigns were a failure that exacerbated inequalities in China. Losurdo praised Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms for rapidly expanding the productive forces and successfully carrying out a modern NEP in China. He said Chinese leaders like Deng freed socialism from “its abstract utopian components” with their “messianic aura” of mass struggle by “normalizing” the market, the rule of law, and the promotion of material incentives. Losurdo concludes that China shows the success of socialism as a pragmatic and “realistic” endeavor once it is purged of revolutionary and utopian fantasies. See Domenico Losurdo, “World War I, the October Revolution and Marxism’s Reception in the West and East,” in Cataclysm 1914: The First World War and the Making of Modern World Politics, ed. Alexander Anievas (Boston: Brill, 2015), 275; Losurdo 2003, 55; Losurdo 2016a, 193–96; Domenico Losurdo, “Flight from History? The Communist Movement between Self-Criticism and Self-Contempt,” Nature, Society and Thought 13, no. 3 (October 2000b): 494–97. For a discussion on Losurdo’s views about Mao and Deng in comparison to Alain Badiou, see Doug Enaa Greene, “A Unity of Opposites: The Dengist and the Red Guard,” Monthly Review Online, August 19, 2022. https:​//​mronline​.org​/2022​/08​ /19​/a​-unity​-of​-opposites​-the​-dengist​-and​-the​-red​-guard​/. 3. Jean-Jacques Marie and Domenico Losurdo, “Losurdo’s ‘Stalin’: the debate between Jean-Jacques Marie and Domenico Losurdo,” Historical Materialism. https:​ //​www​ historicalmaterialism​.org​/book​-review​/losurdos​-stalin​-debate​-between​-jean​ -jacques​-marie​-and​-domenico​-losurdo. 4. Grover Furr, The Murder of Sergei Kirov (Kettering, OH: Erythros Press and Media, LLC, 2013), back cover. 5. Domenico Losurdo, “Preface,” Associazione Stalin. https:​//​www​ .associazionestalin​ .it​ /losurdo​ _preffurr​html; In return, Furr has praised Losurdo’s Stalin: “I found Losurdo’s firm defense of Stalin, particularly on the basis of the Soviet Union’s and the Comintern’s fight against imperialism, to be a breath of fresh air, a sign that there were others who questioned the demonization of Stalin and the consequent rejection of the communist movement of the 20th century.” Grover Furr, “In Memoriam Domenico Losurdo,” Grover Furr, July 1, 2018. https:​//​msuweb​ .montclair​.edu​/​~furrg​/research​/losurdo​_furr070118​ html; See also the friendly exchange between Furr and Losurdo on Nicholas Werth, see Domenico Losurdo and Grover Furr, “Lo storico statunitense Grover Furr a proposito del dibattito su Stalin tra Domenico Losurdo e Nicolas Werth,” Domenico Losurdo. http:​//​domenicolosurdo​ .blogspot​.com​/2013​/01​/lo​-storico​-statunitense​-grover​-furr​ html. For a refutation of Furr’s methodology, see Doug Enaa Greene, “Grover Furr and the Moscow Trials,” The Blanquist, May 3, 2017. http:​//​blanquist​.blogspot​.com​/2017​/05​/on​-grover​-furr​ -and​-moscow​-trials​.html. 6. Marie and Losurdo, “Losurdo’s Stalin.” 7. Losurdo 2020b, 67. 8. Ibid., 74. 9. Ibid., 58 and 61. 10. Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of the Dictator (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 133–34. See also Getty and Naumov 1999, 141–47.

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11. See J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg (New York: Verso, 2019), 747, and Edward Hallett Carr, A History of Soviet Russia: The Interregnum 1923–1924 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin: 1969), 164. 12. Losurdo 2020b, 66–67. 13. Ibid., 63 and 74–75. 14. Cohen 1980, 375–76. For more on the soviet practice of torture and forced confessions, see Getty and Naumov 1999, 3, 477, and 489. 15. Vadim Rogovin, 1937: Stalin’s Year of Terror (Oak Park: Mehring Books, 1998), 66. Quoted in Losurdo 2020b, 70. On Trotsky’s characterization of the purges as a one-sided civil war, see “Once Again: The USSR and Its Defense,” in Trotsky 1976, 38. 16. On the concept of Thermidorian amalgams, see Leon Trotsky, “The Comintern and the GPU,” in Writings of Leon Trotsky [1939–1940] (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973e), 349. See also Deutscher on the amalgam in the USSR in Isaac Deutscher, The Great Purges (New York: Basil Blackwater Publisher, 1984a), 69. Ironically, Grover Furr accuses Trotsky of resorting to amalgams to hide his conspiracies. See Grover Furr, Trotsky’s Amalgams: Trotsky’s Lies, the Moscow Trials as Evidence, the Dewey Commission. Trotsky’s Conspiracies of the 1930s, Volume One (Kettering, OH: Erythros Press and Media, 2015). 17. Rogovin 1998, 6. 18. Quoted in Victor Serge, From Lenin to Stalin (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1937), 116. 19. Benito Mussolini, “5 Marzo 1938,” in Opera Omnia Benito Mussolini XXIX (Firenze: La Fenice, 1959), 64. [my translation] 20. Leon Trotsky, “Thermidor and Anti-Semitism,” in On the Jewish Question (New York: Pathfinder Press, 2009), 36. 21. Vadim Rogovin, Stalin’s Terror of 1937–1938: Political Genocide in the USSR (Oak Park, IL: Mehring Books, 2009), 316. See also Tucker 1990, 507; Ivo Banac, With Stalin against Tito: Cominformist Splits in Yugoslav Communism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 67. See also Chase 2001. The purges also extended into Spain. See Rogovin 1998, 335–38, 341–44, 346–53, 369–72. 22. Losurdo 2020b, 76. Grover Furr also believes that Tukhachevsky was involved in a military plot. See Grover Furr and the Spartacist League, “In Defense of Marshal Tukhachevsky,” Workers Vanguard 41–42 (Winter 1987–88): 45–48. https:​//​www​ .marxists​.org​/history​/etol​/newspape​/spartacist​-us​/1988–1993​/0041–0042​_Winter​ _1989–88​.pdf. 23. Losurdo 2020b, 112. See also Kotkin 2018, 52. 24. Losurdo 2020b, 76. Molotov claimed years later that it was necessary to remove any potential fifth columnists in case of war. See V. M. Molotov and Feliz Chuev, Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics (Chicago: Ivan D. Ree, 1993), 254. 25. Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1985), 259. 26. Deutscher 2003c, 314. Losurdo 2020b, 77–78. 27. Quoted in V. K. Triandafillov, The Nature of the Operations of Modern Armies (Newbury Park: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd, 1994), xxx. Soviet strategist Alexander

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Svechin defined operational art as follows: “Battle is the means of operation. Tactics are the material of operational art. The operation is the means of strategy, and operational art is the material of strategy.” See Aleksandr A. Svechin, Strategy (Minneapolis: East View Publications, 1992), 38. 28. Quoted in Rogovin 1998, 403. See also Kotkin 2018, 245 and Tucker 1990, 233. 29. Quoted in Tariq Ali, The Dilemmas of Lenin: Terrorism, War, Empire, Love, Revolution (New York: Verso, 2017), 236. 30. Kotkin 2018, 414. Grover Furr goes so far as to wonder if the bloodstains on Tukhachevsky’s confession came from a nosebleed and not a beating: “Let’s assume these are bloodstains. What might have caused them? A nosebleed. A paper cut. Whose blood? It could be anybody’s: the interrogator’s; the secretary-typist’s; from one of the archivists handling the document. Or, it could be Tukhachevsky’s.” See Grover Furr, Vladimir L. Bobrov, and Sven-Eric Holmström, Trotsky and the Military Conspiracy Soviet and Non-Soviet Evidence; with the Complete Transcript of the “Tukhachevsky Affair” Trial (Kettering, OH: Erythros Press and Media, LLC), 100. 31. Rogovin 1998, 416–25; Kotkin doubts that the manufactured plot mattered much in Tukhachevsky’s death, see Kotkin 2018, 377–78. For background on the frame-up orchestrated by Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich and a White émigré named General N. Skoblin, see Paul W. Blackstock, “The Tukhachevsky Affair,” Russian Review 28, no. 2 (April 1969): 171–90; Leopold Trepper, The Great Game: Memoirs of the Spy Hitler Couldn’t Silence (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977), 67; Tucker 1990, 381–83. 32. “Report to the Seventeenth Party Congress on the Work of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U.(B.)—January 26, 1934,” SCW, vol. 13, 308–9. 33. Anna Larina, This I Cannot Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin’s Widow (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 59–60. See also Cohen 1980, 356–57 and 360–62. 34. Kotkin 2018, 387. 35. Lewin 2005b, 110. 36. Rogovin 2009, 202. For Goebbels on the military purges, see Kotkin 2018, 432. 37. Losurdo 2020b, 70. 38. “Resolution of the ECCI Presidium on the Situation in Germany—1 April 1933,” in The Communist International 1919–1943—Volume III: 1929–1943, ed. Jane Degras (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 257. 39. Losurdo 2020b, 162. 40. Jonathan Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe 1933–39 (London: Palgrave, 1984), 116. 41. Losurdo 2020b, 162. See also Domenico Losurdo, “Stalin and Hitler: Twin Brothers or Mortal Enemies?” Crisis and Critique 3, no. 1 (2016b): 34. 42. Quoted in Clement Leibovitz and Alvin Finkel, In Our Time: The Hitler-Chamberlain Collusion (London: Merlin Books, 1997), 151. 43. Losurdo 2020b, 162. For background on the failed alliance between the West and the USSR, see Michael Jabara Carley, 1939: The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1999). 44. Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 19. See also Kotkin 2018, 770–73. To his

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credit, Losurdo does acknowledge that the Katyn Massacre was a crime. See Losurdo 2020b, 236. Another difference between Furr and Losurdo is that the former denies that the USSR committed the Katyn Massacre. See Grover Furr, The Mystery of the Katyn Massacre: The Evidence, The Solution (Kettering, OH: Erythros Press and Media, LLC, 2018). 45. Jürgen Forster and Evan Μawdsley, “Hitler and Stalin in Perspective: Secret Speeches on the Eve of Barbarossa,” War in History 11, no. 1 (January 2004): 73. 46. Bini Adamczak, Yesterday’s Tomorrow: On the Loneliness of Communist Specters and the Reconstruction of the Future (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2021), 8. See also Alex de Jong, “Stalin Handed Hundreds of Communists Over to Hitler,” Jacobin Magazine, August 21, 2021. https:​//​www​.jacobinmag​.com​/2021​/08​/hitler​-stalin​-pact​ -nazis​-communist​-deportation​-soviet. 47. Edward E. Ericson III, Feeding the German Eagle: Soviet Economic Aid to Nazi Germany, 1933–1941 (Westport: Praeger, 1990), 182. 48. David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015), 45 and 56. 49. Stalin quoted in Khlevniuk 2015, 199. On Soviet intelligence failures, see: Kotkin 869, 927–29; Roberts 2006, 66–67; Glantz and House 2015, 67. 50. Marie and Losurdo, “Losurdo’s Stalin”; See also Losurdo 2020b, 13 and 251. 51. Glantz and House 2015, 52. For differing assessments of Stalin’s wartime leadership, see Deutscher 1966, 461–97; Kevin McDermott, Stalin (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 124; Roberts 2006, 367; Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 474; and Moshe Lewin, “Stalin in the Mirror of the Other,” in Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, ed. Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 127. 52. Nikita Khrushchev, The Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev Volume I: Commissar [1918–1945] (Providence: Brown University Press, 2004), 663. 53. Losurdo 2020b, 97. 54. Jonathan Brunstedt, The Soviet Myth of World War II: Patriotic Memory and the Russian Question in the USSR (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 24. 55. Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate (New York: New York Review Books, 2006), 665. 56. Losurdo 2020b, 30. 57. Alfred M. de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Anglo-Americans and the Expulsion of the Germans (New York: Routledge, 1977), 65–66. 58. Quoted in Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 302. 59. Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (New York: Penguin Books, 1967), 87. See Roberts 2006 263–65 for figures on rape. 60. Quoted in Alexander Werth, Russia at War 1941–1945 (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1984), 966. 61. Alexandra Popoff, Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 3, 159–64 and 189–91. 62. Quoted in Roberts 2006, 341. 63. Losurdo 2020b, 207.

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Index

abstract utopianism, 144 Action Française, 61 Aczél, György, 149 Adamczak, Bini, 300 Aden, Arabie (Nizan), 173–74 Adorno, Theodor, xxiii, 117–20, 188n8, 188n11; Benjamin and, 126; The Dialectic of Enlightenment, 120, 189n16; on fascism, 120; on Moscow Trials, 119 Adventures of the Dialectic (MerleauPonty), 110–11, 180 Agulhon, Maurice, 55 Algerian War, 169, 183, 186 Ali, Tariq, 272–73, 280n80 Althusser, Louis, xxiii, 117; antihumanism of, 166–67, 198n193; on Chinese Revolution, 167–68; Essays on Self-Criticism, 168; For Marx, 164–65, 198n190; Frankfurt School and, 164–71; French Communist Party and, 164–71; Maoism and, 169, 171, 199n199; on Secret Speech, 165–66, 286; as Western Marxist, 164–71 Amendola, Giovanni, 27 Amis, Martin, 89n133 Andersen, Martin, 131 Anderson, Barbara, 70

Anderson, Perry, 58, 158, 272–73, 280n79 Andropov, Yuri, 47 Angelus Novus (Klee), xiv Animal Farm (Orwell), 16–18 anti-communism: Bolshevism as satanic, xii; Hitler and, 65; Stalinism as satanic, xii anti-fascist movements: Benjamin and, 125–26; Brecht in, 130–31 anti-humanism, 166–67, 198n193 anti-Jacobinism: Arendt on, 40–41; Counter-Enlightenment Project and, 39–43; totalitarianism and, 39–43 anti-Semitism, 309–10; Dreyfus Affair, 40; far-right, 8; Horkheimer on, 189n13; racial, 8; of Solzhenitsyn, 6–8; in Soviet Union, 189n13; spiritual, 8; Thermidor concept and, 226; totalitarianism and, 30 anti-Stalinist movements: Trotsky and, 122; Ukrainian Resurgent Army, 9n18; Vlassov movement, 9n18 anti-totalitarian movements, 58 Aragon, Louis, 173, 251–52 Arendt, Hannah, 242n45; on antiJacobinism, 40–41; on Nazism, 31; Origins of Totalitarianism, 30–32,

339

340

Index

40; On Revolution, 40; on Stalinism, 31; on totalitarianism, 30–32, 86n101 Aristotle, 32 Aron, Raymond, 105, 174 Arrival and Departure (Koestler), 101 Audry, Colette, 172–73 Aulard, François Victor Alphonse, 228 “The Author as Producer” (Benjamin), 125 Babel, Isaac, 252 Babeuf, Gracchus, 42, 215, 226 Bakunin, Mikhail, xiii Barbusse, Henri, 252 Bartov, Omer, 67 Beauvoir, Simone de, 187; Koestler and, 102–3; on Moscow Trials, 172–73; Sartre and, 172–78, 181 Before Stalinism (Farber), 276n26 Behemoth (Neumann), 29 Being and Nothingness (Sartre), 181 Bell, Daniel, 277n38 Benjamin, Walter, xxiii, 100, 119, 274n6; Adorno and, 126; anti-fascist movements and, 125–26; “The Author as Producer,” 125; Bloch and, 124; Communist Party of Germany and, 124; critique of the Enlightenment, 127–28; Critique of Violence, 123–24; disillusion with Soviet Union, 124–27; Horkheimer and, 126–27; on Moscow Show Trials, xii; on mystical fatalism, xiv; One-Way Street, xi; The Origin of German Tragic Drama, xi–xii; Theses on the Philosophy of History, 127; Trotsky and, 124–26; on voluntarism, xiv; as Western Marxist, 123–28; “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 125 Berlin Uprising, 269 Berman, Matvei, 6 Bettelheim, Charles, 199n199 Big Brother concept, Stalinism and, 11–22; totalitarianism and, 16–22

Birchall, Ian, 245n75 Birth of Our Power (Serge), 251 The Black Book of Communism, 75–79; Counter-Enlightenment Project and, xxiii, 44, 60, 76–79; critiques of, 77–78 Black Hundreds, in Russia, 2, 8 black parliamentarism, 156, 197n156 Blair, Tony, 163 Blanqui, Louis-Auguste, 43 Bloch, Ernst, xxiii; Benjamin and, 124; on Bolshevik Revolution, 123; in German Academy of Sciences, 122; on Moscow Trials, 121; as political exile, 121; return to Germany, 122; on Trotsky, 122; as Western Marxist, 121–23 Blum Theses (Lukács), 145 Blyukher, Vasily, 296 Bolshevik Party: power struggles within, 33–34; Thermidor concept and, 217. See also Bukharin, Nikolai; Stalin, Josef; Trotsky, Leon Bolshevik Revolution, 37, 185; Bloch on, 123; as civil war, 63–64; French Revolution as influence on, 63–64; totalitarianism as result of, 53–54. See also Russian Revolution Bolsheviks: class genocide by, 73; in Darkness at Noon, 100; Kronstadt Mutiny/Uprising and, 216, 253–54; Luxemburg on, 213; New Economic Policy and, 33–34; Oppositional Bolsheviks, 70, 224; role in Russian Revolution, 33 The Bolsheviks (Ulam), 40 Bolshevism: anti-communist responses to, xii; evil foundations of, xiii; hegemonic theory of, 157; Jacobinism and, 40, 214–15; Judeo-Bolshevism, 2; proletarian Jacobinism and, 207–8; purges as feature of, 15; in Russia, xxi; as satanic, xii; Stalinism as evolution

Index

of, 35, 205; theory of elites and, 28; universalist, 4 “bolt from the blue” approach, to Stalinism: Big Brother concept, 11–22; Jews as “virus” in, 1–8; methodological approach to, xxiii– xxiv; totalitarianism and, 27–34 Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon (Napoleon III), xxii. See also The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte; Napoleon III Bonaparte, Napoleon, Second Empire under, xii Bonapartism, xxi, 197n166; Thermidor concept and, 231–32. See also The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Borchardt, Hermann, 191n58 Bordiga, Amadeo, 150–52. See also Italian Communist Party Borkenau, Franz, 16, 28, 105 bourgeois revolution, in Russia, 208–9 Brandler, Henirich, 269 Brecht, Bertolt, xxiii, 117–18, 124, 191n58, 254; in anti-fascist movements, 130–31; on Chinese Revolution, 137–38; critique of Nazi-Soviet Pact, 135–36; “The farmer’s address to his ox,” 135; in German Democratic Republic, 136; Great Terror and, 131; House Un-American Activities Commission and, 136; Korsch and, 128–29, 133–34; Life of Galileo, 133–34; MeTi, 129; on Moscow Trials, 131–33; “The Solution,” 137; on Stalin, 130; Stalinism and, 137–38; theater career of, 128–29; Threepenny Opera, 128; “To those born after,” 132–33; on Trotsky, 130, 134–35; as Western Marxist, 124, 128–38 Bredel, Willi, 131 Brentano, Bernard von, 135 Brezhnev, Leonid, 46, 193n94 Broué, Pierre, 240n1

341

Bruckner, Pascal, 58 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 31–32, 39 Buber-Neumann, Margarete, 48 Büchner, Georg, xiv, xxi Bukharin, Nikolai, 33, 36–37, 108, 246n108, 288–89; arrest of, 295; Stalin and, 95, 221; trial of, 134. See also Moscow Show Trials Bulletin of the Opposition (Trotsky), 263, 292 Buonarroti, Philippe, 42–43 bureaucratic collectivism, 24n42 Burke, Edmund, 43 Burnham, James, 18–20, 24n42, 105, 182, 249–50, 259–60, 276n31 Bush, George W., 69 Cachin, Marcel, 214 Callinicos, Alexander, 266 Camus, Albert, 113n13; Koestler and, 102–4; The Rebel, 104, 114n31 The Cancer Ward (Solzhenitsyn), 46 Cannon, James P., 272 Capital (Marx), 94, 128 capitalism, 1; communism and, 111 Carmichael, Stokely, 187 Carr, Edward Hallett, 34–35 The Case of Comrade Tulayev (Serge), 258–59, 288 Castro, Fidel, 78, 187 Caute, David, 169 CCF. See Congress for Cultural Freedom Ceauşescu, Nicolae, 78 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 30, 104–5 Chamberlain, Neville, 299 Chamberlin, William, 214 Chambers, Whitaker, 73–74 Chinese Revolution, 137–38; Althusser on, 167–68; Losurdo on, 308n2 Churchill, Winston, xxiii, 80n18, 286; on Moscow Show Trials, 4; Mussolini and, 4; on Nazi Germany, 28–29; on Russian Civil War, 2–3;

342

Index

on subversive Jews, 2–5, 8n4; on totalitarianism, 28–29 CIA. See Central Intelligence Agency Ciliga, Ante, 48 Clemenceau, Georges, 225 Cliff, Tony, 9n18 Cobban, Alfred, 55–56 Cochin, Augustin, 58 Cohen, Stephen, 29–30, 34, 36–37, 289 Cold War: The Black Book of Communism, xxiii; CounterEnlightenment Project, xxiii, 249, 268 collectivism: bureaucratic, 24n42; Stalin campaigns, 70; Trotsky on, 221–22 Collinet, Michel, 172 colonialism, 78, 183 COMINTERN. See Communist International communism: The Black Book of Communism, xxiii, 44, 60, 75–79; capitalism and, 111; emancipatory potential of, xxi; fascism and, 88n117; Marx on, 49; Orwell’s critique of, 13, 22; Solzhenitsyn as critic of, 48–49; totalitarianism and, 32–33; U.S. Central Intelligence Agency fight against, 30. See also specific countries Communist Age of Reason, 210 Communist International (COMINTERN): founding of, 215; Italian Communist Party and, 150; Koestler and, 97; Losurdo and, 297–298; Lukács denounced by, 143; promotion of revolutions, 222; Serge and, 250 Communist Party of Germany (KPD), 95, 124, 159 Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), 159, 163 Communist Party of Poland (KPP), 262, 291 Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU): Gramsci and, 152–53;

purges from, 227–28, 245n82; Third Period, 232, 262; Trotsky expulsion from, 227; Twenty-Second Congress, 46; Zinoviev expulsion from, 227. See also Communist International; specific communist parties The Communists and the Peace (Sartre), 178–80 The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, 307 The Condition of the Working Class in England (Engels), 11 Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), 105 Conquered City (Serge), 251 Conquest, Robert, xxiii, 7, 287; The Great Terror, 69; Harvest of Sorrow, 68–70; historical legacy of, 71–72; Orwell and, 69 Conrad, Joseph, 264 Conspiracy of Equals, 42, 226 Cornford, John, 160 Corrigan, Philip, 200n201 cosmopolitanism, 308 Counter-Enlightenment Project: antiJacobinism and, 39–43; The Black Book of Communism and, xxiii, 44, 60, 76–79; Cold War and, xxiii, 249, 268; Solzhenitsyn and, 52; Soviet Union as “Evil Empire” and, 68; totalitarianism and, 27–34 Courtois, Stéphane, 76–77 CPGB. See Communist Party of Great Britain CPSU. See Communist Party of the Soviet Union Critique of Dialectical Reason (Sartre), 172, 184 Critique of Violence (Benjamin), 123–24 Cuban Revolution, 187 Cultural Revolution, in Soviet Union, 37–38 The Daily Worker, 161–62 Daniel, Yuli, 48

Index

Danton, Georges, 206, 209 Danton’s Death (Büchner), xiv, xxi Darkness at Noon (Koestler), xxiii, 97, 100–104, 107, 112; Bolshevik references in, 100 Davidson, Neil, 266 Davies, Joseph, 292 Davies, R. W., 70–71 Davis, Mike, 78 Day, Richard, 243n61 Deng Xiaoping, 308n2 Les Derniers temps (Malraux), 261 Desanti, Dominique, 174 Desanti, Jean-Toussaint, 174 despotism, xxi de-Stalinization campaigns: under Khrushchev, 268–71; Marcuse on, 140 Destiny of a Revolution (Serge), 253 The Destruction of Reason (Lukács), 146, 189n16 Deutscher, Isaac, xxiv, 34, 105, 140, 145, 187, 279n74; in Communist Party of Poland, 262; defense of Stalinism, 265; Gomułka and, 269–70; Hobsbawm and, 162; as journalist, 264; on Maoism, 270–71; as Marxist historian, 262–73; The Moscow Trial, 263; The Prophet Armed, 267; The Prophet Outcast, 267; The Prophet Unarmed, 267; on Secret Speech, 284; Stalin, 264–65; on Stalin as military leader, 303; on Tukhachevsky Affair, 292; The Unfinished Revolution, 271 Dewey, John, 105, 257 Dialectical and Historical Materialism (Stalin), 160 The Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer), 120, 189n16 Dialectic of Saturn: as concept, xi–xii, xv, 281–82; Greene on, xv; historical necessity approach and, 101, 112; Losurdo and, 283–84; scope of,

343

283–84; totalitarianism and, 41, 43; value judgments on, 273 Dialogue with Death (Koestler), 102 dictatorships, 31 Dimitrov, George, 304 Dirty Hands (Sartre), 181–82 Djilas, Milovan, 306–7 Doctor’s Plot, 308 Dommanget, Maurice, 55 Donovan, Bill, 104 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 73–74 Dreyfus, Alfred, 253 Dreyfus Affair, 40 Dubček, Alexander, 149 Duclos, Jacques, 178 Duke, David, 8 Durtain, Luc, 251 Dzerzhinsky, Feliks, 210 Eastman, Max, 257 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Marx), 138, 143 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 252, 306 Eichmann, Adolf, 66 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Marx), xii–xiii, xxii Eisler, Hanns, 119, 130 electoralism, 112 elites, theory of, Bolshevism and, 28 Engels, Friedrich, xiii; The Condition of the Working Class in England, 11; on French Revolution, 205–6 England, Independent Labour Party, 12 the Enlightenment: Benjamin as critic of, 127–28; philosophes, 43, 58; rationalism during, xxiii, 67–68. See also Counter-Enlightenment Project Enragés group, 228 Ericson, Edward, 301 Essays on Self-Criticism (Althusser), 168 Everyday Stalinism (Fitzpatrick), 38 existentialism, Sartre and, 174–75, 186 Existentialism versus Marxism (Novack), 95

344

Index

Experiments in Economic Planning in the Soviet Union (Pollock), 118 Fainsod, Merle, 34, 80n22 famines: death tolls from, 78; in Ukraine, 70–71, 78 Fanon, Frantz, 186–87 Farber, Samuel, 276n26 “The farmer’s address to his ox” (Brecht), 135 Farrell, James, 257 far-right anti-Semitism, 8 fascism: Adorno on, 120; communism and, 88n117. See also antifascist movements Fast, Howard, 113n18 Fastenko, Anatoly Ilyich, 45 fatalism, Benjamin on, xiv Feuchtwanger, Lion, 131–32 Finkelraut, Alain, 58 The First Circle (Solzhenitsyn), 47 First Congress of Soviets, 209 Fischer, Ernst, 281 Fischer, Louis, 104 Fischer, Ruth, 288 Fitzpatrick, Sheila, 34, 37–38 Five-Year Plans, 168, 229–30, 235; after Russian Revolution, 37 Fluss, Harrison, 194n107 For Marx (Althusser), 164–65, 198n190 Foundations of Leninism (Stalin), 246n108 France: Action Française, 61–62; Bonapartism in, xxi; Jacobinism in, xxi; Paris Commune of 1871, 1; Second Empire, xii; social revolutions in, 1, 187. See also French Communist Party; French Revolution; specific emperors; specific kings Franco, Francisco, 51 Frankfurt School, 29, 52, 65; Adorno and, 117–20; Althusser and, 164–71; Gramsci and, 150–59; Hobsbawm and, 159–64; Horkheimer and,

117–20; Institute for Social Research and, 118; Lukács and, 142–50; Marcuse and, 138–42; Western Marxism and, 117 French Communist Party (PCF), 55; Althusser and, 164–71; founding of, 214; Losurdo on, 298; MerleauPonty and, 106; during Paris protests in 1968, 57; Sartre and, 172, 175–76, 178–79; student wing of, 167 French Revolution: Bolshevik Revolution influenced by, 63–64; as bourgeois revolution, 57; despotism at end of, xxi; Engels on, 205–6; Furet on, 55–57; historical legacy of, 1; Hobsbawm on, 1; Machiavelli and, 242n45; mobilization of oppressed during, 1; nouveaux philosophes, 57–59; Robespierre and, xiii; Russian Revolution modeled on, 215–16, 231 Frenkel, Naftaly, 6 Friedländer, Saul, 67 Friedrich, Carl, 31–32, 39 From Lenin to Stalin (Serge), 252 Furet, François, 85n89; in antitotalitarian movement, 58; The Black Book of Communism, 60; French Communist Party, 55; on French Revolution, 55–57; The Passing of an Illusion, 59 Furr, Grover, 285–86, 309n5, 311n30 Gagarin, Yuri, 61–62 Garaudy, Roger, 106, 169; on historical necessity approach to Stalinism, 93–95; on Marxism, 93–95 Gaullism, 261 GDR. See German Democratic Republic genocide: by Bolsheviks, 73; Hitler and, 66; in Nazi Germany, 64 Gentile, Giovanni, 27–28 George V (King), 294 George VI (King), 294 Gerassi, Fernando, 173, 176

Index

German Democratic Republic (GDR), 136 German Marxism & Russian Communism (Plamenatz), 40 German October, 219 Germany: Communist Party of Germany, 95, 124, 159; de-Nazification process in, 139; National Socialist Party, 5, 61–68; Non-Aggression Pact, 296; Social Democratic Party in, 138. See also German Democratic Republic; Nazi Germany Getty, J. Arch, 34, 38–39, 47 The Ghost of Stalin (Sartre), 182–83 Gide, André, 104, 252 Ginzburg, Evgenia, 48 The Gladiators (Koestler), 97–100, 113n13 Glantz, David, 303–4 Glucksmann, Andrè, 58 The God that Failed, 104–5 Goebbels, Joseph, 288, 296 Gold, Mike, 252 Goldman, Wendy, 39 Gollan, John, 161 Gollancz, Victor, 11, 20 Gomułka, Władysław, 52, 123, 269–70 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 37, 163 Gorky, Maxim, 252 Gramsci, Antonio, xxiii, 117, 163; on Bolshevization of communism, 151; CPSU and, 152–53; Frankfurt School and, 150–59; Italian Communist Party and, 150–54; permanent revolution theory, 158; The Prison Notebooks, 150, 155, 157–59, 215; Serge and, 250; Togliatti and, 151–55; on totalitarianism and, 155; Trotsky and, 150–53, 159; as Western Marxist, 150–59 Great Depression, 125 Great Purge, 291–97 Great Terror, 131, 286–91 The Great Terror (Conquest), 69

345

Greene, Doug, xii, xv Grigor, Ronald, 39 Grossman, Henryk, 118, 189n23 Grossman, Vasily, 305, 307 Guerin, Daniel, 115n58 Guevara, Che, 187 The Gulag Archipelago (Solzhenitsyn), 6, 44, 47, 50–51, 57–58, 83n74 Habermas, Jürgen, 65 Halliday, Fred, 272–73, 280n79 Hardy, Daphne, 100 Harvest of Sorrow (Conquest), 68–70 Hayek, Friedrich, 32–33, 80nn17–18 HCP. See Hungarian Communist Party Hébertistes group, 228 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, xi, 95; The Phenomenology of Spirit, xv; Thermidor realism of, 143–44 Heidegger, Martin, 60–61, 140 Herzen, Alexander, 205 Hess, Rudolf, 23n20 Heydrich, Reinhard, 136 Hilferding, Rudolf, 28 Hilgruber, Andreas, 65, 67 Hill, Christopher, 161 Hiss, Alger, 74 historical materialism: Marxism and, 94; methodological approach to, xxiii– xxiv; Trotsky and, xv historical necessity approach, to Stalinism, xxiii–xxiv, 267–68; conceptual development of, 93–95; Dialectic of Saturn and, 101, 112; Garaudy and, 93–95; Koestler and, 101, 112; Lukács on, 146–47; Merleau-Ponty on, 111; Sartre and, 93–95 historical realism, Marx on, xiv historicism, German, critiques of, xiv History and Class Consciousness (Lukács), 124, 143 A History of Babeuf’s Conspiracy for Equality (Buonarroti), 42–43 History of Soviet Russia (Carr), 35

346

Index

History of the Russian Revolution (Trotsky), 126 Hitler, Adolf, xxiii; as anticommunist, 65; genocide under, 66; on Jews as moral threat, 62; on Jews as supporters of communism, 5; on Judeo-Bolshevism, 5, 68; on Marxism, 5; Mein Kampf, 295; National Socialists and, 5; Nolte on, 62, 65; Operation Barbarossa, 5, 68, 136, 301–2; Tukhachevsky Affair and, 292. See also National Socialist Party; Nazi Germany Hobsbawm, Eric, xxiii, 117, 197n171; academic career, 161; in Communist Party of Germany, 159; in Communist Party of Great Britain, 159, 163; Deutscher and, 162; Frankfurt School and, 159–64; on French Revolution, 1; Italian Communist Party and, 162–63; on verdicts of Moscow Trials, 160; as Western Marxist, 159–64 Ho Chi Minh, 78, 260–61 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 144 “Hölderlin’s Hyperion” (Lukács), 144 Holy Alliance of Metternich, 1 Homage to Catalonia (Orwell), 14 Hook, Sidney, 105, 132, 259 Horkheimer, Max, xxiii, 117–20; on anti-Semitism in Soviet Union, 189n13; Benjamin and, 126–27; The Dialectic of Enlightenment, 120, 189n16; Marcuse and, 138–39, 141–42; on Stalinism, 119 Horowitz, David, 48, 82n52, 84n76, 273 House Un-American Activities Commission, in U.S., 136 How Russia is Ruled (Fainsod), 34, 80n22 Hoxha, Enver, 78 Hugo, Victor, xii–xiii; on Napoleon III, xxii Humanism and Terror (Merleau-Ponty), 106–7, 109, 112

Humbert-Droz, Jules, 154, 288 Hundred Flowers campaign, 271 Hungarian Communist Party (HCP), 142, 145, 291 Hungary, 195n122, 291; communist revolution in, 148–49, 182; Lukács in, 146–47; withdrawal from Warsaw Pact, 123, 148 Huxley, Aldous, 252 Hyppolite, Jean, 192n87 I Choose Freedom (Kravchenko), 48, 176 Ignatieff, Michael, 163–64 Illuminati, 3 Ilyich, Vladimir, 196n136 imperialism, totalitarianism and, 30 “The Impotence of the German Working Class” (Horkheimer), 118 Independent Labour Party (England), 12 Industrial Revolution, 1 Inside the Whale (Orwell), 23n22 Institute for Social Research, 118 International Congress of Writers for the Defense, 252 internationalism, 306 International Relief and Rescue Committee (IRRC), 19–20 Irving, David, 65 Italian Communist Party (PCI), 150–54; Bolshevization of, 151; Communist International and, 150; Hobsbawm and, 162–63 Italy, fascism in, 61 Jackson, Henry “Scoop,” 72 Jacobinism, xxi; Bolshevism and, 40, 214–15; German Social-Democracy and, 240n12; Jacobin Constitution of 1793, 40; proletarian, 205–16; Rousseau and, 41–42; Russian Revolution and, 55. See also anti-Jacobinism Jambet, Christian, 58 James, C. L. R., 183

Index

Jánossy, Ferene, 145 Jaspers, Karl, 105 Jay, Martin, 120 Jewish people: Churchill on, 2–5, 8n4; Hitler on, 5; Judeo-Bolshevism, 2; as moral threat, 62; “non-subversive,” 3; Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 2; racial genocide of, 64; role in Russian Revolution, 5; “subversive,” 2–5, 8n4; Trotsky on, 3–4; in Tsarist Russia, 2; as “virus,” 1–8. See also anti-Semitism “The Jews and Europe” (Horkheimer), 119 Joffe, Adolf, 227 Journey in the Whirlwind (Ginzburg), 48 Jubilee for Renegades (Bloch), 121–22 Judeo-Bolshevism, 2; Hitler and, 5, 68 Kamenev, Lev, 290 Kanapa, Jean, 174 Karl Marx (Carr), 34–35 Kautsky, Karl, 211, 213 Kerensky, Alexander, 210 Kerenskyism, 210 Kershaw, Ian, 65–66, 86n105 Khlevniuk, Oleg, 287–88 Khrushchev, Nikita, 193n94; de-Stalinization campaign under, 268–71; Secret Speech, 122–23, 137, 148, 165, 247n118 Khrushchev Lied (Furr), 285 Kiernan, Victor, 161 Kinnock, Neil, 163 Kirov, Sergei, 287–88 Klee, Paul, xiv Koestler, Arthur, 95–106; Arrival and Departure, 101; Beauvoir and, 102–3; Camus and, 102–4; CIA and, 104–5; Communist International and, 97; in Communist Party of Germany, 95, 97; Darkness at Noon, xxiii, 97, 100–104, 107, 112; Dialogue with Death, 102; The Gladiators, 97–100,

347

113n13; Hess and, 23n20; historical necessity approach and, 101, 112; imprisonment of, 96; International Relief and Rescue Committee and, 19–20; Orwell and, 17, 19–20, 100; rejection of Stalinism, 105; resignation from Communist Party of Germany, 97; in Soviet Union, 96; The Spanish Testament, 97, 102; The Yogi and the Commissar, 101–2 Kogan, Lazar, 6 Kołakowski, Leszek, 52–55, 84n81; Main Currents of Marxism, 52, 54, 84n76; on Marx, 52–53 Koltsov, Mikhail, 252 Korean War, 110 Kornfeld, Boris Nikolayevich, 45 Kornilov, Lavr, 210 Korsch, Karl, 128–29, 133–34, 143 Kostrzewa, Wera, 263 Kotkin, Stephen, 71, 75–76 Kouchner, Bernard, 58 KPD. See Communist Party of Germany KPP. See Communist Party of Poland Kravchenko, Victor, 48, 176 el-Krim, Abd, 172 Kronstadt Mutiny/Uprising, 216, 253– 54, 275n15 Kubrick, Stanley, 113n18 Kun, Béla, 145, 291 Lācis, Asja, 131 Lang, Fritz, 136 Larina, Anna, 295 Late Victorian Holocausts (Davis), 78 Lazare, Daniel, 91n166 Lecourt, Dominique, 167, 169 Lefebvre, Henri, 173–75 Lefort, Claude, 174 Left Book Club, 14 leftist concepts, in Nineteen EightyFour, 24n49 Left Opposition, 224, 268; Enragés, 228; Hébertistes, 228; Maoism and, 271; Stalinism and, xv

348

Index

Leiris, Michel, 174 Lenin, Vladimir, 78; on Bolshevism, 207–08; cultural revolution advocated by, 217–18; Luxemburg on, 207; Mensheviks as opposition to, 40; on proletarian Jacobinism, 217–18, 240n12; What is to be Done, 33 Leningrad Opposition, 225 Lenin in Zürich (Solzhenitsyn), 6 Leninism: purges as feature of, 15; Stalinism and, 36 Leninism (Meyer, A.), 40, 80n19 Lenin’s Last Struggle (Lewin), 36 Leonetti, Alfonso, 154 Lèvy, Bernard-Henri, 58 Lewin, Moshe, 34, 36, 70 Liberation Army, in Russia, 6 Liebknecht, Karl, 138 The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky (Sedov, N., and Serge), 257 Life and Fate (Grossman, V.), 305 Life of Galileo (Brecht), 133–34 Linhart, Robert, 167 “The Lion and the Unicorn” (Orwell), 16 Literature and Revolution (Trotsky), 151 Literature of the Graveyard (Garaudy), 106 Litvinov, Maxim, 294–95 Losurdo, Domenico, xxiii, 67–68, 71, 78, 87n111, 89n129, 283–308; on Chinese Revolution, 308n2; Communist International and, 297– 298; Dialectic of Saturn and, 283–84; on French Communist Party, 298; Furr and, 285–86, 309n5; on Great Purge, 291–97; on Great Terror, 286–91; on Moscow Trials, 286–87; on Nazi-Soviet Pact, 298–302; on Secret Speech, 284–86; Stalin, 283; on Tukhachevsky Affair, 291–97 Louis XI (King), 59 Louis XIV (King), 59 Louis XVI (King), xxii, 56

Lovestone, Jay, xxi Lukács, Georg, xxiii, 117; Blum Theses, 145; Communist International denouncement of, 143; The Destruction of Reason, 146, 189n16; on historical necessity of Stalinism, 146–47; History and Class Consciousness, 124, 143; “Hölderlin’s Hyperion,” 144; in Hungarian Communist Party, 142, 145; “Moses Hess and the Problem of Idealist Dialectics,” 143; in new Hungary, 146–47; Prague Spring as influence on, 149; On the Process of Democratization, 149–50; Russian Revolution and, 142; on Secret Speech, 284; Serge and, 250; Tailism and the Dialectic, 143; as Thermidorian, 142, 144; as Western Marxist, 142–50; The Young Hegel, 145–46 Luxemburg, Rosa, xv–xvi, 97, 195n122; on Bolsheviks, 212–14; on Lenin, 207; murder of, 138; The Russian Revolution, 212–13; Stalin compared to, 147–48 Macciocchi, Maria Antoinetta, 165 MacDonald, Dwight, 17, 24n42, 253– 54, 257, 260 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 242n45 The Machiavellians (Burnham), 18 The Magnetic Mountain (Kotkin), 75 Main Currents of Marxism (Kołakowski), 52, 54, 84n76 Maisky, Ivan, 302 Maistre, Joseph de, 1 Malaparte, Curzio, 288 Malia, Martin, xxiii, 74–75 Mallet du Pan, Jacques, xiv Malraux, André, 103, 252, 261 managerial revolution, 276n31 The Managerial Revolution (Burnham), 18–20, 24n42 Mandel, Ernest, 179–80, 219–20

Index

Maoism, 48–50; Althusser and, 169, 171, 199n199; Left Opposition and, 271; Sartre on, 201n285 Mao Zedong, 78, 260; Hundred Flowers campaign, 271 Marat, Jean-Paul, 206, 209 Marcuse, Herbert, xxiii; on de-Stalinization of Soviet Union, 140; exile in U.S., 138–39; Horkheimer and, 138–39, 141–42; integration of working class into bourgeois society, 141–42; New Left movement inspired by, 141–42; Office for Strategic Services and, 139; The One-Dimensional Man, 139, 141; Reason and Revolution, 139, 192n87; in Social Democratic Party, 138; Soviet Marxism, 140; as Western Marxist, 138–42 Marcy, Sam, 272 Maretskii, Dmitrii, 225 Margolin, Jean-Louis, 78 Marrot, Raymond, 174 Martin, Henri, 178 Martinet, Marcel, 251, 255 Martov, Julius, 206, 212 Marx, Karl, xvi, 43; Capital, 94, 128; on communism, 49; Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 138, 143; The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, xii–xiii, xxii; on historical realism, xiv; Kołakowski on, 52–53; universalist doctrines of, 83n74; Weitling and, xiii Marxism: demonology and, xiii; Deutscher as historian, 262–73; Garaudy on, 93–95; Hitler on, 5; as materialist philosophy, 94; MerleauPonty on, 106–7; Serge’s rejection of, 256; in Spain, 13. See also Western Marxism Marxism and Philosophy (Korsch), 128, 143 mass politics, totalitarianism and, 30 materialism. See historical materialism

349

Mathiez, Albert, 55, 214 Maurras, Charles, 62 Mayer, Arno, 67–68, 87n111 Mazauric, Claude, 55–57 McMeekin, Sean, 89n130 Medvedev, Zhores, 48 Mein Kampf (Hitler), 293 Men in Prison (Serge), 251 Mensheviks, 208–10, 212, 263; as opponents of Lenin, 40 Menshevism, 226; Trotsky and, 207 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, xxiii, 95, 134, 174; Adventures of the Dialectic, 110–11; on Dialectic of Saturn, 109–11; electoralism and, 112; French Communist Party and, 106; on historical necessity approach, 111–12; Humanism and Terror, 106–7, 109, 112; liberalism of, 112; on Marxism, 106–7; on Moscow Trials, 108–9; Sartre and, 176–77; on Stalinism, 109; Trotsky and, 109, 115n51; Western Marxism and, 117 Mesnil, Jacques, 251 Mészáros, István, 186 Me-Ti (Brecht), 129 Meyer, Alfred, 40, 80n19 Meyer, Heinrich, 131 Midnight in the Century (Serge), 251, 274n6 von Mises, Ludwig, 88n117 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 97, 300 morality, 255 Morton, A. L., 161 Moscow 1937 (Feuchtwanger), 131–32 Moscow Show Trials (Moscow Trials), 40–41; Adorno on, 119; Beauvoir on, 172–73; Benjamin on, xii; Bloch during, 121; Brecht on, 131–33; Bukharin and, 134; Churchill on, 4; Hobsbawm on, 160; Losurdo on, 286–87; Merleau-Ponty on, 108–9; Partido Obero de Unificación Marxista and, 13–15; Sartre on, 172–73

350

Index

The Moscow Trial (Deutscher), 263 Moscow Trials. See Moscow Show Trials “Moses Hess and the Problem of Idealist Dialectics” (Lukács), 143 Munich Agreement, 298–299 Münzenberg, Willi, 96 The Murder of Sergei Kirov (Furr), 285 Mussolini, Benito, 290–91; Churchill on, 4; totalitarianism and, 27–28 “My Country Right or Left” (Orwell), 16 My Life (Trotsky), 126, 158 The Myth of the French Revolution (Cobban), 55 Nagy, Imre, 148 Napoleon III (Emperor): Hugo on, xxii; Stalin compared to, 233–34 nationalism: internationalism as replacement of, 306; in Soviet Union, 304–08; utopianism and, 304–5 National Socialist Party, in Germany, 5, 61–68; race doctrine of, 62 Nazi Germany: dictatorships in, 31; Nazi-Soviet Pact, 29, 119, 127, 298–302; Non-Aggression Pact with Soviet Union, 296, 299–302 Operation Barbarossa, 5, 68, 136, 301–2; racial genocide in, 64; totalitarianism in, 28–30, 34–36; as totalitarian state, 28–29. See also Third Reich Nazism, 28–29; Arendt on, 31 Nazi-Soviet Pact, 29, 119, 127; Brecht critique of, 135–36; Losurdo on, 298–302; Sartre critique of, 173 necessity. See historical necessity Neher, Carola, 131 NEP. See New Economic Policy Neumann, Franz, 29 New Economic Policy (NEP), 33–34, 156, 216–17 The New Economics (Preobrazhensky), 222

New Left movement, Marcuse as inspiration for, 141–42 New Left Review, 272–73 Newsinger, John, 22, 24n29, 24n49 Nicholas II (Tsar), xxii Nietzsche, Friedrich, xiv, 62, 87n111 Nikolaev, Leonid, 287 Nin, Andrés, 215 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell), 12, 14, 19–22; leftist themes in, 24n49; literary influences on, 20; socialism themes in, 21; totalitarian themes in, 19, 21 Nisbet, Robert, 29 Nizan, Paul, 172–74, 252 Nolte, Ernst, xxiii, 60–68, 87n111, 88n117; Heidegger and, 60–61; on Hitler, 62, 65; Three Faces of Fascism, 61–63, 86n105 Non-Aggression Pact, 296, 299–302 “non-subversive” Jews, 3 Noske, Guslav, 214 nouveaux philosophes, 57–59 Le Nouvel Observateur, 58 Novack, George, 95 Novy Mir, 46 Nyers, Rezsö, 149 October Revolution, 33, 99; Pipes on, 72; Stalinism and, xii Office for Strategic Services (OSS), 139 The Old Regime and the French Revolution (Tocqueville), 59 Olivier, Albert, 174 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Solzhenitsyn), 46 The One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse), 139, 141 One-Way Street (Benjamin), xi On Revolution (Arendt), 40 On the Process of Democratization (Lukács), 149–50 The Open Society and Its Enemies (Popper), 32 Operation Barbarossa, 5, 68, 136, 301–2

Index

Oppositional Bolsheviks, 70, 224 oppositional Marxism: Serge and, 28; Souvarine and, 28; Trotsky and, 28 The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Benjamin), xi–xii Origins of the Great Purges (Getty), 38 The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (Talmon), 40 Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt), 30–32, 40 Origins on the Doctrine of Fascism (Gentile), 28 Orwell, George, xxiii; Animal Farm, 16–18; antiwar position of, 16; Burnham and, 18–19; on communism, 13, 22; Conquest and, 69; criticism of Partido Obero de Unificación Marxista, 15; Hess and, 23n20; Homage to Catalonia, 14; in Independent Labour Party, 12; Inside the Whale, 23n22; Koestler and, 17, 19–20, 100; “The Lion and the Unicorn,” 16; “My Country Right or Left,” 16; naming of suspected communists, 20; Newsinger on, 22, 24n29, 24n49; Nineteen Eighty-Four, 12, 14, 19–22, 24n49; on Republicanism in Spain, 13; The Road to Wigan Pier, 11, 13–15; romanticism of, 12; on Stalinism, 11–22; on totalitarianism, 16–22; on Trotsky, 23n20. See also Big Brother concept Orwell’s Politics (Newsinger), 24n29 OSS. See Office for Strategic Services Our Political Tasks (Trotsky), 207 Pablo, Michel, 271–72 Paget, Mamaine, 103 Palmer, Bryan, 198n183 Panin, Dmitri, 45 Papon, Maurice, 77 Pareto, Vilfredo, 28 Paris Communes (of 1793–1794, of 1871), 212

351

Parker, Stephen, 130 Partido Obero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), 13–15, 97; Orwell criticism of, 15; Serge support of, 253 Partisan Review, 259–60 Parvus, Alexander, 6 The Passing of an Illusion (Furet), 59 Pasternak, Boris, 252 Patri, Aimè, 172 patriotism, in Soviet Union, 304–8 Paulhan, Jean, 174 Paz, Magdeleine, 251 PCE. See Spanish Communist Party PCF. See French Communist Party PCI. See Italian Communist Party Pearce, Brian, 161 People’s Democracies, 269–70 permanent revolution theory, 158 The Persistence of the Old Regime (Mayer), 87n111 Peterson, Jordan, 83n74 The Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), xv Pipes, Richard, xxiii, 7, 72–74; on October Revolution, 72 Plamenatz, John, 40 Plato, 32 Plekhanov, Georgi, 206–7 Poland, 123; Communist Party of Poland, 262, 291 Polish October of 1956, 52 Political Messianism (Talmon), 82n52 Pollock, Friedrich, 118 Pol Pot, 78 Popper, Karl, 32 The Possessed (Dostoevsky), 74 POUM. See Partido Obero de Unificación Marxista Prague Spring, 149, 163, 169, 187 Preobrazhensky, Evgeny, 222, 262 The Prison Notebooks (Gramsci), 150, 155, 157–59, 215 proletarian Jacobinism, 205–18; Bolshevism and, 207–8; Communist International and, 215; Lenin

352

Index

on, 217–18, 240n12; Luxemburg and, 212–14; Mensheviks and, 208–10, 212; Stalin and, 236–37; Trotsky and, 210 Proletarian Science? The Case of Lysenko (Lecourt), 169 The Prophet Armed (Deutscher), 267 The Prophet Outcast (Deutscher), 267 The Prophet Unarmed (Deutscher), 267 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 2 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, xii–xiii Rabinowitch, Alexander, 39 racial anti-Semitism, 8 Radek, Karl, 95, 262, 294 Radical Enlightenment, 41, 43 radicalism, xxi Rakovsky, Christian, 228–29, 245n75, 262 Ramsay, Harvie, 200n201 Rancière, Jacques, 167, 170 Rappoport, Yakov, 6 rationalism, during the Enlightenment, xxiii Ravazzoli, Paolo, 154 Reagan, Ronald, 68 realism, of Stalin, 157–58, 219–20, 300. See also historical realism Reason and Revolution (Marcuse), 139, 192n87 The Rebel (Camus), 104, 114n31 Red Army, 44, 67, 177–78, 211–13, 224, 260, 269 Red Star, 306–7 Red Terror, 211 Republicanism, in Spain, 13 Révai, József, 147 revolutionary romanticism, 147 The Revolution Betrayed (Trotsky), xv, xxiii–xxiv, 28, 79n3, 229, 234–35, 237–38 Richet, Denis, 55 Ridgway, Matthew, 178 Ridgway Riots, 178 Rigaudias, Louis, 174

Rights of Man, 43 The Road to Serfdom (Hayek), 32– 33, 80nn17–18 The Road to Wigan Pier (Orwell), 11, 13–15 Robert, Jan, 122–23 Roberts, Geoffrey, 300, 303 Robespierre, Maximilien, xiii, 41–42, 59. See also Jacobinism Rogovin, Vadim, 289, 291 Rolland, Romain, 252 Rosenberg, William G., 39 Rosmer, Alfred, 223–24 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: as intellectual source of totalitarianism, 29; Jacobinism and, 41–42; Social Contract, 41 Rousset, David, 174, 176–77 Rudas, László, 147 Russell, Bertrand, 187 Russell Tribunal, 187 Russia: Black Hundreds in, 2, 8; Bolshevism in, xxi; bourgeois revolution in, 208–9; Jewish contagion fears in, 2; Liberation Army in, 6; October Revolution, xii, 33, 72, 99; Stalinism in, xxi; totalitarianism in, 30, 34, 36; White Armies in, 6. See also Bolshevism; communism; Stalinism Russian Civil War, 2–3 Russian Revolution, 185; Bolshevik’s role in, 33; chauvinism of, 217; despotism at end of, xxi; Five-Year Plans after, 37; French Revolution as model for, 215–16, 231; Jacobinism and, 55; Jewish role in, 5; Lukács and, 142; Sartre as skeptic of, 172; Serge on, 250. See also Bolsheviks; Bolshevism The Russian Revolution (Luxemburg), 212–13 The Russian Revolution (Pipes), 72

Index

Saccarelli, Emanuele, 158–59, 197n156, 197n166 Sakharov, Andrei, 48 salus populi suprema lex, 206 Salvemini, Gaëtano, 252 Samuel, Raphael, 161 Sartre, Jean-Paul, xxiii, 115n58; Beauvoir and, 172–78, 181; Being and Nothingness, 181; on colonialism, 183; The Communists and the Peace, 178–80; Congress of Cultural Freedom and, 105; critique of Algerian War, 183, 186; Critique of Dialectical Reason, 172, 184; Dirty Hands, 181–82; existentialism and, 174–75, 186; in French Army, 174; French Communist Party and, 172, 175–76, 179–80; The Ghost of Stalin, 182–83; on Maoism, 203n285; Merleau-Ponty and, 176–77; on Moscow Trials, 172–73; on Nazi-Soviet Pact, 173; on proletariat class, 179; rejection of Marxism, 187–88; The Search for a Method, 183–84; skepticism of Russian Revolution, 172; on Stalin, 172, 184–86; support of Third World revolutions, 187; Le Temps Modernes, 174–75; on Vietnam War, 187; The Wall, 102; Western Marxism and, 171–88; What is Literature?, 180 Sayer, Derek, 200n201 Shachtman, Max, 249–50, 263, 266– 67, 278n55 Schapiro, Leonard, 40, 80n19 Schapiro, Meyer, 257 Scholem, Gershom, xiv scissor crisis, 220 The Search for a Method (Sartre), 183–84 Second Empire, under Bonaparte, xii Secret Speech, of Khrushchev, 122–23, 137, 148, 165, 247n118; critiques of, 285; Losurdo on, 284–86

353

SED. See Socialist Unity Party Sedgewick, Peter, 261 Sedov, Lev, 252, 275n23 Sedov, Natalia, 252 Serge, Victor, xxiv, 47–48, 174, 196n136, 226, 240n12, 249–62; arrest of, 250–51; in Belgium, 252– 53; Birth of Our Power, 251; The Case of Comrade Tulayev, 258–59, 288; Conquered City, 251; Destiny of a Revolution, 253; Gaullism and, 261; Gramsci and, 250; International Congress of Writers for the Defense, 252; From Lenin to Stalin, 252; The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky, 257; Lukács and, 250; Men in Prison, 251; Midnight in the Century, 251, 274n6; as oppositional Marxist, 28; Partido Obero de Unificación Marxista and, 253; political exile of, 257–58; rejection of Marxism, 256; support for Russian Revolution, 250; Their Morals and Ours, 254–56; Year One of the Russian Revolution, 251; Year Two of the Russian Revolution, 274n4 Shalamov, Varlam, 48 Shatz, Adam, 77 Shultz, George, 69 Silone, Ignazio, 104–5 Silver, Brian, 70 Singer, Daniel, 77, 85n89, 262 Sinyavsky, Andrei, 48 Smith, Andrew, 49 Snyder, Timothy, 91n166 Soboul, Albert, 55–57 Social Contract (Rousseau), 41 social democracy, Jacobinism and, 240n12 Social Democratic Party (Germany), 138 The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cobban), 55 socialism: Bukharin and, 246n108; in Germany, 5, 61–68; as global theory,

354

Index

236; in Nineteen Eighty-Four, 21; Stalin and, 219; Thermidor concept in, 235; Trotsky on, 220 Socialisme et Liberté group, 174 Socialist Party of America, 277n38 socialist realism, 131 Socialist Register, 54 Socialist Unity Party (SED), 136–37 Socialist Workers Party (SWP), 249 Solow, Herbert, 257 Solts, Aron, 6 “The Solution” (Brecht), 137 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, xxiii, 83n68; anti-Semitism of, 6–8; The Cancer Ward, 46; Counter-Enlightenment Project and, 52; as critic of communism, 48–49; The First Circle, 47; The Gulag Archipelago, 6, 44, 47, 50–51, 57–58, 83n74; as Marxist, 45–46; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 46; political exile of, 46; in Red Army, 44; religious faith for, 45; on Trotsky, 7; Two Hundred Years Together, 7 Sorge, Richard, 302 Souvarine, Boris, 28, 79n3, 251, 276n26 Soviet Marxism (Marcuse), 140 The Soviet Tragedy (Malia), 74–75 Soviet Union (USSR): academic studies on, 34; anti-Semitism in, 189n13; Cultural Revolution in, 37–38; de-Stalinization of, 140; dictatorships in, 31; as dysfunctional bureaucracy, 39; as “Evil Empire,” 68; First Congress of Soviets, 209; industrialization in, 236–37; nationalism in, 304–8; Nazi-Soviet Pact, 29, 119, 127, 298–302; NonAggression Pact with Nazi Germany, 296, 299–302; socialist realism as orthodoxy in, 131. See also Russia; specific countries; specific topics Spain: Civil War in, 96, 160, 173; Franco in, 51; Partido Obero de Unificación Marxista, 13–15;

Republicanism, 13; Spanish Communist Party, 13 Spanish Civil War, 96, 160, 173 Spanish Communist Party (PCE), 13 The Spanish Testament (Koestler), 97, 102 Spartacist League, 3 Spartacus (film), 113n18 Spartacus, as literary symbol, 97–100, 113n13 Spender, Stephen, 104 Spinoza, Baruch, xii, 95, 282 The Spirit of Utopia (Bloch), 121 spiritual anti-Semitism, 8 Stalin (Deutscher), 264–65 Stalin (Losurdo), 283 Stalin (Trotsky), 238, 246n115 Stalin, Josef, 78; Brecht on, 130; Bukharin and, 95, 221; collectivation campaign, 70; Dialectical and Historical Materialism, 160; as evil, xiii; Foundations of Leninism, 246n108; Luxemburg compared to, 147–48; military leadership of, 303–4; proletarian Jacobinism and, 236–37; realism of, 157–58, 219–20; socialism and, 219; Soviet nationalism under, 304–8. See also totalitarianism Stalinism: alternative to, 216–23; Arendt on, 31; Bolshevism as foundation of, 35, 205; Brecht and, 137–38; as demonic and evil, xii, xiv; Deutscher as defender of, 265; Horkheimer on, 119; Left Opposition and, xv; Leninism and, 36; Merleau-Ponty on, 109; October Revolution and, xii; origins of, 253–54; Orwell on, 11–22; purges as feature of, 15; in Russia, xxi; Trotsky analysis of, 238–39. See also anti-Stalinist movements; “bolt from the blue” approach; de-Stalinization campaigns; historical necessity approach; Thermidor concept

Index

Stalin’s Peasants (Fitzpatrick), 38 State Capitalism or Totalitarian State Economy (Hilferding), 28 Ste. Croix, Geoffrey de, 161 Striker, Eva, 97 “subversive” Jews, 2–5, 8n4 Suny, Ronald Grigor, 35, 39 SWP. See Socialist Workers Party Tailism and the Dialectic (Lukács), 143 Talmon, Jacob, xxiii, 40–42, 82n52 Le Temps Modernes, 174–75 Terracini, Umberto, 154 Terrorism and Communism (Trotsky), 211 Thatcher, Margaret, 69 Their Morals and Ours (Serge), 254–56 Thermidor concept, of Stalinism, 194n107, 223–28; anti-Semitism and, 226; Bolshevik Party and, 217; Bonapartism and, 231–32; Hegel and, 143–44; Left Opposition and, 224, 233; Lukács and, 142, 144; Oppositional Bolsheviks, 224; socialism and, 235; Trotsky and, 229–39, 265–66 Theses on the Philosophy of History (Benjamin), 127 Third Reich: Auschwitz and, 64–65; defeat of, 29; as totalitarian state, 64. See also Nazi Germany Thirty Years After the Russian Revolution, 261–62 Thompson, Edward P., 54, 161 Thorez, Maurice, 171 Three Faces of Fascism (Nolte), 61–63, 86n105 Threepenny Opera (Brecht), 128 Thurston, Robert, 39 Tito, Josef, 260 Tkachev, Pyotr, 40, 205 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 59 Togliatti, Palmiro, 151–55 totalitarian democrats, 41

355

Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Brzezinski and Friedrich), 31–32 The Totalitarian Enemy (Borkenau), 16 totalitarianism: in Animal Farm, 16–18; anti-Jacobinism and, 39–43; anti-Semitism and, 30; Arendt on, 30–32, 86n101; Big Brother concept and, 16–22; Bolshevik Revolution and, 53–54; “bolt from the blue” approach to, 27–34; communism and, 32–33; conceptual approach to, 27–34; as conceptual term, 27–28; Counter-Enlightenment Project and, 27–34; Dialectic of Saturn and, 41, 43; failure as theory, 27; Gramsci on, 155; imperialism and, 30; main features of, 32; mass politics and, 30; Mussolini and, 27–28; in Nazi Germany, 28–30, 34–36; in Nineteen Eighty-Four, 19, 21; Orwell on, 16–22; revisionist approaches to, 34–39; Rousseau as intellectual source of, 29; in Russia, 30, 34, 36. See also anti-totalitarian movement “To those born after” (Brecht), 132–33 Transitional Program, xvin12 Traverso, Enzo, 67, 89n129, 189n16 Tress, Pietro, 154 Tretiakov, Sergei, 130 The Trojan Horse (Nizan), 172 Trotsky, Leon, 78, 244n66; alternative to Stalinism, 216–23; antiStalinism of, 122; Bloch on, 122; Brecht on, 130, 134–35; Bulletin of the Opposition, 263, 292; on collectivism, 221–22; conception of morality, 255; expulsion from Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 227; Gramsci and, 150–53, 159; historical materialism and, xv; History of the Russian Revolution, 126; Literature and Revolution, 151; Menshevism and, 207; MerleauPonty and, 109, 115n51; My Life, 126, 158; as oppositional Marxist,

356

Index

28; Orwell on, 23n20; Our Political Tasks, 207; in The Prison Notebooks, 158; proletarian Jacobinism and, 210; Red Army, 44, 67, 177–78, 211–13, 224, 260, 269; The Revolution Betrayed, xv, xxiii–xxiv, 28, 79n3, 229, 234–35, 237–38; on socialism, 220; Solzhenitsyn on, 7; Stalin, 238, 246n115; Stalinism analysis by, 238–39; Terrorism and Communism, 211; Thermidor concept and, 229–39, 265–66; on Transitional Program, xvin12; Where is England Going?, 124 Trotskyism, 48–49 Trotskyist Opposition, 156–57 Trumbo, Dalton, 113n18 Tsarist Russia. See Russia Tucker, Robert, 34–36 Tukhachevsky, Mikhail, 291–97 Tukhachevsky Affair, 291–97 Tvardovsky, Aleksandr, 46 Two Hundred Years Together (Solzhenitsyn), 7 Two Kinds of Doom (Hilgruber), 65 Ukraine, famine in, 70–71, 78 Ukrainian Resurgent Army (UPA), 9n18 Ulam, Adam, 7, 33, 40 Under the Bolshevik Regime (Pipes), 72 Under Two Dictators (BuberNeumann), 48 The Unfinished Revolution (Deutscher), 271 United States (U.S.): Central Intelligence Agency, 30, 104–5; House Un-American Activities Commission, 136; Marcuse exile in, 138–39; Office for Strategic Services, 139; response to communism, 30; Socialist Party of America, 277n38; Socialist Workers Party in, 249 universalist Bolshevism, 4 UPA. See Ukrainian Resurgent Army

Urbahns, Hugo, 230 U.S. See United States USSR. See Soviet Union utopianism: abstract, 144; nationalism and, 304–5 Vakulich, Pavel, 294 Vergniaud, Pierre Victurnien, xiii Victor, Pierre, 167 Vietnam War, 187 Vitkevic, Nikolai, 44 Vlasov, Andrey, 6 Vlassov movement, 9n18 voluntarism, xiv Voronyanskaya, Elizaveta, 47 Walecki, Henryk, 263 The Wall (Sartre), 102 Warburg, Max, 191n58 Warsaw Pact, 187; Hungary withdrawal from, 123, 148 Warski, Adolf, 263 We (Zamyatin), 20 Weil, Hermann, 118 Weissman, Suzi, 259, 261 Weitling, Wilhelm, xiii Werth, Léon, 251 Werth, Nicolas, 78 Western Marxism: Adorno and, 117–20; Althusser and, 164–71; Benjamin and, 123–28; Bloch and, 121–23; Brecht and, 124, 128–38; Frankfurt School and, 117; Gramsci and, 150– 59; historical development of, 117; Hobsbawm and, 159–64; Horkheimer and, 117–20; Lukács and, 142–50; Marcuse and, 138–42; MerleauPonty and, 117; Sartre and, 171–88 What is Literature? (Sartre), 180 What is to be Done (Lenin), 33 Wheatcroft, Stephen, 70–71 Where is England Going? (Trotsky), 124 White Armies, in Russia, 6 White Terror, 211

Index

Why the Heavens Did Not Darken (Mayer), 68 Wiesel, Elie, 7 Willikens, Werner, 66 Witness (Chambers), 74 Wittfogel, Karl, 189n23 Wolfe, Bernard, 202n256 Workers’ World Party, 272 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Benjamin), 125 Wretched of the Earth (Fanon), 186–87 Wright, Richard, 104 Yagoda, Genrikh, 6 Year One of the Russian Revolution (Serge), 251

357

Year Two of the Russian Revolution (Serge), 274n4 Yegorov, Aleksandr, 296 Yeltsin, Boris, 280n80 The Yogi and the Commissar (Koestler), 101–2 The Young Hegel (Lukács), 145–46 Yugoslav Communist Party, 291 Zalutskii, Petr, 225 Zamyatin, Yevgeny, 20 Zhdanov, Andrei, 164, 175 Zinoviev, Grigory, 143, 217, 225; expulsion from Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 227 Žižek, Slavoj, 132, 194n107

About the Author

Douglas Greene is an independent Marxist historian living in the greater Boston area. He is also the author of two other books: Communist Insurgent: Blanqui’s Politics of Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017) and A Failure of Vision: Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic Socialism (Washington: Zer0 Books, 2021). His works have been published in Socialism and Democracy, Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal, Cosmonaut, Left Voice, Monthly Review Online, Counterpunch, Cultural Logic, and Red Wedge magazine. He blogs at The Blanquist: blanquist.blogspot.com.

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