What Was Soviet Ideology?: A Theoretical Inquiry 1666937371, 9781666937374

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What Was Soviet Ideology?

What Was Soviet Ideology? A Theoretical Inquiry Petre Petrov

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Petrov, Petre M., 1974- author. Title: What was Soviet ideology? : a theoretical inquiry / Petre Petrov. Description: Lanham, Maryland : Lexington Books, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023039468 (print) | LCCN 2023039469 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666937374 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666937381 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Political science--Soviet Union--Philosophy. | Ideology--Soviet Union. | Communism--Soviet Union. | Soviet Union--Politics and government–1936-1953. Classification: LCC JA84.S65 P47 2024 (print) | LCC JA84.S65 (ebook) | DDC 320.53/22–dc23/eng/20230918 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023039468 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023039469 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

To the memory of Volodia Padunov

Contents

Introduction

1

Chapter 1: What Makes an Ideology Ideological? Chapter 2: The Three Logics of Ideology



Chapter 3: The Ontological Truth of Ideology Chapter 4: The Production of Ideology



Chapter 5: The Show of Civilization



Chapter 6: The Economy of Tokens Conclusion

27 61



87 123 153 191

229

Bibliography Index





237

257

About the Author



273

vii

Introduction

Is there a scholarly topic more trite and tired than Soviet ideology? Endlessly abused by Cold War politicians and pundits, worn out in unreflective popular usage, the phrase has turned into an intellectual fossil.1 For many years, the two sides of it were so firmly welded that one inevitably invoked the other. The word “Soviet” brought to mind the sway of ideology, and the mere mention of ideology brought to mind the Soviet Union, a specimen like no other. For the uncritical mind, the implication was that ideology was something the Soviets possessed, or rather, were possessed by, while in the West one could be one’s own master.2 Nor was this only the conceit of ill-educated bigots.3 It would not be an exaggeration to say that an entire academic field was founded on this very understanding. As programs in Russian studies began to crop up at various American universities from after World War II, it was no secret to anyone that studying Russia—its language, literature, and history—was the broad educational prerequisite for knowing and dealing with the Soviet Union4; and for quite some time, the latter task integrally involved deducing Soviet realities and mentalities from ideological master narratives. In that it was saddled with so much objectionable politics, in that it anchored an entire paradigm of knowledge about the Soviet Union, “ideology” eventually became less a topic to be investigated and more a symbolic item. By handling or not handling it, one signaled an intellectual position. For a whole generation of historians and social scientists, steering clear of ideology was a way of indicating a departure from the until-then hegemonic totalitarian model.5 The testimony of one of those historians is worth recalling here: Some years ago a graduate student at the University of Chicago, who had been attentively listening to my course of lectures in Soviet history and politics, asked: “Why do you avoid the ideology? How can you talk about the Soviet Union without bringing in ideology?” I was somewhat taken aback, but I had an answer. Basically, from the time I started teaching history in 1967, I had been 1

2

Introduction

struggling against the then-dominant causal arguments that explained Soviet policies and practices as derived from Marxism-Leninism. . . . Deductions from Marx’s Capital or Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? could not, we believed, explain much more than the aspirations of leaders. They left out the actual social and economic constraints in which the Bolsheviks found themselves, not to mention the unintended consequences of their choices and actions.6

For both the proponents of the totalitarian model and for those who opposed it, ideology in the Soviet context was something very definite. It was “the ideology,” just as that graduate student had said it. And this meant the official ideology, Marxism-Leninism. For the totalitarians, this official status implied that ideology had come to power and was in fact ruling the country they studied.7 It was of great importance to them, as it was to US foreign policy in the post-war decade, to show that Soviet Union was governed not simply by a party calling itself communist but by Communism itself.8 Identifying Marxist ideas with Soviet gulags remains, to this day, a staple of right-wing political thought. The revisionist historians also took the official status of ideology as their point of departure. But they attributed quite the opposite significance to this fact. To them it meant that the institutionalized orthodoxy of Marxism-Leninism had little bearing on the living realities of Soviet society. As scholars like Sheila Fitzpatrick, Moshe Lewin, Ronald Suny, and Lynne Viola turned their attention away from the halls of high politics, they also turned away from the issue of ideology.9 The mainsprings of history were to be sought elsewhere: in “social processes unrelated to state intervention,”10 in momentary conjunctures, ad-hoc decisions, pragmatic adaptations, and the myriad unscripted doings of common people who endeavored to advance their standing in life, sought to avoid persecution or suspicion, or struggled to procure the necessities of everyday existence.11 As David Brandenberger writes, “Under the influence of this work, the Soviet experience has assumed the a veneer of ‘everydayness,’ transforming Stalinism into the history of ‘ordinary lives in extraordinary time.’”12 It never really occurred to the revisionist social historians that they were participating in a dialectic of intellectual positions; they were not merely exploring under-studied swaths of Soviet reality but stitching the very fabric of the real; in this new perspective, real was that which lay beyond the reach of ideological principles and slogans.13 Put differently, it was not that authentic Soviet reality was to be found beyond doctrinal postulates; rather, what was beyond Marxism-Leninism and its propaganda was being given the status of most authentic reality. There were certainly very good reasons why Soviet ideology should have been treated as something definite and self-evident. This is just how the thing presented itself; it led a most visible existence in mandatory textbooks and

Introduction

3

classes, slogans, and official Party documents; the ideology called itself by that name and recommended itself as an orthodoxy that needed to be studied, believed, and implemented in action. This highly extroverted existence is surely the main reason why in Soviet studies ideology never became an object of serious theoretical interest. It was a haloed canon, a political establishment, a visible property of the state; it was there.14 One could detail its principal theses, point out the intellectual sources,15 chronicle its transformations over time, or describe the organizational structures of its existence, but one did not have to expend much effort on elaborating its concept. As Stephen White has noted, “at least in Western scholarly circles, the nature of the ideology was taken as a ‘given’.”16 Similarly, Joseph Schull expressed “dissatisfaction with the Sovietological literature on the subject, which seemed theoretically muddled and largely devoid of any serious engagement with methodological issues extending beyond the boundaries of Soviet studies.”17 Another political scientist complained that the study of Soviet ideology has “lagged behind research in other areas of the Soviet Union, particularly on the conceptual side.”18 And most recently, one historian found it “startling . . . to realize just how scarce explicit discussion of ideology in the Soviet field actually are.”19 He went on to query, “Why, then, has this most ‘ideological’ of fields, for which an understanding of this key concept remains fundamental, not made discussion of ideology into a central concern?”20 As these statements make it clear, far from being the most secure intellectual possession of Soviet studies, ideology is in fact the field’s weakest spot. The sense of tiresome familiarity that accompanies all talk about Soviet ideology is in no way an index of how well the matter has been grasped; habitualization has ran far ahead of conceptualization. “But the subject is too important to be left in a state of neglect like a surly invalid relative whose justified claims to attention we honor only infrequently and then perfunctorily.”21 Michael H. Hunt wrote this almost half a century ago apropos of ideology in the context of US foreign policy; his words are no less applicable in the context of Soviet history and culture. *** A good first step might be to “make strange” this invalid relative, at once tediously familiar and neglected. The task does not require any special intellectual gymnastics or intricate theorizing. It is enough to simply ask what Soviet ideology is, and see whether the answer succeeds in delivering the self-evident and definite thing that has been promised. And so, what should we understand by “the Soviet ideology”? I would imagine that someone who holds the matter to be self-evident would be tempted to respond in a way that restates the terms of the question: “Why, Soviet ideology is the official

4

Introduction

ideology of the Soviet Union.” But even this safest of answers is not without its hazards. As Alfred G. Meyer has pointed out, “Precisely which body of ideas is being referred to when we talk about Soviet ideology is not at all clear.”22 Even if we bracket the problem of historical change and focus on one particular moment in time, it is not very easy to determine what this official “body of ideas” is supposed to be. A brief look at the scholarly literature confirms that the demarcations of the “official” have been far from unanimous; at times, they have been quite unintuitive. In one of his celebrated essays on early Soviet history, Moshe Lewin asked apropos the 1930s, “One ideology or more?” The answer he gave was “more,” five to be precise. As official Marxism-Leninism was insufficient to bind the new polity, torn by the momentous consequences of the Great Turn, it was supplemented by: (1) a liturgical tendency catering to the religious feelings of the muzhik; (2) overtures to the Russian imperial past; (3) a bureaucratic creed centered on the cult of statehood (gosudarstvennost'); and (4) a dark obsession with seeking and exposing “enemies of the people.”23 Lewin’s main point—the unsuitability of Marxism-Leninism’s abstractions for governing a land of peasants—is quite straightforward. The same cannot be said of his notion of ideology. The term is used loosely, as in most scholarly writing in the field. It is left for the reader to divine why the “supplements” Lewin enumerates, apparently so heterogeneous in nature, should all count as ideologies. It is quite clear, however, that the unsystematic patchwork of these supplements prevents one from speaking of anything like Soviet ideology, in the singular. In the most sustained recent effort to return the issue of ideology to its due prominence in Soviet studies, Brandenberger advanced a thesis very similar to Lewin’s, without committing himself to the “many ideologies” thesis. The Propaganda State in Crisis is, in the first place, about Marxism-Leninism’s failure to legitimize the Bolshevik regime and unify the young state’s populace. After a full decade of Soviet power, Brandenberger recounts, the abstract concepts of political economy and historical materialism remained incomprehensible for the majority of Party propagandists, to say nothing of the largely illiterate masses.24 Desperately searching for an alternative social glue in the face of daunting economic tasks and the threat of war, the Stalinist establishment resorted to a variety of mobilizational exigencies in the 1930s, including nationalism-driven historical revisionism, militant patriotism, leader worship, a mythology of Soviet supermen, and a demonology of enemies. Most of these populist strategies—virtually identical with Lewin’s supplements—originated outside the official ideological establishment, in the milieu of writers, artists, and journalists, that is, of yesterday’s bourgeois intelligentsia.25 Like Lewin’s, Brandenberger’s account leads to a conundrum: what can properly be termed Soviet ideology was not really the

Introduction

5

ideology of Stalinism, for it never really reached the masses. Another emergency program succeeded in doing so, around the middle of the 1930s (before being derailed by the Great Terror), yet that one can hardly be called Soviet; if anything, it was bourgeois. In places, Brandenberger refers to the latter as ideology, yet given his emphasis on its improvised character, eclecticism, and purely instrumental significance,26 such a designation is difficult to justify. In one of the key texts of revisionist historiography, Stephen Cohen described the same historical conjuncture as follows: Official ideology changed radically under Stalin. Several of these changes have been noted by Western and Soviet scholars: the revival of nationalism, statism, anti-Semitism, and conservative, or reactionary, cultural and behavioral norms; the repeal of ideas and legislation favoring workers, women, schoolchildren, minority cultures, and egalitarianism, as well as a host of revolutionary and Bolshevik symbols; and a switch of emphasis from ordinary people to leaders and official bosses as the creators of history. These are not simply amendments but a new ideology which was “changed in its essence” and which did “not represent the same movement as that which took power in 1917.”27

That there was a revival of nationalism, statism, and anti-Semitism under Stalin is, indeed, beyond debate. What is debatable is in what sense these trends can be deemed “official,” and in what sense they are spoken of as “ideology.” Anti-Semitism seems particularly unfit for both labels (to the extent to which it received official articulation, it did so not as anti-Semitism, but as “cosmopolitanism”). If nationalism was “official,” so was internationalism, albeit in a different sense. One was officially enacted, the other was officially proclaimed. Which of the two is “official” in the true sense? The same dilemma arises apropos of class differentiation and many other topics of early Soviet history. Stalinist policies indeed privileged the new managerial class and the intelligentsia, but should we not distinguish between policy and ideology? Is it not precisely in “ideology” that the glorification of the ordinary working folk never abated? “Democratic centralism” was the sacrosanct tenet of party organization during the entire Soviet period. In practice, as everyone knows, there was much centralism and very little democracy.28 What, then, belongs to the content of official ideology: the proclaimed democratic character of the Party or its actual subordination to centralized authority? Clearly, Cohen has chosen to designate as “official ideology” the notions that were put in practice, rather than those merely paraded by the regime. More problematic than the choice itself is the fact that Cohen is unaware of having made it. Nothing in his text suggests that “official” (or “ideology,” for that matter) might have more than one interpretation. The problem, of course, would not go away if, aware of the mercurial semantics, one were to specify

6

Introduction

which meaning of “official” is intended. This would only raise the question, “And what shall we do with the other meaning? Doesn’t that other ‘official’ deserve just as much—and perhaps even more—to be called ‘the Soviet ideology’?” Terminological hygiene cannot resolve a duality that inheres in the matter itself. I shall have much more to say about this duality later on. *** For the moment, let us imagine that the problem has been miraculously resolved, and we have somehow succeeded in precisely demarcating the realm of the “official” at some given moment in Soviet history. In other words, we have identified a set of ideas or propositions to which the label can be unambiguously applied. The instant this impossible feat is accomplished, we would be confronted with another set of formidable issues. Having adjudicated the sphere of the “official,” we now would have to adjudicate what properly belongs in the realm of “ideology.” For instance, looking at the set of authoritative propositions we just selected for inclusion, we might remember that most of them existed also as slogans, and it is in this form that they first reached the majority of Soviet citizens. Does the sloganization of ideological notions fall inside or outside of ideology? And how about the institutionally inculcated habit of citing the classics of Marxism-Leninism (tsitatnichestvo)? Is compulsive rhetorical reproduction itself an ideological element? And where do we put statements about ideology? Are they part of the latter or belong in some other, meta-realm? If we take Marxism-Leninism as a set of definite notions, how are we to regard the canonization and institutionalization of these notions? To be sure, “canonization” and “institutionalization” are not ideas, but are they not inalienable aspects of what we have in mind when we speak of “Soviet ideology”? On the same grounds, we may ask about the choreographed public enactments of unity, enthusiasm, support for the Party, or any other sacramental principle.29 Are the “processions with ‘icons’ of living and dead leaders, ritualized public ceremonials, pompous displays of a kind of secular liturgy, the growing use of vocabulary soaked with religious and semi-religious overtones”30—are these facts ideology or something other than ideology? And what shall we say about a most salient phenomenon like the cult of Stalin?31 It is enough of a headache to determine in what sense and to what degree it could be called “official”; the discomfort is only exacerbated when one has to decide whether the cult qualifies for admission to the realm of ideology.32 Marxism-Leninism did supply doctrinal legitimation for the cult of leaders33; yet the actual glorification of Stalin assumed a character and scale incommensurate with the dry formulas found in Soviet handbooks of political philosophy.

Introduction

7

It might seem that the prudent thing to do is to draw a sharp line around ideas proper and leave out all those other, extraneous matters, which would then have to be considered under rubrics other than ideology. But this exercise of terminological hygiene is no more beneficial than the previous one. It is hard to escape the feeling that, when all those “extraneous matters”— slogans, rhetoric, myth, cult and ritual—have been amputated, most of what made the phenomenon peculiarly Soviet would have been eliminated as well. Nor is keeping ideas separate from policies or practices as easy as it might appear at first. The fact is that many people tend to care about political-philosophical ideas more when they do not remain mere figments of the mind or words on a page, but “lead to something,” which is to say, when they cease being mere ideas and become actions, events, realities. Historians and social scientists are certainly among those people. Thus, social linguist Teun A. van Dijk insists: “We need to ‘see’ ideologies expressed and lived by social actors and ‘at work’ in concrete social situations, that is, in everyday social practices.”34 Meyer, a political scientist and one of the fathers of Sovietology in the US, once remarked: “The term ideology seems to me to carry the implication that ideas should be studied in their relatedness to action.”35 Cohen would undoubtedly concur, for what he calls the official ideology has little to do with theoretical Marxist postulates and much to do with tendencies implicit in actual governmental policies. Brandenberger would too, given the absolute importance he ascribes to ideology’s mobilizational function. Just how treacherous the demarcation of ideas from deeds can be is shown spectacularly in Martin Malia’s The Soviet Tragedy (1995). In this sweeping recapitulation of Soviet history, Malia set out to salvage the totalitarian model of historiography, refusing to acknowledge what for many, and for quite some time, had been the model’s evident and terminal bankruptcy.36 An integral part of his reclamation project was to “reassert the primacy of ideology,” making it “the key to understanding the Soviet phenomenon.”37 As in the good old days, the “Soviet tragedy” was to be traced to Marxism as to its “genetic code.”38 To all those who might believe that socialism was a good idea that failed in practice, Malia explains that it was, intrinsically, a bad idea, which could not but fail in practice.39 “Nothing went wrong with the Revolution,” he assures us, “the whole enterprise, quite simply, was wrong from the start.”40 All of this is as expected,41 but when Malia gets to what for him and many others is the historical juncture definitive of the “Soviet phenomenon,” the Stalin revolution of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the narrative takes a surprising turn: Despite the fact that Stalin and his men were operating in the context of a “Plan,” they had no grand design, or even an approximate draft of a program,

8

Introduction

or any clear idea of how to implement it. Instead, they had only the general goal of socialism understood as planned industrialization and full collectivization. Within these parameters they improvised their concrete program, but with results they had never anticipated.42

At this point, no reader of The Soviet Tragedy could be blamed for evincing signs of confusion. Where is the absolute primacy of ideology? We are being told, on the contrary, that the ideological framework was nothing but a most vague general direction, that there was no grand design but only improvised actions. Two pages further, Malia states explicitly: “Finally, ideology was revised to justify the coming offensive. Stalin declared that the nearer the country got to socialism, the stronger the resistance of the class enemy became and the more intense the class struggle grew.”43 If the ideology is constantly adapted to what is politically expedient, then no actual developments can be deduced from it. Quite the opposite is true: the ideology is to be deduced from political practice. To all appearances, Malia is unaware that all this runs counter to his book’s stated objective; for he carries on as follows: “The dilemma confronting the Party in 1929 was that history does not in reality conform to its presumed logic, yet the Party as an ideocratic regime was irrevocably committed to following this logic nonetheless.”44 What was this “logic” the Party was “irrevocably committed to follow,” if just a moment earlier we were being convinced that the leadership had no firm design or program? It can only be a logic of deeds, not a logic of ideas (the very thing that needed to be demonstrated). And here is where the logic of deeds leads: Marx’s doctrine therefore could only fall victim to the perverse cunning of Party reason. For there was no class struggle in Russia at the time, but only a struggle of the Party against the peasant nation; thus Marx’s theory was made to serve as justification for a coercive Five-Year Plan designed to perfect the Party’s power. Indeed, it is perhaps inherent in the real logic of history that ideologies are almost invariably debased on contact with political action; the higher the ambition of the ideology, and the more drastic the contemplated action, the more likely is the debasement in practice.45

Stalinist practice debases Marxism, and this may strike some readers as a good argument for the primacy of pragmatics over ideology. Yet, as the quoted passage shows, Malia has contrived to make Marxism responsible for its own debasement. The intellectual trick works as follows: when it ceases to be just a utopian “text” and aspires to become reality, socialism triggers a logic of history through which the text itself is perverted. All of this furnishes a perfect illustration for one early commentator’s sardonic remark: “Russian

Introduction

9

communism had to turn out as it has because it now can be seen to have, in fact, turned out as it has.”46 When someone tells us that ideology is the key to understanding a given reality, then we should expect from him to lay out the ideas in question, and then demonstrate to us that these ideas, in fact, determined the makeup of the social world we are considering. Malia’s argument, however, takes just the opposite course: Soviet history is narrated as a sequence of crimes and disasters that ends in collapse; this sequence is said to have followed an inexorable logic; and then this tragic logic is declared to be the very essence of the socialist creed; not of “theoretical” socialism, mind you, but of “real” socialism.47 To anyone who might still think of ideology as a theoretical matter, Malia has this counsel: “Ideology is not a set of precepts that people look up in a book and then apply. It is an all-encompassing mind-set that pervades actions and decisions that to nonideological observers appear disparate and ad hoc.” The “mindset,” which is to say, the ideology, is to be found in the “actions and decisions,” and not in books. Malia’s response to revisionism, with the latter’s emphasis on the contingent, or multiply-determined character of Soviet policies and developments, is that no matter how contingent they might seem—“to nonideological observers”—they are nevertheless realizations of the ideology. Just like any good Stalinist would, Malia considers what had place in the Soviet Union to be true socialism. He thus feels justified in deducing socialism’s “true” ideology from its Soviet implementation and discarding all high-blown philosophy and political theory as inessential façade. (Along with them, he discards also the idea that there can be a socialism substantially different from the Bolshevik one.)48 It is small wonder, then, that ideology proves to be the key to the Soviet experience; it has been made in the image of that experience from the start. The rabbit has been in the hat all along. Some may find the politics of Malia’s narrative insufferable, but I do not think his handling of ideology can be chalked up to idiosyncrasy or terminological confusion. I see in it, apart from the gross conservative bias, an extreme symptom of a predicament to which I have been alluding over several pages now. Stated in aphoristic form, the predicament is that when one meditates on ideology in the Soviet context, one is bound to discover, sooner rather than later, that the ideology is not the ideology. One must acknowledge, of course, the canon of Marxism-Leninism and, in the next moment, acknowledge that this is not really the Soviet ideology; meaning that these are not necessarily the ideas that determined crucial political decisions and social developments.49 The same unsatisfactory result obtains if one were to begin from the other side: as soon as one resolves to think of Soviet ideology as the sum of those ideas or tendencies that did have significant influence

10

Introduction

on the course of history, as Cohen has done (among others), one must again acknowledge that this is not the ideology; meaning that this is not what the Soviet themselves, leaders as well as ordinary citizens, understood to be the orthodox communist creed. As Boris Groys has lamented, The attempt to formulate what the basic principles of Soviet ideology consist in, to provide, so to speak, a short and comprehensible statement of what constitutes the specific content of Soviet ideology as compared to other forms of thought usually leads to a result that, purely intuitively, seems unconvincing. Every formulation of this kind seems incomplete, incapable of embracing every side of the phenomenon.50

For political scientists working on the Soviet Union, the standard way of dealing with the predicament has been to build a scaffolding of various “levels.”51 Drawing on the work of Martin Seliger,52 they have treated ideology as an architectonic, which cascaded from the high plateau of general philosophical notions (Seliger’s “fundamental ideology”) down to the prosaic plane of workable principles, in close proximity to everyday decision-making (“operative ideology”).53 Terms such as “fundamental ideology,” “general philosophical principles” and “dogma” were used to describe the apex of ideology, the fixed orthodoxies of Marxism-Leninism. Beneath these orthodoxies came the “operating ideology,” “action programmes” and “strategy” which defined policy. In addition, it was sometimes postulated that there was an intermediate level of ideology, sometimes described as “doctrine,” between these two extremes in ideology that married the “fundamental” ideology to the “operating” ideology. This approach to ideology created confusion rather than clarity.54

The confusion Neil Robinson has in mind is due to the fact that the classification does not work well in practice, and the assigning of many ideologemes to one category or another quickly devolves into an arbitrary exercise. Yet this is not even half of the problem. The more serious trouble is that schemes of this sort end up doing damage to the notion of ideology. To wit, the main reason for their existence is to give unity to what may appear separate dimensions, to present them as “levels” of the same thing, namely, of the Soviet ideology. But the effort defeats itself by a logic of which the builders of such models remain quite oblivious. In arranging ideas on the two or three shelves provided for the purpose, they forget that in order for the ideas to constitute an ideology, in the proper sense of the word, there must be a relation of cognate content between them, the unfolding of a common meaning that would make them into a system. But no such relation exists between such “fundamental” Marxist notion as the emancipation of women and such

Introduction

11

“operating” Stalinist principle as the need for women to take their customary place in a patriarchal social arrangement. Whoever would insist that these two are simply different expressions of one and the same ideology, would also be sabotaging the term’s basic meaning. *** I hope the preceding remarks have done enough to persuade that things are not at all well with our understanding of Soviet ideology. The notion is both worn out and opaque; it is over-used but under-thought. Rather than being unproblematic, as its casual handling in much scholarly work might imply, it is merely unproblematized. Purveyors of sound common sense may object that some of the difficulties I have noted are no more than scholastic quibble over words (“It’s just semantics!”), and that underneath it all things are pretty simple and clear. To this, one must reply that words articulate concepts, and that there is really no other way for things to be clear except by being apprehended in lucid concepts. The so-called quibble over words is just the way by which we become aware that the concept of ideology in the Soviet context is anything but lucid. As I suggested already, difficulties of this sort may tempt one to “keep things simple,” to not commit to much in one’s definitions. Precisely because Soviet ideology had an objective, institutionalized existence, one is tempted, in lieu of characterization, to simply point to it.55 Something very similar to a gesture of pointing can be found in the Preface to the 1988 collection, Ideology and Soviet Politics: “Ideology is defined in this volume as the official doctrine of Marxism-Leninism to which the Soviet leadership, party and state are all formally committed.”56 Does this really deserve to be called “definition”? To appreciate the strangeness of the statement just quoted, let us imagine the following scene from daily life. An acquaintance of mine sees my pet iguana for the first time and asks, “What is this?” I reply: “Oh, this is Hugo.” He has expected to find out what kind of animal this is. I have only supplied the creature’s proper name. It is the same with a definition that, instead of explaining what is meant by ideology in the Soviet context, tells us that the ideology is Marxism-Leninism. This is really not that different from the act of pointing. In both cases, the item is “identified” in the most minimal sense of being singled out, but it is not identified in the substantial sense of being supplied with features, a “nature,” content. Pointing is not knowing, and neither is naming. Everyone knows that the official ideology in the Soviet Union was called Marxism-Leninism, but it is much more worthwhile to ask: in what sense was Marxism-Leninism ideology? It is true, the definitions of ideology one finds in the work of political scientists can be significantly more elaborate.57 For instance:

12

Introduction

Throughout the discussion that follows, Soviet Marxism is treated not only as thought but also as ideology. An ideology may be defined as a system of interrelated beliefs about politics and society that is directed at a large popular audience. Ideology may favor or oppose change. In either case, it is not merely an exercise in philosophical reasoning but is meant to have practical consequences by influencing people’s actions. Any ideology may be viewed as having three main components: (1) a statement of social values or goals, (2) an analysis of existing society, and (3) a set of guidelines for action. Ideology is not only normative, but also interpretative; it not only shows what ought to be but explains the crucial factors in the contemporary situation. Its action program tells us how to move from the actual to the ideal or, if the actual is identified with the ideal, how to preserve what already exists.58

Generally, there is nothing wrong in defining one’s terms before getting down to business. However, there are times when the business at hand is such that terminological fixations detract from it rather than advance it. Such is the case here. The Soviet phenomenon is presented as a member of a set comprising existing political ideologies. The features it shares with them, the features definitive of the set, are then listed. We get the familiar conception of ideology as a composite made up of “parts,” not very different from the aforementioned levels. Each of these is itself a set of what are termed “beliefs,”59 the varieties of which are “values” and “goals,” “analyses,” and “guidelines for action.” The question why such different items deserve to be classed as beliefs is not raised. Nowhere is it asked whether, in the Soviet case, these were actually believed by anyone—a seemingly crucial prerequisite for using the word “belief.”60 Nor does the definition make any distinction between belief, on one hand, and dogma, rhetoric, or myth, on the other.61 What exactly do we gain when we take the proclamation of class harmony from the 1936 Constitution, call this a “belief,” and classify it together with the Marxist “value” of building a classless society? To me, this looks much more like a serious cognitive liability. In the heyday of the totalitarian school, Soviet experts had no qualms about equating Soviet ideology with Marxism, or communism, pure and simple. By contrast, to speak of Marxism-Leninism or of Soviet Marxism, as Alfred B. Evans and many others have done, is to acknowledge a certain “local peculiarity”; it is to see the Soviet doctrine as an interpretation, perhaps even a perversion, of the original theory. This way of framing the issue had crucial significance both for leftist thought in the West, as it sought alternatives to the Soviet model, and for dissident Marxists in Eastern Europe, intent on recovering the creed’s true meaning in the aftermath of Stalinism. As important as it is to maintain this critical interpretation, it is nonetheless clear that the issue of Soviet ideology is broader than a resume of Marxism or its corruptions. As Michael Waller has cautioned, “To say that the Soviet Union has a

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13

Marxist ideology is to say something about Soviet ideology—something that in certain context may be the essential consideration—but it is by no means all that there is to say.”62 Scholars who adopt definitions like the one quoted earlier are usually quite aware that the topic is not exhausted with the scientific-sounding cataloguing of “beliefs,” “values,” and “goals.” Even the uninitiated would know intuitively that Soviet ideology is “about” much more than ideas. It is also about propaganda, dogma, institution, formula, the “varnishing of reality,” ritualistic obeisance, mind-numbing casuistry, public spectacle, and what Isaac Deutscher once referred to as the “primitive magic of an essentially pre-industrial . . . society.”63 Let us note, in passing, that these characteristics may very well be what a student of Soviet culture really cares about. And yet, at present, no good account exists of whether and in what sense these can count as characteristics of ideology. The usual way they are spoken about is as corruptions, accidents that happened to (communist) ideology in the conditions of Soviet rule. It is common to read that in the Soviet Union Marxism was bureaucratized, dogmatized, ritualized, and so forth. Yet, to my knowledge, no one has been able to explain yet whether, and how, this dogmatized and ritualized thing is an ideological phenomenon. Thus, the paradoxical possibility emerges that much of what is Soviet in the phenomenon is not really ideology, and much of what appertains to the notion of ideology is not really characteristic of the Soviet case. It would be of no help at all if one were to expand the definition of ideology, inserting in it beforehand the special circumstances pertaining to the Soviet case. Such an expansion would be, from another point of view, a reduction and impoverishment. Inasmuch as the general notion would thus be pre-modeled on the individual instance it aims to comprehend, it would shed its universality. That is to say, it would cease to be a concept, in the proper sense of the word. Genus and species would coincide, yielding zero intellectual value. As we shall see in chapter 1, this kind of reductive procedure was deployed with conviction in the totalitarian school of thought. Recently, a liberal enlargement of the notion of ideology has been proposed by historian Michael David-Fox, whose complaint about Soviet studies’ neglected Grundbegriff I quoted earlier. In a chapter of his Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union (2015), the author invokes the ancient Indian fable of a few blind men feeling different parts of an elephant and, consequently, coming away with very different conceptions of the animal.64 In the analogy, the elephant is Soviet ideology; the blind men are its students, each grasping only a partial aspect of the subject. Resorting to another metaphor, David-Fox speaks also of Soviet ideology’s “six faces”: doctrine, worldview, historical concept, discourse, performance, faith. His objective is to reconcile these divergent understandings

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“in a pluralist, multidimensional, and non-exclusionary fashion,” allotting to each of them a measure of truth.65 The notion of the “ideological sphere” is supposed to be the space of their reconciliation66; yet there does not seem to be much substance to this notion other than the author’s determination to give competing perspectives a place in the sun. The gesture of intellectual magnanimity never produces the intended synthesis, remaining just a gesture. David-Fox has taken as given the very thing that needs demonstration: that we are dealing with six views of the same matter, rather than with six—or however many67—separate matters. It is prima facie obvious that if x is “worldview,” then x could not be also “discourse.” By the same elementary logic, if x is the personal beliefs of Bolshevik leaders (“faith”), then Soviet public rituals (“performance”) would not belong to x. Since these terms have very different significations, their referents cannot be declared offhand to be aspects of the same entity (or constituents of some superordinate “ideological sphere”). Theoretical work of mediation needs to be performed before the “faces,” or “parts,” of the mysterious creature can count as anything more than a rhetorical contrivance. *** All these difficulties and ambiguities may, ultimately, lead one to conclude that it is our stubborn clinging to the phrase “Soviet ideology” that is to blame. What if the high currency of this expression has led us to believe that it names something actual and singular, but on closer inspection it turns out that it really has no definite referent?68 Perhaps thinking in such terms is futile and the concept should be dropped like a bad intellectual habit.69 This is not a resolution I am ready to accept. The contradictions of a thing are not necessarily reason to declare the thing out of existence. They may well indicate, instead, that the ways in which we seek to grasp the thing are inadequate. From the position of dialectical thought, a notion is inadequate, in a most basic sense, when it seeks to comprehend an entity solely in positive terms, as a bundle of substantial “features,” and treats contradictions as something to be overcome, an obstacle beyond which the identity of the thing is to be secured. An excellent example are those “working definitions” that present ideology as a definite inventory of ideas and leave it for later to ask whether these are actually believed or acted upon. Whatever uses such an approach may have, it does not help at all in appreciating the originality of what had place in the Soviet Union. Any literature major should be able to explain why it is fruitless to approach, for instance, Marcel Proust’s magnum opus with a definition of what a “novel” is. The fact is that much of what constitutes the great originality of À la recherche du temps perdu would fall outside the definition, it

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would not be “comprehended” by it. The features usually subsumed under the definition would align poorly with the characteristic features of Proust’s text. The only possible meaning of the exercise could be to show just how much À la recherche du temps perdu is not a traditional novel. And yet, it would be equally misguided to say that Proust’s writing falls outside the genre of the novel. A departure it most certainly is, yet the departure is effected from within the genre itself. A definition that generalizes over many existing novels inevitably presents the genre as a collection of features. But in a writing practice conscious of literary tradition and convention, as Proust’s modernist practice is, the genre is itself the distancing from itself, its own (re-)definition. We are dealing with a dynamic form: not a collection of norms (as in the classicist understanding of genre), but a movement of volatizing and recasting those very norms. When confronted with this immanent movement, any a priori delimitation of genre proves to be an impotent schematization. The present inquiry will pursue a somewhat analogous course in respect to Soviet ideology. “Soviet” here does not designate an instance of a well-known genre. It designates, rather, the historical experience in which the genre undergoes a certain dialectical transformation. Before us is a “text” that both is and is not its generic form, that is, ideology, for it is the form’s becoming-other to itself. I place “text” in quotation marks to signal that I am aware of the alarming rate at which everything in the world around is turning into text and discourse. In no way do I mean to say that Soviet ideology is disembodied signification and nothing else. I place quotation marks around “genre” to indicate that I am using the word in reference to ideology only in a most indirect and provisional manner. All I wish to do presently is anticipate in more familiar terms an argument of significant complexity, which only the book as a whole can carry out properly. It would do for now if the heuristic analogy with literary genre helps us appreciate the nature of most problems we encounter when we try to define the Soviet ideology. They stem from the fact that we approach the phenomenon with definitions external to it, abstract notions arrived by classing it together with items (other ideologies) with which it is presumed to be of a kind. We thus allow no space for the thing to be its own (re-)definition, to make itself the other of what it is supposed to be. Such abstract schemes do not allow us to conceive the possibility that the text’s belonging to the “genre” may consist in nothing so much as the departure from it, that the fixed and positive identity we seek turns out to be this dynamic negativity. Ideology is not a genre, of course, not in any accepted meaning of the word; nor is Soviet ideology a text, as I will be arguing at length in the pages to follow. But it is form, even if not of the artistic variety. And whatever insight this book has to contribute begins with the insistence that ideology should be regarded as form. For this reason, the reader will not find here a systematic

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explication of Marxist-Leninist ideas, or a history of their modification over the lifespan of the Soviet Union. The content of Soviet ideology has been the subject of numerous studies, especially in the Soviet Union; this subject is now quite exhausted. In what follows, I will draw on Soviet exegeses of Marxism-Leninism, not in order to supplement them with one of my own, but in order to exhibit the movement of self-reflection and self-objectification through which the subject of this study transcended its own pre-defined form. Although introductions are where authors usually make methodological declarations, what I just proposed does not qualify as such a methodological gambit. The decision to regard ideology as form is not a “perspective” that this author has chosen to adopt, as one might choose to put on this pair of glasses rather than that one; it is not some special approach to the matter, which I have deemed more advantageous than alternative ways of looking at it. It is simply how the matter, Soviet ideology, presents itself. Although I did mention dialectics a short while ago, I certainly do not see it as an approach of that kind, a technical provision transcendent to the object of investigation, through which the said object is to be unlocked. Rather, dialectics is the discord that each individual entity is in itself. To think dialectically is not to adopt the “viewpoint” of contradiction, but simply to hearken in thought to this immanent discord. The exercise begins by asking whether the object is, indeed, what it is supposed to be. When the object proves to be “problematic,” which is to say, to be something other than its purported identity (as it inevitably must, since it has been taken in isolation, as something self-subsisting), dialectical thinking holds on to this negative result. For it, the object is this very resistance, or defiance, of definition; it is the negative of its assumed identity. As Hegel expresses it, “The dialectic . . . is this immanent transcending, in which the one-sidedness and the restrictedness of the determinations of the understanding displays itself for what it is, i.e., as their negation. That is what everything finite is: its own sublation.”70 The object is not a definite something that is “burdened” with problems, problems that some perfected methodology may solve. Rather, the object is nothing other than the problem that it has turned out to be. In this introduction, I wished to show that the supposedly definite thing we refer to as the Soviet ideology is similarly problematic. The very endeavor to define it causes it to appear as something other than what it is supposed to be. It is supposed to be content, a certain composite of ideas, meanings. But when we endeavor to grasp it as such, to specify just what this corpus “contains,” we end up with something partial and unsatisfactory. And we get to the standpoint of ideology as form by simply holding on to and interpreting this negative consequence: that Soviet ideology cannot be grasped in terms of content. We do not fetch this standpoint from some theoretical toolbox and

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bring it to bear on the matter, but simply follow where the line of the immanent “problematic” points us.71 The abstract adoption of a method, or theoretical framework, has characterized what might be called the “linguistic turn” in Soviet studies; its outcome has been to recast the old-fashioned problem of ideology as one of discourse and signification.72 Neil Robinson writes: To study ideology . . . is to study the vehicle that carries meaning, namely language, and to see how parts of that language, the concepts used and contained in political communication, are used to define relationships of power. The best way to see the effect of the content of ideology on politics is therefore to view ideology as discourse, an act of communication, and to discover what mechanisms regulate what can be communicated, what can be included and what is excluded in the discourse of ideology.73

One simply resolves to “view ideology as discourse,” avowedly because this way of looking at it is “the best way to see the effect of the content of ideology on politics.” The theoretical perspective is chosen the way one might choose the most suitable tool for a given job.74 An old instrument is tossed aside—in this case, the old paradigm of ideology as an edifice made up of levels—and a shiny new instrument (the mark “Made in France” clearly visible) takes its place. All this happens on the assumption that the material to which the tool is to be applied has a once-and-for-all given, unchanging nature; it is, therefore, we who must decide how this material should be handled.75 This type of abstract procedure handicaps Alexei Yurchak’s otherwise excellent Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. A ground-breaking contribution, it analyzes the transformation of official Soviet ideology during the post-Stalinist era, with particular attention to the Brezhnev years.76 It is just that Yurchak almost never speaks of ideology, preferring instead Bakhtin’s term “authoritative discourse.” The terminological switch is made as a matter of course. Yurchak takes it as self-evident that what we have before us is discourse, and so it should be treated as such. The approach comes pre-packaged, so to speak, with the disciplinary framework of linguistic anthropology. Yurchak then proceeds to trace a shift from the “referential” mode of Stalinist texts to the “performative” mode of the late Soviet period.77 In other words, although a dynamic is being analyzed, a change over time, the dynamic occurs within the unchanging framework of discourse analysis. The Soviet authoritative discourse first functions in one regime, then in another, but remains what it is throughout; it is discourse before and after the “shift.” The dynamic of the object, the change it undergoes, does not affect the analytical framework, the way the object is regarded, just as geological developments on Mars do not affect the choice of

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telescopes we use to observe them. But while it is safe to assume that Martian geology has had little influence on advances in optical technology here on Earth, things stand very differently with those figurative instruments called concepts and theories. Those do grow from the soil of history, the very same history in which the object to which they are to be “applied”—in our case, Soviet ideology—lives. This being so, one should be at least a little curious as to whether the historical coming-to-be of the object does not have something to do with the likewise historical coming-to-be of our concepts. What if these are moments of one and the same process? This would invalidate the strict separation, so fundamental to science and all disciplines that wish to emulate it, between the abstract subject of cognition and its object, between concept and datum. It was the vocation of much of nineteenth-century criticism to explicate how a given literary work “reflected” the world around us, what it “taught” its readers, what it “revealed” about the mind (and heart) of its author. In the early twentieth century, a group of young Russian philologists revolted against this tradition, claiming that all of those concerns are extraneous to literature, properly understood. Literature was an artifice, they argued, and understanding it amounts to understanding the principles and elements through which the artifice came to be. One should not busy oneself with civic ideas, moral principles, or psychological profundities, but with “devices,” principles of textual organization, realized effects. On the face of it, this was a confrontation between two “approaches.” On the face of it, the approaches were “applied” to the same thing, namely, literature. The object being such as it is, it seemed to be only a matter of deciding which approach is more appropriate to it, which allows us to see literature for what it truly is. Upon further thought, however, this way of regarding the situation proves to be inadequate. The approaches in question are not transcendent to the thing that they aim to comprehend. They belong to the fabric of culture to which literature, too, belongs. It is this fabric that radically changed around the turn of the century. As it did, literature and the theoretical reflection upon it changed together (which is not to say that they were somehow mechanically synchronized). The “instrument” was forged in the same process as the thing it was supposed to handle. What the Russian Formalists encountered as literature was very different—not just on the level of individual creations, but also as an institution—from what even their elderly contemporaries had become accustomed to call by that name. It was in actual literary practice (of the Russian Futurists, above all) that many of the Formalist theoretical positions originated. It was in contemporary artistic work that the consciousness of method was becoming ever more acute, the constituents of the real world were being treated as mere material for aesthetic constructions, and the work’s “effect” was increasingly divorced from whatever used to be called

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“meaning.” It was, first of all, modernist art and literature that were becoming “formalist,” and as this transformation was taking place, it cast new light on the entire artistic tradition. One might say that modernist practice itself was “reflecting” upon the art and literature of the past and giving new meaning to these phenomena. It was this reflection immanent to the cultural process that made possible, as a further outgrowth, the theoretical reflection of the Russian Formalists and the American New Critics. For this reason, to speak of “theory” or “methodology” that is brought to bear on, and “illuminate,” the object of literature is highly misleading. The object in question, since it is the work of human subjects, is suffused by consciousness and historically dynamic; being such, it is more than capable of illuminating itself. Just like the doctrine of literature, “the doctrine of ideology itself belongs to the movement of history, and . . . even if the substance of the concept of ideology has not changed, its function has, and is subject to these dynamics.”78 And so, the method adopted in the present inquiry is “to follow the movement of the concept, which is at the same time the movement of the thing.”79 In so doing, we shall eventually come to see the Soviet specimen as a dialectical transformation of that general thing, ideology. Soviet ideology, too, was a practical enterprise that “reflected” upon its presuppositions. We fail to do justice to it when we approach it with readymade definitions of ideology, definitions taken from some theoretical authority and “applied” to the empirical matter at hand. Instead, what we need to do is become aware of that immanent reflection that turns our object into subject, into the agent of its own definition, and interpret this dialectical movement. The Russian Formalists began their enterprise by asking what makes art artistic and literature literary.80 Everything they did subsequently can be seen as a multi-directional solution of this problem. To my knowledge, no Soviet intellectual ever explicitly asked what makes ideology ideological. And yet, as I will argue at length over the following pages, this question animated and defined the enterprise that was Soviet ideology; it was its internal, constitutive problematic. Soviet ideology was not a theoretical meditation on the essence of ideology, but rather a practical reproduction and exhibition of that essence. NOTES 1. “Until recently it appeared that the problem of Soviet ideology had died from sheer fatigue and been given a decent burial by the revisionist social historians” (Choi Chatterjee, “Ideology, Gender and Propaganda in the Soviet Union: A Historical Survey,” Left History 6, no. 2 [1999], 11). 2. Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction, New and Updated Edition (London: Verso, 2007), 4.

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3. This was George Kennan’s conviction, which opposed American realism to Soviet ideological fanaticism, and which powerfully shaped US foreign policy during the Cold War. See Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Heaven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 6–7. Hunt adds this explanation: “Precisely because Americans could afford to leave their ideology implicit and informal, they have tended to regard as unusual if not aberrant most other ideologies—such as those espoused by communist, fascist, or strongly nationalist regimes—which are couched in explicit, formal, even formulaic terms” (13–14). See also the quotation from George Lichtheim on p. 30 in the present study. 4. On the formation of the discipline of Russian Studies in the United States, see David C. Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 13–42. 5. For a wide-ranging historical account of the totalitarian approach, see Abbot Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Among the seminal texts that made totalitarianism the dominant framework for the study of the Soviet Union in the post-war period are: Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1973); Merle Fainsod, How Russia Is Ruled (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953); Carl J. Friedrich, ed., Totalitarianism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954); Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (New York: Praeger, 1966); Jakob L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker and Warburg, 1952). The fall of the Soviet Union stimulated a revival of the totalitarian approach during the 1990s, as evidenced by such historical studies as: François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, trans. Deborah Furet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York: Free Press, 1993); Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). For a ground-breaking engagement with the Cold-War politicization of Soviet studies, see Stephen Cohen, “Scholarly Missions: Sovietology as a Vocation,” in Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History since 1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 3–37. 6. Ronald G. Suny, “On Ideology, Subjectivity, and Modernity: Disparate Thoughts about Doing Soviet History,” Russian History 35, no. 1–2 (January 1, 2008), 251. 7. Bertram D. Wolfe, An Ideology in Power: Reflections on the Russian Revolution (New York: Stein and Day, 1969); Mikhail Geller and Aleksandr M. Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present (New York: Summit Books, 1986). 8. As revolutionary ferment in post-war Europe could not possibly be a reaction to real social inequity, it had to be explained as the mystifying lure of ideology, to which impoverished populations were said to be especially susceptible. 9. Alex Pravda, “Ideology and the Policy Process,” in Ideology and Soviet Politics, ed. Stephen White and Alex Pravda, Studies in Russia and East Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1988), 225.

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10. Sheila Fitzpatrick, “New Perspectives on Stalinism,” Russian Review 45, no. 4 (1986): 359. 11. For an account of the revisionist movement by a major protagonist, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Revisionism in Soviet History,” History and Theory 46, no. 4 (2007): 77–91. 12. David Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination, and Terror under Stalin, 1927–1941 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 1. For a cogent resume of the debates on early Soviet history, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Introduction,” in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London: Routledge, 1999): 1–14. 13. As Jochen Hellbeck writes, “a generation of social historians has revealed the active participation of large segments of the population in the Bolshevik enterprise. In the process, however, the Soviet order was strangely de-ideologized, and its workings were explained in terms of the ‘self−interests’ of the groups in society identified as its beneficiaries. Yet these historians made no attempt to critically examine the forms self-interest could take in a socialist society” (Jochen Hellbeck, “Everyday Ideology: Life during Stalinism,” Eurozine, February 2010). This objection to revisionism is not without problems of its own. Hellbeck seems to take for granted that the Soviet Union was a “socialist society,” characterized by its own distinct form of subjectivity. I criticize at length Stephen Kotkin’s cognate notion of a socialist “civilization” in chapter 5 of the present study. 14. Alfred G. Meyer, “Political Ideologies in the Soviet Union: Reflections on Past Attempts to Understand The Relationship between Ideas and Politics,” in Ideology and Soviet Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), 56. 15. John A. Armstrong, Ideology, Politics, and Government in the Soviet Union: An Introduction, 3d ed. [rev. and expanded] (New York: Praeger, 1974), 27–49. 16. Stephen White, “Ideology and Soviet Politics,” in Ideology and Soviet Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), 1. 17. Schull went on to remark: “In reviewing the broader scholarly literature on ideology, however, it appeared that the theoretical muddle was not limited to Soviet studies” (Joseph Schull, “What Is Ideology? Theoretical Problems and Lessons from Soviet-Type Societies,” Political Studies 40, no. 4 [1992]: 728–29). 18. Rachel Walker, “Marxism-Leninism as Discourse: The Politics of the Empty Signifier and the Double Bind,” British Journal of Political Science 19, no. 2 (1989): 162. 19. Michael David-Fox, Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), 75. 20. David-Fox, Crossing Borders, 77. 21. Hunt, xi. 22. Meyer, 44. 23. Moshe Lewin, “Grappling with Stalinism,” in The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York: The New Press, 1994), 304–10. 24. Brandenberger, 9–24. 25. Brandenberger, 4.

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26. Brandenberger, 257. 27. Stephen F. Cohen, “Bolshevism and Stalinism,” in Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New Brunswick, NJ: Routledge, 1998), 16; emphasis in the original. 28. Fainsod, 180–81. 29. Christel Lane, The Rites of Rulers: Ritual in Industrial Society—the Soviet Case (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Karen Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Indiana University Press, 2000); Malte Rolf, Soviet Mass Festivals, 1917–1991 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013). 30. Lewin, “Grappling,” 306. 31. Jan Plamper, The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). 32. As we saw, Brandenberger interprets the leader cult as an exigent ideological device for a regime struggling to legitimize itself and hoist a pre-modern society into modernity; yet he does not conceptualize why this pragmatology deserves the name ideology. Moshe Lewin takes the glorification of Stalin as a transgression of Marxism-Leninism, illustrating how inadequately official ideology mapped onto the realities of social life. Kristel Lane agrees that the cult cannot be accommodated by the principles of a socialist ideology. See Brandenberger, 52; Lewin, “Grappling,” 38–61; Lane, 24–25. 33. Brandenberger, 54–56. 34. Teun A. van Dijk, Ideology: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach (London: Sage, 1998), 6; emphasis in the original. 35. Meyer, 44. Because he cares for ideas manifested in actions, Meyer goes on to conclude that the “real” ideology of the Soviet period is that of modernization (52). 36. George Enteen has provided this lucid explanation of the totalitarian model’s second life, the one that began with the fall of state-socialist regimes in Eastern Europe: “If the theory of totalitarianism wanes, the concept itself has taken on a new life. Scholars living in the rubble of communism have picked up the term and wielded it with great dexterity. Outside the world of scholarship, it has become a household word in the regions of the ex-Soviet Union. Many people there feel that it describes their historical experience. Many Western scholars still seem to feel that, insofar as the term points in the direction of political acts and conscious intention as major historical determinants, it is a valuable concept. If the designation of an actual society as a totalitarian system is deemed too airy an abstraction, the term totalitarian as a modifier can, nevertheless, inform us about the aspirations and practices of various governments. Scholars on this side of the controversy think that the political perspective provides a better explanation of the end of communism than social history does” (George Enteen, “Robert V. Daniels’s Interpretation of Soviet History,” Russian Review 54, no. 3 [1995], 316). For a less sympathetic take on this second coming of the Cold War in Soviet studies, see Lynne Viola, “The Cold War in American Soviet Historiography and the End of the Soviet Union,” Russian Review 61, no. 1 (2002): 25–34. 37. Malia, Soviet Tragedy, 16.

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38. Malia, Soviet Tragedy, 16. 39. As Yanni Kotsonis cleverly observes in his review of The Soviet Tragedy, “Malia condemns Bolsheviks for being good socialists, not failed socialists.” See: Yanni Kotsonis, “The Ideology of Martin Malia,” Russian Review 58, no. 1 (January 1, 1999): 124. 40. Malia, Soviet Tragedy, 10. 41. Mihailo Markovic has formulated this general rule for interpreting early Soviet history: “The more conservative a theoretician is, the more eager he would spontaneously be to transfer a part of this odious emotional connotation from Stalinism to Marxism, and to explicate the latter in such a way as to almost analytically derive the view that the former was nothing but its necessary theoretical and practical consequence” (Mihailo Markovic, “Stalinism and Marxism,” in Stalinism: Essays in Historical Intepretation, ed. Robert C. Tucker [New Brunswick, NJ: Routledge, 1999], 299). 42. Malia, Soviet Tragedy, 190–91. Here Malia’s account echoes a passage in Fainsod’s seminal How Russia Is Ruled?: “[After the revolution], the tragedy of unintended consequences overtook [the Bolsheviks]. As they sought to come to terms with the pressures which impinged on them, visions of the future had to be modified or abandoned. Instruments became ends; the retention and consolidation of power dwarfed all other objectives. The party of revolution was transformed into the party of order” (Fainsod, 87). 43. Malia, Soviet Tragedy, 192. 44. Malia, Soviet Tragedy, 193. 45. Malia, Soviet Tragedy, 193. 46. Quoted in Cohen, “Bolshevism and Stalinism,” 6. 47. This accords with Cohen’s characterization of the totalitarian model of Soviet historiography, whose “blinkered purpose . . . was to dramatize the ‘inner totalitarian logic that had unfolded ‘inevitably’ between 1917 and the Stalinism of the 1940s and 1950s” (Cohen, “Scholarly Missions,” 20). 48. Kotsonis, 127. 49. Michael Waller formulates the dilemma as follows: “Instead of assuming that the ideas of Marx provide the ideology of the CPSU, it should be asked what the actual components of the CPSU’s ideology are” (Michael Waller, “What Is to Count as Ideology in Soviet Politics?,” in Ideology and Soviet Politics [London: Palgrave Macmillan,1988], 23). 50. Boris Groys, “The Problem of Soviet Ideological Practice,” Studies in Soviet Thought 33, no. 3 (1987): 191. 51. See, for instance, Graeme Gill, “Ideology and System-Building: The Experience under Lenin and Stalin,” in Ideology and Soviet Politics, ed. Stephen White and Alex Pravda (London: Palgrave Macmillan,1988), 59–82. 52. Martin Seliger, Ideology and Politics (New York: Free Press, 1976). The important collection, Ideology and Soviet Politics (1988), edited by Stephen White and Alex Pravda, acknowledges its debt to Seliger in its very title. 53. Seliger, Ideology and Politics, 108–21, 175–85.

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54. Neil Robinson, Ideology and the Collapse of the Soviet System: A Critical History of Soviet Ideological Discourse (Brookfield, VT: E. Elgar, 1995), 15. 55. As one author notes, “The question of [ideology’s content] . . . was not often asked, because the answer seemed so obviously to have been provided by the corpus of Marxism-Leninism” (White, 5). 56. Stephen White and Alex Pravda, “Preface,” in Ideology and Soviet Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), vii. 57. A useful overview of the definitions of ideology circulating in the social sciences, and the challenges they spawn, is offered in John Gerring, “Ideology: A Definitional Analysis,” Political Research Quarterly 50, no. 4 (1997): 957–94. In a more recent survey, Malcolm B. Hamilton identifies twenty-seven “definitional elements” that anchor the various approaches to ideology (Malcolm B. Hamilton, “The Elements of the Concept of Ideology,” Political Studies 35, no. 1 [March 1987]: 18–38). Terry Eagleton, for his part, lists sixteen possible definitions of the term (1–2). 58. Alfred B. Evans, Soviet Marxism-Leninism: The Decline of an Ideology (Praeger, 1993), 3–4. 59. For a general conception of ideology as a system of social beliefs, see Van Dijk, 28–52. 60. The assumption of ideological belief is criticized, among others, in Schull, 730–31, 735; Walker, 163. 61. Thus Waller avers that “our ideas of what is to count as ideology in Soviet politics have not included, to the extent that they should, the entire realm of ritual and the mythos” (32). 62. Waller, 27. 63. Quoted in Robert H. McNeal, “Trotskyist Interpretations of Stalinism,” in Stalinism: Essays in Historical Intepretation, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New Brunswick, NJ: Routledge, 1999), 49. 64. David-Fox, Crossing Borders, 79–80. 65. David-Fox, Crossing Borders, 79. 66. David-Fox, Crossing Borders, 78–79. 67. David-Fox admits the possibility of alternative taxonomies (Crossing Borders, 79). 68. At least one scholar has proposed that official Soviet ideology has no determinate content. See Walker. 69. There have been those who have questioned the usefulness of the broader concept of ideology. For a discussion, see Gerring, 960–62. 70. G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic: Part I of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zusätze, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1991), 128. 71. I use the term “problematic” in a markedly different sense from that which Louis Althusser (following Gaston Bachelard) has popularized. For Althusser, a “problematic” is a generative structure of meaning that constitutes a field of intellectual production and defines it as the field that it is. What unifies the field is the kind of fundamental questions that the texts belonging to it are compelled to address (une problématique). By contrast, my use of the term references the Hegelian theme of

Introduction

25

constitutive contradiction in the object of knowledge. For Hegel, an object never coincides with its definition, because a “definition” comes—by definition—from outside the object. Each object has its truth in the other. Knowledge is adequate to its object when it registers (and develops) this contradiction. See: Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2005), 49–86; Louis Althusser and Ètienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Review, 1970), 25. 72. David-Fox, Crossing Borders, 91–94. For a discussion of the two concepts and their intellectual contexts, see Trevor Purvis and Allan Hunt, “Ideology, Discourse, Ideology, Discourse. . . . ” The British Journal of Sociology 44, no. 3 (1993): 473–99. 73. Robinson, 19. 74. An identical approach is implemented in Schull. 75. John Levi Martin has characterized this abstract approach as “nominalist epistemology,” writing: “we tend to assume that general theoretical terms must be created by the analyst and are heuristic devices used to greater or lesser success in particular analyses. Thus we assume that each investigator is basically free to choose how to define his or her terms, and the worst that we can say regarding a particular case is that the definitions didn’t help much” (John L. Martin, “What Is Ideology?” Sociologia, Problemas e Práticas 77 [2015]: 10). 76. Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 77. For an extended critique of Yurchak’s “shift,” see Petre Petrov, “The Rule of Reality and the Reality of the Rule (On Soviet Ideology and Its ‘Shift’),” Studies in East European Thought 73, no. 4 (2021): 435–57. 78.Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, Aspects of Sociology, trans. John Viertel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 183. 79. Frankfurt Institute, 183. 80. See: Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” in Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (London: Dalkey, 1991), 1–14; Roman Jakobson, Noveishaia russkaia poeziia. Nabrosok pervy: Podstupy k Khlebnikovu (Prague: Politika, 1921).

Chapter 1

What Makes an Ideology Ideological?

The question asked by this book’s title, What Was Soviet Ideology?, should not be understood to imply that we have identified our subject, back in the past, have it in our sights, so to speak, and it is now just a matter of discerning more clearly its features and deciding on its exact nature. Rather, as I suggested a few pages back, we find ourselves in a more basic uncertainty: far from having anything definite in our sights, we need to first find what out we should be looking for. The book’s title, then, really asks: what do we mean when we speak about ideology in the context of Soviet history and society? What does the word “pick out” from that context? This chapter does not aim to resolve the uncertainty; in a way, the goal is just the opposite: to deepen it, while giving the problem a more definite theoretical shape. I do this by exploring the tension, conceptual as well as political, between two senses of the word “ideology.” One picks out an existent: an ideology. The other picks out a relation, the ideological. Both will prove inadequate for theorizing the Soviet specimen. But it is only through awareness of them, of their opposition, but also of their principled connection, that we could begin to unfold the dialectic of ideology as form. THE IDEOCRACY THESIS Many early discussions of Soviet socialism were driven by a conviction, at once forceful and vague, that one was dealing with a hyper-ideological phenomenon. I say vague, because this conviction was not based on any theoretical probing of what “ideology” or “ideological” might mean, but instead proceeded from the impression that doctrinal ideas were absolutely decisive in the affairs of Soviet society. 27

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In 1937, exiled Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev, addressing himself to a Western audience, explained that Communism in his native land was not quite the same thing as Marxism.1 It was, rather, the latest embodiment of the Russian Idea, an essentially religious striving diverted to secular aims and perverted in the process.2 The Russian Idea was the emanation of—what else?—the Russian soul, in which a history of enduring social inequity, and lasting impotence to counteract that inequity, had instilled apocalypticism, utopianism, radicalism, dogmatism, and “totalitarianism” (a fashionable new word at the time Berdiaev was writing). The Russian radical intelligentsia transferred these genetic traits onto the latest intellectual import from the West, Marxism, imbuing it with energy and meaning that it did not possess in se. Thus, when the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, it was really the (disfigured) Russian Idea itself that came to power. Its demiurgic maximalism appealed to the “instinct of the masses,”3 because they were, after all, the bearers of the Russian soul.4 In such a genealogy, Soviet socialism appeared as a secular religion, “a pseudomorphosis of theocracy,”5 while the Bolsheviks figured as a modern priesthood in the service of radical utopian thought; the proletariat took the place of the suffering Russian narod as the prime object of mystic devotion and messianic redemption.6 The notions of secular religion and ideocracy, both key ingredients of the totalitarian interpretative model, have enjoyed long intellectual lives. The former, famously championed by Raymond Aron in the 1940s and 1950s,7 reemerged in the early 1990s to anchor an entire academic subfield devoted to the study of “political religions.”8 As for that other, cognate idea, that Soviet socialism should be seen as the autocratic rule of ideas, its multiple iterations include: Waldemar Gurian’s introduction of the term “ideocracy” into the discourse of Western political science9; Hannah Arendt’s pioneering description of totalitarianism, in which Fascism and Stalinism are to be seen as kin instances of a world dominated by the lethal “logic of an idea”10; the enthronement by Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski of “indoctrination” as a pivotal category for the understanding of Soviet society11; dissident Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski’s view of the Soviet Union as an “ideological state,” a descendant of Plato’s ideal republic12; Richard Pipes’s very similar genealogy of Soviet Marxism, in which the totalitarian bent of Russian statehood is traced to the times of medieval Muscovy13; Carl A. Linden’s characterization of the regime as “despotic ideocracy”14; and Malia’s virulent indictment of the same evil, in a slightly different wording (“ideocratic partocracy”),15 which, as we saw, he combined with a no less virulent insistence that socialism in fact was built in Russia, and built fully in accordance with “the moral idea of socialism.”16 The work done by social historians since the 1960s seemed to stand imposingly in the way of anyone who might wish to claim that Marxism-Leninism had

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determined totalistically the shape of life in the Soviet Union. Conservatives like Malia were not deterred. All that needed to be done was to reduce the official creed to a few “fateful” principles: abolition of private property, the legitimacy of revolutionary violence in the context of class struggle, central planning, one-party rule. These were said to have made up the “genetic code” of Soviet socialism, “the formula on which the system had rested from the beginning.”17 One could then speak of a “fatal logic” by which everything important in Soviet history had played itself out. Thus shorn of much of its contents and turned into a malicious historical virus, the Idea proved to be, again, all-powerful. In the new millennium, cultural theorist Mikhail Epstein took up the ideocracy thesis, buttressing it with a far-reaching philosophical claim.18 Echoing Berdiaev,19 he contended that Marxism, which so many have faulted for facile materialist determinism, was in fact an idealist undertaking, a veritable culmination in the long life of Platonism on European soil.20 It was Marx, the argument went, who first “deduced a system of severe ideocracy,”21 while his Russian disciples merely realized the full implications of his thought. Thus, Epstein felt justified in referring to Soviet ideology as “Marxist Platonism” or “Plato-Marxism”: “an idealism that asserts itself as the regulative principle of material life.”22 The Soviet state, then, was ideological to a superlative degree: not only was it ruled by a preconceived system of ideas, whose particular content may be this or that; before any content, it was ruled by the Idea as such, that is, by Reason’s insatiable hunger for unification.23 A similar insistence is to be found in the voluminous and influential work of sociologist Aleksandr Zinov'ev. For him too, Soviet Marxism is not one ideology among others, but the essential manifestation of this phenomenon in history, ideology par excellence. In Communism as Reality we read: “This is the most significant form of ideology in the history of humanity. Its example allows one to see most clearly the properties of ideology in general.”24 Curiously, Zinov'ev prefaces these words by stating that nothing necessitated the adoption of Marxism as the doctrine of state socialism in Russia. He, thus, presents us with an ideology that is somehow both preeminently exemplary and preeminently fortuitous. IDEOLOGIES VERSUS IDEOLOGY The reason why Soviet ideology “allows one to see most clearly the properties of ideology in general” is fairly straightforward. The exponents of the ideocracy thesis really did not have a notion of “ideology in general,” one which would be independent—and prior—to what it aimed to comprehend. As the introduction to this volume suggested, in Soviet studies, ideology

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has very rarely been treated as concept, a cognitive model for understanding society. Instead, it has lived its life mostly as a name that refers us unproblematically to a fact in the world, to an entity with objective existence. Rather than being an a priori intellectual construction that allows us to make sense of a historical social order, “ideology” has served as the transparent designation for a thing existing within this order, a most conspicuous body in its landscape. A different way of putting this is to say that students of the Soviet Union have mostly asked about an ideology, rarely about ideology. In this, they have been in accord with the dominant approach to the subject within the American social sciences. In the words of Michael Freeden, “No longer is ideology regarded as an aberration of perception or of understanding; instead, a positivist empiricism is harnessed to identify and investigate a widespread social phenomenon: the existence of organized, articulated, and consciously held systems of political ideas incorporating beliefs, attitudes and opinions, though latent beliefs are also included.”25 The fact that Soviet studies were born and developed as an endeavor to “know your enemy”26 goes a long way in explaining the shift of focus from the conceptual universal to the empirical singularity. The utility of theoretical deliberations on what ideology might mean in general paled before the conspicuous appearance on the historical scene of political regimes that unabashedly proclaimed having an ideology. That one such regime continued to exist after World War II, now with a menacingly enlarged European dominion, and continued to declare its ambition to implement its founding doctrine, shaped decisively how ideology was understood in the newly constituted academic field. Writing in the mid-1960s, George Lichtheim offered illuminating commentary on this political and intellectual context: Since these democracies had recently been engaged in a mortal struggle with fascism, and were then at grips with the Stalinist variant of communism, the notion suggested itself that what distinguished them was the rejection of totalitarian creeds, that is, attempts to reorganize society dictatorially under one-party control, in the name of some political philosophy or Weltanschauung. These systems were then dubbed “ideological,” and in this manner Miss Arendt’s fantasies about German and Russian history received the imprimatur of academic sociology. In the process the traditional understanding of the term “ideology” was sacrificed to a political aim, that of demonstrating that communism (and by implication socialism in general) ran counter to the general movement of Western society—the latter being pluralistic and therefore resistant to all attempts to implant a “utopian new order” in the name of a revolutionary “ideology.”27

In short, the universal was modeled on the particular; the notion of ideology became a replica of “actually existing” state ideologies.

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This tendentious inversion, whereby the singular becomes the standard for the universal, is clearly in evidence in Arendt’s influential early account of totalitarian dictatorships. Without mentioning any previous theorization of ideology, without even considering that such a theorization might be necessary, Arendt proposes that the word should speak for itself. But when the word is made to speak on the pages of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), what we hear is less the testimony of some inherent and general sense than a very specific interpretation tailored to capture very recent historical phenomena: An ideology is quite literally what its name indicates: it is the logic of an idea. Its subject matter is history, to which the “idea” is applied; the result of this application is not a body of statements about something that is, but the unfolding of a process which is in constant change. The ideology treats the course of events as though it followed the same “law” as the logical exposition of its “idea.” Ideologies pretend to know the mysteries of the whole historical process—the secrets of the past, the intricacies of the present, the uncertainties of the future— because of the logic inherent in their respective ideas.28

At no point in this much-quoted passage is Arendt aiming for the concept. The use of articles before the noun, as well as the plural form (“ideologies”), makes this abundantly clear. On the previous page, she has indicated already that her concern is with these relatively recent things—the ideologies—which “can explain everything and every occurrence by deducing it from a single premise.”29 Arendt is describing historical phenomena, and if she attempts a gesture of definition, it is only as a generalization from these existing entities. The genus she sets up has only two species—Fascism and Stalinism—and is defined solely through them and their perceived commonalities. The example of Friedrich and Brzezinski, in their Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956), is perhaps more revealing still. For they really want to set off from a general definition of the term before proceeding to consider the case of totalitarian political faiths.30 And yet, the logic of their undertaking is such that it drives them inexorably toward the same result. They begin by quoting Talcott Parsons (a colleague at Harvard),31 who had characterized ideology as an integrative social medium that articulates a community’s norms, values, and goals in relation to the total situation in which the community finds itself.32 Without much ado, the two authors dismiss this definition for being un-usefully broad. In lieu of substantiating their rejection, they issue a counterstatement: “Ideologies are of much less general and more recent significance. They arise in connection with parties and movements maintaining explicit systems of thought; they are the product of the age of mass communication.”33 This assertion in no way proves that Parsons’s model was flawed. But it does prove that Friedrich and Brzezinski have something completely

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different in mind. Parsons had spoken of ideology as a sociological universal; they wished to speak of particular political ideologies. Although, by this point in the text, it has become apparent that Friedrich and Brzezinski do not really need a guiding concept, since they know in advance what ideologies are, they nevertheless move on to consider another influential sociological thesis: that of Karl Mannheim. In the nearly two decades since its translation into English (1936), Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia (1929) had become an important reference point for social scientists in the West; this was certainly the text most responsible for making ideology a salient item on the academic agenda.34 Yet Mannheim’s contribution came with a complementary serving of epistemological anxiety: all social knowledge was situated and, as such, at odds with objective reality. His sociological theory, which drew on Marx while also distancing itself from him, made ideology (and utopia) a function of social position; it mapped society as a dynamic totality of such positions in an ongoing interaction. Mannheim’s “general” conception of ideology rested on the radically relativist assumption that “the thought of all parties in all epochs is of an ideological character.”35 Mannheim made a valiant effort to fence off a special space of objectivity for the social scientist,36 but while it was clear why such epistemological privilege may be desirable, it remained dubious whether it is theoretically tenable.37 These were doubts that Friedrich and Brzezinski could not afford to entertain. They confidently take the position of objective observers and, from it, restate their thesis that ideologies are the armaments of political parties and activist movements. They also dismiss the dichotomy of “ideology” and “utopia,” which in Mannheim sets apart systems of thought tied to the maintenance of the status quo and those aimed at its transcendence.38 Since this distinction is not readily applicable to the twentieth-century political systems Friedrich and Brzezinski are dealing with, it is jettisoned outright.39 The authors want to make it clear that “utopia,” far from being an antipode of “ideology,” is a constitutive dimension of the latter. Once again, a reference to recent history settles the issue: the two totalitarian regimes have shown conclusively that ideologies necessarily aim at a radical transformation of the existing order; ergo, ideologies are inherently utopian.40 Having discarded conceptual alternatives they never seriously considered, Friedrich and Brzezinski proceed to offer their own definition of ideology as “a reasonably coherent body of ideas concerning practical means of how to change and reform a society, based upon a more or less elaborate criticism of what is wrong with the existing, or antecedent, society.”41 (This happens to be a merely cosmetic modification of Karl Wittfogel’s characterization of totalitarian doctrines quoted on the same page.42) No secret is made of the fact that the supposedly general notion is only the compulsive shadow cast upon thought by two particular political regimes.43

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33

It would be unjust to charge Friedrich and Brzezinski with the intellectual subterfuge of replacing one thing with another: the universal quality (the “ideological”) with the singular instance (“an ideology”). At every step, their text eloquently testifies that for them the very possibility of such a distinction has disappeared. Their mistreatment of Parsons and Mannheim is so blatant, so disarmingly unfair, that one must suspect a fundamental blockage: the question of ideology has been occluded from the outset, made unthinkable by the political conspicuity of an ideology. An inversion has taken place whereby the species has asserted itself forcefully, taking the place of the genus, so that existing characterizations of the genus (not only in Parsons and Mannheim, but also in Marx, with whom Brzezinski was certainly well acquainted) begin to appear as inadequate or, at best, unenlightening generalities. That this blockage was not restricted to the thinking of Friedrich and Brzezinski can be seen by perusing the proceedings of the conference on totalitarianism convened three years prior to the publication of Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, in 1953, at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Except for a momentary intervention by Alex Inkeles,44 all those who spoke about ideology did so in terms of an explicit doctrine mobilized toward (radical) political aims and in turn capable of mobilizing masses of followers. And it is the same understanding that dominated the “end-of-ideology” debate of the late 1950s and 1960s.45 For intellectuals like Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Edward Shils, World War II and Stalin’s gulags had marked the end of secular religions, more precisely—of the power of systematized belief over the minds of men. Using simpler language, they were describing the very condition that, two decades later, Jean-François Lyotard will diagnose as the deligitimation of meta-narratives.46 What these theorists did not ask (and neither did Lyotard) was whether the end of ideologies was also the end of the ideological.47 As I have suggested, for many liberal intellectuals in the West this question was foreclosed from the outset, insofar as the adjectival meaning was derived from the nominal one, rather than the other way around.48 Against this background—whose enduring significance for Soviet studies cannot be overemphasized—the assertion of someone like Zinov'ev that Marxism-Leninism is the supreme example of ideology should be seen as both highly justified and highly vacuous. For if one begins with a (supposedly) general notion that has been pre-modeled, consciously or not, on the worldviews institutionalized by twentieth-century dictatorships, and then turns around to notice that Soviet ideology embodies the notion perfectly, the procedure’s unacknowledged circularity indicts its result as a banality.49 The shift whereby the classical—and critical—notion of ideology has come to be overshadowed by that other meaning, favored by political science

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and applicable to particular political doctrines, has been identified and criticized by Claude Lefort: Thus, by means of a remarkable ruse, ideology has come to designate almost the contrary of what it originally meant. Once referring to the logic of dominant ideas, removed from the knowledge of social actors and only revealing itself through interpretation, through the critique of utterances and their manifest connections, it has today been reduced to a corpus of theses, to the system of beliefs that provides the visible framework of a collective practice, identified with liberal-democratic discourse for some, with Leninist or Stalinist (indeed Maoist or Trotskyist) discourse for others, or even with fascist discourse; and it is identified with these discourses in the very form in which they present themselves.50

It should be pointed out that the subsumption of what I have called the “adjectival” sense of ideology under the nominal one is far from being politically innocent. When the historical singularity, “ideology in the flesh,” is taken as the measure for what ideology is in general, the latter is thereby locked into an extant object, contained, and thus kept at a safe distance. One could handle it without fear of contagion and without feeling compelled to explain one’s motives. If ideology is identified with rigid systems of thought that cast fanatically demiurgic designs in pseudo-scientific formulas, then one’s stance against this vice is likely to be seen as being also outside it. Terry Eagleton has written sarcastically on the implication of such a theoretical position: “What this comes down to is that the Soviet Union is in the grip of ideology while the United States sees things as they really are. This, as the reader will appreciate, is not in itself an ideological viewpoint.”51 *** The intellectual trend I have been describing made it difficult to ask in any meaningful way about the relationship between ideology and social reality. This is because the two terms were set ab initio in opposition to each other. Any interaction between them could only be an external one, a matter of collision between radically foreign substances. Since ideology was taken in the sense of fanatic utopian thought, a divorce from the real world was definitive of it. A product of arid, schematizing reason, ideology could only be inimical to reality, the latter understood to involve irreducible complexity, proliferating particularity, contingency, and indeterminacy. Whereas in the ideocracy thesis (totalitarian-utiopian) thought and reality are abstractly opposed, so that it could only be a question of the former doing harm to the latter, the standpoint of the ideological involves a dialectic between the two. Social reality is seen as unfolding through thought, which means that thought, even when it lies, testifies to reality. Thus,

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35

to speak of the “ideological” is to tacitly evoke a pact with hermeneutic reason. Representations are deemed “ideological” in that they reveal the world through what they say about it. The interpretation of ideology begins with the “saying,” that is, with the referential content of a text, and proceeds to do the “revealing.” By meditating on the content of a discourse, we become aware of what has conditioned the production of that discourse. Something “comes through” the explicit content: an intention, subjectivity, situation, contradiction. This is the “moment of truth” in ideology, the prize for the hermeneutic effort. The ideological, succinctly expressed, is the connection made between the content and structure of thought, on the one hand, and its worldly conditions of possibility, on the other. Consider Mannheim’s twin conception of ideology and utopia. On numerous occasions throughout the book, Mannheim refers to historically specific ideologies and utopias. These are individual instances of social thought, each possessing distinct intellectual content. But they only qualify under the general categories of analysis insofar as they embody the ideological or the utopian.52 There is a general principle that is prior to all empirical singularities. And the principle, tout court, is this: the thinking attributable to a social group is inflected by the total situation in which the group leads its historical existence. In both ideology and utopia, thought is “pregnant” with a situation. If a group’s concrete existence dictates that it should strive to arrest the forces of historical development, then its thought would obey the principle of ideology. If, inversely, a group’s situation puts it at odds with the current social order, this casts collective thought in the shape of utopia. In both cases, thought distorts reality. Yet the distortion, because it follows an intelligible principle, itself becomes a code for the real. In the remainder of this chapter, I will consider whether this dialectic of thought and reality accords with our knowledge of Soviet ideology. The discussion is divided into four subheadings, each devoted to a specific interpretation of ideology in what I have called the “adjectival” sense. My goal is to show that our subject resists all such interpretations; it defies the pact with hermeneutic reason. IDEOLOGY AS FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS Like most other interpretations, this one has its roots in the work of Marx and Engels, since this is also where the main tradition of theorizing ideology originates. (The positivist analysis of ideas initiated at the Institut de France shortly after the revolution of 1789, and associated with the name of Antoine Destutt de Tracy, has had a meager intellectual posterity.)53 This is also the interpretation against which many of the later theses on the subject were

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elaborated. The phrase “false consciousness” appears in Engels’s letter to Mehring,54 although it is not to be found in the texts penned by Marx. In famous passage in The German Ideology (1846), Marx and Engels describe ideology as the domain in which men’s actual circumstances undergo an inversion, “as in a camera obscura.”55 The ostensible target is German philosophy, and more specifically—the school of the Young Hegelians, which means that this seminal Marxist account is directed against an ideology. Its domain, however, is defined not by the systematicity of the ideas that compose it (i.e., not by its character as a doctrine), but rather by the mechanism of illusory projection-separation. Ideology is that which is detached from real life, but in such a way that the detachment itself is to be explained from real life. Idealist thought takes its own products—abstract representations—as the true determinants of nature and society. This is its delusion, its “otherworldliness,”56 but another emphasis immediately follows: “this phenomenon [the ideological inversion] arises just as much from [men’s] life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.”57 Thus, the ideological is determined in a twofold manner: both as that which is otherworldly and as that which is rooted. It is important to notice that these two aspects do not fall asunder, as unrelated observations on the same subject. They constitute a unity, in which one is subordinated to the other: as abstract, ideas are rooted; their very otherworldliness is something worldly.58 The falsity of bourgeois consciousness is its idealism, but this idealism is materially determined. The chapter on the fetishism of commodities in the first volume of Capital initiates an account of false consciousness that differs markedly from the meditations in The German Ideology.59 Instead of the general talk of “inversion,” Marx now describes the concrete workings of commodity production and circulation as reflected in human consciousness. As agents in the life of capital, both producers and consumers, exploiters and exploited, are guided by mystified appearances. These arise immediately from the very form of economic relations process under capitalism, whose nucleus is the commodity form. The appearances dissimulate the essential truth of capitalism; yet the dissimulation in question is no longer an idiosyncrasy that first plays itself out “in the brain.” Rather, it issues from the very mechanism by which bourgeois society reproduces itself.60 The illusion is objective and necessary: the very metabolism of capital makes it so that toilers see the sale of their labor as an act of equal exchange, just as consumers and producers see exchange value as an inherent property of whatever they are buying and selling.61 It is the world itself that is inverted, not its representation by human consciousness: “the actual agents of production themselves feel completely at home in these estranged and irrational forms of capital-interest, land-rent, labor-wages, for these are precisely the configurations of appearance in which

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they move, and with which they are daily involved.”62 On this account, the everyday consciousness in bourgeois society is “false” not in its idealism, but precisely in its realism. It takes things exactly as they are.63 The worker sees his labor power as a commodity, because it has become that; producers believe they are marketing quantities of abstract value because the market has in fact brought their goods into a system of universal equivalence.64 While in Marx and Engels the notion of ideology as false consciousness is mostly implicit, in Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (1923) it receives an explicit and extensive elaboration. The starting point is Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism and his concept of reification.65 The falsity Lukács attributes to the dominant mode of thought in bourgeois society has the character of an objective limitation. This thought is inherently incapable of grasping the totality of the social process. Such a view of the whole would reveal the contradiction endemic to the capitalist system and portend its inevitable demise. Bourgeois consciousness cannot attain this cognition, since doing so would amount to something like a cognitive suicide. It, therefore, becomes a false consciousness by necessity. It must misrecognize its world and its being in it so as to preserve its own integrity.66 The limits that constrain bourgeois thought are the objective limits of the capitalist mode of production.67 Although necessarily brief, this gloss of Lukács’s position on ideology suffices to indicate that the aspect of misrepresentation, that is, of “falsity,” is seen as a function of a real contradiction located on the level of socio-economic existence. Can Soviet ideology be characterized as a historical form of false consciousness? Historian Robert V. Daniels has devoted much of his later work to substantiating an affirmative answer to this question.68 He finds that while the phrase has been evoked quite frequently in studies of the Soviet Union, the concept behind it has not been used to its full theoretical potential. Daniels sets out to do this in a chapter explicitly titled “Stalinist Ideology as False Consciousness.”69 Both The German Ideology and History and Class Consciousness are cited here, yet the reader would have difficult time discerning just what it is that Daniels takes from these texts. The notion of false consciousness, as he uses it in reference to ideological Stalinism, bears no resemblance to what either Marx or Lukács understood by it. Daniels believes that his thesis will be proven if he shows the two parts of the expression to be applicable to Soviet history. In other words, his argument seeks to establish that (1) official ideology was false, in the sense of being an inadequate representation of the real state of affairs at home and abroad70; (2) this same ideology was consciousness, meaning that it was the actual mindset of the great majority of Soviet citizens.71 In the chapter’s concluding statement, the two premises are articulated side by side: “the state imposed false consciousness—in other words, official lies—and inculcated it

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so effectively that to the end it remained part of the mental equipment of a large part of articulate Soviet society.”72 The second premise, which harkens back to the totalitarian school of thought, is difficult to accept, as it assumes the omnipotence of propaganda and reduces human minds to blank slates on which the state inscribes at will the characters of its dogma. But even if both parts of the argument were allowed to stand as given, they would still not amount to the proof Daniels seeks. The purely external addition of “false” and “consciousness” fails to reestablish the unity of the original definition, as we find it in the classics of Marxism. Against his explicit intentions, Daniels succeeds in showing why the notion of false consciousness is inapplicable to Soviet ideology.73 A misrepresentation propagated dogmatically is not the same as misrecognition determined objectively. We are dealing with two very different meanings of “falsity.” One amounts to a consciously implemented deception; the other implies an unconscious mechanism of distortion, itself geared to socio-economic relations. If Soviet ideology lies, it certainly does not do this through some unreflected causality that begins at the material foundations of social life. Even if we assume that an overwhelming number of Soviet citizens saw themselves as inhabiting the earthly kingdom of equality, liberty, and joyous labor—certainly a far-fetched assumption—it would be incongruous to deduce this deceptive appearance from some objective processes shaping people’s common existence. IDEOLOGY AS CLASS POSITION This understanding of ideology could very well accompany the previous one (as it did for Lukács). Yet it is worth treating it separately inasmuch as it allows us to distinguish a sociological, or socio-political, problematic from the epistemological concern with the truth or falsity of representations. When the latter concern is put aside, the door is opened for a positive definition of ideology as the more or less consistent body of conceptions and beliefs characteristic of a social group or society as a whole. Such a non-evaluative sense of ideology, which does not seek to indict the adherents of a given worldview, was advocated first by Mannheim as part of his program for a sociology of knowledge. It subsequently became dominant in the social sciences, where it has been used largely without reference to class formations and antagonisms.74 In the Marxist camp, the postulate that each class is defined by its determinate place in the socio-economic structure led to the idea that social collectives also occupied a determinate position from which to cognize the world. From here, it was a short step to the conclusion that each class entered the struggle for political dominance armed with its own ideology. This step was taken in the years of the Second International, and received

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its signal expression in Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? (1902), which opposes bourgeois political thought to something called “socialist ideology.”75 The latter was, for Lenin—as it will be for Lukács two decades later—not the empirical consciousness actually attained by the proletariat, but rather the full self-consciousness attainable by it. In short, it was scientific socialism. First elaborated by politically committed intellectuals, this superior form of knowledge was to be introduced from the outside into the workers’ movement, as an essential corrective to the “trade-union” consciousness endemic to that movement. It was Lukács who supplied the philosophical backing for the view of revolutionary ideology as synonymous with the optimal self-awareness of a class-subject. With the concept of “imputed” consciousness, he also reaffirmed Lenin’s promotion of a requisite system of thought over the actual beliefs of the individuals making up a class.76 The trouble with applying this conception of ideology to Soviet realities should be immediately apparent. There are only two possibilities for how such an argument may go, corresponding to two possible subjects to which the ideological consciousness can be attributed; both must be objected to, although for different reasons. The first option is to treat the Soviet version of Marxism as the genuine expression of the class being of the now-victorious proletariat—a proposition that defeats itself in that it simply repeats the counterfeit claim of the Party orthodoxy. Alternatively, one might seek to attribute the dominant ideology to a dominant group, following the well-known dictum from The German Ideology that “the ideas of a ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”77 And indeed, an influential thesis holds that, under the banner of proletarian dictatorship, the Soviet regime was in fact the rule of a different class: the Party bureaucracy. This position, hotly debated by Trotskyists and their opponents in the years leading up to World War II,78 was expounded in later dissident texts like Milovan Djilas’s The New Class (1955) and Georg Konrád and Iván Szelényi’s The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (1979).79 But even if—provisionally endorsing such an interpretation—one posits the existence of a more or less coherent ruling class defined by a historically novel form of property relations,80 this is still very far from concluding that the state ideology somehow expresses the existential situation of that class. Thus, it is not clear what one should make of the following statement by historian Giovanni Bofa: “Ideological orthodoxy . . . actually represented the consciousness—or if you prefer, the ‘false consciousness’—of the whole directing stratum of Soviet society.”81 If this is taken to mean that conscious adherence to the party line, through all its zigzags, guided the behavior of Soviet officials, we would have an innocuous restatement of common knowledge, with which everyone would readily agree. But if the

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suggestion is that the “orthodoxy” was a mindset genetically determined by the mode of existence of the new class, then it is plainly wrong. The set-up is simple: on one side, we have our corporate subject, while on the other—the consciousness that “belongs” to it. The attribution, however, remains purely external. In no way could the subject be said to be the source of the ideas said to belong to it, for they predate its birth. It is through these very ideas, politically implemented (the leading role of the Party, the nationalization of property, the centrally planned economy, et cetera), that the subject is first constituted. As Djilas emphasized, the peculiarity of the new class consisted in its purely political (rather than economic) genesis.82 By contrast, the notion of ideology as class position refers to instances of knowledge that arise from existing relations of production, from forms of living social practice. It is this genetic dependence that allows us to read back: from the ideas to the practice of which they are a reflection. But in the Soviet case, such a hermeneutic ends up in a short circuit. Insofar as Leninist doctrine openly proclaims the supremacy of the Party, it is highly misleading to say that it “expresses” the practical consequences of this very idea. Where practice is the materialization of ideology, it is impossible to claim that ideology is the coming-toconsciousness of practice. None of this is meant to deny that Stalinism featured ideological “innovations” directly beneficial to the governing elites. One thinks of the slogan “Cadres decide everything,” under which the regime established a non-egalitarian system of remuneration, and thereby catalyzed a process of social stratification.83 But to collect such features and brand them as the ideology of Stalinism, in order to show, at the next step, that this ideology was shaped by class interest, is to move in a vicious circle.84 One can easily find other official ideologemes that escape such an interpretation. Nothing is more native to Stalinism than the idea of the “enemy among us” (itself derived from the premise that victorious socialism inflames the class struggle, while also making it more covert), and yet it defies explanation in terms of hegemonic class interest. One would have to admit that during the purges of 1936–1938, it was the “ruling class without tenure”85 that suffered most from the practical consequences of this dominant idea. For much the same reasons that invalidate a view of Soviet ideology as a correlate of class position, a more broadly economist account of the same phenomenon proves hopelessly inadequate. No deep analysis is needed to show that official doctrine did not arise from the infrastructure of social production in the manner in which Marx first described it in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859).86 The doctrine was in place much before the “base” of which it was supposed to be an effect. The process we find at work from the very beginning of Soviet history is exactly the opposite of what the founders of Marxism and their followers of

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the Second International thought to be the genesis of intellectual products, legal norms, and political institutions. In Soviet Russia, these were not the offspring of fundamental material forces, but comprised the instrumentality through which such forces were first constituted and mobilized.87 IDEOLOGY AS IMAGINARY RELATION In a powerful reworking of traditional Marxist positions, French philosopher Louis Althusser presented ideology not as an affair between reality and consciousness mediated by either class position or an objective dynamic of distortion, but as a relationship of social reality to itself mediated by an imaginary instance.88 The point of departure is Marx of “The Fetishism of Commodities,” where the functioning of the capitalist system is shown to produce a structure of phenomenal appearances with the character of objective and necessary illusion (see above). Althusser developed this insight, supplementing it with the perspective of psychoanalysis (Freud inflected through Lacan) and furnishing a perspective largely missing from traditional Marxist analyses: the making of the individual (as) subject.89 The result is an original and provocative account that aspires to connect the macro-realities of historical formations and economic structures to the hidden recesses of identity formation. And it is nothing other than ideology that secures this connection. Its role, as Althusser sees it, is precisely that of “personalizing” the impersonal, cold necessities of the socio-economic process. Ideology, then, is the name Althusser gives to the requisite instrumentality that ensures the insertion of individuals into the mechanism by which a form of social being reproduces itself. Insofar as it fulfills this very real and very necessary function—or, better, insofar as it is this function—ideology is not “false.” And neither is it consciousness. . . . Althusser does not tire of repeating that ideology is not about ideas.90 It is about how people live their lives with other people in determinate structures of social practice and intercourse. The consciousness with which they do so is but a function of the unconscious “recruitment” and mobilization by which they have been made into the more or less reliable components of the working whole. Thus, when Althusser characterizes ideology as an imaginary relation, he means something quite unlike what common sense would take to be “imaginary.” His usage, derived from psychoanalytic theory, is meant to suggest that ideology is indispensable to the individual insofar as this individual is necessarily a subject in the field of organized social practice. Far from being an ephemeral mental fabrication, the imaginary is the subject’s lived relation to the actual conditions of her existence. It is the only way she could inhabit “reality.” This is Althusser’s decisive break with historicist Marxism: ideology does not hover above the

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real, as a reflection (distorted or not) belonging to a corporate consciousness; through the concept of the imaginary, it is thought together with the real. At first sight, Althusser’s theory appears quite congenial to an understanding of Soviet society. It promises to solve one of the vexed problems that have troubled students of this society: the problem of belief. Were most Soviet citizens earnest devotees of the project of socialism, or did they pragmatically reproduce mandated formulas and gestures of allegiance while keeping a mind of their own (as some social historians would have it)? With Althusser, one has the option of dismissing the dilemma altogether. Since it is not about ideas, ideology is also not about belief. Social actions—no matter how ritualistic, no matter how cynically distanced from what the subject genuinely believes—are what ultimately “counts.” It is in her actions that the individual “believes,” and not in her conscious devotions. This authorizes one to argue that in attending meetings, voting “for” or “against,” applauding, and marching down the street, Soviet citizens were in ideology, regardless of the conscious attitudes with which they attended to these public performances. Thus, historian Peter Kenez, with no apparent knowledge of Althusser’s theory, explained the success of the Bolshevik ideological enterprise in the following terms: First the people came to speak a strange idiom and adopt the behavior patterns expected of them, and only then did the inherent political message seep in. The process of convincing proceeded not from inside out but outside in. That is, people came to behave properly, from the point of view of the regime, not because they believed its slogans but because by repeating the slogans they gradually acquired a “proper consciousness.”91

One troublesome aspect of adopting such a theoretical stance has been pointed out by some of Althusser’s critics: the content of ideology becomes occluded; there are no more messages, only gestures. It is certainly important to know what ideology does, but we would also want to know what it says.92 If it is really not a matter of ideas, under what rubric should we ask how ideas appeal to individuals? Saying that Soviet subjects “practiced” ideology reminds us usefully of the fact that political rituals are not empty formalities, but functional supports for the regime. Yet it does not excuse us from considering ideology as a discourse that articulates quite specific propositions. One should be also wary of taking Althusser’s argument “the wrong way.” The way he wishes to follow is toward deepening the relation between individual and ideology, not reducing it to a matter of external motions. If he leaves behind the question of belief, it is in order to discover something prior and more substantial. Only by forgetting the importance of Freud for

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Althusser’s thought could one read the latter as advocating a shallow formalism in which ideology is nothing but the pure mechanics of social action. These mechanics are significant not by themselves, but insofar as they are embedded in an unconscious structure that is more effective than any overt allegiance. Althusser wishes to point us to a level of experience that “interpellates” the individual before she is ever exposed to the sublimities of holistic worldviews and canonized faiths.93 In the famous passage from “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” which serves to illustrate the workings of ideology, a person on the street spontaneously recognizes himself as the addressee of the policeman’s shout, “Hey, you!” The moment of recognition is the moment of interpellation; yet it is not immediately clear why the ideological capture succeeds. To understand the mysterious effectiveness of the call, we have to realize that ideology is inscribed in two places within this curious scenario (something Althusser does not make clear): it is the explicit appellation addressed to the subject, but it is also the unconscious pre-formation by which the passerby has already been made into a subject. Both of these are domains of “ideology.” Only from the latter could we explain why the interpellation inevitably gets its man. The paradox, as Althusser unfolds it, is that someone becomes a subject because she has been this all along. Whatever the merits of this unabashedly circular argument, it allows us to see why a “ritualistic” reading of ideology would not do justice to Althusser’s position. It is not the empty motion of turning around that first implicates the subject in ideology; the gesture is significant because it formalizes a recruitment that has taken place already. In For Marx, Althusser stresses the organic inherence of ideology, which permeates the whole of social existence, and goes on to write: “Men ‘live’ their ideologies . . . not at all as a form of consciousness, but as an object of their ‘world’—as their ‘world’ itself.”94 This and other passages make it clear that consciousness and, with it, belief, is put aside in order to make prominent a more potent claim by which individuals are summoned to their social roles. As in the previous sections, I wish to argue that this interpretation of ideology’s nature is ill-suited to the society that emerged from the revolution of 1917. Insofar as the new order was established through an unprecedented effort of eradicating old customs and mentalities, suppressing religious practices, radically altering the social fabric, and dismantling the inherited economic infrastructure, it is very difficult to speak of any organic connection between its ideology and actual social existence. Nothing in Soviet experience corresponds to Althusser’s physiological metaphor of society “secreting” ideology as an indispensable element of its life cycle.95 This vision might be germane to the world the Bolsheviks undertook to change, but not to the one they were engaged in constructing. The unconscious grip by which ideology has always already taken possession its subjects may be claimed

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for cultures in which a certain time-honored “way of the world” has not only shaped representative intellectual statements, but has suffused the practical philosophies of the quotidian, the primary education within the family sphere, and the ethics of personal interactions.96 Soviet culture, even toward the end of its lifetime, was anything but that. For Althusser, ideology is world before it is a proclamation or belief. On this view, we must say that Soviet ideology is anti- or counter-ideological, insofar as it takes the opposite route. It is first a proclamation, which, through belief, seeks to install itself as world, that is, as the immanent structure of human experience. That this transformation was never carried out in the Soviet Union seems to me beyond argument. IDEOLOGY AS RATIONALIZATION Giving up the attempt to attribute the dominant ideology to a class subject/ position, one may still hold that it serves to rationalize objectionable practices or to make comprehensible a troublesome reality. The suspicion that exalted ideas could function as an alibi for pragmatic pursuits is as old as humanity. During the nineteenth century, in the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, this suspicion turned into a wholesale assault on the very faculty of reason. In Schopenhauer, the objectifications of reason were seen as subordinate to the will—the irrational thing-in-itself; while in Nietzsche reason stood accused of being, at best, the handmaiden of power and, at worst, a falsification or a form of emasculated life.97 Stripped of its autonomy, rationality was made virtually synonymous with rationalization: the schematizing of the world provisional to the pursuit of pragmatic objectives. And what in Nietzsche’s philosophy had been a general thesis—cognition’s subservience to instinctual life—was developed by Freud into a concrete analysis of the way in which psychic representations are shaped by the vicissitudes of the instincts. The primary agent of knowledge, the ego cogito, was no longer to be grasped as a sovereign legislator, but rather as a troubled negotiator between the subliminal pressures of the id and the rigorous demands of the superego. By the same token, its representations were anything but the “straight text” of clear-sighted apprehension. They were to be read, instead, as the cipher of unacknowledged silences, evasions, and distortions. “Rationalization”—a term Freud borrowed from Ernest Jones— designated a specific defense mechanism by which the subject misrepresents objectionable aspects of its behavior. Yet there is a sense in which, for psychoanalysis, much of the work of human self-consciousness is an effort of rationalization: the imparting of coherent, sensible form to a biographic narrative riddled with aporia. After Freud, the way was open for a thoroughgoing “hermeneutic of suspicion” in regard to any form of intellectual production.

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One only needed to replace “desire” with “interest,” or “psychic trauma” with “social conflict,” in order to map the insights of psychoanalysis onto the terrain of politics and ideology. An early “vulgar” application of Nietzschean and Freudian themes to sociology can be found in the work of Vilfredo Pareto, who treats social ideas as epiphenomena of primitive human emotions. While Pareto does not call ideology by its name, the notion can be extrapolated straightforwardly from the pivotal dichotomy of “residues” and “derivations.” The former are the sentiments that spring from the realm of instinct and constitute the genuine driving force behind any political action. But insofar as political strategies must secure legitimacy, it is imperative that they appear as motivated by reason. The derivations—a blanket term for all significant ideas circulating in social space—are nothing other than the rational appearances of irrational motives. That which, for Pareto, makes any system of belief “derivative” of emotive forces, would qualify it also as an ideological construct. On his view, ideology would have to be recognized as a universal and ineradicable predicament, since its roots lie in the mind’s propensity to justify behavior by means of logic.98 Some more recent accounts of ideology have done away with Pareto’s naïve essentialism (itself an echo of the Enlightenment’s anxious concern with the brute power of the human passions) while preserving the scope and radical nature of the predicament. Reviving Nietzsche’s claim for the complicity of power and cognition, a line of postmodern thinkers has treated the very work of symbolization as an ideological operation. If Pareto presents the social sphere as the playground of human sentiments dressed as suasive ideas, followers of Michel Foucault are likely to depict it as a battleground of discursive strategies, “interested” claims to meaning, which are simultaneously conduits of power. Since every instance of knowledge or discourse is “located”—that is, issues from a definite position in social space—and is, to that extent, “interested,” ideology becomes ubiquitous as a phenomenon and well-nigh useless as a concept.99 Foucault himself dismisses it along with the metaphysical baggage it carries: the assumption of a transcendent platform from which an impartial knower could proclaim certain ideas to be biased or distorted.100 Where all meaning is ideological, the talk of ideology becomes meaningless. Those who, like John Frow, have chosen to retain the concept while also keeping faith with Foucault, speak of ideology as the “political functionalization of speech,” “the tactical appropriation of particular positions by a dominant social class,” and “the differential, and differentially effective, investment of discourse by power.”101 This is not a return to the thesis of ideology as class position. Discourse here is not a crystallization of a definite consciousness, or the coherent explication of a worldview that can then be

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“imputed” to a class subject. Subjects—dominant as well as dominated—are constituted through it, not prior to it. An authoritative discourse is regarded as ideological not because a ruling class speaks the content or form of its existence through it, but because asymmetrical relations of power have been rationalized in it and endowed with the authority of truth. A critique of ideology that sets out from these premises would have to show how a certain system of knowledge produces and sustains a form of social domination. Jürgen Habermas is another thinker who identifies ideology with the workings of power on discourse, but his intellectual sympathies lie with Freud much more than with Nietzsche. For him, power is not the complementary other of knowledge, but the enemy of authentic understanding. Habermas proceeds from a normative definition of rational communication and goes on to characterize ideology as a systematic deviation from this standard. Psychoanalysis lends him the model for conceptualizing the distortions visible on the level of discourse. These are thought by analogy with the dissimulative mechanisms by which psychic phenomena such as dreams, parapraxes, and neurotic symptoms are generated. The role of repressed desire in Freud is played in Habermas by illicit political motivation. Its presence can be read in the gaps and obfuscations that the ideological text displays as it stitches its web of meaning. Like dreams and symptoms, dominant discourses both conceal and betray their true determinants. A critical hermeneutic, thus, becomes possible that begins from the textual lacunae and shows them to be the unintended signs of hegemonic interests. A similar type of hermeneutic is practiced by Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, the two most prominent exponents of “psycho-Marxism,” who have brought the paradigms of psychoanalysis to bear on the ideological critique of various cultural texts, from works of classical literature to popular fiction and Hollywood movies. Jameson’s Political Unconscious (1981) takes in equal measure from the insights of Lacan and the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss as it elaborates a theory of narrative as “symbolic action,” which resolves on the imaginary plane a real contradiction endemic to the social order.102 The Lacanian Real is recast by Jameson as History—the absent determinant of collective life, which announces itself only in a negative fashion: as that unspeakable “something” around which a text constructs its fictions. This is the strong, unconventional sense in which stories prove to be “fictional”: as narrative organizes and makes sense of a given historical experience, it also ideologizes it by substituting for the terms of class antagonism the more easily soluble issues of personal identity, generational conflict, moral choice, sexual dynamics, and so forth. For Žižek as well, ideology is the symptomatology of the Real.103 He is at one with Althusser in emphasizing that the ideological is a lived relation, that the imaginary—the “fantasy,” in Žižek’s terms—has an enabling, constitutive

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character for human subjectivity.104 But he finds it necessary to add that the ideological fantasy is also a screen-mediator between the subject and the traumatic truth of a divided society.105 As in Habermas and Jameson, the text of ideology betrays the absent cause that has shaped its meaning: “distortion and/or dissimulation is in itself revealing: what emerges via distortions of the accurate representation of reality is the real—that is, the trauma around which social reality is structured.”106 Could this line of thinking be followed toward a better understanding of Soviet ideology? Could the latter be seen as a discourse that symbolizes, that is, both announces and mystifies a problematic reality? As long as we understand what the question implies (and the preceding discussion was intended to clarify its terms), the answer should be in the negative. To be sure, one finds no shortage of traumas and scars in Soviet history. But that these scars should mark, in no matter how disguised a fashion, the text of official ideology was more the exception than the rule. One could point to the various “vermin” of Stalinism—kulaks, wreckers, Trotskyist spies, masked agents of imperialism, “rootless cosmopolitans”—and argue convincingly that these were fictional creations in the strong sense suggested above; that the steady reproduction of such phantasms over the entire Stalinist period was meant to deflect attention from the actual problems of “actually existing socialism”; that the figure of the enemy in general—external or internal—was a resilient, perpetually returning symptom, which served both to repress and express the traumatic truth of the impossibility of socialism in Russia.107 Although in different terms, this point has been made by many commentators of early Soviet history. The point is well taken, yet one should be wary of taking it too far. Making out of it a general characterization of Stalinist, or Soviet, ideology would once again leave us with a very limited view of the phenomenon. As with the argument for dominant class interest, we would be left with a great many doctrinal theses that fall outside the scope of the proposed explanation. It may well be that paranoid visions of insidious malefactors served to disguise the defects of Stalinist socialism, but what do we do with its rosy pictures of the present and exuberant projections of the future? Since these cannot be interpreted as the symptomatic manifestations of disavowed predicaments, are we to conclude that they are not ideological phenomena? Proclamations of material abundance and spiritual beatitude in the land of the Soviets, highly typical of the Stalinist period, were far from faithfully reflecting current reality, but they were also not the complex psychological refractions of painful dilemmas. The Stalinist “varnishing of reality” is something quite different from a rationalization of that same reality, for the subliminal mechanism by which nagging problems generate their own mystifications is missing. A much simpler mechanism is at work, whereby problems are boldly painted over with

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different, brighter colors. When the Stalin constitution announces the extinction of class antagonism in the country, this surely does not amount to rationalizing persisting social tensions (e.g., between the ascendant bureaucracy and the working masses); for instead of being given discursive justification (that is, admitted, then motivated), these tensions are simply decreed out of existence. The text of the 1936 constitution bears no trace of them (we cannot read it “deconstructively” and glean the troublesome facts it obfuscates); the hermeneutic channel is blocked. Where the argument for Soviet ideology as an instance of rationalization falters, the “softer” claim for it as a legitimation of an existing configuration of power will also run into difficulties. Of course, there is a general sense in which we can speak of Marxism-Leninism as legitimating the regime of power in the Soviet Union. After all, the rule of the Communist Party was based not only on its credentials as agent of revolution, on its iron discipline and will, but also on its members’ possession of an avowedly superior form of knowledge. This knowledge—Marxism-Leninism itself—professedly qualified them for political leadership, as well as for governance over every kind economic and cultural activity. As political expertise stood higher and adjudicated over every other species of knowledge and skill, it was understood that the carriers of such expertise were going to occupy positions of authority and privilege. In the Soviet Union, the synchrony of power and political consciousness was so thoroughgoing, so openly espoused by the regime, that taking a strong argumentative stance on this issue would seem out of place.108 The legitimation thesis loses traction for yet another reason: throughout the Soviet period, political education was not only open, but mandatory; likewise open were the ranks of the governing bureaucracy; it is thus difficult to speak of a stable structure of social inequality that was sanctified and perpetuated by the dominant ideology. Moshe Lewin’s famous image of Stalinist Russia as a “quicksand society” may be rhetorically inflated, yet it stands as an important reminder that models borrowed from societies with well-defined lines of class division are ill-suited to the situation in the early Soviet Union.109 In the end, the legitimation thesis says either too little or too much. If all it seeks to establish is that the ideology of state socialism sanctioned the project of building socialism in one country, it ends up perilously close to tautology. If, on the other hand, what is asserted is that the official ideology upheld a determinate paradigm of social domination, then it says too much. For this would imply that a certain distribution of social positions and interests in Soviet Russia could be thought as prior to, or at least independent from, its ideological supports, which, as I argued earlier, is an untenable proposition. The dilemma could be avoided by adopting a Foucauldian perspective and seeing official ideology as an institutionalized, and relatively open, discursive

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space in which individual agents first lay claim to personal identity, social status, and power. Such, to a great extent, is the perspective adopted by Stephen Kotkin in his highly influential Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (1997), which represents the creation of social identities in Stalinist Russia as a strategic game played in the field of officially sanctioned rhetoric and public performance.110 In chapter 5, I engage at lengthwith Kotkin’s account of Stalinism and his perspective on ideology. Presently, I wish to point out only that in the Foucauldian framework he adopts, legitimation can no longer serve as a meaningful concept. And neither could ideology, in the adjectival sense. The term can still be used to designate generally and conventionally the common playground of power and identity, but not to raise the politically and epistemologically significant question, “What makes a particular utterance ideological?” BEYOND THE IDEOLOGICAL? It would appear that the foregoing discussion has produced only negative results. By showing that what goes by the name of Soviet ideology cannot be reconciled easily with dominant conceptions of the ideological, it threatens to leave us empty-handed. Are we then to take leave of our subject by conceding that it does not form a well-defined object of inquiry, or even— that it is not a worthy intellectual pursuit? Could we rest content with the paradoxical assertion that Soviet ideology was is, in fact, not ideological? Or should we simply dismiss it as a body of petrified dogmatics, largely unconnected with the actual ways by which Soviet Russia was ruled by its masters and experienced by its subjects? Such dismissals have been quite common among critics of totalitarianism, who have often followed their insistence on the centrality of ideology with arguments about its purely formal character. Among the many formulations of the “dead-letter” thesis, Kolakowski writes of Soviet Marxism as the “rhetorical dressing for the Realpolitik of the Soviet empire”111; and David Joravksy states: “After 1929 the ideology actually at work in the minds of the chiefs is to be found much more in their intuitive judgments of practical matters than in the largely irrelevant texts of theoretical ideology.”112 In an article published under the institutional name of the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung, the final step is taken: the systems of thought propagated by the two totalitarian regimes are declared to be undeserving of being considered under the heading “ideology.” Although the following passage references only Nazi Germany, the article makes it plain that the diagnosis applies fully to Soviet Russia:

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[The]critique of ideology, as the confrontation of ideology with its own truth, is only possible insofar as the ideology contains a rational element with which the critique can deal. That applies to ideas such as those of liberalism, individualism, the identity of spirit and reality. But whoever would want to criticize, for instance, the so-called ideology of National socialism would find himself victim of impotent naïveté. Not only is the intellectual level of the authors Hitler and Rosenberg beneath all criticism. The lack of any such level, the triumph over which must be counted among the most modest pleasures, is the symptom of a state, to which the concept of ideology, of a necessarily false consciousness, is no longer directly relevant. No objective spirit is mirrored in such so called “thought,” rather it is a manipulative contrivance, a mere instrument of power, which actually no one, not even those who used it themselves, ever believed or expected to be taken seriously.113

Initially it seems that the question raised here is about the insufficiency of rational stimulus. Critical reason cannot find satisfaction because the object it has chosen to deal with—totalitarian ideology—is intellectually inferior and thus presents no real challenge. It eventually becomes clear that it is not only a matter of intellectual inferiority, but of how this object is constituted, how it exists in the world. The problem is not just that the ideas of Hitler or Stalin are primitive, but that they do not connect with any objectivity that could support critical analysis. An already familiar conviction underlies these reflections: for a system of thought to be called ideological, it is expected to participate in a dynamic of illusion and truth such that the illusion, insofar as it is a necessary one—which is to say, conditioned by objective factors—permits the subsequent exposure of truth. This is a somewhat narrower interpretation of what I called earlier the pact with hermeneutic reason. In the understanding of the Frankfurt School critics, ideology is false consciousness that promises to unveil, behind its manifest postulates, the latent presence of an “objective spirit.” Insofar as totalitarian doctrines fail to deliver on this promise, they also fail to qualify as genuine ideological phenomena. I think this argument is on the right track, right until the point where it joins hands with the end-of-ideology thesis and gives up on the task of ideological critique. It has been my purpose in this chapter to show how difficult it is to relate the letter of Soviet Marxism to some objectivity (or subjectivity) that might constitute its ultimate ground. Still, I do not think that this is a good enough reason to conclude that we are no longer on the territory of the ideological. Even less it is a reason to fall back on the notion of ideology as a “body of ideas,” a methodological abstraction that captures very little of the Soviet phenomenon’s historical peculiarity. Rather, we need to see how the Soviet experiment ushers in an entirely new sense of the ideological. The intellectual squeamishness with which the Frankfurt School dialecticians handled Stalinism prevented them from appreciating a transformation in

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the nature of ideology that is nothing if not dialectical. The issue on which they took their stand—the absence of “objective spirit” behind the formulas of Soviet propaganda—is not to be interpreted only in terms of privation, as a deficiency of the thing under investigation. As the following chapters will demonstrate, this negativity is just as much what animates the thing and constitutes its positive identity. The essence that Soviet ideology lacks, when viewed from an external, objective standpoint, is something it produces internally, or subjectively. NOTES 1. “It is particularly important for people in the West to understand the national roots of Russian communism, its determination by Russian history. Knowledge of Marxism would not help in this” (Nikolai Berdiaev, Istoki i smysl russkogo kommunizma [Paris: YMCA Press], 7). 2. Nikolai Berdiaev, The Russian Idea (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1947). 3. “[Russian Marxism] showed how great is the power of ideas over human life, if this power is total and corresponds to the instincts of the masses” (Berdiaev, Istoki, 88). 4. Berdiaev, Istoki, 115. 5. Berdiaev, Istoki, 137. 6. Berdiaev, Istoki, 88–89, 118. 7. Raymond Aron, “L’Avenir des religions séculières,” Commentaire 8, no. 28–29 (1985): 369–83; Raymond Aron, L’opium des intellectuels (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1955). 8. Foundational for this trend has been the work of Italian historian Emilio Gentile. See: Emilio Gentile, “Fascism as Political Religion,” Journal of Contemporary History 25, no. 2/3 (1990): 229–51; Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). See also: George L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism (New York: Fertig, 1999); H. Maier and M. Schäfer, eds., Totalitarismus und politiche Religionen: Konzepte des Diktaturvergleichs (Padeborn: F. Schöning, 1996). 9. Waldemar Gurian, “Totalitarianism as Political Religion,” in Totalitarianism, ed. Carl J. Friedrich (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1953), 119–29. 10. Arendt, 469. During the 1953 conference on totalitarianism held at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Arendt proposed the term “logocracy” as a more appropriate designation of totalitarian regimes than the already popularized label “ideocracy.” See: Totalitarianism: Proceedings of a Conference Held at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, March 1953, ed. Carl J. Friedrich (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, University Press, 1954), 133–34. 11. Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (New York: Praeger, 1965).

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12. Leszek Kolakowski, “The Intellectuals,” in Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990), 37. 13. Richard Pipes, Communism: A History (New York: The Modern Library, 2001). 14. Carl A. Linden, The Soviet Party-State: The Politics of Ideocracy (New York: Praeger, 1983). 15. Martin Malia, “A Fatal Logic,” National Interest 31 (Spring 1993), 88. 16. Malia, “Fatal Logic,” 87–88. 17. Malia, “Fatal Logic,” 90. 18. Mikhail Epstein, “Ideas against Ideocracy: The Platonic Drama of Russian Thought,” in In Marx’s Shadow: Knowledge, Power, and Intellectuals in Eastern Europe and Russia, ed. Costica Bradatan and Serguei Alex. Oushakine (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010), 13–36. 19. Berdiaev, Istoki, 137. 20. As Enzo Traverso has noted, “adopting this ‘ideocratic model’ scholarship turns into genealogy, sketching different origins of twentieth-century political wickedness” (Enzo Traverso, “Totalitarianism between History and Theory,” History and Theory 54, no. 4 [2017], 110). In the case of Marxism, this tendency is showcased most imposingly in Talmon’s Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. Criticizing Talmon’s book, Alfred Cobban has pointed out the perils of far-reaching intellectual lineages: “Tracing a line of descent backwards is bound to produce positive results, and then by a simple process of reversion we can create the illusion of a necessary catena of cause and effect. Thus one could trace a train of influence leading from Stalin back through Lenin, Marx, Hegel, Kant, Rousseau, Locke and Hooker to Aquinas. Each link in the chain is valid, yet it must be confessed that, though there are common features and affinities in the ideas of Aquinas and Stalin, the whole has distinctly less value than the parts” (Alfred Cobban, In Search of Humanity [New York: Braziller, 1960], 183). 21. Epstein, 18. 22. Epstein, 17. 23. In line with Berdiaev, Epstein asserts that the desire for unification is deeply native to Russian philosophical thought. He sees Russian religious philosophy, which dominated the intellectual scene at the turn of the century, as having prepared the ground for the reign of Marxist utopianism after 1917. For Epstein, the two movements, traditionally perceived as ideological antagonists, in fact constitute an uninterrupted continuity within the larger trajectory of Russian “totalism.” See Epstein, 15–16, 18–19. For the widely-held view of Silver-Age philosophy as antithetical to Marxism, see Andrzej Walicki, “Russian Philosophers of the Silver Age as Critics of Marxism,” in Russian Thought After Commuinsm: The Recovery of a Philosophical Heritage, ed. James P. Scanlan (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), 81–103. 24. Aleksandr Zinov'ev, Kommunizm kak real’nost' (Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1981), 194. 25. Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 15. 26. See Engerman.

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27. George Lichtheim, “Ideology and Soviet Politcs: Comments,” Slavic Review 24, no. 4 (1965), 608. 28. Arendt, 469; emphasis added. 29. Arendt, 469. 30. “The problem of totalitarian ideology must be seen within the more general context of the role of ideology in the political community” (Friedrich and Brzezinski, 73). 31. In 1949, Parsons had joined the Executive Board of the newly-founded Russian Research Center at Harvard, and thus become an important actor in the establishment of Russian studies in post-war United States. 32. Talcott Parsons, The Social System (New York: Free Press, 1964), 349. 33. Friedrich and Brzezinski, 73 (emphasis added). 34. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. Louis Writh and Edward Shills (London: Routledge, 1936). For Mannheim’s influence on the social sciences in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s, see Job L. Dittberner, The End of Ideology and American Social Thought (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1979), 11–20; Irving M. Zeitlin, Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 281–319. 35. Mannheim, 69. 36. Mannheim, 87–96. 37. In Henry Merton’s colorful take of Mannheim’s epistemological conundrum: “These efforts to rescue oneself from an extreme relativism parallel Munchhausen’s feat of extricating himself from a swamp by pulling on his whiskers” (Henry Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure [New York: Free Press, 1968], 561). 38. Mannheim, 36. 39. Friedrich and Brzezinski, 73–74. 40. Friedrich and Brzezinski, 74 41. Friedrich and Brzezinski, 74. 42. “[A] reasonably coherent body of ideas concerning practical means of how totally to change and reconstruct society by force, or violence, based upon an all-inclusive or total criticism of what is wrong with an existing or antecedent society” (quoted in Friedrich and Brzezinski, 74). 43. “It would appear that ideology is seen as a defining feature of [totalitarian societies] because in Russia and Germany ideology was overt and concerned with changing the status quo. It is therefore defined only in terms consistent with its expression in those two nations” (Colin A. Ridgewell, “The ‘Popular’ Concept of Totalitarianism,” MA Thesis [Simon Frazer University, 1970], 23). 44. By way of defending his own description of totalitarianism in terms of “mystique” rather than “ideology,” Inkeles suggested that the latter term should be reserved for the general situation in which a group or an individual rationalizes their mode of existence. See Totalitarianism, 136. 45. Representative publications expounding this notion include: Raymond Aron, “The End of the Ideological Age?” in The Opium of the Intellectuals, trans. Terence Kilmartin (London: Norton, 1962), 305–24; Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On

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the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (New York: The Free Press, 1967); Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973); Seymour M. Lipset, “The End of Ideology?” in Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960), 267–304; Seymour M. Lipset, “Socialism—Left and Right—East and West,” Confluence 7, no. 2 (Summer 1958): 173–92; Seymour M. Lipset, “The Changing Class Structure and Contemporary European Politics,” Daedalus 93, no. 1 (Winter 1964): 271–303; Edward Shils, “The End of Ideology?” Encounter 5, no. 5 (November 1955): 52–58; Edward Shils, “Ideology and Civility: On the Politics of the Intellectuals,” Sewanee Review 66, no. 3 (July-September 1958): 450–80. 46. Jean-François Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 47. As David McLelland points out, the thesis “depends heavily for its validity on an equivocation between the decline of ideology and the decline of ‘old ideologies’—principally Nazism and Communism” (David McLelland, Ideology [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995], 46). 48. Interestingly, Bell’s explicit definition of ideology also builds on a symptomatic misreading of Mannheim (preceded by a critique of Marx’s position on the subject). In the book that gave the end-of-ideology thesis its name, the author references Mannheim’s distinction between the “particular” and “total” conceptions of ideology. Tellingly, Bell has no need for the former, which ties beliefs to specific interests and motivations. As for the latter, he adopts it as his own, but not before a curious gloss in which Mannheim’s argument is maimed beyond recognition. In Bell’s reading, a total ideology is “not necessarily the reflection of interest”; instead, it stands for “an all-inclusive system of comprehensive reality, it is a set of beliefs, infused with passion, and seeks to transform the whole way of life” (Bell, End of Ideology, 399–400). The similarity of this definition to the one advocated by Friedrich and Brzezinski is evident. Less evident is the similarity to Mannheim’s notion of ideology, which has little to say about either its “passionate” or the transformative aspects (if anything, those are characteristic of the utopian mode of thought). For Mannheim, ideologies are “total” in the sense that they can only be understood in relation to the comprehensive life situation of a group, and not because they are extremist designs for the total remaking of the world. Thus, from Mannheim’s actual position, anything like an “end of ideology” would be an incomprehensible notion. 49. As Ridgewell has pointed out, the circular procedure characterized the totalitarian model more broadly: “In a way, there is a self-supporting circular process whereby the concept is defined in terms of the features of the society one wishes to study, and the result is, naturally enough, that the concept is found to be applicable to that society. . . . There is, therefore, a tendency for specific historical details to be used as if they were fundamental elements of a general conceptual framework, instead of only providing the basis for the development of such a framework” (38). 50. Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, trans. Ben Fowkes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 183; emphasis in the original. 51. Eagleton, 4. See note 3 on p. 20 in the present study.

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52. Still, Mannheim did not explicitly treat the distinction between ideology as a genetic principle concerning ideas, and a specific complex of ideas that can be said to obey such a principle (an ideology). 53. Freeden, Ideologies, 14. 54. Engels to Mehring 14 July, 1893, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1956), 511–12. 55. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology: Including Theses on Feuerbach and Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1998), 42. 56. Marx and Engels’s account of ideology in this early text bears significant resemblance to Feuerbach’s critique of religion, which the latter sees, similarly, as a transposition-alienation of the human beyond the sphere of material existence. In their Theses on Feuerbach, they had acknowledged the connection, while staking new ground beyond their predecessor. Although Feuerbach had shown the earthly source of heavenly projections, he had failed to relate the escapist impulse to “the cleavages and self-contradictions of the secular basis” (“Theses on Feuerbach,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000], 172). 57. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 42. 58. On this point, see Jan Rehmann, “Ideology Theory,” Historical Materialism 15, no. 4 (2017): 213. 59. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1976), 163–77. 60. This will be expressed with particular clarity in Volume 3 of Capital: “The finished configuration of economic relations, as these are visible on the surface, in their actual existence, and therefore also in the notions with which the bearers and agents of these relations seek to gain understanding of them, is very different from the configuration of their inner core, which is essential but concealed, and the concept corresponding to it. It is in fact the very reverse and antithesis of this” (Capital 3:310; emphasis added). 61. See Stuart Hall, “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism Without Guarantees,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10, no. 2 (1986), 34. 62. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Penguin, 1981), 969. 63. On the basis of this Marxian insight, Karel Kosík has developed the notion of the “pseudoconcrete” (Karel Kosík, Dialectics of the Concrete: A Study on Problems of Man and World [Dodrecht: D. Reidel, 1976], 1–8). 64. Marx, Capital, 1:280. Another example of such realism is the discussion of profit and interest in Marx, Capital, 3: 497–98. 65. Rehmann, 217. 66. “And if this insight [that capital itself is responsible for market crises] were to become conscious it would indeed entail the self-negation of the capitalist class” (Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics [London: Merlin Press, 1971], 64).

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67. Lukács, 64. The consciousness of workers can also be “false,” but in a different sense: as not corresponding to the “objectively possible” or “imputed” consciousness of the class. 68. Robert V. Daniels, Trotsky, Stalin, and Socialism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991); Robert V. Daniels, The End of the Communist Revolution (London: Routledge, 1993); Robert V. Daniels, The Rise and Fall of Communism in Russia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). 69. Daniels, Rise and Fall, 254–65. 70. “Until perestroika, the Soviet Union was permeated verbally with Marxist ideology in every aspect of life, yet the system embodied institutional forms and social values that had nothing in common with Marxism except in the most superficial sense” (Daniels, Rise and Fall, 255–56). 71. “Stalinism extended the arbitrary false consciousness of ideology from the sphere of individual thinking to the mental life of the whole society” (Daniels, Rise and Fall, 264). 72. Daniels, Rise and Fall, 264. In an earlier study, Daniels quotes a similar formulation by German dissident philosopher Rudolf Bahro: “The party organization of today is a structure that actively produces false consciousness on a massive scale” (quoted in Robert V. Daniels, Trotsky, Stalin, and Socialism [Boulder, Co: Westview, 1991], 183; emphasis added). 73. For a well-argued critique of Daniels’s position, see Enteen. 74. See Lefort, 182–83. 75. Lenin, V. I. What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement (New York: International Publishers, 1978), 40–43. For further discussion, see chapter 4 in the present study. 76. Lukács, 51, 74. 77. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 67. 78. See the survey of Marxist debates on the issue in: Marcel van der Linden, Western Marxism and the Soviet Union: A Survey of Critical Theories and Debates since 1917 (Leiden, Holland: Brill, 2007), 45–98. 79. Gavril Miasnikov, Ocherednoi obman (Paris, 1931); Lev Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where It Is Going? (New York: Pathfinder, 1972); Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (London: Thames and Hudson, 1957); Georg Konrád and Iván Szelényi, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power: A Sociological Study of the Role of the Intelligentsia in Socialism, trans. Andrew Arato and Richard E. Allen (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979). For early accounts of the bureaucratic state as an international phenomenon, see: Bruno Rizzi, La bureaucratisation du monde (Paris: 1939); James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World? (New York: John Day, 1941). For a history of the concept of the “new class,” see: Lawrence P. King and Iván Szelényi, Theories of the New Class: Intellectuals and Power (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). The view of the bureaucracy as the new ruling class in Soviet Russia was famously rejected by Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed (112–13). For an early Soviet rebuttal, see Nikolai Bukharin’s response to

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Karl Kautsky in Mezhdunarodnaia burzhuaziia i Karl Kautskii, ee apostol (Moscow: Pravda, 1925), 22–23. 80. On this point, I find convincing Stephen Cohen’s view of the Soviet bureaucracy as “more akin to the traditional tsarist soslovie, an official privileged class that served the state . . . more than it ruled the state” (Cohen, “Bolshevism and Stalinism,” 27). 81. Quoted in Daniels, The Rise and Fall, 263. 82. Djilas, 38. 83. I. V. Stalin, “Rech' v Kremlevskom dvortse na vypuske akademikov Krasnoi armii 4 maia 1935,” in Sochineniia, Vol. 14 (Moscow: Pisatel', 1997), 60–63. 84. This vicious circle is in evidence in Charles Bettelheim and Bernard Chavance argument that Stalinism is the ideology of state capitalism in Russia. In an attempt to show the relevance of Marxist analysis for the understanding of Soviet society, the authors refer to the ruling elite as “state bourgeoisie,” and maintain that the ideological formation of Stalinism should be related to the birth and development of this class. While they acknowledge that “it would be useless to attempt to make a given ideological transformation correspond to a given social formation ‘term for term,’” they nevertheless insist that “general correspondences” could be found (Charles Bettelheim and Bernard Chavance, “Stalinism as the Ideology of State Capitalism,” Review of Radical Political Economics 13, no. 1 [1981], 41). In arguing their point, however, Bettelheim and Chavance reduce Stalinism to a set of ideologemes selected for being most characteristic or dominant. No concept from Marxism proper enters this selective set, for Stalin is said to have made a total break not only with Marx but with Lenin as well (43). After this radical operation, Stalinist ideology is found to consist of a kernel of “etatist” ideas and the pulp of slogans that merely varnish reality. 85. Moshe Lewin, “The Social Background of Stalinism,” in Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New Brunswick, NJ: Routledge, 1999), 130. Fainsod has made a similar in his seminal account of the Soviet political system: “The industrial elite as a class was indispensable, its individual members were expendable. Given the pressures under which it operated, the new industrial elite remained a circulating rather than a stable elite. Privileges attached to a function; they disappeared when the function was no longer performed” (106.). On this point, see also Andrei I. Kolganov, Chto takoe sotsializm: Marksistskaia versiia (Moscow: Librokom, 2012), 499–500. 86. “In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness” (Karl Marx, “Preface to A Critique of Political Economy,” in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton [London: Penguin, 1975], 425).

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87. That the “base” in the Soviet Union was shaped by the political and ideological superstructure is an idea that goes back to the writings of Rudolf Hilferding in the 1930s. See Rudolf Hilferding, “State Capitalism or Totalitarian State Economy,” in The Marxists, ed. C. Wright Mills (New York: Dell Publishing, 1963), 334–39. 88. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–86; Louis Althusser, For Marx. trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Vintage, 1969). I have discussed the former text in relation to Stalinist ideology in Automatic for the Masses: The Death of the Author and the Birth of Socialist Realism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 180–93. 89. See: Stuart Hall, “The Problem of Ideology,” in Marx 100 Years on, ed. B. Matthews (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983), 67. 90. Althusser, “Ideology,” 167–70. 91. Kenez, Birth, 255. As Brandenberger has pointed out, this passage prefigures Kotkin’s influential notion of “speaking Bolshevik” (16). See Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 198–237. 92. Paul Ricoeur makes this point in his critique of Althusser: “We cannot define these ideologies’ structure only by their role in the reproduction of the system. We must make sense of their meaning before considering their use. The assumption that ideologies’ content is exhausted by their use is without justification; their use does not exhaust their meaning” (Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia [New York: Columbia University Press, 1986], 155). 93. This prior interpellation could, once again, be thought by analogy with Marx’s analyses in Capital. In selling his labor, the worker renders objective the ideology of equal exchange. Insofar as his life is possible only through the repeated act in which his labor power is brought into equivalence with a sum of money, he lives it “in ideology” without the need to profess a personal belief in the free market. Prior to any conscious creed, the worker is claimed by “freedom” through the exigencies of the world he inhabits. 94. Althusser, For Marx, 233 (emphasis in the original). The unconscious and a priori character of ideology is described lucidly by Ricoeur: “The interpretative code of an ideology is something in which men live and think, rather than a conception that they pose. In other words, an ideology is operative and not thematic. It operates behind our backs, rather than appearing as a theme before our eyes. We think from it rather than about it” (Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, trans. John B. Thompson [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press], 227; emphasis in the original). 95. Althusser, For Marx, 232. 96. In his critique, Jacques Ranciere has pointed out that Althusser’s understanding of ideology is modeled on the function of religion in traditional societies. See Jacques Ranciere, “On the Theory of Ideology [The Politics of Althusser],” Radical Philosphy 7 [1974], 3; Jacques Ranciere, Althusser’s Lesson, trans. Emiliano Battista [London: Continuum, 2011], 105). 97. I discuss the relevance of Nietzsche’s philosophy for a theory of ideology in chapter 3.

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98. “The human being has such a weakness for adding logical developments to non-logical behavior that anything can serve as an excuse for him to turn to this favorite occupation” (Vilfredo Pareto, The Mind and Society, vol. 1, trans. Andrew Bongiorno and Arthur Livingston [New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Co., 1935], 104). 99. Eagleton, 8. 100. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 60. In another place, Foucault confesses that “what troubles me with these analyses which prioritize ideology is that there is always presupposed a human subject on the lines of the model provided by classical philosophy, endowed with a consciousness which power is then thought to seize upon” (Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 [Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980], 58). 101. John Frow, “Discourse and Power,” in Ideological Representation and Power in Social Relations, ed. Mike Gane (London: Routledge, 1989), 198–217. 102. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981). 103. For a discussion of the symptom from Marx to Lacan, see Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 2008), 3–22. 104. Žižek, Sublime Object, 27–30. 105. Žižek, Sublime Object, 45. 106. Slavoj Žižek, “Introduction: The Spectre of Ideology,” in Mapping Ideology (London: Verso, 1994), 26; emphasis in the original. 107. See Lefort, 223. 108. For a nuanced take on the issue of legitimation, see Schull, 737. 109. See Moshe Lewin, “Society, State, and Ideology during the First Five-Year Plan,” in The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York: The New Press, 1994), 221. 110. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997). 111. Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism (New York: Norton, 2005), 871. 112. David Joravsky, “Soviet Ideology,” in Soviet Studies 18, no. 1 (1966): 11. 113. Frankfurt Institute, 190.

Chapter 2

The Three Logics of Ideology

I have proposed that we understand Soviet ideology as something third, something beyond the empirical-realist fixation with an ideology, but also beyond the pact with hermeneutic reason implicit in various theorizations of the ideological. What that “something third” might be is presently far from clear. A good number of pages will be needed to flesh it out. The first step, however, must be to construct its logical skeleton. Although Soviet ideology was a historical phenomenon, and thus the artifact of determinate worldly circumstances and doings, it is necessary for the purposes of this exposition to grasp its character first in a purely conceptual way. Only in this way will we be able to rigorously explain its originality. That—still hypothetical—“something third” cannot be a solution theoretically willed by us. It cannot be, in other words, some new notion of ideology that we have devised in order to overcome the problems that stand in our way. For instance, we cannot deal with the dead-letter conundrum by pushing Marxism-Leninism aside and proclaiming that the real ideology of the Soviet state is to be found somewhere else. Marxism-Leninism certainly was the ideology of the Soviet state, and whatever other sense of the term we introduce must incorporate that plain fact. The way beyond the letter of Marxism-Leninism must pass through it, not around it. I should like to recall here the analogy I drew in the introduction, using Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (although pretty much any modernist text could have served the purpose). When we realize that a traditional definition of the genre “novel” does not do justice to Proust’s work, we are compelled to go beyond the inadequate concept with which we began. In the next moment, however, we should realize that it is not we, but the work itself that is doing just that; it is itself the going-beyond of the traditional nature of the novel; the work is the concept (genre) in action, its practical transformation. And such is also the case with Soviet ideology. It, too, should be understood as a (moment of) dynamic form, a historically concrete going-beyond of what “ideology” had been before. 61

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As the name itself suggests, every form of ideology is also a form of logic. Hence, before inquiring about the actual worldly existence of Soviet ideology, we need to grasp the logic to which it refers. This involves a dialectic of three “moments,” which are also three kinds of logic, or three types of unity. To think ideology as form means nothing other than to abstract from the ideological content (whatever specific propositions, or values, are being put forth) and train our attention on relation as such. We will then find that under the name “ideology” three different kinds of relation are conceivable. That is to say, ideology as form can be thought as having three modalities staggered in a dialectical progression. The first two are the ones with which we dealt in Chapter 1; they are also the ones that have informed much of the existing theorizations of ideology, although they have never been connected in the way I am proposing presently, as moments of a dialectically legible, historically dynamic form. The third is the one that will require the most extensive treatment, as that is where I will seek the opening for a new understanding of Soviet ideology. *** In the first of the three modalities, “ideology” is simply the form of unity that holds multiple representations, or propositions together; it is the relation that obtains between these individual elements and that makes them into a solid whole. This, of course, is none other than the view of ideology as a “body of ideas” or a “system of thought.” For any such system of thought, we can bracket the propositional meaning that has been constructed and contemplate the web of meaning as such: how one idea connects to another, building up to a more or less complex ensemble, call it a “worldview,” “creed,” “doctrine,” or “master narrative.” We can refer to this first type of unity as the form of systematicity or internal coherence. It has been the predominant form for thinking about ideology in the social sciences and the basis for the kind of anatomical dissections I referenced in the introduction to this study. The form in question is on display in dictionary definitions like the following: 1b: the integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program 1c: a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture.1 Within the integrated whole, each representation is mediated with all the others. Yet the overall unity is itself unmediated, and therefore appears as an existent, a factual given. It is as if the so-called “body” of ideas was one among the world’s entities, something that is simply there. In short, ideology,

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under this form, appears as a discrete empirical singularity, an ideology. The form of coherence is also the form of empirical immediacy. Each ideology, as a “body,” an immediate datum, confronts other such bodies. They all have the same form of unity—the relation of internal coherence—and differ only in their content, which is to say, in the particular vision of the world that has been systematized (just as physical bodies differ in their material composition, while sharing in the general forms of unity, that is, mass and extension). As the corporeal metaphor suggests, this conception of ideology easily lends itself to spatialization. A body can be dissected into “parts,” just as a structure can be analyzed into “levels.” And so, the component elements of an ideology—the representations that come together into an organized whole—can be thought as occupying discrete “places” in an internally articulated space that holds them all. I mentioned already Seliger’s influential model, which maps two main “dimensions” (“fundamental” vs. “operative” ideology), and which, in addition, identifies the indispensable components of each ideological system: “description,” “analysis,” “moral prescriptions,” “technical prescriptions,” “implements,” and “rejections.”2 A sophisticated development of this perspective was offered by Michael Freeden in the 1990s. It began from the axiom that political science should occupy itself, not with ideology, but with ideologies, “those systems of political thinking, loose or rigid, deliberate or unintended, through which individuals and groups construct an understanding of the political world they, or those who preoccupy their thoughts, inhabit, and then act on that understanding.”3 Freeden was concerned less with living individuals and how they inhabited ideologies, and more with the internal organization of these extant conglomerates of meaning, their “morphology.” He noticed that different, even inimical, political ideologies could operate with the same notions—“freedom,” “democracy,” “justice.” What makes them distinct “bodies” is the “place” occupied by this or that term in a given morphology (“core,” “adjacent,” or “peripheral”). To wit, an ideology was identified with a specific patterning of intellectual content, a determinate structure of internal coherence.4 The same perspective from which we regard an ideology as a “body” is what allows the many individual ideas to be represented as an Idea. Precisely because the different representations unfold one and the same content, they can be seen, not as discrete meanings, but as one single Meaning. It will be recalled that in the more mystical versions of the ideocracy thesis, the Idea, or Utopia, was seen as possessing quasi-metaphysical power, through which it invades and ravages its antipode, “reality.” And the power in question, as Arendt famously argued, is none other than the form of internal coherence: the fact that (totalitarian) ideologies are closed systems, monolithic rational designs, which seduce the human mind with their logical consistency.

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One kind of ideological content can be identified through its difference from other kinds of content. Thus, liberalism is not conservatism, libertarianism, populism, socialism, and so on. However, because each political ideology is taken as an empirically given entity, which is to say, as a content that has been formed and now exists factually, its alterity from other ideologies is itself a factual matter. The social scientist can take stock of the difference between this or that set of political ideas, note areas of overlap, arrange doctrines on a continuum from “left” to “right,” and so forth. Yet the difference cannot be thought of as an active principle that constitutes the diverse entities. Ideologies can interact with one another only as fully formed “bodies,” not unlike balls on the billiard table that is public life. They are said to “compete” in the political arena for the votes of particular national communities and, ultimately, for the right to shape state policy.5 Needless to say, this kind of real-world interaction does not fundamentally affect what the entities are in themselves. They encounter one another as already-constituted solids of meaning. If in a given political context ideology “A,” does battle with ideologies “H,” “L,” and “N,” this constellation is purely a matter of historical circumstance; no necessary connection exists between the competitors. It is sometimes conceded that the principles of one political ideology could be modified in the course of the confrontation with its rivals. Still, the opponents are seen as constituted prior to their confrontation, not through it. Even when two doctrines stand in stark opposition to each other by virtue of the fundamental “values” they expound, as, for instance, liberalism and conservatism, it is not this difference that makes them what they are. Liberalism does not exist through conservatism, nor vice versa. Each exists on its own, as a given set of principles that has taken shape historically and found its embodiment in an existing political movement and/or party. How a political ideology has come to be what it is becomes a question of intellectual history, which traces ideas to certain authors and their texts. This genesis of an ideology can, and is, treated quite apart from the finished product and its inner organization, or “morphology.” All of this is to say that in the first form of the dialectic, ideology does not have a real other, a determining alterity that makes it what it is. In the shape of an ideology, it only confronts a multiplicity of indifferent others, actually existing, alternative ideologies. They are indifferent in the sense that they have their being not through one another, but through external factors, and their intercourse does not fundamentally affect their identity. This situation changes when we pass on to the second form of the dialectic. Here we find what I earlier referred to as the “adjectival” meaning of the term. No longer denoting the systematic nature of thought or discourse (the relation that holds discrete representations together), ideology, in the sense of the “ideological,” points us to a relation that obtains between representations and their conditions of possibility. We now attend to the way in which

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ideas are shaped and unified by something that lies beyond them, a non-ideal other, to which they bear witness. Whether we are thinking of ideology as false consciousness, a superstructural correlate of the “base,” a necessary moment of social organization, an expression of class being or will to power, or the imaginary dimension of real conditions of existence, we are thinking relation, mediation. What such different theoretical proposals have in common is a form that ties representations to a determining ground that is not represented in them. Since ideas now appear as determined from outside, their own sphere, “ideology,” is no longer something immediate; rather, it is mediated with its “significant other”—the reality that constitutes its ultimate truth.6 To distinguish this from the first moment in the dialectic, that of inner coherence, we might call it the form of external determination. To wit, we are no longer dealing with an ideology. Instead of confronting a thing in the world, a “body,” we are explicitly aware of dealing with mediation. When, after hearing someone’s pronouncement, we declare, “This is ideology,” we are obviously not implying that the person has just laid out an entire system of belief. Rather, by omitting the indefinite article, we are signaling our awareness of a relation between what has just been said and some unacknowledged motives, possibly of broader political import. As we saw in the previous chapter, the hermeneutic of the ideological is not confined to a hermeneutic of suspicion. The content that “comes through” the explicit meaning of representations does not need to be objectionable, and thus in need of unmasking. It could be, simply, a “situation,” as in Mannheim’s sociological theory. There is hardly a theorist who has not confused these two perspectives on ideology, at least on occasion (more commonly, writing “ideology” when meaning “an ideology”).7 And yet the difference in principle, marked by a tiny grammatical element, is quite straightforward. It is, to repeat, the difference between two kinds of unity: on the one hand, the internal unity of representations that yields a single, common content; and, on the other, the unity between representations and their determining conditions. The “logic” that is a component part of the term “ideology” is, in the first case, the logic of interlocking propositions and the meanings they articulate; in the other, it is a logic that links the explicit meaning of propositions to a generative principle of meaning. In one case, we take a content as something already shaped and given, subsisting on its own. In the other case, we see the content overwritten, as it were, by another, non-ideal content, which, for us, becomes the true substance of the ideas in question, the “moment of truth” in ideology. In the latter case, ideology is not a “what” but a “how”: how the formation of ideas is determined from outside the sphere of ideas. This was the question that the Young Hegelians had failed to ask and from which Marx began his critique in The German Ideology: “It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers

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to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the relation of their criticism to their own material surroundings.”8 In the second modality of ideology, the immediacy characteristic of the first one is certainly transcended. And yet, as soon as this occurs, another kind of immediacy makes itself felt. It now characterizes the unity between ideas and their transcendental ground. None other than this new relation is responsible for doing away with the simple being-there of ideas. In the new perspective, ideas are not just there, but are produced, posited. They are through something else; in short, they are-as-mediated. Thus, Marx’s critique makes us see the philosophy of the Young Hegelians, not simply under the aspect of a self-standing doctrine, but as a reflection of the “wretchedness of the real conditions in Germany.”9 This status of being a reflection is something new, which was missing under the form of systematicity. What appears as unmediated now is the very form of unity. That is to say, the relation through which certain ideations are rendered “ideological” presents itself as something quasi-actual; it obtains. For a relation to obtain is not quite the same thing as for a “body” to be there. Nonetheless, it is a kind of immediacy, a second-level substantivity—a fact whose significance will become clear only when this new kind of immediacy is in turn dissolved in the third logic of ideology. The two moments of form—that of internal coherence and that of external mediation—are not to be thought of as alternatives that exclude each other. They stand in dialectical opposition, which means that the second one does not abolish the first altogether; rather, it negates and preserves it at once. It is, therefore, very possible to think the aspect of coherence together with that of determination. For instance, one could think, as Marx did, of the intellectual production of a given society, or even of an era, as a superstructure sustained by a particular mode of production and the class relations characteristic of it.10 Without addressing here the merits of the base-superstructure model, we could note that it, too, furnishes a spatialized representation of the being of ideas. The superstructure can be seen as an existing totality of values, laws, and conceptions that, as its name implies, sits “on top” of an ontological stratum that counts as more essential (Marx refers to the latter as the “real foundation” of society).11 We should also notice, however, that this existence is anything but thing-like. True, we may be contemplating extant artifacts of culture, law codes, or political treatises, all of which would seem to have that substantial mode of being. It is just that the way we regard them is not as parts of an inert conglomerate that is merely there. We are looking as much at them as through them, so as to see the ground from which they have emerged (just as Marx wished to look through the chimeras of German philosophy in order to see German reality). These concrete representations,

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just as the superstructure in toto, are for us the appearance of another, more essential dimension. For this reason, what I christened the form of external determination could just as aptly be called the form of objective appearance. To say that ideology is appearance is to say that it has its truth somewhere else, not in itself, not in what it explicitly says about the world. From here, two conceptual paths open up, both of which were in fact taken at various times by various thinkers in the actual historical course of theorizing ideology. The first possibility, given that the truth of ideology lies somewhere else, is to conclude that, therefore, ideology is in itself untruth, illusion, mystification. This was the path taken by the Marxist critical tradition, beginning with the Deutsche Ideologie. Here is not the place to discuss the various twists and turns of that path. It will suffice to say, by way of a generalization, that for the critical tradition in question, ideology is synonymous with dissimulation; it is untrue not necessarily because what it says diverges from fact,12 but because what it says perpetuates, in one way or another, the falsity of the social world. As we have seen, the aspect of dissimulation remained at the center of Marx’s later formulation, in the first volume of Capital, where he does not explicitly speak about ideology. Here the truth of the capitalist mode of production is “inverted” on the level of habitual, everyday practice, before it is reflected in ideas.13 But there is a second possibility: from the fact that ideology is thought whose truth lies elsewhere one could project the possibility of these two detached planes coming together. For, after all, the form of external determination is nothing other than the unity between representations and that essential other, in which their ultimate truth resides. Thus, it contains, structurally, so to speak, the possibility of envisioning their reunion. This was the substance of Lenin’s departure, as he cast Marxism itself as a type of ideology, the imputed worldview of the proletariat, in which antagonistic social being has at long last generated a form of cognition adequate to itself. Lukács followed in the same theoretical direction, as he reserved systematically distorted cognition for the subject of bourgeois ideology, while nominating (true) proletarian consciousness, in its essential negativity, as the only one capable of comprehending the totality of socio-economic life.14 With both Lenin and Lukács, we are back at the position of ideology as a system of thought. But this is not a regression to the basic form of internal coherence. For what renders the said system of thought true or untrue is its dependence on, and determination by, a particular class position, which is also the position of a subject. However, because the concept of ideology has to accommodate the possibility of both distorted and adequate relation to the essence, it becomes a neutral one—some Marxists would say, neutered— with no more critical edge than the old notion of Weltanschauung. A similar

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neutralization takes place when one decides to extend logic of distortion to the entire realm of knowledge. As we saw in chapter 1, this is the case in some theories of ideology that have drawn inspiration from Nietzsche and Freud. Although for both these thinkers the work of intellect proceeds under the sign of dissimulation, serving as it does to occlude the dynamics of the Will to Power and sexual desire, the dissimulative mechanism is coextensive with rationality, or consciousness, as such. When this mechanism is taken as the model for interpreting ideology, the problematic of truth and falsity becomes a dead end. Since all cognitions have their truth somewhere else, since they are all the mystified form of appearance of something more primal and real, the epistemological yardstick is nowhere to be found.15 This allows for a paradoxical inversion whereby the realm of appearances reacquires truth, albeit of a different kind. Once the distortive mechanism is universalized, distortion ceases to be something negative or, as some would say, is “bracketed.” The phenomenal plane no longer counts as a plane of illusion and can be seen as a relay of the essence and—as we shall see—essentialized in its own right. In short, the appearances are not to be opposed to the real; they become an aspect of the real. This is where we find Althusser’s conception of ideology, heavily indebted as it is to Marx of “The Fetishism of Commodities.” Drawing equally on psychoanalysis, it universalizes ideology as a functional aspect of the socio-economic mechanism, which ensures that subjects are supplied for, and held fast in, the determinate positions required by that mechanism. As knowledge, ideology in Althusser is partial and untrue; it is the deficient other of science. But this matters little, for the cognitive is not the essential dimension of ideology. What matters most to Althusser is that, even if epistemologically deficient, ideology is a moment of the real. It has not an ideal, but a material existence, hard-wired to the circuit of social reproduction. There is no doubt that, for Althusser, the work through which social life is reproduced constitutes the most essential aspect of the historical process, the very principle of its motion. Because ideology is an integral participant in this work, truth falls to it too. Boldly, and controversially, Althusser proclaimed that ideas have “purely and simply disappeared from our presentation.”16 This appears to exempt his approach from the logic of external determination since, once the ideal realm is taken out of consideration, the realm of materiality has no outside. Such is indeed the case; yet I should highlight the fact that Althusser’s departure happens strictly within the dialectical logic we are now considering. Only insofar as, in the classical Marxist tradition, ideas have always been thought in unity with material social processes, is Althusser able to drop them from his model, while extending the notion of “practice” beyond the Marxist focus on economic activities proper. One might say that, while in factories

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people “practice” their economic subjection, in Althusser’s ideological state apparatuses—a different type of factories—they are seen to “practice” their psychological and cultural subjection. Because, in classical Marxism, ideology transmits the essence of the social—the relations of production—because production is the “truth” of ideology, one could identify the two and conceive ideology as production. This is just what Althusser has done; ideas have ceased to matter much for him because he has performed this identification. The social process, as he conceives it, is one big “economy,” material through and through, and ideology is the sector of that economy responsible for the production of subjects. The same considerations apply, mutatis mutandis, to the postmodern attempt to replace the problematic of ideology with that of discourse. Just as Althusser’s maneuver was enabled by the Marxist critique of ideology, the Foucauldian turn to discourse is enabled by the Nietzschean critique of cognition. We begin by thinking “knowledge” and “power” in a unity, while keeping the two sides of the relation separate. But because they are seen as related, it becomes possible, in a further step, to remove the difference that keeps them apart. The result is that the two sides collapse into each other; all knowledge is declared “interested,” the very site of the exercise of power, and so forth. We find ourselves in a one-dimensional space, where it is impossible to ask how cognition (or consciousness, or the subject) is “determined.” In such a space, since there is no alterity, reflection cannot happen. What used to be determining (interest) and what used to be determined (knowledge) have been identified, analogously to the splicing-together of “ideology” and “practice” in Althusser. In both cases, the two sides’ identity is simply their prior unity, “realized” in theory. It is important to appreciate this new relation to truth, as it will constitute the point of departure for the third and final logic of ideology. The second moment of the dialectic thematizes the divergence between what ideology says and what it transmits. Ideology is appearance, and yet it is appearance of something real, and not a figment of subjective deception. Thus, a “moment of truth” is inextricably bound to it. Under the second form, we attend to what ideology says, but in such a way as to be able to discern something else that “comes through” this manifest content. And what comes through is another kind of truth; not the epistemological truth of propositions, but truth in the sense of the ultimate, transcendental ground of those propositions. This truth exists for us, the hermeneuts of the ideological, and is not reflected in the representations we are considering. I stressed the point earlier that the relation between ideas and the determining conditions to which they owe their existence and content is quasi-factual, it obtains. It is something that hermeneutic reason “uncovers.” The pact with that reason, to remember, consists in this: that we should be able to grasp a connection between ideas and some

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objective basis that lies, figuratively speaking, “behind” them. We read the ideological representations back to that objective basis; and this is precisely what makes them, for us, an instance of ideology. Without such a connection, it would not be proper to speak of any matter as “ideological.” As we saw in the preceding chapter, for Soviet ideology this relation does not really hold; the pact with hermeneutic reason is voided. At the end of the chapter, I proposed that this is because the relation has been transformed; it has been dialectically raised to another level or exists in a different form. We fail to find it because it is not there; it is, not as something that exists, or obtains, but as something that is posited. In the second form of the dialectic, the connection between ideas and their essential ground is held in external reflection, which is just another way of saying that it obtains for another (the theorist-hermeneut, who traces appearances back to the objective basis that has generated them). But in the third moment of form, it is reflected inwardly; it is no longer for another, but for itself. Ideology itself is what “makes the connection,” manufactures it, so to speak. Or rather, we should now give the name “ideology” to the agency responsible for this “making.” In the first modality, the form of ideology is the systematic, body-like, unity of contents; in the second—the unity between those contents and their (external) conditions of possibility, their mediation by an essential other. In the third moment, the form can be understood as the unity of those two unities, the mediation between the positions of “an ideology” and “the ideological.” The three-step dialectic progression we have before us is none other than the triad of “Being,” “Essence,” and “Concept” that structures the movement of Hegel’s Logic. *** Hegel’s magnum opus, comprising the Science of Logic, published between 1812 and 1816,17 and the later condensed version, part of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, whose final edition appeared in 1830, presents its students with formidable difficulties, and has generated countless pages of philosophical exegesis and controversy. It is quite impossible to do justice here to the significance of this monumental undertaking, and even less—to the intricate development of the multitudinous logical categories. To avoid an inappropriately long detour through such dense matters, I shall have to rely on the reader’s prior familiarity with Hegel’s dialectical method and his project in the Logic.18 I will highlight only those aspects that help differentiate the three general structures that underlie the divisions of the Logic, the doctrines of Being, Essence, and Concept, giving particular attention to the last one. At the stage of Being, we are dealing with existents, which are thought to be there as merely given, subsisting by themselves, as it were, in primal

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immediacy. We believe we can have direct access to them, see them, touch them, and so on. Such is the conceit of sense knowledge, “which takes everything limited and finite for something that [simply] is.”19 Hegel calls this “abstract immediacy,” because in the mode of sense knowledge, things are found rather than thought. They abide side by side, each ending where another begins, without there being any necessary relationship between them. Ordinary consciousness treats the distinct terms as indifferent to one another. Thus we say, “I am a human being, and I am surrounded by air, water, animals, and everything else.” In this ordinary consciousness everything falls outside everything else. The purpose of philosophy is, in contrast, to banish indifference and to become cognizant of the necessity of things, so that the other is seen to confront its other.20

When something confronts not an indifferent multitude of others, but its own other, we have entered the logical domain of Essence. Here, things are found to be in constitutive dependence on something else, something “deeper” and enduring. This leads to the impossibility of regarding them as things; they are just the terms of a relation, as, for instance, with the positive and negative poles of electricity (if we see them clearly marked on a battery, this doesn’t mean that they are material locations, even less entities). In each such relation, one term counts as prior, determining, while the other figures as subordinate, determined. The ontological sphere of Essence corresponds to the faculty of reflection. According to Hegel, reflection is what we do when we take finite existents not as self-subsistent, but see them as the appearance, manifestation, or expression of something else.21 No longer satisfied with things as found, we begin to think them over, seeking to understand how they subsist, what makes them the way they are.22 (For example, we might inquire “What makes ideas ideological?”). In reflection, being is as-mediated; we look through what is there to contemplate its ground, cause, or law. “The immediate being of things is here represented as a sort of rind or curtain behind which the essence is concealed.”23 Although reflection does away with the raw immediacy of Being, the mediation that characterizes the realm of Essence is still imperfect. The determinations that occupy the two sides in the relation of reflection are still finite, for they are kept fixed and apart from each other; they “are supposed to be grasped and to be valid each on its own, separately from the one opposed to it.”24 Thus, in a “vulgar” Marxist perspective, one considers the superstructure of society to be determined by the base, yet the two are conceived as quite different actualities; so that one could very well consider the economy as a separate “sphere,” something that “is” apart from political institutions, legal norms, ideas, and cultural creations.

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At the last stage of dialectical development, all semblance of such independent subsistence vanishes. In the logical sphere of the Concept, every singularity is as something ideal, a transient moment in the notional totality, whose dependence on the whole is likewise ideal.25 All we have before us here are terms that have been produced in and by the very movement that “comprehends” them.26 The movement in question is that of something singular that develops internally, producing distinctions within itself and, in so doing, becoming a rich totality. The crucial point—to which we will be returning repeatedly in the course of this study—is that in the Concept alterity disappears or is only apparent. Difference is produced by the inner articulation of the same active “matter” (“subject”), as it unfolds its implicit content, particularizing and actualizing itself. Its “other” is internal to it, a necessary moment of its becoming, and thus not really other.27 Such, Hegel tells us, is the proper nature of thought, “that thought is itself and its other, that it overgrasps its other and that nothing escapes it.”28 In short, with the Concept we attain an “absolute” ontological plane, in the sense that nothing is presupposed to it, or given in advance; or rather, everything that is given is given (posited) by the very movement in which it is given.29 In a first approximation, one could see the Concept as the completely explicated reason why and how something is the way it is. It is the full set of essential features that characterize a given entity and the full gamut of conditions that enable the entity to be. Thus, the concept of the plant would encompass its physical constitution, the functions of its various parts, and the environmental factors that enable the fulfillment of those functions (germination, growth, nutrition, reproduction). It is clear, however, that the explication of each such individual concept leads to its transcendence.30 When we consider the nature of a plant, we are compelled to take into account matters that go well beyond it. Nutrition, for instance, has a much broader applicability, and so does reproduction; shedding light on these processes brings us to the laws of organic chemistry and biology. The concrete existent with which we began, the plant, is dissolved into a myriad of relations. Having begun from the question of what a plant is, we eventually find ourselves confronted with the concept of life in general. To wit, when we seek to give the full reason how and why something is the way it, we initiate a chain of further “reasons,” which ultimately takes us all the way up to the order of the universe.31 Therefore, in Hegel there is only one Concept, properly so called: the Reason why everything is the way it is and happens the way it does32; or, in religious terms, the divine Plan of Creation, whose revelation is the same as the actual course of world history. Since it is Hegel’s belief that thinking constitutes the substance of all things,33 his Logic is also an ontology, and its different stages are not just figures of thought, produced by the various forms of consciousness, but also

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modes of existence.34 Thus, when he speaks about Begriff, Hegel intends quite a bit more than the intellectual grasp—exhaustive though it might be— of how things are.35 The Concept is not just the absolute knowledge of things but their absolute progenitor, too, the final cause of all that is. It does not just understand what things are, but makes them what they are: “the Concept is the principle of all life, and hence, at the same time, it is what is utterly concrete.”36 Hegel is quite adamant that the Concept is not something we construct in our heads as we observe the world and try to make sense of it: It is a mistake to assume that, first of all, there are ob-jects which form the content of our representations, and then our subjective activity comes in afterwards to form concepts summarizing what the ob-jects have in common. Instead, the Concept is what truly comes first, and things are what they are through the activity of the Concept that dwells in them and reveals itself in them.37

When one thinks essence as an active principle of self-becoming (in one place, Hegel refers to the Idea as “the absolutely powerful essence”),38 that goes out of itself into merely apparent otherness as a way of fulfilling itself, then one is really thinking the Concept. I am quite aware that Hegel’s dialectical spiral, through what are, simultaneously, logical and ontological realms, may not be the most easily digestible food for thought. For some, the foregoing remarks will undoubtedly appear arcane, in stark contrast to the supposedly simple, self-evident historical reality of Soviet ideology. In response, I would like to recall, first, that it is the goal of this study to complicate our understanding of Soviet ideology, and that, therefore, it should not come as a major surprise if matters get a bit more complicated along the way. After all, it is precisely this appearance of simple being-there that is presently at stake, and what the purportedly arcane theorization seeks to challenge. Second, it should be made clear that the dynamic of Being, Essence, and Concept, difficult though its exposition in Hegel is, is not some outlandish speculation, solely applicable to abstruse philosophical matters.39 The reason it can help us penetrate the problematic of ideology is that the dialectic in question informs the way all of us—not just philosophers— conceive of and speak about the world around us. In what follows, I would like to offer two illustrations of this fact, which will allow me to both bring the dialectical logic a bit closer to earth and to rehearse its steps once more. *** Let us first take the word “humanity.” It requires no philosophical training whatsoever to discern at least two ways in which the word can be used. First, it can function as a synonym for “mankind.” When we say, “This scientific

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discovery will benefit all of humanity,” we have in mind, as the beneficiary of the scientific breakthrough, the human population of the globe. This is, of course, the perspective of Being. Just as “ideology,” in this modality, could be said to refer to “the sum total of ideas,” so the word “humanity” here refers to the sum total of humans inhabiting the earth. The form of unity that we are implicitly positing when using the word in this sense is the collectivity of individuals that “belong” to the same species. It is given in advance that these beings are humans, which in turn gives us the empirical conglomerate of the said beings, humanity. Hegel refers to such unities as “abstract universals.” It is a poor kind of universal, for all it does is register the commonality of multiple individual existents that are assumed to “be” quite independently of the cognitive act that confers identity on them. At this stage in the dialectic, we are not asking what makes individuals into humans. This will come later and will take us to the second step of the dialectic. For now, humans simply are such by virtue of empirically identifiable traits like erect posture, a certain size and shape of the brain, the ability to use language, and so on. Their factual existence, alongside that of other similar beings, “makes up” the likewise factual existence of the species, or differently expressed, humanity “consists” of the individuals that have been identified beforehand as humans. So constituted, humanity is something that is there in the world; mankind is one kind of creatures among others, and, on this basis, can be compared with other living forms, again, in an empirical fashion. But there is yet another way in which we use the word “humanity,” certainly related to the first, while carrying a different meaning altogether. Redeploying a term from the preceding discussion, we can call this meaning “adjectival,” because it pertains to a quality more than to a thing-like entity. Of some particularly nasty act, for instance, we may say that it shows a “lack of basic humanity” or, inversely, of some charitable deed—that it demonstrates someone’s “true humanity.” It is obvious that here the noun is a substantivation of the adjective “human” (the charitable deed could just as well be described as a truly human one). Of course, the very form of the noun creates the appearance of something substantial. Still, this is nothing like the bare factuality that characterizes the first meaning of the word, humanitycum-mankind. Presently, we are dealing with a certain general character that manifests itself in the actions of people but is something entirely different from the people themselves as empirical individuals. We are at the stage of Essence. And indeed, “humanity” in this second sense can be thought of as a kind of distillate of essential traits that lies beyond the plane of actual human doings. Some doings actualize it, while others do not. This is tantamount to saying that humanity here is not immediately identical with the being-there

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of human individuals. It represents the deeper, or ultimate, truth of mankind, principally separate from its (f)actual existence. Let us note that, at this second step of the progression, being human is something mediated. It is not a given, an anthropo-biological fact ascertainable by the presence of certain observable features. Now “human” is a distinction that needs to be won, not the empirical distinction between species, but one between essential determinations. It is the ideal of mankind, rather than its actual state. The gap between the ideal and actuality, which is the same as that between essence and appearance, is characteristic of the dialectic’s second moment. This gap will only be overcome at the next, and final, step of the progression. In the meantime, humanity-cum-mankind is found to exist somewhere other than where its truth, or ultimate ground, lies. We should recall here the analogous situation, in which ideas, in their actual existence, were separated from their ultimate conditions of possibility. To think humanity in this second sense is nothing other than to think the question, “What makes human beings what they are (that is, human)?” The question itself could have, and has had, a variety of answers. For our purposes here, it is quite immaterial whether, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, one equates humanity with rationality or, in the spirit of religious ethics, one takes it as synonymous with love, charity, and compassion. It is not the specific interpretation that interests us here, but just the fact that the essence of what it means to be human—no matter how defined—is something that is both withdrawn from existence and represents its constitutive dimension. The paradox, corollary of the gap between essence and existence, is that although this is what humans truly are, in their actual lives most of them are quite remote from humanity. Their essential being is no more than potential being (which is, of course, the principal reason why the ideal has earned such a bad reputation through the ages). It can be admitted that the third meaning of the word “humanity” is not necessarily one that has occupied the mind of most people living today, although it did stoke considerable enthusiasm some two centuries ago. It is a meaning that holds the previous two together, while also moving beyond them. What is required is to conceive of existing mankind, the empirical totality of human individuals living in the world, as a collective agent working on behalf of that ideal called “humanity.” Once we do this, the ideal would cease to be that airy thing that the word usually brings to mind. The opposition between being-there and essence, the two initial moments of the dialectic, now falls away. Now we do not find existence here, and essence somewhere else. Unlike the latter, the Concept is fully actual. Essence was withdrawn from being, and it was essentially indifferent to it whether it was manifested in the world or not. (Even if we imagine a stretch of history such that several whole generations of mankind consist of nothing but scoundrels, the ideal of

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what it means to be human would not be affected by this in the slightest.) The last step of the dialectic is all about the overcoming of this indifference. The Concept leaves no room for anything merely potential, which may or may not come to actuality.40 Were mankind ever to become the conscious master of its destiny, then the word “humanity” would refer to the fact that humans have made themselves into what they essentially are. It would be the name of this monumental historical project. One could say that the third moment of the dialectic is the moment in which humanity becomes subject. This is certainly true, but such way of putting it risks missing an important point, namely that the dialectic ends up dissolving the opposition between subject and object. What we have at the end is not just humanity as subject, but equally as object (it is, after all, the object of its own making). The word “project” seems to convey the composite semantics quite well, as it speaks at the same time of something concrete and object-like (a project), and of activity, which is definitive of a subject. If we take a view of the entire course of the dialectic, we could say that what begins as a mere thing in the world, ends up as conscious activity in which it takes itself as an object and transforms itself in accordance with its own essence. As another illustration of the same logic, let us take a phenomenon that is often featured in theoretical discussions of ideology, sometimes as a positive alternative (for instance, in Althusser) and sometimes as only a disguised kin: science. Because science has institutionalized existence, the analogy with Soviet ideology, which led a similar existence, promises to be even more informative. Unlike the previous example with humanity, we would not need to strain our imagination to envision what the third moment of the dialectic might look like, for that is not some distant utopian horizon but a reality that is very much with us today (and has been for quite some time). At first, again, we have before us a collection of empirical singularities, the individual scientific disciplines. Each of them is a science. There are many of them in existence; we find them as entities in the world, just as we might find the various departments of science if we visited the campus of some university. They are there, one alongside another. Just as each ideology is distinguished from the other members of the class by its particular content, so is each individual science set apart from the rest by its subject matter: one deals with the basic substances of the physical world, another with living organisms, a third with celestial objects and phenomena, and so on. It goes without saying that the realm of each discipline can be subdivided further, which accounts for the appearance of various branches, some of which, in time, could be recognized as constituting separate sciences. In our initial perspective, which is that of Being, a science presents itself as a “body” of knowledge, a collection of established facts, whose unity is given by the identity of the general subject matter. (At the next step, this unity will not

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be merely given, but mediated, posited.) The cognitions “comprising” each such body are organized systematically; they complement and build on one another, so as to provide as complete a picture as possible of the particular empirical domain. The word “science” can be used to designate the domain encompassing all specialized domains; in such case, it is synonymous with “the sciences,” as is clear from such statements as, “Industry has benefited greatly by the advances in science.” While such a way of looking at things cannot be called false, in the usual sense of the word, it is manifestly partial. Pretty much everyone should be able to sense that there is much more to science than the primitive perspective of Being can accommodate. We are compelled to move beyond it, so as to capture this “more.” And since we have rehearsed the dialectical steps already, it should be easy to anticipate what comes next. We transcend our initial position by asking the question, “What makes science what it is (that is, scientific)?” This brings us to the perspective of Essence. Predictably, the noun whose meaning we have been scrutinizing takes on the already familiar adjectival aspect. Thus, if someone gushed about a recent scientific breakthrough with the words, “This is science at its finest,” it would be plain as day that the speaker is referring neither to an existing discipline, nor to the full array of such disciplines (“science” = “the sciences”), but to a certain quality, or character, that has just received an admirable embodiment. As noted apropos of ideology, the form of unity at the second stage of the dialectic is given not by a “what” but by a “how.” In the case we are currently considering, it was the “what” of empirical content that gave unity to each individual science. This is now superseded by a new type of unity for which the indefinite article is not appropriate. Something is “science”—without the “a”—if it evidences a certain way of doing things, a certain “how.” While at the previous step, a treatise could be considered “science” insofar as it belonged to an existing corpus bearing that name, it must now earn admission by proving itself to be genuinely scientific. And while before we could say that a science “consists” of a certain conglomerate of facts established by research, in our new perspective, we are attending to how facts are constituted as such, that is, as scientific facts. We are explicitly aware of a relation: the facts are not simply “there” for us, as an extant collection of verities, but are grasped together with the norms of scientific procedure. In short, they are-as-mediated. As before, we could say that, in looking at the facts, we are, at the same time, looking through them to see that essential dimension that endows them with the character of scientific objectivity. Science apprehended as essence is wherever the relation of objectivity, verifiability, demonstrability is to be found. Because it is explicitly relation that we are dealing with, it is only in a figurative sense that we can say that it is “found.” As I suggested already, it is better to say that the relation “obtains,”

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which would serve to signal that the position of primal immediacy has been surpassed. A different kind of immediacy characterizes the second form of unity, as is evidenced by the fact that one can conceive of the scientific as a positive property that, say, an article in a biology journal “possesses.” When we considered the example of humanity, the word “ideal” seemed appropriate for the second moment of the dialectic. It is certainly possible to use it in the present context, too, and say that a certain undertaking merits the label “scientific” insofar as it abides by the ideal of science. We may call to mind such a familiarized phrase as “the ideal of scientific objectivity,” while also recalling that, once upon a time, it was a common pastime among philosophers to rank the sciences by how closely they approximated the said ideal. What this way of speaking ends up revealing, however, is just how inadequate the standpoint of Essence really is. It should strike us right away that the phenomenon we know as “science” is about much more than an ideal “how,” which may or may not be realized in the course of a particular learned endeavor. And so, once again, we are compelled to move beyond this standpoint, in order to do justice to the “more,” to apprehend it conceptually. Yet the all-important fact here is that we sense the need to move on only because the phenomenon with which we are concerned has “moved on.” Science, too, is a dynamic form; in its actual historical development, it has long transcended the phase of Essence, the stage on which it merely “aspired” to attain to a lofty “ideal.” We reached the second moment of the dialectic by asking, “What makes science what it is (that is, scientific)?” It is now time to see that the one true answer to this question is . . . “science.” It is science itself that makes itself into what it is supposed to be. The so-called “ideal” of science has not been abandoned. It is just that, in today’s world, it does not exist as an ideal at all. For quite some time now, the essential “how” of science has referred to a set of standards, regulations, and procedures that have shed any semblance of ideality. They have become a most objective force, embodied in a formidable mass of technologies and a sprawling network of institutional arrangements, investments, and practical applications. What someone in the eighteenth century might have called the “spirit” of science has been objectivized through and through. And while it took a good doze of Utopian imagination to conceive of how humanity might humanize itself, that is, how it might, qua subject, make its own essence into something objective, the transformation now before us can be appreciated in a most down-to-earth frame of mind. It is not we who “conceptualize” the present-day existence of science in this dialectically ornate way.41 Nay, we are only doing justice, in thought, to the fact that science in the real world has become its own concept. As Hegel meant it, the Concept is fully actual; in it, the opposition between Being and Essence has been extinguished.42 What has been merely ideal and potential,

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and thus opposed to existence, is now actualized and comes forth as the concrete configuration of the existent. This is just what we witness in the domain of science, where the so-called “values” of objectivity, verifiability, and systematicity have become thoroughly embodied and, consequently, appear not at all as values, but as the operative principles of technological and institutional apparatuses. “Science” in the third, and most adequate, sense is neither an entity, nor an essential truth beyond the empirical world, but an actual process in the world. It is neither simply “there,” nor “obtains”; rather, it actualizes itself, producing and reproducing its own conditions of existence. To this extent, it should be grasped as a purposive activity, or subject. Yet its subject-like existence is anything but disembodied. For science is, at the same time, those very conditions of existence that are being produced and reproduced: the overwhelming objectivity that comprises professional networks and positions, research institutes and laboratories, technologies, publications, educational undertakings, caches of information, and—not to forget—immense flows of capital. It is, after all, through this objectivity that any activity that is to count as “scientific” is first mobilized. To wit, science, in the third moment of the dialectic, is the concrete, practical unity of those two aspects: an ongoing “project,”43 which is as much activity as it is massively present reality. We transcend naïve ways of looking at science when we see that it does not simply know the world, registering facts about it in a systematically ordered fashion, but pre-forms the world to accord with its own activity. The determination of what should constitute proper scientific method is, at the same time, a determination of what should count as “factual” and “real.” Increasingly synonymous with technology, science does not simply lift a veil behind which objective reality is to be found; rather, it shapes the objectivity of that reality. This fact—the constitution of the object’s objectivity by the subject—was philosophically programmed in Kant’s First Critique, but it has gained much additional substance and significance since, in the actual course of history. For in our present day, it is not some transcendental ego that grounds the truth of empirical knowledge. This is now accomplished by the actuality of science itself, as an existing and functioning machinery of instrumental cognition. Kant’s categories have been brought down from the transcendental heavens and are now to be found as the operative specifications and calibrations of that very real machinery. The production of scientific knowledge should, thus, be seen as the reproduction of Science via its merely apparent other. Because the object (“reality”) has been pre-formed to accord with the constitution of the subject (the apparatus of industry-science), the action upon that object is at the same time the subject’s communion with itself, its self-determination, and self-affirmation. This circular course, on which something sunders itself into self and other, and by passing through

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that other “returns to itself objectified,” “through objectivity unites itself with itself,”44 is the logical form of Hegel’s Concept. We could see how all of this is relevant to our understanding of ideology if we reflect on what happens with the status of representations on our dialectical ladder; after all, both science and ideology, from a certain point of view, can be said to “consist” of representations. This, of course, is the starting point of the dialectic. A science, at the outset, presents itself as a particular conglomerate of cognitions. Physics, for instance, can be seen as a body of established truths, laws, theories, models, and so forth. We regard these not really as cognitions, but precisely as “scientific truths,” unmediated presentations of reality. At this stage, we do not ask what makes a law a law but take it as a fact of nature that two points of mass attract each other. The law, in other words, is “there,” as a reality constitutive of the physical universe. At the following step, we see scientific representations not as given but as determined. And what determines them, what makes them properly scientific, are criteria such as objectivity, universality, and empirical verifiability. Previously, facts appeared to us as something absolute, but now they appear as relative to the principles just mentioned. Instead, the aspect of immediacy now devolves to the principles themselves. It seems to us that “scientific objectivity” is an absolute standard that, insofar as it determines cognitions, can be used for estimating the worth of this or that form of knowledge. What happens at the third step of the dialectical ladder is that these principles themselves shed their absolute aspect. For they are now seen as products of science operating as causa sui, a self-positing activity. In this perspective, “scientific objectivity” is not a transcendent standard that could determine what counts as “science” and what not. Rather, it is an artifact of that process-project called science, whose raison d'être is the practical domination of nature.45 We come to realize that “scientific objectivity” is the name of just one truth among others, and that this truth is relative to the project it grounds. To say, as I did earlier, that the ideal of science has been made fully objective is the same as saying that the principles that once could be thought as transcendent to the actual business of seeking empirical knowledge are now immanent to it. More simply expressed, the principles have been built into the apparatus through which scientific practice is first made possible.46 To sum up: we begin with cognitions as opaque givens; then we are able to look through them and see the ground on which they are determined as “scientific”; and finally, we look through both those planes to see how what makes cognitions “scientific” is itself made in an actual self-positing processproject. Transposing this into the problematic of ideology, we get: first, the unmediated encounter with representations that make up the body known as “ideology”; next, we look through those representations to grasp that which determines them as “ideological”; and finally, we apprehend, in a further

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beyond, how that which makes representations ideological is itself an artifact of an actual, institutionalized practice. This last, synthetic view, I wish to argue, is the only one adequate to understanding the nature of Soviet ideology. When one begins by “defining” Marxism-Leninism as a body of ideas, the fact that it was an institutionalized practice, and everything entailed by it, falls by the wayside. It is not that political scientists and historians of the Soviet Union were unaware of this fact. Far from it. The problem is that this fact, which is most obvious indeed, is not comprehended by the notion of ideology; it is not thought in it, but somewhere apart from it. What we get, as a result, is that the ideology was one thing, and the fact that it became institutionalized, codified, formalized, propagandized, and ritualized, is something else, something that happened to the ideology but is really not of it (and thus we can imagine that those things could very well not have happened). In short, the state-institutionalized existence of ideology has been conceived as a circumstance extraneous to what ideology is in itself. Such an approach yields only rickety abstractions. For Soviet ideology was in itself all those things (institutionalization, dogmatization, ritualization, sloganization). They are not to be added to the ideological content proper at some later point, as supplementary considerations, but must be thought in the content itself, as the content. And we are now, at last, within sight of a concept that will allow us to do just that. This is none other than the synthetic view in which we see ideological representations together with that which makes them ideological, and both of those moments—as mediated by a third: an institutionalized practice, ideology-cum-project. And I should emphasize once more that we arrive at this concept not through some special theoretical ingenuity. Nor do we “apply” the concept to the thing that we are seeking to understand. Rather, the thing itself exists as its own concept, in the Hegelian sense of the word. It is the kind of thing that, qua activity, mediates between its being-there and its essence. *** Every analogy limps; it can never map exactly onto that which it is supposed to illuminate. This is certainly the case with the extended analogy between science and ideology. Not everything fits perfectly (but then, if it did, it would not be an analogy). One aspect that sticks out rather uncomfortably concerns the essence, or ideal, that is supposed to be made objective. In the case of science, we do not hesitate to point to such positive values as objectivity, universality, and systematicity. But what positive values can there be in the realm of ideology? It seems slightly preposterous to think that ideology might have an “ideal,” let alone one that deserves to be made actual. From its modern beginnings, science has touted its lofty aspirations. Ideology, however,

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was never a concerted enterprise, in which individual ideologies could be seen as contributing, as was the case with the sciences. It is, therefore, difficult to imagine something like a common program, implicit or explicit, that ideology-cum-project might put in practice. Given that the word has mostly referred to biased, illusory, or distorted cognition, it is not easy to see how it can designate anything like a positive essence. Part of the answer to this conundrum was foreshadowed in chapter 1. There I pointed out that, when ideas are taken in their dependence on social being, a differentiation occurs in the very nature of truth, such that we have, on one hand, the epistemological truth of what ideas explicitly say and, on the other, the ontological truth of what ideas implicitly mediate. The latter is precisely the positive moment that is taken up and made into an ideological artifact in the third moment of the dialectic. The chapter that follows will illustrate the intellectual-discursive manufacture of such a truth. NOTES 1. Merriam Webster Dictionary Online, s.v. “Ideology,” https:​ //​ www​ .merriam​ -webster​.com​/dictionary​/ideology 2. Martin Seliger, “Fundamental and Operative Ideology: The Two Principal Dimensions of Political Argumentation,” Policy Sciences 1 (1970): 325. 3. Freeden, Ideologies, 3. 4. Freeden, Ideologies, 77. 5. Michael Freeden, “Ideology: Political Aspects,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, ed. Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, accessed July 14, 2022, https:​//​www​.sciencedirect​.com​/referencework​/9780080430768​/ international​-encyclopedia​-of​-the​-social​-and​-behavioral​-sciences 6. Tellingly, one of the early sections of Die Deutsche Ideologie is titled “The Real Basis of Ideology.” Thus, from its inception, the critical meaning of the term is based on a relation between ideas and something more real, which lies “behind” them. 7. A good illustration of this fact is furnished by Raymond Geuss, The Idea of Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 4–44. In an otherwise discerning discussion of ideology, the author shows himself quite incapable of isolating the second sense of ideology, repeatedly framing various Marxist interpretations in terms of an ideology. 8. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 36; emphasis added. 9. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 29. 10. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1904), 11. 11. On the topographic representation of ideology, see Ricoeur, Lectures, 106, 108. 12. The issue of what makes ideology “false” is addressed lucidly in Eagleton, 16–18, 24–26. Eagleton’s discussion draws substantially on that in Geuss, 4–44.

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13. This logic is anticipated in Marx’s early critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. There, Marx writes, “This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world.” This leads him to issue a call to “give up a condition that requires illusions” (Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction (1843–44)” in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton [London: Penguin, 1975], 244; emphasis in the original). 14. Lukács, 76. 15. Eagleton, 159–75. 16. Althusser, “Ideology,” 169. 17. Hegel, G. W. F. The Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010). 18. A most accessible introduction to the Logic can be found in Stephen Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From Being to Infinity (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2006). 19. Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, 178; emphasis in the original. 20. Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, 187. 21. Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, 176 22. “What is sensible is something singular and transitory; it is by thinking about it that we get to know what persists in it” (Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, 53). 23. Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, 176. 24. Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, 241. 25. Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, 236. 26. “It is the process that creates its moments and passes through them all” (G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018), 28. 27. Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, 238. 28. Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, 50. 29. As Hegel has it, “the movement of the Concept is development, in which only that is posited which is already implicitly present” (Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, 237; emphasis in the original). 30. Hegel distinguishes the Concept as such from such individual, determinate concepts, “for instance, man, house, animal, etc., [which] are simple determinations and abstract representations; these are abstractions that that take only the moment of universality from the Concept, leaving out particularity and singularity, so that they are not developed in themselves and therefore they abstract precisely from the Concept” (Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, 242). 31. “The effort to uncover a concept that truly identifies the thing for what it is plunges the mind in an infinite sea of relations” (Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, 2nd edition [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1941], 68). 32. “[A] Notion is, first, in its own self the Notion, and this is only one and is the substantial foundation; secondly, a Notion is determinate an it is this determinateness in it which appears as content; but the determinateness of the Notion is a specific form of this substantial oneness, a moment of the form as totality, of that same Notion

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which is the foundation of the specific notions. This Notion is not sensuously intuited or represented; it is solely an object, a product and content of thinking, and is the absolute, self-subsistent object [Sache], the logos, the reason of that which is, the truth of what we call things” (Hegel, Science of Logic, 39). 33. Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, 57. 34. André Doz, La logique de Hegel et les problèmes traditionnels de l’ontologie (Paris: Vrin, 1987); Houlgate, 115–43. 35. “The notion has a dual purpose. It comprehends the nature or essence of a subject-matter, and thus represents the true thought of it. At the same time, it refers to the actual realization of that nature or essence, its concrete existence. All fundamental concepts of the Hegelian system are characterized by the same ambiguity. They never denote mere concepts (as in formal logic), but forms or modes of being comprehended by thought” (Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, 25). 36. Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, 236. 37. Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, 241. 38. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (London: George Bell and Sons, 1894), 10. 39. As Houlgate assures us, “Hegel’s Logic is difficult, but nothing about it is meant to be esoteric; it is not to be the province of a privileged few who are gifted with some mysterious power of dialectical insight or intuition” (66). 40. Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, 240. 41. Nor is there a trace of idealism in this way of understanding science. For we are not attributing any innate power to the Idea, through which the course of historical development of science might have been predetermined, all the way to the full realization of the said Idea in the contemporary world. 42. Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, 237. 43. For the interpretation of science and technology as a “project,” see Herbert Marcuse, “Industrialization and Capitalism in the Work of Max Weber,” New Left Review 30, no. 1 (1965): 151–69; Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (London: Routledge, 1991), xlvi-xlvii, 147–73. Marcuse’s radical political stance toward science as an accomplice in domination owes a great deal to Husserl’s and Heidegger’s critiques of technological modernity; from Heidegger and Sartre it borrows the philosophical significance of the term “project.” See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970); Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 57–85; Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland, 1977), 3–35. Marcuse’s interpretation of technological-scientific domination as a historically specific project has been countered by Habermas, who sees science as a “project of the human species as a whole.” See Jürgen Habermas, “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology,’” in Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 81–122.

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44. Hegel, Science of Logic, 649, 656. 45. For the most trenchant statement of this point, see Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 147–73. 46. This by no means closes the historical dialectic of science. If one wished to comprehend the process-project in its full scope and ultimate determinations, one would need to introduce the broader context of capitalist economy and show how the development of science is mediated, at every step, by that context. Then, the truth we were after, the ultimate “reality” of science, which just a moment ago seemed to be within our grasp, would turn out to lie somewhere else, and a new dialectical spiral will begin that will lead us, at the end, to see how the process by which science reproduces itself is subsumed by and instrumentalized for the reproduction of capital. In the present context, however, it is not necessary to trace this spiral in any detail. I turned to the topic of science not for its own sake, but in order to illustrate something more general, a dialectic that is also at work in the realm of ideology.

Chapter 3

The Ontological Truth of Ideology

We now have the general parameters of a location where we might find and appreciate what is peculiar about Soviet ideology. These parameters were specified in the preceding chapter in terms of Hegel’s logic. The goal was to distinguish, with some philosophical nuance, two basic perspectives in thinking about ideology and to show the dialectical path that leads beyond them, to a third possibility. Even with the real-world analogies I offered along the way, the discussion was conducted on a fairly abstract level. For Hegel’s is a general logic, and as such, its categories abstract from any worldly realities that it might be the logic of. This means that, although we could have attained some understanding of where the path leads, just how to follow it toward a theory of ideology remains far from evident. What does the sublime sphere of the Concept, which opens directly onto the Absolute, have to do with the disreputable business of ideology? It is all fine and good to state, with Hegel, that the truth implicit in the relation of reflection is “realized,” and that this realization constitutes a qualitatively new moment of the dialectic. But what do these abstract terms tell us about the very particular problematic under consideration here? We have gleaned by now that we are supposed to see Soviet ideology not merely as a thing that is there (a doctrine); nor as a relation to an ontologically prior moment, a “moment of truth” outside the representational content of ideas; but rather as a movement of self-relation, self-definition, self-positing. Beginning with chapter 4, this movement will be examined in its full scope and reality, as a process that structured public life in the Soviet Union and unfolded through institutionalized practices of various kinds. Presently, however, I shall take a deliberately limited perspective, and consider it as a movement of meaning that “happens” in a text, a kind of a “maneuver,” or strategic device, executed in the element of discourse. Soviet ideology was not an intellectual ploy and cannot be seen as something merely discursive. But the reduced, “sandbox” perspective offered in this chapter could prove useful in that it allows us to work out, from concrete textual material, the 87

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still-opaque transformations of the dialectic. In particular, I wish to shed light on the all-important shift in which the ontological truth of knowledge, which obtains “for another,” is reflected inwardly, becoming the property of a new kind of knowledge, which no longer has an other. The chapter discusses two significant intellectual encounters of the twentieth century: Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy and Stalin’s interpretation of Lenin’s revolutionary theory. It is no more than a coincidence that both these encounters took place in the context of university lecture courses: Stalin’s On the Foundations of Leninism was a series of lectures he delivered in the spring of 1924; Heidegger lectured on Nietzsche in several university seminars between the years 1936 and 1940.1 But it is another, more substantial correspondence, that I will seek to flesh out below. Both Heidegger and Stalin engaged with a figure that was, in a sense, their alter ego, certainly their most important predecessor. In the process of interpreting their predecessor’s thought, they did not merely explicate the ideas of an important thinker; they framed those ideas in a specific way, producing a new kind of meaning about the meaning of ideas. Heidegger and Stalin, each in his own way, executed a turn of thought in regard to the thought they were interpreting, that of Nietzsche and Lenin, respectively. And it is this common turn that I would like to digest analytically. There is nothing fortuitous in my choice of the two pairings to be featured in this chapter. Since an ontological turn is the issue at stake, Heidegger is, of course, the primary philosophical point of reference. It is he, after all, who set out to “destroy” the tradition of Western metaphysics, which had made epistemology its guiding concern. Heidegger saw Nietzsche as the last great metaphysician, both a culmination and termination of the tradition in question.2 The dialogue between Heidegger and Nietzsche carries an additional benefit, as it will allow me to cast the discussion, from the outset, in appropriately philosophical idiom. The choice of the other pairing requires even less justification. If one wishes to understand the phenomenon of Marxism-Leninism, there is hardly a more appropriate place to begin than with what is Stalin’s most substantial exposition on the subject. HEIDEGGER READING NIETZSCHE Nietzsche is, arguably, the thinker with whom Heidegger engaged in a most sustained and searching manner. Much of this intellectual effort took place in the crucial decade of the 1930s, which witnessed also the paradigmatic “turn” (Kehre) in Heidegger’s intellectual journey, as well as his ill-fated romance with National Socialism.3 His lectures and essays on Nietzsche run to many hundreds of pages—a wealth of material to which I will not

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be able to do justice here. My comments will address only the aspect most relevant to a theory of ideology, namely, the status of knowledge and truth. As this is a central concern for both philosophers, virtually the entire text of the four-volume Nietzsche is informed by it. And yet it is Heidegger’s third seminar at Freiburg, “The Will to Power as Knowledge,” from the fateful summer of 1939,4 that bears most directly on the issue. In the course of the five or so years in which he delivered his lectures on Nietzsche, Heidegger’s position markedly shifted, and the shift had much to do with how the erstwhile Rector of Freiburg University came to perceive and relate himself to the Nazi regime. This is to say that anyone curious to know what Heidegger thought about Nietzsche should be prepared to discover in those lectures not a singular interpretation but, at the very least, a duality of perspectives. Thus, in the first two seminars, from the years 1936 and 1937, the principle of the Will is treated in positive terms and related to a momentous historical mission for which the German people must make itself ready. By the last seminar, of 1940,5 the Will to Power appears in distinctly sinister light, as the principle of aggressive domination and self-aggrandizing subjectivity. Pledged to the “extreme counteressence of the primordial determination of truth,”6 Nietzsche’s thought comes to be seen as complicit with the technologized, nihilistic nightmare that threatens the world with destruction.7 Although Heidegger marks from the outset a distance between his and Nietzsche’s positions, this distance appears, at first, as a matter of following Nietzsche’s thought to its most far-reaching implications; in the later seminars, however, Heidegger recasts it as a radical break, a clash of philosophical titans, from which a new, truly humanized era of historical existence just might be inaugurated. A more formidable challenge than negotiating the shifting terrain of Heidegger’s attitude toward Nietzsche comes from the sheer complexity of the two philosophical positions. To limit oneself to a specific issue is of little help, for it remains the case that even matters of secondary importance are tied to the entirety of a philosopher’s thought. If one wished to pull them out of the whole, one would be pulling much of the whole along with them. This is quite inevitable whenever one is dealing with a foundational matter such the status of knowledge and truth. One would be well advised, then, to begin by glossing at least the major philosophical concepts deployed by Nietzsche and Heidegger. This is difficult enough in the case of Nietzsche, who most consciously avoided the business of rigorous terminological definition and systematic exposition. The task of clarifying key philosophical terms becomes truly daunting when one turns to Heidegger, whose writing, so highly reliant on linguistic originality (and I mean this in the double sense of ingenuity and return to origins), conjures up a whole new language of its own.8 Some of the items in this language are

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ancient Greek words like physis, aletheia, and ousia, most of them recalled from their distant historical birthplace to bear witness to a radically different mode of knowing. Others are neologisms like “worlding” (Welten), “thrownness” (Geworfenheit), or “present-at-hand” (Vorhandenheit), coined for the purpose of capturing thoughts that philosophy, allegedly, has not yet been able to think. Most items in Heidegger’s vocabulary, however, are ordinary German words like “event” (Ereignis), “care” (Sorge), or “clearing” (Lichtung), which he insists on endowing with special philosophical meaning; for the same purpose, he sometimes stitches them together into composites like “being-with” (Mitsein) or “being-toward-death” (Sein-zum-Tode). Whether Heidegger is claiming to be restoring the authentic, yet forgotten, sense of such significations or to be installing novel semantics for the purpose of probing virginal conceptual depths, the cumulative result is an idiom whose familiar surfaces conceal labyrinthine complexity. Since the exercise of terminological pre-orientation promises to be long and tedious, certainly way out of proportion with the task presently at hand, I propose a shortcut that will place us instantaneously in medias res. Rather than wading through dense terminological forests and only later getting to the matter for which terms are being collected, it may be better to get at the matter first, through an easily accessible “picture,” and then introduce specific philosophical notions as they become pertinent for the exposition. As will become evident shortly, the picture I have in mind is related to passages in Heidegger’s first seminar; it is chosen deliberately, so that both thinkers’ positions can be plausibly developed from it. It is a scene from the realm of nature; not a specific scene, in a determinate time and place, but the most generic scene of all: an animal creature living in a certain environment. For a philosopher like Nietzsche, or Heidegger, even this minimal way of introducing the scene is bound to raise some big questions: What is implied when we say that the creature “lives” in a certain environment? And what are we to understand by the word “environment”? Its etymology points us to all those things that “surround” the creature in question. But is this an adequate way of conceiving how the animal exists in what we call the “natural world”? What if much more is at stake in a living being “having” an environment? With this quandary, we are already in a position to mark a basic common ground between Nietzsche and Heidegger. For the two would agree that even an animal existence involves much more than the co-presence of the entity we call animal and another entity we call the environment. There never is a point at which these two can be conceived as independent items, so that we could, subsequently, bring them into relation by showing how, say, the animal “adapts” to and “inhabits” the environment. It would not be controversial to

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posit that the primary given, for both Nietzsche and Heidegger, is a lived world. Although we may never know how an animal experiences its environment, we could say with a fair degree of certainty that the same environment is lived differently by different creatures. But this means that the environment as such does not exist. It is an abstraction from actual lived realities, which are in each case given together with the creature that lives them. To wit, what we call the environment, is given in each case as a specific organization of “resistances,” “dangers,” “opportunities,” and so on. In accordance with the animal’s physical constitution, some elements are made prominent, a matter of keen perception, while others recede into the background. Here is how Heidegger presents the picture in the first seminar, as he glosses some of Nietzsche’s Darwinian themes: What lives is exposed to other forces, but in such a way that, striving against them, it deals with them according to their form and rhythm, in order to estimate them in relation to possible incorporation or elimination. According to this angle of vision, everything that is encountered is interpreted in terms of the living creature’s capacity for life. The angle of vision, and the realm it opens to view, themselves draw the borderlines around what it is that creatures can or cannot encounter. For example, a lizard hears the slightest rustling in the grass but it does not hear a pistol shot fired quite close by. Accordingly, the creature develops a kind of interpretation of its surroundings and thereby of all occurrence, not incidentally, but as the fundamental process of life itself: “The perspectival [is] the basic condition of all life” (VII, 4).9 With a view to the basic constitution of living things Nietzsche says (XIII, 63), “The essential aspect of organic beings is a new manifold, which is itself an occurrence.” The living creature possesses the character of a perspectival preview which circumscribes a “line of horizon” about him, within whose scope something can come forward into appearance for him at all.10

The illuminating center of this lengthy passage is the quote from Nietzsche, “The essential aspect of organic beings is a new manifold, which is itself an occurrence.” These are Nietzsche’s words, but Heidegger’s later philosophy is prefigured here as well. I have highlighted the word “occurrence” because the guiding thought of Heidegger’s Kehre is that of being as an “event.” With each living creature, a determinate “angle of vision” is brought to bear on the environment, so that the latter cannot be thought as indifferent “surroundings,” but appears as a specifically interpreted, oriented, manifold. With the “angle of vision” a definite realm is “open to view,” what Heidegger calls Lichtung, “clearing.” In short, a world “happens.” Heidegger’s philosophy of Being is nothing other than the insistent inquiry into how it is that a world happens, specifically for humans and humankind.

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But before introducing our species, anthropos, into the picture, let us linger for a while longer with Nietzsche’s animal creatures. A lizard is able to hear the faintest rustling of grass but cannot hear a gun fired near it because, through its organic constitution, its perceptual field is structured in a certain way. The gunshot is filtered out. It does not “register” in the lizard’s world; it is a non-event. The gunshot is “there” for us, as we have the requisite constitution to hear it, but not for the lizard. From here, one can venture to ask, “What decides which things are there (for a living being) and which are not?”; or now in an explicitly Heideggerian manner, “What gives rise to the ‘there’ itself?” It would be plain nonsense to say that an animal organizes the “data of experience” into a world. The agency we would be implying by putting things this way is plainly implausible. The most we can allow ourselves to say is that whenever a certain life-form is given, a life-world is also given (to it). But neither the individual creature nor the species is capable of giving itself that life-world. So what gives? With this question, we can mark the point where Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s positions diverge. For, according to the latter, Nietzsche never raises the all-important question of how the “there” comes to be.11 One is allowed to wonder, of course, whether the question is legitimate; whether Heidegger is not projecting the very thing he is claiming to be discovering: the third thing that is beyond beings and their world and that, supposedly, endows beings with a world.12 I am consciously refraining from arbitrating on the issue. The goal here is not to adjudicate whether the claim about Nietzsche’s “forgetfulness” is justified or not, and whether what Heidegger’s philosophy purports to have done constitutes any real advance. All I wish to accomplish here is make clear how Heidegger frames Nietzsche’s thought. And this begins with the assertion that the latter is hobbled by a handicap common to all of Western metaphysics.13 Like a long line of great thinkers before him, Nietzsche is unable to ask what is that co-gives a life-form together with its life-world. Instead, Nietzsche stakes his case on the insight that the occurrence of a world, and the fixity such occurrence brings about, is in each case relative to the needs and powers of this or that life form. What happens when humankind is introduced into this picture derived from the general realm of biological life? For Nietzsche, nothing essential changes in the picture. In other words, he thinks the “human condition” by straightforward analogy with animal and, more broadly, organic life.14 By such analogy, human consciousness would not figure as some special endowment. It is just a peculiar organ with the help of which a specific life form, homo sapiens, takes on the challenges and possibilities of its existence. In Heidegger’s philosophy, human, conscious, being (Dasein) introduces a qualitatively unique mode of having a world and grounding the “there.” For Nietzsche, it does not; for him, the products of consciousness—images,

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conceptions, all the way up to whole systems of ideas and ethical orders—are ultimately reducible to the basic functions of life. They are different in quality, but not in principle, from the instinctual-perceptual attunement through which an animal inhabits a world. Humans just happen to be a type of living beings that organize the chaos of external stimuli and internal urges through such means as “truths” and “values.” Nietzsche ascertains that the particular species of animal called man happens to be at hand. An unconditioned necessity for there being such living beings at all cannot be seen, much less shown to be founded. This species of animal, extant ultimately by chance, is so constituted in its own life that it reacts in a special way to the collision with chaos, namely, in this definite way of securing permanence, specifically by way of devising categories and adapting itself to three-dimensional space—both of these as forms of stabilizing chaos. “In itself” there is no three-dimensional space, there is no equality among things, there are no things at all as fixed and constant items with their own fixed qualities.15

Heidegger intends the first two sentences in this gloss critically. He would give a special status to the “particular species of animal called man,” the status of the unique locus where the truth of being finds a home. But Nietzsche has failed to see that; he has taken mankind as something that is there, in the world, the way lizards are. And just like the lizard, the human animal is governed by that which constitutes the essence common to all worldly beings—the “beingness of beings,”16 as Heidegger expresses it: will to power. The rest of the passage alludes to the categories of reason through which, according to Kant, the world is given to us as a spatial and temporal continuum, populated with more or less stable objects, obeying the principle of causality, and so on. Nietzsche sees in the categories of reason a variety of coping mechanism.17 The same holds true for the fundamental laws of logic: “Just as certain sea animals, for example, jellyfish, develop and extend their tentacles for grasping and catching, the animal ‘man’ uses reason and its grasping instrument, the law of contradiction, in order to find his way around in his environment, in that way securing his own permanence.”18 This is Heidegger speaking, ventriloquizing Nietzsche,19 with just a faint touch of the grotesque to make his listeners aware that this is the wrong way to think about human Dasein. Let us stay with Nietzsche, however, so as to move, in his company, a bit closer to the issue of ideology. What we will see is the second step of the dialectic, executed in concreto. The way the will to power manifests itself among humans is through acts of valuation. Writ large, such acts establish whole systems of values. Constellations of ideas, even when they pretend to be objectively valid representations (as with scientific cognitions), are to be seen as systems of values

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and traced back to acts of valuation.20 Each such act is an ordering of reality in the vital interest of a particular group (tribe, class, race, religious community).21 “Reality” as such is an abstraction; all that there is are various constructs asserted as reality in the self-assertion of this or that form of human life.22 One could however speak of the “reality” that the process as a whole reveals, the process in which different forms struggle to promote their particular mode of existence. This is none other than the ultimate reality of the will to power. In each positing of truth, Nietzsche asks us to see the will to truth; in each manifestation of a will to truth, he asks us to find the self-assertion of a life; and each self-assertion of a life he asks us to understand under the essential rubric of will to power. By following this chain, we get to the realization that the will to truth is but a modality of the will to power.23 Nietzsche sets out to interpret the form of systematicity as such: not the significance of this or that order of values, but of the ordering impulse itself. What he discovers is that, behind each system, there is a desire for system, and this desire is the human variant of the need for homeostasis. Humans construct systems of notions because, like all living organisms, they need to organize the chaos of experience into structures of apparent permanence.24 As Nietzsche writes, paratactically: “Not ‘to know’ but to schematize—to impose upon chaos as much regularity and as many forms as our practical needs require.”25 As long as one is contemplating this practical necessity, there is nothing to criticize. This is just how life is: in the struggle for survival, every being needs to find its bearings, and this implies a preliminary structuring of the environment into a set of relatively stable objects and relationships.26 Nietzsche’s censure begins only at the point where the stable orders humans create in thought—including systematized philosophical thought—come to be valued as the “real,” or “true,” world.27 This is the paramount illusion he wishes to expose. People believe in systems without realizing that every believing is a function of the need to believe. They cherish truths without knowing that this is only because “truth is the kind of error without which a certain kind of living being could not live.”28 The truth of ethical and philosophical systems turns out to be an error, an illusion. And yet, the perspective Nietzsche has adopted implies that a new kind of truth comes onto the scene. Because he interrogates systematicity as form, Nietzsche is able to ask about the meaning of that form. And the meaning, as we saw, is to be found in the quasi-biological need for permanence. The form is thus made relative; it is related to an essence through which its existence is to be explained. In his lectures, Heidegger quite fittingly frames Nietzsche’s project as one concerning the “essence of knowledge.”29 We are in the second moment of the dialectic, as we attend to how Nietzsche is carrying out, in philosophical thought, the movement through which the form of internal coherence is transcended. In any “ideology,” that is, in any particular

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order of ideas, he sees, before anything else, the ordering impulse itself. The content of the ideas itself is bracketed, at least initially, so that Nietzsche can point us to the essential reality behind the will to order. Every ideology has its truth elsewhere: the ideo-logical is grounded in the bio-logical. When we grasp this relation, we are thinking a new form, a new kind of unity: that of external determination. This implies that ideas are not just “there” for us; we see them as necessitated by something else, something more real than they are; and we also see that they, the ideas, are opaque to the necessity that has brought them about and ordered them into a system. Now let us turn our attention to Heidegger and observe what happens when he works over Nietzsche’s position. To foreshadow: a further moment of truth will emerge, and with it, the dialectic of ideology will arrive at its third and ultimate station. We would begin on the wrong foot if we approached Heidegger’s engagement with Nietzsche as a philosophical disputation, an argument between two thinkers in which a difference of approach is at stake. This is very much the case, but it is not at all how Heidegger presents the encounter. And for my purpose here, it is essential to adopt his perspective, so as to show how Nietzsche’s thought is framed within it. In what he calls his “confrontation” with the author of Zarathustra, Heidegger believes to be settling accounts with the entire history of the West.30 This is no figurative manner of speaking. For Heidegger, historical being works itself out through (philosophical) thought, and in Nietzsche’s thought he sees an entire era playing itself out to a grand finale: “For us, a confrontation does not mean supercilious ‘polemic’ or vain ‘critique.’ Confrontation means meditation on the truth that is up for decision, for a decision not made by us, but one that Being itself, as the history of Being, makes for our own history.”31 The pathos of this statement may appear slightly ridiculous to us today, but the idea that history is decided primarily in thought is a straightforward consequence of the way Heidegger understands the “event” of Being. Let us recall our starting point, where, in relation to a certain living organism, Nietzsche speaks of the “occurrence” of a “manifold,” that is, the incidence of a perspectivally structured world. Since there can be no plausible agency that one could hold responsible for fashioning the said manifold, all one can say is that a world happens together with the life form, or that the two are co-given. Heidegger exploits this impossibility of ascribing agency to introduce a third term into the setup, apart from the life form and its world, namely, Being. It is not a third “thing,” for Being is not to be thought of as an entity. It is the happening itself, which can be said to “give” a world to a living being. When that being is an animal, the structuration of the manifold, the way the world is made present to it, is relative to the senses, instincts, and needs of survival. And this means that the question of whether something will be “there” for

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the creature or not—something like a gunshot, for example—is determined immediately, at the level of physical constitution. The animal’s “there” thus bears no relation to truth. With homo sapiens, however, the manifold of a world is given in consciousness, which means also in thought: “Man is man insofar as he comports himself to beings by way of thought. In this way he is held in Being.”32 The fact that man is outfitted with a world means that for a human being other beings are there in an absolutely original way. They are as interpreted, understood, and spoken. Without mankind, the stuff of the universe will still be there somehow, but it will not be there as “things,” “objects,” “values,” “events,” or “goals.” All these modes of presence imply sense-making, meaningfulness, and, as such, are uniquely characteristic of the human world. We cannot even say how things would be there without man, for we would be using language to say it. And in so doing, we will be inevitably imposing on everything we utter the worldliness-cum-meaningfulness peculiar to our mode of being. At the risk of doing violence to Heidegger’s intentions, one could put the matter in religious terms and say that God created man so that the there could exist in truth (or via truth). Heidegger would certainly protest, pointing out that his Being is no supreme subject; yet this objection should not prevent us from seeing the theological inspirations behind the “thinking of Being.”33 This much is certain: Heidegger refuses Nietzsche’s path of conceiving human existence by analogy with other forms of life.34 Man “happens” in history, not in nature. And from this it follows that she happens more than once. In the course of history, the event of Being recurs, each time establishing a new cultural universe, a “civilization,” based on a distinct regime of truth, in which the manifold of existence is ordered in a certain way, as a specifically “articulated abundance.”35 In the very same event, mankind is each time reinvented, given a new shape and a new destiny.36 Because Heidegger is unwilling, or unable, to conceive of humanity as a practical agent, capable of determining its own destiny, he presents history in quasi-creationist terms, with the irruptions of Being taking the place of the demiurgic acts of Providence. Even more curiously, he is convinced that the destiny of mankind is most genuinely experienced in thought.37 Worldly happenings and doings only play out a pre-given, hidden script: “What is happening in such a way that actual historical situations and conditions are seen as merely the consequences of this hidden history; as consequences, they have no control over their ground.”38 Great philosophers, Heidegger included, are the true heroes, for they are the script’s custodians; everyone else belongs in the supporting cast.39 The final curiosity is that, although Being stands for infinite potential, and thus for potentially infinite “events,” there has only been one major happening so far, at most two. For history, which in Heidegger is synonymous with that of the Western world, is almost

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fully coextensive with the reign of metaphysics.40 The little that is left over falls to Heidegger’s beloved Eleatic age, a short prelude, which, according to him, came closest to a genuine attunement between man and world.41 I cannot give much space here to Heidegger’s interpretation of metaphysics, which occupied him through his entire intellectual life.42 It should suffice to note that for him the era of metaphysics is the historical playing-out of a certain essential orientation of humankind vis-à-vis beings. As noted, this history unfolds most essentially in thought, and in the present case this means Western philosophy, where beings eventually come to be encountered as “objects,” while the being that so encounters them, man, comes to understand himself as a “subject.”43 This is a particular configuration of worldliness-cum-meaningfulness. It is characterized, in the first place, by the fact that the question of where meaningfulness itself comes from is lost; Heidegger refers to this as the “oblivion,” or “forgetfulness,” of Being.44 By the end of his Nietzsche seminars, he will insist that the terminal point of Western metaphysics, as a historical configuration of meaningfulness, is one of utter meaninglessness.45 The terminal point in question is reached nowhere else than in Nietzsche’s philosophy.46 Here, the beings man encounters are denied any intrinsic truth of their own; they are seen as mere material, only provisionally invested with significance in value-creating acts through which a domineering subject (the Overman) affirms itself as will to power.47 More significant for my present purpose is the fact that philosophical thought, that of Nietzsche, as well as that of Heidegger, is seen by the latter as the site of truth.48 Even if Nietzsche takes us to the point where beings are without truth of their own, he still belongs to the history of Truth, which is the same as the history of Being.49 And so does Heidegger. . . . His Ereignis is nothing other than the installation of an essential pattern of meaningfulness for man. And if this pattern culminates in meaninglessness, this does not render it any less “fateful”; it does not make it any less a “happening” of Truth.50 Heidegger speaks of his own philosophy as an attempt to “inhabit” a site different from the one in which Nietzsche’s thought dwells. He explains repeatedly that this is not some voluntaristic lunge, as if one could decide to move, by sheer intellectual exertion, to a previously unexplored location.51 Such an attempt would be appropriate for a philosopher who conceives of himself in terms of subject.52 Heidegger wishes to perform a different kind of philosophizing, the kind in which thinking does not take the initiative but waits and “hearkens,” making itself ready to receive the “summon” of Being.53 Heidegger is really not as far as he would like us to believe from one of Nietzsche’s pet ideas: that the era of Western decline will come to an end with a new breed of thinkers-creators capable of willing a whole new value system (and an infinite succession of such value systems).54 Only Heidegger believes that the paradigm-setting act cannot be something subjectively

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willful, self-assertive; it must happen as a quasi-providential “advent.” Since the world is generally something that is given, in a manner of destiny, one has to wait patiently for the Giving.55 One way to understand Heidegger’s mysterious Ereignis is to imagine that, apart from meaningful things and the people for which those things are meaningful, there is the Meaningful as such, conceived as the origination of both. Differently expressed: when we think that the meaningfulness of things and events in the world, as well as the shape of the historical consciousness for which this meaningfulness holds, might have arisen together through the occurrence of the Meaningful as such, then we are thinking Heidegger’s Being, or something very close to it. Rather than take issue with this extravagant proposal, I should like to indicate how it might be relevant to the understanding of ideology. Nietzsche’s basic position is that thought posits truth without recognizing that this act is necessitated by the requirements of life; and in this sense, what thought esteems as truth is, in fact, an illusion. Heidegger responds that Nietzsche pillories the untruth of every philosophy without asking about the nature of truth. This, however, is not through a short-sightedness on the latter’s part, but because Nietzsche belongs essentially to the era of Being’s obliviousness.56 It is not so much that Nietzsche has failed to see the origin of all truth; it is, rather, Being that has withdrawn itself into hiding, and with it—the fundamental question as to the essence of truth.57 For its part, Heidegger’s advancement over Nietzsche is not the special feat of a great individual mind, but it is to be attributed to an epochal reawakening, an upsurge of Being itself.58 To put it in the terms I proposed just a moment ago: Nietzsche’s thought comes from the absconding of the Meaningful; while Heidegger’s thought purports to come from the “site” where the Meaningful might once again approach mankind and grant it destiny.59 In Heidegger’s infamous Rektoratsrede of 1933, as in the subsequent seminar, “Being and Truth,” the epochal event is explicitly linked to the triumph of National Socialism.60 Unmistakable echoes of this are to be heard four years later, in the first series of Nietzsche lectures.61 Yet it is not the triangle Nietzsche-Heidegger-National Socialism that should compel us to reflect on the issue of ideology. It is not a matter of affirming that Heidegger was an ideologist of an odious political regime, but of appreciating how a new meaning of ideology emerges from his confrontation with Nietzsche. We need to see how, in this confrontation, Heidegger’s thought follows a movement beyond the second stage of the dialectic. This happens when thought, in its movement, posits its own relation to Being; as if the two were wedded in advance, that is, in advance of the actual contents that thought might have. For Heidegger, Nietzsche’s will to power grounds the “wrong” kind of relation of man to beings.62 But the crucial point

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is that this does not make Nietzsche wrong. Exactly insofar as he is thinking this “wrong” relation, Nietzsche belongs to the happening of Truth: Again, the basic experiences of the thinker never stem from his disposition or from his educational background. They take place in terms of Being’s essentially occurring truth. . . . That the Being of beings becomes operative as will to power is not the result of the emergence of Nietzsche’s metaphysics. Rather, Nietzsche’s thought has to plunge into metaphysics because Being radiates its own essence as will to power; that is, as the sort of thing that in the history of the truth of beings must be grasped through the projection as will to power.63

Here, it is plainly in view for us how thought posits its own essentiality. For what Heidegger asserts of Nietzsche’s philosophy he would not hesitate to assert of its own, namely, that in it “Being radiates its own essence.” We could say that what we are witnessing here is thought essentializing itself via a merely apparent other. And this is just what the third moment of the dialectic involves. We saw that, with Nietzsche, the real ground of knowledge, of all systems of ideas, is to be found somewhere else. And this means that it is found though an act of external reflection. Nietzsche’s own critique of knowledge is itself that external reflection in which ideas, on the one hand, and the essence, on the other, are held together, yet kept apart. For the ideas fail to do justice to that essence. But Heidegger’s philosophy turns this into an internal reflection; it essentializes itself by placing itself, in advance, at the site where Being “radiates” truth. More simply put, here we have a thought that wants to think “essentially,” wants to return to an imagined past in which something like destiny still existed, and philosophy—supposedly—distilled that destiny. And so it pictures itself as “occurring” at a great historical rupture and “hearkening” to the new truth that the Ereignis is about to eventuate. What speaks in this philosophy is a modern subjectivity that knows itself as uprooted but thinks that the predicament might be reversed if thinking—of all things— becomes aware of its rootedness in Being. There is no need to ridicule Heidegger’s conceit; it would suffice to apprehend the movement of his thinking through which a third sense of the ideological becomes visible. The movement, in its basic outline, is such that thought, cum subject, distinguishes itself from itself, cum object, so as to posit the object’s relation to the essence, but since it is really no different than that object, all that it has done is to have affirmed its own essentiality, its ontologically secured meaningfulness. In the case we are considering, thought-cum-subject is Heidegger discourse, as it engages with Nietzsche; thought-cum-object is, of course, Nietzsche’s philosophy. Heidegger’s discourse about Nietzsche ends up relating the latter’s thought to Being that

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“radiates its own essence.” But Nietzsche here stands for all of (great) philosophy, a tradition of which Heidegger certainly wishes to be considered part. And this is to say that Nietzsche is not truly an “other” for Heidegger. What has started as a “confrontation” is resolved into a self-relation. For as he casts himself in the role of Nietzsche’s antagonist, Heidegger is presenting his own thought as equally necessitated by the “fateful” unfolding of Western history. The self and the other end up being the same, for they both “take place in terms of Being’s essentially occurring truth.” In what sense, then, can we think of Heidegger’s philosophy as ideology? Certainly not under the first form of unity, as an internally consistent “picture” of the world; Heidegger quite explicitly distances himself from the kind of thinking whose business is to construct worldviews.64 Nor do I think we should be too quick to take the philosophy of Being under the second mode of unity, by seeking to relate it directly to some external “real” that might be said to speak secretly through it. This option should remain open, of course, for the alternative would mean giving up on ideological critique altogether. But we cannot exercise the option without seeing, first, how Heidegger’s thought has anticipated the movement of ideological critique; it has taken over the very position from which such a critique speaks and made it into its own positive ground. As we just witnessed, it is precisely Heidegger’s philosophical discourse that posits for itself an essential relation to the real named “Being.” In other words, the form proper to ideological critique is reflected inwardly, giving rise to a new form: no longer one of external determination, but rather of self-determination—the movement proper to the Concept. To grasp Heidegger’s philosophy as ideology is to grasp how, through this movement, it places itself in the third position of the dialectic. An ideological critique of Heidegger can only begin from there; it can only be viable as a critique of that third position. STALIN READING LENIN In most respects, Stalin’s lectures on Lenin are nothing like Heidegger’s seminars on Nietzsche. The context, purpose, substance, style, and length of the two discourses are so different that considering them side by side might call to mind the proverbial apples and oranges. A much shorter text, On the Foundations of Leninism is also short on intellectual originality, not to speak of philosophical depth.65 Its intended audience was a group of future party functionaries with a most rudimentary philosophical training (which, however, closely approximated that of the lecturer). While it aspires to political orthodoxy, Stalin’s discourse does not aim to formulate a new position within that orthodoxy. It claims to be no more than a general introduction to the

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subject of Leninism, a study guide of sorts.66 The style matches the stated objective: it is dryly procedural and self-consciously dull. Each topic is broken down into a definite number of rubrics and is exactly equal to them. The catechism format, so characteristic of Stalin’s orations, is fully on display here: questions are followed by unquestionably correct answers; deviant interpretations are countered with canonical quotations; litanies of theses, or “main points” (osnovnye polozheniia), terminate in pedantic recapitulations. Through all this, one rarely gets a sense that Stalin is interpreting what Lenin thought and said. The disciple simply recites the master’s contributions and states their significance. Whatever the disciple’s professed intentions, however, his presentation does more than rehash Lenin’s ideas. And although the “more” in question is not to be measured in absolute intellectual terms, it represents a qualitatively new moment in the dialectic of ideology. Stalin’s attitude toward Lenin is, indeed, nothing like Heidegger’s “confrontation” with Nietzsche, and yet the end result is comparable. Whether Stalin is aware of it or not, he executes in relation to Lenin the kind of ideo-onto-logical maneuver that we saw Heidegger carrying out in relation to Nietzsche. Stalin delivered his lectures on Leninism in early April 1924, at the Communist University named after Iakov Sverdlov. The text was published in several installments in Pravda from late April to early May of that same year. In 1928, it was incorporated into the book Problems of Leninism (Voprosy leninizma), which was to be, for the remainder of Stalin’s lifetime, a mandatory reading for every well-educated citizen of the Soviet Union.67 In the absence of professional Marxist pedagogues, it was a common practice for Bolshevik leaders to lecture to the next generation of party cadres enrolled at Sverdlov University. The likes of Lenin, Kalinin, Bukharin, Lunacharskii, and Sverdlov himself took the rostrum at various times during the 1920s. Stalin had already appeared before the university’s communist cell in 1923, delivering “On the Strategy and Tactics of the Russian Communists.”68 When he did so again, in the spring of 1924, Lenin was no more, and the battle for his succession was well under way.69 Significantly, between Stalin’s two visits, the general assembly of the university’s party organization had voted in favor of Trotsky’s Left Opposition and criticized the line of the Central Committee, as well as the General Secretary personally.70 The topic Stalin had chosen for his new lecture course was fully in keeping with the wave of public commemorations in the months following the Bolshevik leader’s death.71 Needless to say, it was also a topic well suited for someone who might wish to present himself as the guardian of Lenin’s legacy.72 Still, it is fair to wonder whether the audience Stalin addressed that spring at Sverdlov University could have had much prior knowledge of the topic, “Leninism.” The term was certainly not new. It was first put in circulation in

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1903, at the time of the split in RSDLP, by Lenin’s Menshevik opponents.73 On their lips and under their pens, it meant a voluntarist and authoritarian departure from true Marxism. After 1922, when Lenin’s illness removed him from the political scene, and his lieutenants began sparring over the correct line the Party should follow, the term took on a new life, now with a distinctly positive meaning. This meaning, however, was at first quite indefinite. Before 1924, hardly anyone who spoke of Leninism would have thought of it as a subject matter deserving of extensive learned treatment. It was certainly not the name of a coherent doctrine, but rather a political rallying cry, or a way of evoking the Bolshevik esprit de corps. This state of affairs is evident from Trotsky’s controversial brochure, The New Course, which appeared in January 1924, just days before Lenin’s death.74 In it Trotsky opposes the imminent threat of bureaucratization in the party by summoning the spirit of Leninism, a conceptually unsorted mélange of “realism,” “militancy,” “revolutionary honesty,” “manly freedom,” and several other desiderata. Some of this conceptual flabbiness also characterizes Stalin’s treatment of the subject, but here it ends up producing a definite ideological effect, as I will explain shortly. At the beginning of his address, Stalin defines Leninism as “the theory and tactics of the proletarian revolution;”75 then speaks of it as a “method”;76 later on, he refers to the “period of Leninism”77; and, at the end, he famously characterizes it as a “style” of political work, which combines “Russian revolutionary sweep with American efficiency.”78 To make matters worse, Stalin gives free rein to his habit of treating abstract concepts as if they were living beings.79 As a result, in many places in the text Leninism figures as the subject of actions usually reserved for human agents. This quasi-animate entity proves capable of “growing up” (vyros), “taking a step forward,”80 “answering a question,”81 “drawing conclusions,”82 and being “right” (prav) about things.83 The reason must be that Stalin is thinking Leninism, the doctrine, together with Lenin, the person, and so, instead of saying that Lenin was right about the role of the peasantry, he says that Leninism was right about it. One could smile at this rhetorical grotesque and move on. Yet it could be worth our while to stop and consider that other oddity Stalin served to his audience at Sverdlov University: the “period of Leninism” (period leninizma). More than a slip of the tongue, the phrase points to a most interesting aspect of Stalin’s interpretation. If Leninism is, among other things, a system of ideas, Stalin frames these ideas as the product of a specific historical period and, as we shall see, a specific geo-political conjuncture. He thinks Leninism, the doctrine, together with the time and place in which the doctrine came to be. We should recognize here the second moment of the dialectic, in which ideas exist in a new kind of unity, beyond that of internal coherence, in that they are related to a ground external to them. In Stalin, this ground has the

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shape of Russia, and it “radiates” the kind of positive essence to which, in Heidegger, all great philosophy owes its existence. Instead of “ground,” Stalin speaks of “foundations” (osnovy). Rather than the simple title “Leninism,” he chooses for his course the scholastically pompous “On the Foundations of Leninism.” The General Secretary must have put some thought into this wording, for the first sentence he addresses to his audience is not, “Leninism is a big subject,” but “The foundations of Leninism are a big subject.” From such an opening, Stalin’s listeners might have been led to believe that they were about to hear an exposition of a doctrine; in which case the osnovy that the speaker was so insistently highlighting could only refer to the principles upon which the said doctrine rested. This would have confined the discussion of Leninism to the first form of ideology. But such is not at all Stalin’s approach. As a summary of a doctrine, his text can only be judged incomplete. It is enough to point out that Lenin’s major work, Materialism and Empirio-criticism, gets virtually no attention. Stalin mentions it only once, in passing,84 without any discussion of its contents. Such an omission, coming from someone who has studied most diligently Lenin’s oeuvre, cannot be considered fortuitous. Nor can we be content with the explanation that Stalin was simply unable to handle the philosophical intricacies of Materialism and Empirio-criticism. If Stalin could so easily bypass Lenin’s main treatment of dialectical materialism, it must be because he had something very particular in mind when he spoke of osnovy leninizma. While his lectures do indeed rehash some of Lenin’s most important ideas, Stalin’s “foundations” stand for much more than that. In the first place, they refer to the historical conditions of possibility of Lenin’s political thought. Accordingly, the lectures begin not with a precis of ideational tenets, but with a history lesson. The text’s first section is fittingly titled “The Historical Roots of Leninism.” As will become his habit in years to come, when, as a leader of CPSU, he will deliver comprehensive reports to the highest Party assemblies, Stalin reviews first the international, then the domestic situation at the beginning of the twentieth century. After describing the contradictions of imperialism on a global scale, he asks rhetorically: “This is all very well, but what has it to do with Russia, which was not and could not be a classical land of imperialism? What has it to do with Lenin, who worked primarily in Russia and for Russia? Why did Russia, of all countries, become the home of Leninism, the birthplace of the theory and tactics of the proletarian revolution?” The answer is promptly given: “Because Russia was the focus of all these contradictions of imperialism. Because Russia, more than any other country, was pregnant with revolution, and she alone, therefore, was in a position to solve those contradictions in a revolutionary way.”85 The idea that the global imperialistic “chain” is more likely to be broken in an underdeveloped country like

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Russia plays a pivotal role in Stalin’s account. Yet it is not as an idea that Stalin first takes it up. In his account it initially figures as a historical actuality that grounds Lenin’s insight (rather than the insight shedding light on the historical actuality): because such was indeed the objective constellation of historical factors, Lenin was able to advance his theory of imperialism; because Russia was indeed the place where the contradictions of monopoly capitalism were expressed in the sharpest, most direct, and undisguised way, it was also the only place where an updated revolutionary Marxism could have come into existence. “That is why Russia became the home of Leninism, and why Lenin, the leader of the Russian Communists, became its creator.”86 What makes Stalin’s explanation most peculiar is that he draws the historical background of Leninism from Lenin’s own account in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917).87 In other words, he sketches the “foundations of Leninism” using one of Leninism’s foundational texts. Certainly, Lenin’s 1916 pamphlet is both a theory and a history of modern imperialism, just as Marx’s work is both a theory and history of capitalism. Stalin exploits this fact to fashion a logical loop in which Leninism ends up being its own foundation. History grounds the truth of theory, but the history that serves the purpose is part and parcel of that same theory. Let us carefully follow this Mobius band and attend to how it is constructed. Stalin never asks the question whether Lenin’s theory of imperialism is epistemologically true, that is, whether it corresponds to reality. He takes it that this question has been answered by the Russian revolution, which has proven that Lenin’s theory is correct. The revolution, however, is more than a fact to be used as evidence in a case of right versus wrong. It is, before all else an Event, quite nearly in the Heideggerian sense of that which first grants the possibility to be right or wrong. Without going into any philosophical deliberations, Stalin is suggesting that a Marxist teaching can be true only if it is truly revolutionary, but it can only be truly revolutionary if it has sprung from a time-place that is “pregnant with revolution.” This time-place was Russia of the early twentieth century. The same logic is then projected back in time, to the birthplace of classical Marxism: The same thing, approximately, “happened” in the case of Russia and Lenin as in the case of Germany and Marx and Engels in the forties of the last century. Germany at that time was pregnant with bourgeois revolution just like Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century. . . . There can hardly be any doubt that it was this very circumstance . . . that served as the probable reason why it was precisely Germany that became the birthplace of scientific socialism and why the leaders of the German proletariat, Marx and Engels, became its creators.88

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The exact reproduction of the earlier formula (“why Lenin, the leader of the Russian Communists, became its creator”) rhetorically underscores the seamless historical analogy. And what the analogy tells us is that Lenin is a true Marxist not because he knew Marxism well and followed its principles, not because he brought those principles and ideas to bear on the tasks of the Russian revolution, but because his thought was inextricably one with the Event, just as Marx’s scientific socialism had been. Stalin never asks whether Lenin correctly interprets the work of Marx and Engels. This question, too, has been decided in advance, and not because Stalin is a hardened dogmatic. He, of course, believes that Lenin’s grasp of Marxism is beyond reproach. Yet he never frames the issue as one of adherence to an ideological creed. It is not a matter of a later set of ideas according with an earlier orthodoxy. For Stalin, it is a matter of the ideas’ “foundations” in historical actuality. It is the “foundations” that make ideas true. Such is the logic of Stalin’s ontological turn. To be sure, Stalin’s Event is not exactly like Heidegger’s. The latter is interested in the historical shapes of truth through which, in each case, mankind comes to relate to beings and world. As with each biological life-form, so with each human-historical life-form, the world is given “horizonally,” in a delimited perspective. And this means that it is both unveiled and concealed (each regime of truth grounds only one way for things to “be”; in holding sway, it blocks from view other ontological possibilities).89 For Stalin, on the other hand, the Revolution is an absolute illumination. In it and through it, the forces that shape history are laid bare and can be known in their (non-relative) truth. A true revolutionary theory—the original Marxism, as well as Leninism—is one that grows out of this illumination.90 About the period of the Second International Stalin remarks that it was a time in which “the catastrophic contradictions of imperialism could not yet show themselves [vskrytsia] in an absolutely evident way [s polnoi ochevidnost'iu].”91 This may give us a clue as to why he resorts to the unfortunate expression “the period of Leninism.” Stalin wishes to contrast two phases in recent history: one in which the contradictions of imperialism are not fully developed, and a subsequent one in which they work themselves out into an actual revolutionary situation. The first is a time of cognitive dusk, from which no adequate theory of imperialism could be expected. The second is a time of unveiling and “absolutely evident” exposure. It is “the period of Leninism.” His own expression does not really do justice to Stalin’s argumentation; for he is thinking in terms of time-space, not just time. After all, the revolutionary situation unfolds not just over a certain temporal stretch, but also in a specific region of imperialism’s dominion: Russia. Nor would it do justice to Stalin’s logic to say that the revolution makes the mechanisms of history visible. For this would imply that the revolution is something like a conflagration occurring over here, and throwing light

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on some other object, found over there, a light that makes this previously obscured object more clearly visible. This picture won’t do for the obvious reason that the forces shaping history are not to be found somewhere apart from the revolution; they are what makes the revolution. That which casts light and that on which light is cast are one and the same. And because this is so, a genuine revolutionary theory cannot mean, simply, a kind of knowledge that generalizes on the basis of important historical events. Knowledge must be thought of as an aspect of the Event as such; in the fire of the revolution there is not just the heat of (class) struggle but also the light of truth. Stalin prefers metaphors of procreation to those of illumination. He describes both Germany and Russia as being “pregnant with revolution,” while also noting that the former was the “birthplace of scientific socialism.” For the phrase, “pregnant with revolution,” one can substitute “pregnant with contradictions” or “pregnant with crisis,” without losing any of the meaning the speaker wishes to convey. After all, Lenin’s theory of imperialism is a theory of the contradictions of the world capitalist system. What Stalin is saying is that such a theory can come into existence only where the contradictions are directly experienced. The theory is nothing other than this experience, given in intellectual form. To put it in a different way, the true character of imperialism does not show itself everywhere in the same way; there are privileged spatio-temporal “openings” where its contradictions come to the surface. As a consequence, these openings are also conduits of the revolution. Russia of the early twentieth century is just such a special time-space, and Lenin is the point in which the decisive visibility of imperialism’s objective logic turns into true theory and decisive revolutionary politics. I take the liberty of quoting at full length Stalin’s peculiar explanation for why the proletarian revolution happened in Russia: Where will the revolution begin? Where, in what country, can the front of capital be pierced first? Where industry is more developed, where the proletariat constitutes the majority, where there is more culture, where there is more democracy—that was the usual reply given in the past. No, objects the Leninist theory of revolution, not necessarily where industry is more developed, and so forth. The front of capital will be pierced where the chain of imperialism is weakest, for the proletarian revolution is the result of the breaking of the chain of the world imperialist front at its weakest link; and it may turn out that the country which has started the revolution, which has made a breach in the front of capital, is less developed in a capitalist sense than other, more developed, countries, which have, however, remained within the framework of capitalism. In 1917 the chain of the imperialist world front proved to be weaker in Russia than in the other countries. It was there that the chain broke and provided an

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outlet for the proletarian revolution. Why? Because in Russia a great popular revolution was unfolding and at its head marched the revolutionary proletariat, which had such an important ally as the vast mass of the peasantry, which was oppressed and exploited by the landlords. Because the revolution was opposed by such a hideous representative of imperialism as tsarism, which lacked all moral prestige and was deservedly hated by the whole population. The chain proved to be weaker in Russia, although Russia was less developed in a capitalist sense than, say France or Germany, Britain or America.92

Before taking up the Moebius band of Stalin’s argumentation, we should note that nothing like a theory of the weakest link is to be found in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. There, Lenin is mostly concerned with describing the nature of the new world system; in the book’s later chapters, he also insists, against Kautsky, that the contradictions of this system will inevitably be exacerbated. Although Lenin notes that the surplus profits generated by the capitalists of England, France, and Germany serve to bribe portions of the working class in those countries, he does not draw from this the conclusion that imperialism can only be detonated from its least developed enclaves. The phrase “weakest link” comes from a short piece in Pravda, of 1917, unrelated to the topic of imperialism.93 As for the idea itself, it really belongs to Stalin, despite being habitually attributed to Lenin.94 The latter did regard imperialism as an economic and political order whose parts and operations are interconnected, a “chain.”95 And he did take the uneven development of capitalism as a good reason to expect that a proletarian revolution may be successful, at first, in only one country (although he believed that this would have to be an advanced capitalist country).96 Stalin combines these two ideas into one and presents it as the “Leninist theory of revolution.” In the passage just quoted, Stalin seems to be concerned with proving the theory right. At the beginning, the question of where the proletarian revolution will occur first is posed in hypothetical terms. Stalin starts by miming the “old” answer, favored by the economist Marxists of the Second International, then gives the Leninist “new” answer. Both of them belong in the sphere of theoretical prediction. The “Leninist theory of revolution” predicts that the chain of imperialism will be breached, not in the industrialized bastions of global capitalism, but on its periphery. Stalin then moves onto the plane of historical actuality and notes that the chain was, in fact, breached in Russia. This circumstance, however, can only validate the theory if it is shown that the events of 1917 constitute a direct expression of a crisis of the imperialist economic and political system. What is needed is a proof that Russia was, indeed, the “weakest link” in the chain. But Stalin offers no such proof. He simply states that, in 1917, the chain “proved to be weaker in Russia” [okazalas' slabee v Rossii]. The verb okazalas' connotes accidental occurrence, and

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not at all a lawfully determined outcome. When Stalin asks why the chain broke precisely in Russia, this is the same as inquiring why the revolution had to take place there. It is, thus, a glaring case of tautology to answer, as he does, “Because in Russia a great popular revolution was unfolding.” Before we think of this as an accidental infraction of logic, we should remember that we came across the same explanation earlier: “Because Russia, more than any other country, was pregnant with revolution, . . . she alone . . . was in a position to solve those contradictions in a revolutionary way.” All this says is that a revolution happened in Russia because Russia was pregnant with revolution. The political stakes are clearly visible behind Stalin’s logical contortions. Let us imagine a skeptic asking the question—a question that nagged many a Marxist in the aftermath of 1917—“How do we know that the Bolshevik coup was a true proletarian revolution, and not a voluntarist adventure,97 blind to the decidedly unripe socio-economic conditions in Russia at the time?”98 To this, Stalin would certainly answer that Leninism has made such a question meaningless. After Lenin, we can no longer understand the crises of capitalism by looking at individual societies and their economies. The conditions for revolution are determined by the dynamics of the imperialist system as a whole, even if the conflagration begins in one particular country. What makes a country ripe for, or “pregnant” with, revolution is not the state of its “own” economy or socio-political sphere, but rather a certain critical constellation of factors from within and beyond its geographic borders. “This is all fine and well,” our skeptic could reply, “but how do we know that Lenin’s theory is correct?” The weak rejoinder would be to say, “We know this because a revolution did, in fact, take place in a most unlikely place: Russia.” This would bring us back to where we started, as it fails to dispel the suspicion of voluntarism. The events of October 1917 cannot verify Lenin’s theory, since it must be shown first that they express a systemic crisis of imperialism. Stalin’s solution is to shift the very terms of the problem: the revolution is not proof of Lenin’s theory; it is its genetic code. The issue of whether the theory is right about the revolution is folded into the notion that it is of the revolution. If we use the word “correct” to indicate the correspondence of ideas to what is the case, and we reserve “true” for the genetic wedlock of knowledge and being, then what Stalin wishes to impress on his audience is that Lenin’s theory is correct because it is true, and it is true because “Leninism came from the depths of the proletarian revolution” (vyshel iz nedr proletarskoi revoliutsii). Or, if we wished to use the word “truth” for both relations, we must say that the epistemological truth of Leninism is grounded in its de profundis ontological truth. This second truth is a discursive artifact. It is what Stalin’s texts posits or produces.

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The historical analogy Stalin draws between the German and Russian situations echoes a passage in Lenin’s major work, What Is to Be Done? (1902). We could take this as an opportunity to reflect on how Stalin’s framing of Leninism differs from Lenin’s own understanding of “revolutionary theory.” What separates the two positions is the same dialectical distance that lies between Heidegger’s and Nietzsche’s views of philosophical knowledge. It is the difference between the second and third modalities of ideology. The passage in question comes just before the important second chapter in What Is to Be Done?, with its discussion of spontaneity and consciousness, working-class movement and revolutionary vanguard, bourgeois and proletarian ideology. Before tackling these issues, Lenin devotes the last section of chapter 1 to urging the importance of theory for the socialist movement in Russia. He inveighs against the “economists” in RSDLP for their eclecticism and narrow-minded practicality, insisting that “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.”99 He summons the authority of Engels, quoting at length from the Second Preface to The Peasant War in Germany. In 1874, Engels had written that the German workers have for the moment been placed in the vanguard of the proletarian struggle. How long events will allow them to occupy this post of honor cannot be foretold. But let us hope that as long as they occupy it, they will fill it fittingly. This demands redoubled efforts in every field of struggle and agitation. In particular, it will be the duty of the leaders to gain an ever clearer insight into all theoretical questions, to free themselves more and more from the influence of traditional phrases inherited from the old world outlook, and constantly to keep in mind that socialism, since it has become a science, demands that it be pursued as a science, i.e., that it be studied.100

Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, Lenin sees the Russian proletariat in the same exceptional position. It must face “the most revolutionary of all the immediate tasks confronting the proletariat of any country.”101 If Russian workers prove equal to the task, if they succeed in doing away with tsarist autocracy, they will earn the “post of honor” of a revolutionary vanguard.102 But they can hope to fulfill the said task only if they are “guided by the most advanced theory.”103 Both Engels and Lenin argue for the expediency of rigorous theoretical reflection. This is enough to tell us that for them such a reflection is not a given. It is not as if the very existence of powerful revolutionary ferment guarantees the appearance and sway of “advanced theory.” Only because the two are not related does it make sense to demand, as both Engels and Lenin do, that theory must guide the proletarian movement. Theory is necessary for the movement but is not necessitated by it. The “pregnancy” of

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a revolutionary situation does not assure the birth of theoretical truth. In places, Lenin writes as if the opposite may be the case. The growth of popular unrest in Russia, far from guaranteeing ideological purity and rigor, has drawn “heterogeneous elements” to the socialist cause and blunted the edge of Marxist thought.104 Although Lenin’s discourse, like Stalin’s, carries a message of Russian exceptionalism,105 the mode in which this message is delivered is quite different. Lenin speaks repeatedly of “tasks,” just as Engels had spoken of “demand” and “duty.” The Russian proletariat could become the vanguard of the workers’ movement on the condition—and it is one of many conditions—that its own vanguard, the revolutionary Party, is ideologically prepared and unified. For Lenin, ideological truth is a political desideratum, not an ontological endowment. All of this is a straightforward consequence of Lenin’s views on ideology, which he will sketch—rather than substantially develop—just a few pages later. As is well known, he recognizes just two ideologies: bourgeois and proletarian.106 Ideology is an attribute of social class. And since, as Marx and Engels had announced in The Communist Manifesto, the class composition of Western societies is tending toward simplification and polarization, leaving on the battlefield of history only the two “essential” classes whose agon sums up the meaning of all preceding development,107 there can only be two kinds of ideology. Ideology is something different from actual social consciousness. The former is where the objective interests of a class find their representation. The members of a class may not have consciousness of those interests. Such is the case with the proletariat. It has an ideology, in the sense that a knowledge of its true interests has been attained; and yet, the existing working-class movement does not have it, for it has not made this knowledge its own. Nor could the proletariat be expected to make scientific socialism into its political consciousness proper for as long as it remains what it is: an oppressed, culturally dominated class. This is why Lenin proclaims, following Kautsky, that proletarian ideology must be brought to the toiling multitudes from outside, by the enlightened members of the vanguard party.108 What is more, Lenin echoes Kautsky view that “socialism and the class struggle arise side by side and not one out of the other; each arises under different conditions.”109 On this view, the link between the objective conditions for revolution and the development of revolutionary theory is, at most, indirect. There can be no talk of the former “begetting” the latter. Lenin wrote tantalizingly little on the question of proletarian ideology. Most of his effort, in What Is to Be Done? and elsewhere, was expended on lambasting deviations from orthodox Marxism. In Imperialism, and especially in the article “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism” (1916), is where these polemics come closest to framing a materialist theory of ideology. Lenin connects opportunism, first, to a social agent, a Träger of the

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ideological tendency, the so-called “labor aristocracy”110; he then elucidates the systemic circumstances under which this social layer has emerged and is being reproduced. The super-exploitation of colonial domains allows monopoly capital to turn part of its inordinately high profits into a security blanket at home by “bribing its lower classes into acquiescence.”111 Provided with nonmenial jobs, higher salaries, and opportunities for political career, the “privileged upper stratum of the proletariat in the imperialist countries”112 now has a material stake in the maintenance of the existing social order. The political expression of this fact is the turn away from radical politics and the embrace of a reformist agenda that plays into the hands of the ruling bourgeois class. Its ideological expression is a corrupted Marxism that turns a blind eye on the contradictions endemic to the capitalist mode of production. Following the line of causality Lenin has drawn, we come to see theoretical ideas in a unity with their socio-economic ground: we take them together with the group whose ideas they are, with the interests of that group, and with the mechanism by which the group and its interests come to be. These factors make up the external “other” through which the ideology of opportunism is mediated. To show it as so mediated is nothing other than to point to its ultimate truth, which resides not in what the ideas say, but in the logic of their genesis. In other words, we regard them under the second form of ideology, that of external determination. Stalin’s presentation of Leninism is based not on the view of proletarian ideology from What Is to Be Done?, but rather on the argument we find in “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism.” Stalin simply applies the terms of Lenin’s materialist critique to Lenin’s own thought, changing the signs in the process. While Lenin had shown the conditions under which imperialism breeds opportunism, Stalin shows that those same conditions breed revolutionary Marxism, although in a different geo-political locus. The logic is disarmingly straightforward: in the West, the contradictions of capitalism are muffled; the ideological reflex of this state of affairs is a false, un-revolutionary Marxism; in Russia, by contrast, the contradictions of capitalism play themselves out with undisguised acuteness; the result is a true revolutionary theory. There is one particular passage in “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism” that can plausibly be taken to have been Stalin’s inspiration. It reads as follows: On the one hand, there is the tendency of the bourgeoisie and the opportunists to convert a handful of very rich and privileged nations into “eternal” parasites on the body of the rest of mankind, to “rest on the laurels” of the exploitation of Negroes, Indians, etc., keeping them in subjection with the aid of the excellent weapons of extermination provided by modern militarism. On the other

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hand, there is the tendency of the masses, who are more oppressed than before and who bear the whole brunt of imperialist wars, to cast off this yoke and to overthrow the bourgeoisie. It is in the struggle between these two tendencies that the history of the labor movement will now inevitably develop. For the first tendency is not accidental; it is “substantiated” economically. In all countries the bourgeoisie has already begotten, fostered and secured for itself “bourgeois labor parties” of social-chauvinists. . . . The important thing is that, economically, the desertion of a stratum of the labor aristocracy to the bourgeoisie has matured and become an accomplished fact; and this economic fact, this shift in class relations, will find political form, in one shape or another, without any particular “difficulty.”113

The passage outlines the split in the socialist movement, the topic of Lenin’s article. It is a rift between two tendencies, political as much as ideological, engendered by the same objective process, capitalism-become-imperialism. They coexist in the same historical time but are manifest in different spaces of the world’s geo-political map. One is the general realm to which imperialism’s super-profits flow and are accumulated. The other is the realm where most of these same profits originate, where the exploitation of “Negroes, Indians, etc.” is perpetrated. On the former area of the map, the industrialized metropolitan West, Lenin locates the tendency to parasitism, whose corollary is the de-radicalization of the labor elites and their alliance with the bourgeoisie. The opposite tendency, of a rising revolutionary wave, itself a reaction to the rising toll of exploitation, is manifest in the peripheral zones of the capitalist world system. Lenin’s argument goes no further than the point at which opportunism and social chauvinism are sutured to their economic raison d’être. He does not perform the same operation for the other side of the map. While the economic effects of imperialism in the metropolis are said to acquire, necessarily, a certain political and ideological form, no such superstructural equivalent is postulated for the exploited periphery. This is the point at which Stalin intervenes and says what in Lenin is neither said nor implied: that just as imperialism was bound to produce bad Marxism in the pacified center, it could not but give rise to good Marxism in the combustible Russian periphery. The consequence is that the picture becomes perfectly symmetrical; Leninism now figures in it as the inverted, positive image of opportunism. Earlier, we saw why Lenin would have found such a symmetry problematic: he did not believe that advanced revolutionary theory comes about by the same logic as the ideological corruption of Marxism. That second tendency to which he calls attention, “the tendency of the masses . . . to cast off this yoke and overthrow the bourgeoisie,” does not directly determine its proper ideological expression, for all the reasons that had been advanced in What Is to Be Done?

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The step Stalin takes to “complete the picture” of Lenin’s two tendencies is the step that also completes the dialectic of ideology to which we have been attending. At first glance, it might not be easy to see a qualitatively new moment in Stalin’s gambit. For, in his interpretation of Lenin’s teaching, he seems to be doing no more than extending, in a positive direction, the logic by which “bad” Marxism comes about. Leninism indeed appears to be “ideology” in the same way opportunism is, only with the signs reversed. As noted, the genesis of both ideological phenomena is tied to the same historical process; one is determined by the rise of the revolutionary tide under imperialism, while the other—by its ebb. This way of regarding the situation, however, misses an all-important circumstance. For Stalin, Leninism is not an “other”; it is not an object, in the way opportunism is; it is not just a discourse about which Stalin speaks, but also the discourse from within which he speaks. While in Heidegger’s dialogue with Nietzsche, there is a show of “confrontation,” that is, a show of difference, ultimately negated in the postulated fate(-fullness) of all great philosophy, in the present case the subject and object of interpretation are aligned from the start. Stalin speaks about Leninism as a Leninist. Thus, we could say that Leninism speaks about itself. And in so doing, essentializes itself. This circumstance, as noted earlier, is the distinguishing mark of the Concept. It belongs to the Concept to differentiate itself internally, as subject and object, so that, qua subject, it could define the object it itself also is; or, in other words, so that it could determine its own being. Under the second form of the dialectic, what we mean by “ideology” is the relation whereby social thought is determined by a factor external to that thought (e.g., class interests). And this is just how Lenin presents opportunism. Under the third form, however, we mean by “ideology” the movement in which thought essentializes itself, the relation it establishes between itself and the conditions of its own truth. Crucially, these conditions are not external to the thought in question but are its own artifacts; they are ideal moments themselves. We saw this plainly with Heidegger, who grounds the truth of philosophy, including his own, in the Event. Heidegger’s Ereignis, even if it pretends otherwise, is itself a philosophical concept; it belongs to the same thought that it is tasked with grounding. I tried to show a similar loop (I referred to it as a Moebius band) in Stalin’s treatment of Leninism. The ultimate truth of Leninism, a non-epistemological one, is its inherence in the Revolution. But this genetic relation, of Russia being “pregnant” with revolution and consequently “begetting” also a true revolutionary theory, is itself an idea derived from Lenin’s writings on imperialism; it is a construct of Stalin’s own making but presented as coming from the “Leninist theory of the revolution.” When everything is said and done, Leninism figures as both ideological thought and that which supplies the ontological ground

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for thought. In the second instance, the ideological character of a discourse is attributed to it from without, by the ideological critique, which takes a given set of ideas and shows them to be determined by a factor unreflected in those ideas. But in the third form, which Heidegger’s and Stalin’s lectures exemplify, the same operation is performed internally, within the discourse itself. Now the discoursing thought makes itself ideological, as it were, by supplying its own truth determination. It does so by splitting itself in two, into a self and (putative) other, a subject and object, so as to show itself, via that other, as endowed with ontological truth. This is what Heidegger accomplishes when he contends that Nietzsche’s thought, the ultimate fulfillment of Western metaphysics, is “destined” by the history of Being. With Stalin, an analogous result is attained when he argues that Lenin’s ideas are, in truth, “conceived” by the objective sway of the Revolution in Russia. *** The two dialogues considered in this chapter allowed us to observe how the unity between ideas and being is constructed discursively, as an intellectual artifact. We now need to expand our field of vision, beyond the interiority of thought. We shall follow the same logic, by which the same type of unity will be produced. Yet we will be dealing with a very different species of “production,” of a much greater scope and complexity, a production whose stage is social life itself. NOTES 1. The text of the lectures was published, with Heidegger’s authorization, in 1961 in a two-volume edition: Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, 2 vols. (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961). Included here are also the text of lectures Heidegger prepared but was unable to deliver, as well as several essays on aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy penned in the 1940s. The English translation, cited here, appeared in four volumes, beginning in 1979: Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. David Farrell Krell, 4 vols (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979–1987). 2. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:3–9. 3. In the preface for the first edition of Nietzsche, Heidegger explained that the texts contained in it “provide a view of the path of thought I followed from 1930 to ‘The Letter on Humanism’ (1947)” (Heidegger, Nietzsche, 1:xl). 4. War mobilization in Germany interrupted the seminar in July. Two lectures Heidegger had planned for its conclusion were drafted but never delivered. They were published in the Nietzsche book as a single text under the title, “The Eternal Recurrence of the Same and the Will to Power.”

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5. I am referring to “Nietzsche’s Metaphysics,” a typescript dated August-December, 1940, from which Heidegger apparently lectured in the winter semester of 1941– 42. For an explanation of this text’s tangled history, see: Heidegger, Nietzsche, 1:xxxvi. 6. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:239. 7. In his last seminar, Heidegger comments critically on the way Nietzsche’s thought foreshadows National Socialism’s racial ideology (Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:231, 245). 8. A great deal has been written on the importance of language for Heidegger’s philosophy. Among English-language volumes devoted to the subject are: Joseph J. Kockelmans, ed., On Heidegger and Language (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971); Robert Mugerauer, Heidegger’s Language and Thinking (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1988); Jeffrey Powell, ed., Heidegger and Language (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013); Duane Williams, Language and Being: Heidegger’s Linguistics (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Wanda T. Gregory, Heidegger’s Path to Language (London: Lexington, 2016). 9. The page references following Heidegger’s quotations of Nietzsche are to the German edition of the latter’s collected works: Grossoktavausgabe Nietzsches Werke, 19 vols. (Leipzig: Kröner, 1901–1913). 10. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 1:212. 11. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 1:67; 3:157, 164; 4:199. 12. In one place, Heidegger himself suggests coyly: “One might almost surmise and maintain correctly that with what we call the ‘differentiation’ between Being and beings we have invented and contrived something that ‘is’ not and that above all does not need ‘to be’” (Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4:154). 13. In another lecture course, Heidegger characterized Nietzsche as “the last victim of a long-standing errancy and neglect, but as this victim the unrecognized witness to a new necessity” (Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000], 39; emphasis in the original). 14. At times, Nietzsche hedges the analogy, as in this passage: “In contrast to the animals, man has cultivated an abundance of contrary drives and impulses within himself: thanks to this synthesis, he is master of the earth” (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kafumann and R. J. Hollingdale [New York: Vintage Books, 1968], 506–7). 15. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:102. 16. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:60, 220–21; 4:41. 17. In one place, Nietzsche speaks of the categories of reason as “means toward the adjustment of the world for utilitarian ends (basically, toward an expedient falsification)” (Nietzsche, Will to Power, 314). 18. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:103. 19. Of the style of his engagement with Nietzsche, Heidegger admits at one point: “In the following text exposition and interpretation are interwoven in such a way that it is not always immediately clear what has been taken from Nietzsche’s words and what has been added to them” (Nietzsche, 3:190).

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20. In one of the copious notes posthumously published as The Will to Power, Nietzsche exclaims: “To what extent the basic epistemological positions (materialism, idealism) are consequences of evaluations: the source of the supreme feelings of pleasure (‘feelings of value’) as decisive also for the problem of reality!” (312). 21. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–34; Nietzsche, Will to Power, 227–28. 22. This is the meaning of the following note from Nietzsche’s Nachlass: “Being and appearance, psychologically considered, yield no ‘being-in-itself,’ no criterion of ‘reality,’ but only for grades of appearance measured by the strength of the interest we show in an appearance” (Nietzsche, Will to Power, 323). 23. “Will to truth is a making firm, a making true and durable, an abolition of the false character of things, a reinterpretation of it into beings. ‘Truth’ is therefore not something there, that might be found or discovered—but something that must be created and that gives a name to a process, or rather to a will to overcome that has in itself no end—introducing truth, as a processus in infinitum, an active determining—not a becoming conscious of something that is in itself firm and determined. It is a word for the ‘will to power’” (Nietzsche, Will to Power, 298). See also: Nietzsche, Will to Power, 314. 24. A continuation of this naturalist line of thought can be found in the empirio-critical philosophies of Richard Avenarius and Ernst Mach, both of whom treat human cognition as a means of adaptation. 25. Quoted in Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:70. For Heidegger’s glosses, see Nietzsche, 3:86–88. 26. This issue is discussed in Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:62–64. 27. The opposition between the “apparent” and “true” world runs through the entirety of Nietzsche’s Nachlass. Some of the most illuminating passages on the subject date from March-June, 1888. See: Nietzsche, Will to Power, 315–22. For Heidegger’s commentary, see: Nietzsche, 3:58–63, 123–30. 28. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 272. 29. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:20–38. 30. In one of his lectures, Heidegger refers to Nietzsche as “the West’s last thinker” (Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. Fred D. Weick and J. Glenn Grey [New York: Harper and Row, 1968], 46). For a useful contextualization and discussion of the encounter between Heidegger and Nietzsche, see David F. Krell, “Analysis,” in Heidegger, Nietzsche, 1:230–57. 31. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4:59. 32. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 2:223. 33. In one place in the seminar, Heidegger even speaks of the “god of Being” (Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:183). 34. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 2:26, 139–40. 35. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 2:196. 36. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:187. 37. “It is precisely a matter of thoughts, since these determine man even more than those other things; they alone determine him with respect to these very foodstuffs, to this locality, to this atmosphere and social order. In ‘thought’ the decision is made as

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to whether men and women will adopt and maintain precisely these circumstances or whether they will elect others; whether they will interpret the chosen circumstances in this way or that way; whether under this or that set of conditions they can cope with such circumstances” (Heidegger, Nietzsche, 2:22). 38. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:56. The point is expressed even more clearly in this passage penned in 1937: “The configuration of the Western intellectual world and thereby the world in general depends to an essential extent on the power and preeminence of this word and its history. In history, words are often mightier than things and deeds” (Heidegger, Nietzsche, 2:186; emphasis added). 39. Consider this passage from the conclusion of the typescript “Nietzsche’s Metaphysics”: “Metaphysics is not a human artifact. Yet that is why there must be thinkers. Thinkers are in each case preeminently situated in the unconcealment that the Being of beings prepares for them. As a result of its historical essence, ‘Nietzsche’s metaphysics,’ that is to say, the truth of beings as such and as a whole, which has now been preserved in words derived from his fundamental position, is the fundamental trait of the history of our age, which is inaugurating itself only now in its incipient consummation as the age of modernity” (Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:249–50). 40. Consider such pronouncements as, “Directly after its inception, Western philosophy becomes un-Greek and remains so, explicitly or not, until Nietzsche” (Martin Heidegger, Being and Truth, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt [Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010], 20); or, “The whole of Western thinking from the Greeks through Nietzsche is metaphysical thinking” (Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:7). 41. This assertion can be found in numerous places in Heidegger’s writings and lectures. See, for example, Being and Truth, 5–7; What Is Called Thinking?, 167–68. For an engaging and witty discussion of Heidegger’s relationship to Greek antiquity, see: Glenn W. Most, “Heidegger’s Greeks,” Arion 10.1 (2002): 83–98. 42. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996), 17–23; Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997); Heidegger, Introduction. 43. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:179, 220–21; 4:93. 44. Since there have not been many other such eras, it is difficult to say whether the oblivion in question is not a corollary of the “Event” itself, that is, whether Being, as the opening up of a determinate historical world, does not presuppose its own opacity. Heidegger is not always clear on the issue. 45. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:155, 179–80. 46. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:7–8. 47. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4:121. 48. See pp. 113–14 in the present study. 49. “In its own Being, therefore, truth is historical. Truth always demands a humankind through which it is enjoined, grounded, communicated, and thus safeguarded” (Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:187). 50. “What ‘is,’ what is still happening in Western history—hitherto, at present, and to come—is the power of the essence of truth” (Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:31).

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51. “Everything depends on our inhering in this clearing that is propriated by Being itself—never made or conjured up by ourselves. We must overcome the compulsion to lay our hands on everything” (Heidegger, Nietzsche 3:181). See also: Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, 6–7, 17. 52. “The step back from the one thinking to the other is no mere shift of attitude. It can never be any such thing for this reason alone: that all attitudes, including the ways in which they shift, remain committed to the precincts of representational thinking” (Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter [New York: Harper and Row, 1971], 179). See also: Heidegger, Nietzsche 3:178–80; Heidegger, “Age.” 53. “To think ‘Being’ means: to respond to the appeal of its presencing. The response stems from the appeal and releases itself toward that appeal. The responding is a giving way before the appeal and in this way an entering into its speech” (Heidegger, “The Thing,” 181–82). 54. Consider the following statement from the 1937 seminar at Freiburg: “The thought of eternal return thinks being in such a way that being as a whole summons us without cease. It asks us whether we merely want to drift with the tide of things or whether we would be creators. Prior to that, it asks us whether we desire the means and the conditions by which we might again become creators” (Heidegger, Nietzsche, 2:174). In an earlier place in the same seminar, Heidegger had stated: “A tradition takes shape as a power of Dasein only where it is sustained by the creative will, and only as long as it is so sustained” (Nietzsche, 2:79). The appearance of the term Dasein should alert us to the fact that here Heidegger is not glossing Nietzsche, but expressing his own position. 55. On the interpretation of Being as giving, or “what gives” (playing off the German phrase for “being there,” es gibt), see Martin Heidegger, “Time and Being,” in On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 1–24; Heidegger, Nietzsche, 2:227–33. 56. “The thoughts of a thinker of Nietzsche’s stature are reverberations of the still-unrecognized history of Being” (Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4:12). 57. “[Metaphysics] does not recognize [Being], not because it repudiates Being itself as to-be-thought, but because Being itself stays away. But if that is so, then the ‘unthought’ does not stem from a thinking that neglects something” (Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4:213; emphasis added). 58. “In spite of the ascendant power of technology and of the universally technicized ‘mobilization’ of the globe, hence in spite of a quite specific preeminence of an ensnared nature, an altogether distinct fundamental power of Being is on the rise. . . .” (Heidegger, Nietzsche, 2:186). 59. “Nearness to essence is the privilege—but also the fate—of only a few” (Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4:39). 60. For a devastating early account, by one of Heidegger’s erstwhile students, see Karl Löwith, “The Political Implications of Heidegger’s Existentialism,” in The Heidegger Controversy, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 167–85. 61. “If the capacities for questioning are to survive in Dasein, this question is to be Europe’s task for the future, for this century and the century to come. It can find its

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answer only in the exemplary and authoritative way in which particular nations, in competition with others, shape their history” (Heidegger, Nietzsche, 2:102). 62. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:174–78. 63. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:181; emphasis added. 64. Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 4–11; Heidegger, “Age”; Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:195–96. 65. I. V. Stalin, “Ob osnovakh leninizma: Lektsii, chitannye v Sverdlovskom universitete,” in Sochineniia, Vol. 6 (Moscow: OGIZ, 1947), 69–188. 66. Stalin, “Ob osnovakh,” 69. 67. I. V. Stalin, Voprosy leninizma, 10th edition (Moscow: Partizdat, 1935). 68. The earlier lecture has been published in: I. V. Stalin, “K voprosu o strategii i taktike russkikh kommunistov,” in Sochineniia, Vol. 5 (Moscow: OGIZ, 1947), 160–80. Stalin borrowed liberally from that text for the later sections of On the Foundations of Leninism. 69. Lenin had been absent from political life since the end of 1922, when a second stroke confined him permanently to Gorki. The Party Central Committee entrusted Stalin with overseeing “the isolation of Vladimir Ilich in terms of personal relations with staff and correspondence” (quoted in Stephen Kotkin, Stalin, Vol. 1, Paradoxes of Power [New York: Penguin, 2014], 484). 70. Aleksandr Reznik, Trotskizm i levaia oppozitsiia v VKP(b) v 1923–1924 gody (Moscow: Svobodnoe marksistskoe izd-vo, 2010), 38. 71. See Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 213–44. The main initiative of this commemorative campaign was the so-called “Lenin’s Enrollment”: the recruitment of thousands of new party members, mostly from the ranks of the working class. It is to Lenin’s Enrollment that Stalin dedicated his On the Foundations of Leninism. See: I. V. Stalin, “Organizatsionnyi otchet Tsentral'nogo Komiteta XII s'ezdu RKP(b), 24 maia 1924,” in Sochineniia, Vol. 6 (Moscow: OGIZ, 1947), 200–202. 72. On the symbolic struggle in the Party leadership over Lenin’s legacy, see Tumarkin, 207–23; Kotkin, Stalin, 1: 542–46. In this struggle, Stalin’s had a notable strategic advantage: his personal secretary, Ivan Tovstukha, was also the man in charge of Lenin’s archive, established by initiative of the Party Central Committee in 1923. 73. G. E. Zinov'ev, Leninizm: Vvedenie v izuchenie leninizma (Leningrad: Gos. izd-vo, 1925), 1. 74. Lev Trotsky, Novyi kurs (Moscow: Kranaia nov', 1924). 75. Stalin, “Ob osnovakh,” 71. 76. Stalin, “Ob osnovakh,” 81–87. 77. Stalin, “Ob osnovakh,” 138 78. Stalin, “Ob osnovakh,” 187–88. 79. The idiosyncrasies of Stalin’s language and thought are inventoried in: Mikhail Vaiskopf, Pisatel’ Stalin: Iazyk, priemy, siuzhety (Moscow: NLO, 2002). 80. Stalin, “Ob osnovakh,” 70. 81. Stalin, “Ob osnovakh,” 142.

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82. Stalin, “Ob osnovakh,” 142. 83. Stalin, “Ob osnovakh,” 138. 84. Stalin, “Ob osnovakh,” 90. 85. Stalin, “Ob osnovakh,” 76–77. 86. Stalin, “Ob osnovakh,” 77. 87. V. I. Lenin, Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Imperialism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1933). 88. Stalin, “Ob osnovakh,” 77–78. Like many other of Stalin’s pronouncements, this explanation of Marxism’s nativity was canonized and reverently reproduced during his lifetime. In the academic volume Historical Materialism (1950), we read: “The birthplace of Marxism, and in particular historical materialism, was Germany of the 1840s, and its creators were the leaders of the German proletariat, Marx and Engels. And this is not coincidental. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the center of the revolutionary movement was moving steadily from West to East, to Germany, where a bourgeois-democratic revolution was ripening” (F. V. Konstantinov et al., eds., Istoricheskii materializm [Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1951], 19). Even after Stalin’s death, the thesis survived in official expositions of Marxism-Leninism. See, for example, A. D. Makarov et. al., eds., Marksistskо-leninskaia filosofiia: Istoricheskii materializm (Moscow: Mysl', 1967), 48. 89. This is a central theme of the treatise, “Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being.” See: Heidegger, Nietzsche, 2:199–250. 90. The following, fairly typical, statement from the early Stalinist period illustrates the extent to which this notion of ontological truth, expressed in metaphors of illumination, had become a canonized part of Marxism-Leninism: “The victory of October provided a new, universal-historical experience for the working class, which shed a new light on Marxist historical theory, which elevated this theory to a new height. The October Revolution and the subsequent construction of socialism in our country served as a gigantic floodlight [prozhektor] that illuminated in the most profound way the whole process of world development and its laws” (I. Razumovskii, “Oktiabr' i istoricheskii materialism,” Pod znamenem marksizma 9–10 [1932]: 53; emphasis added). 91. Stalin, “Ob osnovakh,” 80. 92. Stalin, “Ob osnovakh,” 97 (emphasis in the original). This explanation is repeated almost verbatim in the entry on Marxism-Leninsm in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which appeared after Stalin’s death in 1953. See: Bol'shaia Sovetskaia Enstisklopediia, s.v. “Leninizm,” Vol. 24 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe nauchnoe izdanie “Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia,” 1953), 324. 93. V. I. Lenin, “Krepost' tsepi opredeliaetsia krepost'iu samogo slabogo zvena ee,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Vol. 32 (Moscow: Politizdat, 1969), 201–2. 94. The idea was first suggested by Parvus, Rossiia i revoliutsiia (St. Petersburg: Izd. N. Glagoleva, 1906), 133. See: Baruch Knei-Paz, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 16–19. Bukharin also used the phrase (Christopher Read, Lenin: A Revolutionary Life [London: Routledge, 2005], 125). 95. Lenin, Imperialism, 79.

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96. V. I. Lenin, “O lozunge soedinennykh shtatov Evropy,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Vol. 26 (Moscow: Politizdat, 1969), 354; V. I. Lenin, “Voennaia programma russkoi revoliutsii,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Vol. 30 (Moscow: Politizdat, 1969), 133–34. On this point see also: Herbert Marcuse, Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 42–43. 97. Karl Kautsky’s writings on Soviet Russia in the years following the revolution are the locus classicus for this interpretation. See, specifically, Karl Kautsky, Die Diktatur des Proletariats (Vienna: Wiener volksbuchhandlung, I. Brand & Co., 1918). 98. The following passage from a 1932 article in the journal Pod znamenem marksizma (Under the Banner of Marxism) glosses the skeptical position: “It turns out . . . that our revolution does not contain in itself anything that is historically necessary and lawful, that the dictatorship of the proletariat in our country is a historical ‘accident,’ a senseless adventure by the Bolsheviks, whose inner collapse is inevitable, sooner or later . . . ” (Razumovskii, 56; emphasis added). 99. V. I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement (New York: International Publishers, 1969), 25. 100. Quоted in Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, 28. 101. Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, 29. 102. Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, 29. 103. Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, 26. 104. Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, 17, 25. 105. The idea of Russia’s special role in the international revolutionary movement is developed at the beginning of Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920). In later years, the characterization of the Russian proletariat as “the most revolutionary working class in the world” will become a canonized common place. See: V. I. Lenin, “Detskaia bolezn' ‘levizny’ v kommunizme,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Vol. 41 (Moscow: Politizdat, 1969), 1–8; Konstantinov et al., Istoricheskii materializm, 306–7. 106. Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, 40–41. 107. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Washington Square Press, 1970), 57–79. 108. Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, 31. Lenin’s quarrel with Kautsky dates from the beginning of the First World War and what the former saw as the nationalist apostasy of the German Social Democrats. Before that time, Lenin presented himself as a faithful follower of Kautsky. See the revealing footnote in V. I. Lenin, “Two Tactics of Social Democracy,” in Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1962), 66. 109. Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, 40. “The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals. By their social status, the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia. In the very same way, in Russia, the theoretical doctrine of Social-Democracy arose altogether independently of the spontaneous growth of the working-class movement; it arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the development of thought among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia. . . . Hence, we had both the spontaneous awakening of the working masses, their awakening to conscious

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life and conscious struggle, and a revolutionary youth, armed with Social-Democratic theory and straining towards the workers” (Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, 32). 110. The expression was popularized by Engels (Friedrich Engels, “Preface,” in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1944, trans. Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky [London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co, 1892], xv). 111. John A. Hobson, Imperialism (London, 1902), 205; quoted in Lenin, Imperialism, 93. 112. V. I. Lenin, “Imperializm i raskol sotsializma,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Vol. 30 (Moscow: Politizdat, 1973), 165. 113. Lenin, “Imperializm,” 175; emphasis in the original.

Chapter 4

The Production of Ideology

Ideology is the logic of ideas. We have seen that there are, in fact, three distinct kinds of logic that we can discern behind the same familiar term. Accordingly, we can ascribe three different meanings to the word “ideology.” The three logics, however, are related; they mediate with one another and pass from one into another. And so, after all, there is just one, dialectical logic of ideology that encompasses three moments, three types of unity. In the first moment of the dialectic, we are dealing with something thing-like: an ideology, an individual conglomerate of ideas, distinguishable from other such complexes. In the second moment, we have before us a quality, or as a philosopher may word it, a determinacy, that characterizes a particular discourse: the ideological. This determinacy, however, is not an artifact of the said discourse; it is not the discourse that has determined itself as ideological. Rather, the aspect in question is ascribed to it from the outside, by the ideological critique, which espies a connection between certain ideas and their (unacknowledged) determinations. To wit, the ideological quality is there für ein anderes, “for another.” In the third moment of the dialectic, that same quality is produced internally; the discourse posits for itself the ultimate truth of ideas. The discourse, we might say, ideologizes itself. It presents itself as having the quality of essential groundedness, which is to say, of having a genetic relation to being. Under the second form, the connection between ideas and existence is factual; the ideological critique merely points to it, exposing it. By contrast, under the third form the connection is artifactual; it is an intellectual construct. The discourse turns out to be true, but only because it has itself fashioned the notion of what should count as “true.” In Stalin’s lectures on Leninism, discussed in the previous chapter, all three moments of the dialectic are plainly in view. First, there are the principal ideas of Lenin, of which the lectures offer a resume. These ideas do not reach us, the readers, or the primary audience at Sverdlov University, directly. After all, it was not Lenin speaking to the aspiring Party cadres in the spring of 1924, but the man who would eventually replace him as the leader of the Bolshevik 123

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Party. It is Stalin who presents Lenin’s ideas as a coherent whole and as fully consistent with the tenets of Marxism. This is “ideology” under the form of systematic, thing-like unity. We should note, however, that this form is mediated: it is produced in the course of Stalin’s exposition. Second, in that same exposition, the speaker pillories the opportunist theories of the Second International, essentially paraphrasing Lenin’s argument on the subject. In showing that these theories reflect the ebb of the proletarian movement in the West during the “epoch of imperialism,” Stalin reproduces for his audience the second form of the dialectic, that of external determination. He then subsumes Lenin’s ideas under the same form of unity, arguing that Leninism is the direct expression of an objective historical dynamic: the weakening and rupture of imperialism’s chain in Russia. This assertion constitutes “ideology” in a new sense, distinct from the previous two. The logic informing it is that of self-determination, inasmuch as the discourse that asserts the truth of an ideology is not just about that ideology but equally of it. Stalin’s discourse is not just about Leninism. It is also a Leninist discourse; it determines itself as such. How so? In the first place, of course, by the fact that the speaker presents himself as a faithful disciple of Lenin’s, unconditionally endorsing the teacher’s views on each and every issue. Yet Stalin does not simply declare Lenin’s ideas to be true; he fashions for his audience a specific notion of their truth. The third hypostasis of ideology is what we get when we take Lenin’s ideas in the specific way in which they have been objectified and valorized; that is to say, when we take them together with Stalin’s presentation of them. This requires no special ingenuity on our part, for in On the Foundations . . . Lenin’s “teaching” is in fact mediated by the presentation in which it figures as a discursive object. It comes to us in a certain “framing,” or “packaging.” With the discussion of Stalin’s canonized text, I wished to show the third logic of ideology at its most concrete: as the logic of a particular argumentation, in a particular discursive performance. I did not wish to suggest, however, that Soviet ideology is to be equated with a certain logical “move” found in select doctrinal texts. The reality of the phenomenon we call Soviet ideology far exceeds the realm of intellectual strategies and semantics. It was the reality of a many-sided social process, spanning a vast network of institutions, and involving millions of people. The third form of unity, which I have sought to isolate and describe, is ultimately the unity of that process unfolding in the real world. The present chapter undertakes to sketch it from an initial, bird's-eye view. This preliminary perspective will be supplemented and refined in the two chapters that follow. ***

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In its historical actuality, Soviet ideology presents itself in two aspects, which its students have had a very difficult time in reconciling. At each moment in time, Soviet ideology was, first, a discrete conglomerate of officially sanctioned ideas and pronouncements. In this corpus one could identify individual parts, as was routinely done in textbooks and encyclopedias: methodology (materialist dialectic); general philosophical knowledge (dialectical materialism); doctrine of socio-historical development (historical materialism); political economy; theory and tactics of the revolutionary struggle; and doctrine of the future communist society (scientific communism). One could distinguish the ideas of Marx and Engels from the contributions of their Bolshevik followers. One could divide the whole into particular subject areas, the provenance of this or that individual doctrine (of the state, of cultural revolution, of proletarian dictatorship, and so on). In principle at least, each of these could be broken down further, and the entire corpus presented as an aggregate of discrete propositions, each articulating an individual cognition. And, finally, Marxism-Leninism as an orthodoxy could be separated from its various alleged corruptions. No one could deny that Soviet ideology existed as just such a “body of ideas.” Every citizen of the Soviet Union who ever held in hand a textbook of Marxism-Leninism—and great many did—would testify that the body had a most palpable reality. Yet this is not the full reality of Soviet ideology. To realize this, we need to do little more than reflect for a moment on the imaginary textbook of Marxism-Leninism that our imaginary Soviet citizen is holding. Certainly, the official doctrine is there, in his hand, an entity as discrete as the volume in which it is contained; inside that volume are equally discrete subject headings, following each other in a certain order of exposition. Marxism-Leninism is indeed before us in the form of a thing. Yet this thing has not fallen from the sky. It has been produced, through definite actions and under definite circumstances. It is the result of multiple kinds of work, of which publication is only the concluding act. Behind the palpable material presence of the book body lie political and educational considerations, administrative decisions, the intellectual labor of the authors, the work of academic committees, editors, and censors.1 What appeared to us, just a moment ago, as a self-subsistent thing, now shows itself to be the artifact of practice. Soviet ideology was indeed a definite system of philosophical, socio-historical, and political-economic views. At the same time, and in each moment of its existence, it was also a vast and dense field of practices sustained by a complex structure of institutional provisions. It is neither possible nor necessary to present in detail this landscape, notoriously complicated by the dynamic of incessant organizational change and rechristening. For my purposes here, it would suffice to sketch only its most salient features, such as they emerged during the first two decades of Soviet power:

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• Scholarly-scientific work, including the recovery, transcription (and, where necessary, translation), archival preservation, editorial preparation, and publication of doctrinal texts and documents related to the history of the workers’ movement and its leaders. Such curatorial work was the principal mission of the Institute of Marx and Engels, founded in 1921,2 and the Lenin Institute, in existence since 1924. The two merged in 1931 to form the Institute of Marx, Engels, and Lenin,3 which functioned as the main research center on matters of ideology and Party history until the end of the Soviet period.4 The Institute, which was under the direct jurisdiction of the Party’s Central Committee, had a sibling in Leningrad and, eventually, branches in most Soviet republics. It organized conferences, administered archives and libraries, and curated museum exhibitions.5 Apart from its heftiest and glossiest output—the tomes of various collected works by the founders of Marxism-Leninism—the Institute issued academic periodicals,6 scholarly monographs, conference proceedings, histories, biographies, bibliographies, compendia of archival documents, collections of official resolutions, and transcripts of Party congresses. Another major hub of Marxist-Leninist scholarship during the early Soviet period was the Socialist (later, Communist) Academy of Social Sciences, comprising a number of disciplinary units and issuing over a dozen journals during its lifetime (1921–1936).7 • Marxist-Leninist education, from the highest level of academic training to initiatives aimed at basic ideological literacy. During the decade of the 1920s, this work was administered by Glavpolitprosvet, a section within the Commissariat of the Enlightenment.8 The top of the political-educational edifice featured the so-called komvuzy, institutions of higher learning like the aforementioned Socialist Academy and Sverdlov University, the Zinov'ev University in Leningrad, and the famous Institute of Red Professors.9 The last of these, as its name reveals, was tasked with educating the elite corps of Marxist pedagogues. Below this tier was a network of Party schools (sovpartshkoly) on the republican and regional levels10; further down came schools of political literacy (politgramotshkoly), evening courses, Marxist-Leninist circles, and planned politicalideological instruction during Party-cell meetings.11 Nor should one forget the self-study of Marxism (samoobrazovanie), a practice in which great many Soviet citizens engaged, and which, although factually taking place outside official organizations, was everywhere institutionally prescribed and encouraged.12 As everyone knows, Marxism-Leninism did not remain confined to specialized schools, but from the beginning entered as a most vital subject the curricula of the state educational system.13 Writing in 1963, two American dentists complained that their

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Soviet colleagues were required to devote more course hours to political-ideological education than to the study of surgical stomatology.14 • The vast domain of agitation and propaganda, as something distinct from school-centered indoctrination in Marxism-Leninism. Here, we find a bewildering variety of practices, the specific character of each determined by place, purpose, audience, and medium.15 Let us recall only those originally Soviet phenomena such as the agit-trains and agit-ships of the post-revolutionary years16; Lenin’s pioneering project for monumental propaganda; the dramatizations of historical events en plain air17; the staging of mock political trials; the “Red,” or “Lenin’s,” corners found in soviets, workers clubs, and apartment buildings18; the political patronage (shefstvo) of village communities by workers’ collectives from the city19; the agitpunkt, with its inventory of materials and practices20; the “live newspaper” (zhivaia gazeta)21; film screenings accompanied by live political commentary22; the simple oral beseda in a village reading room (izba–chitalnia).23 To this very partial list, one could then add, at one fell scoop, all the more conventional forms of propaganda through the media of print, radio, film, and later television. Such practices were mobilized in a highly coordinated fashion during mass campaigns associated with important political initiatives or events.24 The campaigns themselves, like all work of political education and propaganda, were directed by а special organ of the Party’s Central Committee, renamed several times over the Soviet years but widely identified by the snappy acronym, Agitprop.25 Republican, regional, and local Party organizations had their own Agitprop departments, with analogous functions, their exercise commanded by directives from Moscow. Among those functions was the organization of public festivities, for which the central administration of propaganda sent detailed scripts and lists of pre-approved slogans.26 • Practices of ideological control and censorship27—a sphere that is very difficult to demarcate inasmuch as its institutional forms, at certain points, fade into a complex reality of routine procedures and internalized norms. To list only the most visible points of this landscape: censorial interventions by the Party leadership targeting specific ideological deviations, often publicized in special resolutions, and serving the practical purpose of recalibrating and remobilizing the apparat below28; the regular operation of state agencies of censorship, headed by Glavlit, a sprawling bureaucracy with a staff of thousands29 and branches on all levels of Soviet government, responsible for vetting all material to be published, aired, exhibited, or staged30; ideological control as a function incorporated into the routine work of all editorial boards, publishing houses, media agencies, creative unions, artistic councils, and repertory

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commissions31; ideological censure exercised as part of the professional duties of literary, film, art, and theater critics; acts of ideological “vigilance” and “unmasking,”32 common during the Stalinist period, performed by people not formally entrusted with tasks of censorship; public performances of “criticism and self-criticism” (kritika i samokritika), usually following the exposure of “grave ideological errors” in this or that organization33; and finally, the “internal censor,” the ineffable mechanism by which ideological strictures internalized by individual authors shaped their intellectual or artistic output.34 • The practice of high theory, which is to say, everything deemed to be an original contribution to the doctrine of Marxism-Leninism. Clearly, this exclusive category concerns only the very summit of political-discursive production in the USSR: writings and pronouncements by the Leader, resolutions of the Party and the Comintern, the Party program, and Soviet Constitution.35 And yet, in order for Stalin’s latest oration to become an “invaluable contribution to Marxism-Leninism” and enter the mainstream of Soviet intellectual life, it needed to be framed as such. This was the work of such high priests of political orthodoxy as Viacheslav Molotov, Andrei Zhdanov, Aleksandr Shcherbakov, and Lev Mekhlis.36 And under what category should we include the practical aftermath of such supreme sanctions, the wave of mandatory discussions in Party committees and general assemblies, the “drawing of necessary conclusions,” and the campaigns to “turn into life” (voplotit' v zhizn') the Leader’s words? These ideological campaigns, regularly recurring during the Stalinist period, were likewise the product of centralized organizational activity commanded from the Party’s Central Committee.37 Chapter 6 will examine more closely one such campaign: the Stakhanov movement of the mid 1930s, itself a continuation of the long-running campaign of socialist competition. The purpose of this short overview is not to unveil previously unknown facts, but to impress the need for us to keep this massive field of institutionalized doings always in view when theorizing the nature of Soviet ideology. To be sure, there is a good and bad way of doing this. The bad way consists in lining the two series facts side by side and declaring that the official ideology was a body of such and such ideas while also existing as a network of such and such institutions and practices. I did precisely this several pages back, and quite intentionally, in order to differentiate two aspects that are as distinct as Lenin’s ideas and the treatment of them we find in Stalin’s On the Foundations.  And yet, these aspects are distinct as moments of a unity, and it is their coming-together that we must seek to recreate in our understanding of Soviet ideology. This implies that we need to overcome the “indifferent

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also” that connects the two sides.38 Surely, dialectical thinking must begin by distinguishing Lenin’s theory of revolution from what Stalin has to say about it. But then it must recognize that, in Stalin’s discourse, the two are brought together. One is made an object for the other, by that other; the énoncé belongs to the énonciation.39 Thus, what we get in Stalin’s lectures is not Lenin’s theory of revolution, but rather “Lenin’s theory of revolution,” the quotation marks highlighting the fact that before us is an ideological construct, a discursive artifact. The same kind of thinking should be extended to the realm of official ideology’s worldly existence. Little is to be gained if one simply supplements a taxonomy of ideas with a factography of institutional structures and practices. Such a purely mechanical juxtaposition of discrete aspects fails to recreate the genuine nature of the phenomenon at hand. For Soviet ideology was not a system of ideas and also a field of institutionalized practices, but the concrete, dynamic unity of the two. The thoughts of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin did not exist in some ethereal sphere apart from the myriad activities directed through the party-state apparatuses. They were the stuff of the said activities, the objects of specific measures, enactments, and undertakings. People encountered them not as ideas, pure and simple, but in this or that form of institutional-practical mediation: as a slogan, directive, citation, learned interpretation, popular exposition, mandatory educational subject, prescribed ritual. There was no zero degree of mediation, that is to say, no instance in which the practical context of the circulation of Marxist-Leninist ideas could be said to have added nothing to their “original” content. Such an act as the publication of Lenin’s collected works was, of course, not the neutral rendition of what the esteemed author once said and wrote. Implied in the act was the official recognition that every word of the great revolutionary leader was worth recovering and evangelizing. Contained in those volumes were “Lenin’s immortal words,” his “great teaching.” The quotation marks here indicate institutional value added, a property that cannot be peeled off from the intellectual substance of ideas. Because they were officially sanctioned ideas, they invariably appeared—whether in a slogan, directive, citation, learned interpretation, or popular exposition, in this value form. To summarize the case as presented so far: Soviet ideology existed in institutionally mediated practices, through which it was, in each instance, specifically objectified; it figured as the object of instruction, scholarship, popularization, canonization, censorship. These various forms of objectification, in different fields of practice, were, at the same time, so many instances of valorization. To turn a line from Stalin’s speech into a slogan, to prescribe the slogan for a particular public celebration, to carry a banner with those words during a demonstration—all of this amounted to reproducing a definite form of value. Such a way of regarding Soviet ideology brings the previously

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sundered aspects into a whole; we no longer have ideas over here and institutionalized practices over there, but their articulated unity: ideology as a process in which it objectifies and valorizes itself. This unity is not invalidated by the fact that we can distinguish different moments in it. Certainly, we can abstract the ideas as such from the forms of their objectification and valorization, as well as from the institutional mechanisms that made that possible. And yet, the moments are inseparably bound together. They existed for one another: the institutional mechanism existed for the sake of producing that “value added,” which was in each case the value of the doctrinal ideas, that is to say, of the ideology. I do realize that I have proposed so far is not quite enough to bring out the special character of Soviet ideology. After all, many of these same considerations seem germane to every political doctrine. Are not all political ideas made present in social space through concrete practices of proselytizing, education, publication, and so forth? And, such being the case, is this practical activity not ultimately premised on the value attributed to the ideas in question by a group of people, very often organized in bodies called political parties, but sometimes also in institutions such as think-tanks, foundations, and learned societies? When we observe that a political ideology is being openly proclaimed, systematized, researched, or taught, what are we witnessing if not a process that practically promotes the value attributed to a set of ideas? What, if anything, makes Soviet ideology qualitatively different? The answer to this question is implicitly contained in the entire preceding discussion, which over many pages now has been focused on ideology qua form. The specificity of the Soviet case is not just a matter of the unprecedented scope of the political-ideological enterprise; nor does it have to do with the thoroughgoing exercise of censorship, which effectively eliminated from public life all political ideas incompatible with the orthodoxy. While these are important considerations, they are more about scale than about character. What truly distinguishes Soviet ideology, as a process, is that in it the reproduction of ideological meaning was only a means for the (re-)production of the general form of ideology. If the mission of a liberal think-tank is to advocate such ideas as democracy, rule of law, and free enterprise, it is the substance of those ideas that is being promoted, their use value, so to speak. In official Soviet culture, another form of value takes precedence: the formal value of ideology as such. Consider, once again, On the Foundations of Leninism. . . . What we have before is an exposition of Lenin’s ideas, to be sure; the ideational contents of Leninism are being reproduced in Stalin’s lectures. But this reproduction serves a definite purpose: to establish the truth of Leninism, as something different from the verity of this or that postulate of Lenin’s. The value of what Lenin thought is folded within the value of what, in Stalin’s estimation, Leninism is.

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*** Althusser’s theory, considered briefly in chapter 1, would seem to furnish us with a ready-made template for making sense of our subject. Not really interested in the life of political ideologies, Althusser endeavored to conceptualize ideology per se; and he described it precisely in terms of a process (within the larger process of social reproduction) carried out through a manifold of stateinstitutionalized practices. The structures within which the said practices are embedded are those of the church, the family, schools, the media, social and cultural organizations. They receive the collective moniker “ideological state apparatuses” (ISAs) and as such are distinguished from the “repressive state apparatuses” (RSAs: the government, the army, the police, the legal system), responsible for the direct exercise of political domination.40 Apparent similarities notwithstanding, this generalized picture of ideology is a poor fit for the Soviet context. Nor should one expect otherwise, given that Althusser’s model is very obviously based on facts and characteristics of the modern bourgeois state. Whatever the model’s overall theoretical worth,41 the attempt to apply it to Soviet ideology could produce a beneficial effect; the poor fit itself could allow us to appreciate the specificity of the phenomenon that concerns us here. One immediately apparent difference is that, within the Soviet state, ideology had an institutional embodiment quite separate from the traditional mechanisms of socialization, education, and culture inherited from the previous epoch. Apart from what Althusser understands to be the ideological state apparatuses, Soviet ideology possessed its own apparatus, explicitly so conceived, built, and even named.42 This fact has significant conceptual implications. It is plain enough that “ideological” could not have the same meaning when applied to the activities of Agitprop as when used to describe those of a social club in rural France. Nor could we fail to recognize that the Soviet school system was a vehicle of ideology in a wholly different way than, say, the Swedish one. Taken together, these rather elementary considerations point up a crucial issue, the issue that the present inquiry aims to solve: what exactly do we mean by “ideological” in the Soviet context? When Althusser uses the modifier in reference to the non-coercive apparatuses of the state, he means that the practical function of these institutions is determined by the needs of social reproduction, which, in a class-divided society, is necessarily the reproduction of a certain regime of economic domination.43 Thus, the term “ideological” receives its meaning via the act of external reflection, a theoretical-hermeneutic exercise that unveils for us, the readers, the ultimate ground, or truth, of such activities as praying, attending soccer games, or reciting poems in class.44 Before our eyes, as we read Althusser’s ISA essay, these turn out to be practices of “ideology.” He,

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the author and theorist, has presented them to us as such. In short, ideology appears here under the second form of the dialectic, the unity of external determination. The totality of the practices Althusser circumscribes could bear the name “ideological process” inasmuch as these practices, in any given instance, make actual the general function of ideology, which is that of perpetuating the socio-economic status quo. I had the opportunity to observe already, back in chapter 1, that Soviet ideology does not have this kind of immediate relation to the realities of social life’s material reproduction. Quite the opposite is the case: by the late 1920s, in proportion to its advancing institutionalization, which is to say, to its solidification as a separate apparatus, official ideology became a largely autonomous sphere within the general division of labor, one type of work among others (if a rather privileged one). In fact, this is just how it was spoken of; ideologicheskaia rabota was a phrase with wide currency not just then, but during the entire Soviet period. Somewhat less common was the designation idologicheskii rabotnik (“ideological worker”) for anyone vocationally involved in ideological work.45 The degree of professionalization and specialization in this sphere can be judged by the fact that within the first decade of Soviet rule, in addition to salaried ideologues, propagandists, censors, scholars, and countless bureaucrats, a caste of experts on socialist mass festivities had come into being; by the end of the 1930s, the profession of the “mass organizer” (massovik) had been established.46 All those people were “doing” ideology, not implicitly, but quite explicitly, and were, therefore, quite materially interested in promoting the value of their work. At the very same time, in the years that marked the beginning of Stalinism, another development came to be powerfully manifested: ideologicheskaia rabota spilled far beyond its self-designated perimeter and colonized all other non-coercive “apparatuses.” In the aftermath of Stalin’s 1931 letter to the journal Proletarskaia revoliutsiia (Proletarian Revolution),47 itself the shrill crescendo of the Cultural Revolution, with its campaigns to Bolshevize all cultural and social institutions, the media, science, and law, these spheres became, for all practical purposes, sectors of the “ideological front.” Accordingly, writers, artists, scholars, and journalists came to be routinely referred to as “workers of the ideological front” (rabotniki ideologicheskogo fronta).48 If we decide to call all of this the “ideological sphere,” then we would mean, in the first place, the sphere of objectification and valorization of ideology; and not, as in Althusser, the sphere that mediates between socio-economic being and individual subjectivity. Between the millions of Soviet subjects—actual or potential—and what we might call the socialist imaginary, there stood the reified presence of Ideology itself. This is not to deny that great many citizens of the USSR made sense of who they were, or should be, through the narratives and categories of Marxism-Leninism. This seems to me beyond debate.

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Yet I am presently concerned not with the subjective side of the process, but rather with its objective logic. Whatever meaning this or that person might have forged for herself in the light of Marxist-Leninist ideas, it remains the case that in the Soviet Union those ideas were always and everywhere made the objects of social experience in the context of institutional-practical mediation. Many individuals unquestionably took the official doctrine and turned it into a personal faith, into a political and moral self—a fact that has received much attention in writings on Soviet subjectivity.49 This subjective use value, however, in no way contravenes the objective existence of another kind of value, one that appertains not to the ideas themselves but to the form of their unity. To state once more a point already made: Soviet citizens never dealt with ideological meanings simpliciter, but always and everywhere with meaningful meanings, which is to say, with representations explicitly marked as belonging to an ideology and, as such, bearing the official seal of ultimate truth; in short, with representations already in the general form of value given to them by the institutionalized practices whose totality was the process we call Soviet ideology. If we could speak of those social activities as a totality, it is because, despite their great variety and heterogeneity, they also exhibit a common movement; the process can be said to have obeyed a singular logic. Furthermore, insofar as this logic did not just obtain but was consciously implemented, it is rather more appropriate to speak of a process-project. Soviet ideology was a project, indeed, because its lead actors thought it of great importance for the Party and the country to have (an) ideology. Consequently, the centrally administered process of ideologicheskaia rabota was made to accord with a certain idea of what “having (an) ideology” should look like. It is important to distinguish here between two levels of representation. First, there are the ideas that can be said to make up the “body” of an ideology. Such, for instance, is the notion that class struggle is the engine of historical development. Of entirely different kind is the idea of what “having (an) ideology” should look like. This representation does not belong to the “body” of an ideology, but rather constitutes the telos of the institutionalized process; it defines ideology as a project, the object of its own making. In chapter 6, we will revisit these different orders of meaning and value. *** When something or someone is both the subject and the object of one’s own making, we have an instance of self-determination, the third moment of the dialectic. Let us put aside for now the critical doubt as to whether anything like being a subject and achieving self-determination is possible for us, human beings, and let us focus, instead, on the purely logical content that is

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at stake here. Self-determination is a process, one in which ends and means, activity and result, constitute a concrete unity. Through my own activity I bring about a different state, or shape, of my self. The beginning and end points are obviously different, yet continuous. The “old” and “new” selves are not different items, but states of the same individual. I become an other to myself without losing myself. The work that I have done—my own work upon my own self—mediates, unifies the “before” and “after.” After all, it is the “I” that makes the “old” self into a new one. As Alexander Kojeve expresses it in his lectures on Hegel: “The negating being negates its identity to itself and becomes its own opposite, but it continues to be the same being. And this, its unity within opposition to itself, is its affirmation in spite of its negation or ‘dissolution,’ or, better, ‘transformation.’”50 If I am to make myself into something other than what I am now, it could only be because I am conscious of a better way to be, a higher “value.” At the outset, I am not yet one with that value; I do not live it, but have it before me in objectified form, as an idealized “image,” a model. In this sense, objectification is an integral moment of self-determination. The latter is nothing other than the work through which I bring myself in conformity with the objectified value, working on myself so as to pattern my existence on the model in question. We could reach for an industrial metaphor here and say that in self-determination one becomes the active producer of one’s self. The self is the product, one which is made in accordance with a model—the valorized image of what the self should be. We can—and must—distinguish the three moments: producer, product, and model. But we must also see their actual unity, which is that of the “enterprise” of self-determination. The production of the self, as a process, is the dynamic identity of producer, product, and model. Presently, however, we are not dealing with a self in the sense of a “someone,” but with an impersonal “something,” namely, an ideology. We are contemplating a state enterprise that produced texts and performances, an institutionally organized activity. Still, this enterprise not only can, but must be interrogated in terms of subjectivity. We must recognize here the same movement of self-determination in which producer, product, and model are brought together into a unity. Soviet ideology is the concrete activity, carried out through various Party and governmental apparatuses. But it is no less the product of this enterprise, its end result or artifact. The artifact was produced in accordance with a normative image, a representation of “what having (an) ideology should look like.” Just as the contents of Marxism-Leninism were ubiquitously mediated by the process of their valorization and appeared as “immortal work” (bezsmertnyi trud), “the most necessary, essential slogan” (naibolee neobkhodimyi, nasushchnyi lozung), “ideas of genius” (genial'nyie idei), so was their totality, the ideology, always mediated by its own reified

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and valorized image. The component aspects of this image and their dynamic relationship will be examined in more detail in chapter 6. Presently, it will suffice to highlight the general movement of “image-making,” which is indistinguishable from the substance of the thing we are considering. In the Soviet context, to experience ideology was to encounter it in the context of its self-presentation as “the one and only truly progressive ideology,” “the worldview of the proletariat,” and “the creative development of Marx and Engels’s legacy.” What we might call the process of ideological production was, in the first place, the organized creation and promotion of a certain (self-)image of ideology. Although the practices of official ideology were many and varied, we could distinguish two general species of value that were objectified in and through them, two dominant images of ideology. Both are images of truth, although of a different kind; both should be familiar, not the least because we already came across them in Stalin’s canonized exposition of Leninism. One is the image of epistemological truth, the other, of ontological truth. In the first instance, Soviet ideology presents itself as a definite system of objective knowledge, a body of revealed truth, a “science.” This body, called Marxism-Leninism, consists of complementary parts, each comprising, further, laws relevant to the particular domain of this or that doctrine (nature, history, political economy). All of this makes up a perfect monolith, cemented by logical consistency, each assertion clearly deducible from a more general principle. As Lenin once proclaimed, “In this philosophy of Marxism, forged from a single piece of steel, not a single basic premise, not a single substantial part can be taken out without deviating from objective truth, without falling into the clutches of bourgeois-reactionary lie.”51 Although no part can be taken out, contents can be added, as the doctrine is said to be always developing, incorporating into itself ever-new knowledge, sourced from ever-new historical experience52; yet this ongoing supplementation does not impinge in any way on the perfect solidity of the system. The individual parts, although integrated into a holistic “body,” can stand on their own, as so many discrete truths, their value inseparable from the original form in which they have been stated. Before passing on to the other self-image of Soviet ideology, we could ask about the one invoked just now: is this reality or sham, a factual description or a wishful self-advertising? Was Marxism-Leninism really the highest form of knowledge, capable of explaining everything, not just in the realm of human history, but also in the world of nature? Was it, indeed, perfectly consistent in its elaboration? Questions like these are illuminating in their patent inadequacy. For what is being asked is whether the actuality of Soviet ideology conformed to its glamorized self-image. But what exactly is the actuality of Soviet ideology? It would be wonderful if one could examine the thing called

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Marxism-Leninism and determine whether it matches the claims Soviet propagandists made about it, to see whether it is indeed scientifically objective, methodologically rigorous, tightly cohesive, and so forth. This, however, cannot be done. Marxism-Leninism does not exist somewhere apart from its valorized image. Soviet ideology was the process of its self-presentation; it was the actual production of Marxism-Leninism in a certain form of value. It is possible, of course, to reach for an external standard and assert that what passed for sublime philosophy in the Soviet Union was no genuine intellectual achievement but a trumped-up appearance, an elaborate make-believe. This philosophy avowed the ability to explain everything, but all it ever did was put on a show of explanation. The trick had a semblance of credibility only because the “reality” to be comprehended had been defined in advance in the very categories that would later be used to “explain” it. All of this is surely the case. Much of Soviet philosophy, especially during the Stalinist period, was indeed a show of theoretical rigor, logical consistency, and scientific objectivity. Having said that, one must acknowledge that the show was not really “empty.” Behind it there lay an intricate organization of activities, many of them professionalized and carried out in accordance with institutionalized norms and expectations (“job descriptions”). We must recognize that the show was the product of an “enterprise”; it was an ongoing “production.” And this amounts to registering, once again, the unity of a process-project. Soviet ideology was the production of its own show, just as the activity of advertising is the production of a promotional image of a certain product or enterprise. In our case, however, the enterprise that produces the image is also the one that is being promoted. In its most visible manifestations, ideologicheskaia rabota was labor on behalf of a doctrine. The character and organization of this work, in each given instance, were determined by such tasks as: defining the limits of the canon (which texts belong to it and which are to be excluded); systematizing its principles; producing a singular consistent interpretation of the various “teachings”; organizing and presenting its contents for various pedagogical purposes; adapting those same contents to the purposes of mass propaganda; safeguarding its integrity through various forms of censorship. The immediate artifacts of these activities were instructions and resolutions, officially sanctioned publications, authoritative interpretations, scholarly works, textbooks, propagandist pamphlets, and a myriad of speech performances. In a more general sense, the product of all this ideological work was the show of Marxism-Leninism as a solid body of truth. As the purity of the doctrine was a matter of paramount importance to the Soviet leaders, and of immediate practical concern to the numerous censorship agencies, ideological meanings tended toward the status of things—precious things, with almost sensuous immediacy, insofar as their value was

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inseparable from the original form in which they had been expressed. The surest way to preserve them in transmission—in the act of exegesis, application, or popularization—was by direct citation from the source of sacred wisdom or a most faithful paraphrase. Already by the middle of the 1930s, most subjects of intellectual discussion in the Soviet Union came prepackaged, as it were, with an array of references and quotations from canonized texts, which an author claiming expertise on the subject was supposed to know and handle discursively. This was part of the “job description” even in areas such as child pedagogy, seemingly remote from the concerns of historicalmaterialist philosophy and political economy. Apart from textual common places, this requisite knowledge included references to historical events and current realities that illustrated the correctness of doctrinal theses. To “treat” an issue, then, consisted in showing how words already spoken and stamped as true may be relevant to that issue. It required weaving a textual tapestry of those canonized references and quotations, which were an integral part of one’s professional expertise. Learned exercises of this sort quite consciously conveyed the impression that it was not the author who was presently solving the problem, but rather the treasure trove of Marxism-Leninism that had contained the solution all along.53 The height of interpretive mastery was when an author managed to demonstrate, not only that Lenin had had something relevant to say on the issue of child-rearing, but that there actually existed a “Leninist teaching” on child-rearing, a self-standing theory within the general theory that was Marxism-Leninism. Just one example of this ubiquitous strategy can be given here. In its first issue for the year 1934, the main Soviet journal of philosophy, Pod znamenem marksizma (Under the Banner of Marxism), carried an article by one Nikolai Bobrovnikov titled “V. I. Lenin on the Reeducation of the Masses in the Process of Socialist Construction.”54 The topic is spelled in the title. Its exposition begins, conventionally, by asserting its vital importance for the present moment.55 After this, the author proceeds to demonstrate that the topic was also central to Lenin’s thinking. There follows a series of quotations from Lenin interspersed with explanatory commentary and paraphrases.56 The pronouncements concern the dictatorship of the proletariat; the need to defeat the old regime, not only politically and economically but also ideologically and culturally; the tasks of the Party in this regard; the survivals of bourgeois consciousness in the Soviet Union and their basis in the economy; the role of the intelligentsia during the transitional period; the issue of proletarian culture; and so on. Along the way, the author does not neglect to point out that Lenin’s position was but a development of “Marx’s teaching.”57 Nor does he fail to devote ample space to Stalin’s contribution to the question, itself a “development of Marxism-Leninism . . . on the new stage of the transitional period.”58 Before long, it transpires that “Stalin’s historical

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report to the 17th Party Congress gives, in essence, an all-sided justification and further development of the Leninist theory about the socialist reeducation of the laboring masses in the process of revolutionary struggle for the building of socialism.”59 The name given to the theory sounds as bizarre in Russian as it does in English translation. Even more bizarre, however, is the notion that anything of the sort might have existed. Lenin certainly could not have suspected that his scattered reflections on how to combat Russia’s cultural backwardness and the survivals of bourgeois ideology constituted a full-blown theory. “Leninist,” of course, is not the same as “Lenin’s,” and so the leader of the Russian Revolution may be excused for failing to appreciate the full significance of his own accomplishment. In the present context, “Leninist theory” means approximately: something rooted in Lenin’s intellectual-political legacy, which Stalin subsequently developed and which we now—thanks to Stalin—can recognize as an essential contribution to Marxism. This is just a cursory glimpse at a sample of scholarship from the Stalinist period. Still, the sample is as typical as can be; the procedure I have highlighted could be found in thousands of variants and on most diverse topics of learned discussion. Bobrovnikov implemented in his text what had become, by that time, an accepted and expected practice, glossed in such official pronouncements as, “In every endeavor the individual should remember that there is no sphere of work about which [Vladimir] Il'ich [Lenin] has not thought, about which he did not leave clear and comprehensible words and behests.”60 It was a matter of both political prudence and professional diligence to follow this exhortation. Bobrovnikov made a theory out of things Lenin and Stalin had said on a certain issue. He produced, quite intentionally, a certain form, which we should have no trouble identifying. It is the first form of the dialectic: the unity of internal coherence by which a number of ideas could be said to constitute a singular and definite entity, something that is “there.” This entity has a name: “the Leninist theory about the socialist reeducation of the laboring masses in the process of revolutionary struggle for the building of socialism.” The moniker basically exhausts the entire content of the theory. There is really not much else to it than the thought that it’s quite all right to build socialism without an adequate consciousness and culture (or even literacy) on the part of the masses, for these prerequisites can be acquired along the way. What is important is not the content but the need to present it as a solid piece of a greater solid corpus called Marxism-Leninism. Had the author done anything else, he very well could have been accused of “underestimating the Leninist theory about the socialist reeducation, etc.” In the first place, Soviet ideology was the show of its monolithic unity, the immediate embodiment of truth in the word. This valorized self-presentation was folded into another: a show of ontological grip, rootedness, and vitality.

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More than a socialist creed, Soviet ideology was the corollary of “actually existing socialism.” It was not merely a “body,” but also a “soul,” that is, the spiritual-intellectual outgrowth of a definite historical experience. It was not just “there,” as a system of ideas that one could master; it was also “living,” continually feeding on that unique experience and renewing itself. It was not just a compendium of laws, of true theories and propositions; it also stood for a new (and final) age of truth, coincident with a new life form: socialist humanity. In other words, it was true by ontological default, in advance of any specific content, since it was—supposedly—rooted in the ultimate stage of world-historical existence. As one canonical definition words it: “Marxism Leninism is not one of the multitude of philosophical schools or currents, but the worldview of the working class, of millions and tens of millions of the laboring masses, fighting for the destruction of capitalist slavery, for socialism. It is the worldview of the Soviet people, the first in humanity’s history to have built a new, socialist society.”61 What had begun as a worldview expressing the interests of a particular class, was ascribed, from the 1930s onward, to Soviet people in toto, as their way of thinking, necessarily arising from the conditions of their historically unique mode of life. The world of “actually existing socialism” these people inhabited represented a new civilization.62 And it was only proper that such a unitary life-world would have a unitary intellectual, cultural, and moral outlook, a singular “style” of thought and feeling: In the place of the former multi-structured [mnogoukladnoi] economy, in the USSR was created a monolithic socialist economy. On this material basis was constituted the unprecedented in the past political and spiritual unity of the people. Our society is free from class antagonisms and, despite the class differences still existing in it, is unified as one by common economic interests, common political aspirations, common morality, common ideology.63

Here is ideology representing itself as essential relation, in a unity with a social life, itself unified by a dominant mode of production. It was an image of hegemony; the official ideology framed its rule as the sway of Being. Because the socialist way of life had triumphed, the Zeitgeist corresponding to it likewise reigned supreme: “In the USSSR, Marxism-Leninism is the undividedly dominant ideology of all the people (bezrazdel'no gospodstvuiushchei, vsenarodnoi ideologiei).”64 This Marxism-Leninism, a kind of a popular religion, did not descend from the pages of philosophy books. Rather, it sprung directly, and ineluctably, from the “base”: “The moral-political unity of society was established with the creation of a socialist base, in the place of the capitalist base, when all social groups in the USSR became socialist, when the interests of the entire people were tied closely to the successes of

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the development of the socialist mode of production.”65 The material foundations of Soviet life, installed by Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan, were expected to engender the corresponding superstructures.66 Being could not but determine consciousness. And the Party assumed the role of the midwife assisting in this process, ensuring that only those ideological, cultural, and moral phenomena appropriate to the new mode of social life were given lasting, institutionalized existence. As an organic expression of Soviet life, there had to appear—by ontological default—Soviet literature, Soviet law, Soviet morality, and, before anything else, Soviet ideology. For this is how a “base” manifested its reality and perpetuated its power,67 how it gave rise to a distinct historical civilization. The notion of Soviet civilization, or “way of life,” as well as the phenomena through which this novel form of historical existence manifested itself, will be the principal subject of chapter 5. *** Earlier I insisted that Soviet ideology does not arise organically from a socio-economic base, as the classical Marxist account of social ideas would have it.68 One must agree with the critics of the Frankfurt School when they complain that “no objective spirit is mirrored in such so called ‘thought.’”69 Indeed, the logic of reflection, or external determination, by which ideas are found to be rooted in some ultimate “real,” must be laid aside. We have now passed beyond it and are confronting another kind of logic, such that the essentializing relay between being and ideas is once again before us but in the form of a show, something deliberately produced and acted out. The third form of the dialectic, corresponding to the sphere of the Concept in Hegel, is the logic of this production. The Frankfurt School critics approached so-called totalitarian ideology as if it were thought and found it vacuous. What they failed to appreciate is that thought had gone beyond itself, becoming a state-organized ritual of truth, the repeated objectification of ideas in a general form of value. As thought, Soviet ideology indeed mirrored no objective spirit; yet, as a real-life activity it was nothing if not the ongoing production of the appearance of such objective spirit. From the onset of Stalinism, all ideological innovations promulgated by the Party necessarily instantiated a double form of value. On the one hand, these ideas were irreproachably true to Marxism, that is, consistent with an already-sacralized corpus. On the other hand, they were said to be true to the “epoch,” that is, to have captured the essential tendencies of the specific phase of historical development. This latter value was verbalized as the “vitality” or “living power” (zhiznennost', zhiznennaia sila) of Marxism-Leninism.70 Its conceptual expression was the “unity of theory and practice.”71 Soviet ideology was that very “theory” begotten by the practice of building socialism,

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but it was also the theory that theory should be begotten by practice.72 It is apt to recall here Stalin’s figures of procreation in which he sought to capture the historical significance of Lenin’s ideas.73 Nineteenth-century Germany had given birth to classical Marxism, while early-twentieth-century Russia had birthed Leninism. It was a simple extension of this logic that as—now Soviet—Russia entered the phase of “actually existing socialism,” this new type of historical practice should engender its own ideological reflection. The more dogmatic Marxism-Leninism became from the late 1920s onward, the more its Bolshevik stewards insisted that it is not a dogma but a living, creative theory nourished by the fresh springs of history. As the building of socialism unfolded, it continually fed the science of historical materialism. The ongoing historical process gave rise to new phenomena of social life. Marxism-Leninism, as discourse, purported to be issuing and renewing itself from this epoch-making, phenomenon-engendering, experience.74 The doctrine presented itself as “scientific” insofar as it was the unveiling of “objective tendencies” and immanent necessities that were coming to light only now, as the new era of human earthly existence was being inaugurated. Yet this coming-to-light, and hence the scientific credentials of the doctrine, presupposed another, prior moment. In its self-valorized image, Soviet ideology was (scientifically) true because it was “alive.” And “alive” meant that it, or rather, the Party, was intimately connected with the life of the people: The Communist Party, generalizing the experience of its class and the entire people . . . has the ability to grasp tendencies that have not yet manifested themselves fully, but which hold the key to the future [no kotorym prinadlezhit budushchee]. The Marxist party does not invent anything; it proceeds from life itself [idet ot zhizni]. . . . The Party can lead the masses and teach them only if it, in turn, learns from the masses, that is, if it carefully studies that which is being born in the practice of the people [v narodnoi praktike], absorbing in itself the wisdom of the people.75

“Practice,” just another name for “being,” constituted the primary unveiling, through which the future became visible. It was then the task of “theory” to fix in the general form of laws—the laws of socialism—the immanent tendencies that practice had disclosed.76 This was sure to happen because the agent of theoretical insight, the Party, was also the primary agent of “practice.” Consider how the eminent philosopher of Stalinism, Pavel Iudin, illustrated the “living spirit” of Marxism apropos of the dynamic between the forces and relations of production. In his Nature of Soviet Society, Iudin explained that the bourgeois socio-economic system is characterized by a contradiction due to the private ownership of the means of production. This had been Marx’s

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great scientific discovery: “Marx’s idea is expressed in a general theoretical formula, an algebraic formula, as it were.”77 Socialism, however, is a different system and calls for a new theoretical generalization, a new “algebraic formula.” In comes Stalin: Joseph Stalin expressed this with the greatest scientific precision when he pointed out that in the USSR the relations of production fully correspond to the character of the productive forces, for the social ownership of the means of production here fully corresponds to the social character of the process of production. In generalizing the experience of socialist construction, Stalin in this thesis formulates the new, fundamental law of development of the communist social-economic system.78

In this officially endorsed dictum, the two aspects of valorization we have been considering are brought together, one being shown as folded into, and dependent upon, the other. There is first the image of ideology as a body of truth, a scientific theory that formulates inexorably valid laws. Yet in a second image we are also shown how such a theory comes about. This is precisely the image of Marxism’s “creative development.” Stalin’s thesis is scientifically true because it is alive, that is, because it emerges from the “experience of socialist construction,” as the generalization of that experience. When we regard Soviet ideology as a system of ideas, under the first form of the dialectic, we fail to account for the process of valorization that made of them not simply ideas, but “progressive social ideas.” Whatever their specific content, they were invariably cast in this general form of value. In Soviet parlance, progressive ideas were those that “express the essential need of the epoch, the interests of the advanced class formation, of the people, the interests of millions.”79 The Soviet masses, of course, since they lived in a world free of oppression and obfuscation, did not fail to recognize the ideas as their own; they embraced them and united around them. Having taken hold of the minds and hearts of millions, progressive ideas turned into a mighty material force.80 They ceased to be “theory” and became “practice,” on a mass scale; thus, the superstructure was able to transform the base from which it had arisen. By contrast, reactionary ideas were such as grew from a collective historical existence in decline; they expressed the interests of exhausted social forces.81 Such ideas were impotent to impel meaningful collective action; they could mystify, but not unify. The ontological dynamic of struggle between classes and modes of existence was reproduced as an agon of two main ideologies, one “progressive” and “living,” the other one reactionary and moribund. It would be wrong to maintain that, objectively, the content of Soviet ideology was one thing, while such labels as “living” and “progressive” are merely

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subjective valuations, self-serving propaganda claims that can be safely discounted. True, the value added to officially promulgated ideas was subjective, if by this one means that no impartial standard can be found by which the value in question can be judged. But just this, and nothing else, characterizes the third moment of the dialectic: that the standard of value, of the “truth” of ideology, is not somewhere outside of it, but is produced internally. Ideology itself produces the “being” (or “practice,” or “the epoch”) to which its own ideas will be said to “correspond” and thus qualify as “progressive.” And this subjective activity is, at the same time, something quite objective, insofar as it radically shaped the reality of Soviet life. For the valorized self-presentation of ideology as “progressive” and “living” was far more than an affair of rhetoric or argumentation. To repeat, we are dealing not merely with an ideological text that advances claims as to its own truth value and seeks to substantiate them. In its self-presentation, Soviet ideology went beyond “text,” it transcended its own being as discourse, to become something very nearly resembling a social process. Insofar as the ideological state apparatus, in its ubiquitous organizational reach, could mobilize millions of people to the performance of officially prescribed actions and rituals, it thereby produced the very “practice” of which its own “theory” was said to be a reflection. As the Stalinist regime claimed that socialist ideas have penetrated deep into the masses, it also operated a vast enterprise of political education and propaganda that disseminated those ideas, making them, indeed, omnipresent. As it claimed that a unitary mode of production was giving rise to a likewise unitary way of life and worldview, the regime established a system of censorship that enforced a general uniformity of thought and expression in the Soviet public sphere. As it claimed that the masses were uniting as one behind the slogans of the Party, having recognized in them their true collective interest, the Agitation and Propaganda Department of that same Party was organizing mass public enactments of unity and support for the “general line.” As Stalinist ideologues claimed that socialism had become reality and was giving birth to a new human species, Soviet Man, with a new worldview and new morality, the ideological apparatus administered performances through every walk of life in which individuals were exhibiting normative political behavior and the outlook corresponding to it. As it claimed that the socialist superstructures were sprouting from the fecund socio-economic base, the officialdom engineered such phenomena as socialist realism, socialist competition, Soviet law, and Soviet science. Not just ideas, but this entire circuit of organizational initiatives, performances, and discourses is the proper referent of “Soviet ideology.” If one wishes to speak of “ideological production,” then the phrase would have to refer not just to the production of those idealities we call “meanings,” but to the production of the entire show of ontological truth, of what I referred to earlier as the Meaningful.

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Show is neither the appearance of essence nor just another way to say “fiction” or “lie.” Appearance merely arises from essence while remaining a secondary, derivative reality. Essence, as the primary reality, is reflected in appearance while remaining withdrawn, beyond the sphere of direct apprehension. Essence stays back, in quiescence; it withholds itself qua essence. In its stead, appearance, the inessential, comes forth. Show, on the other hand, does not merely arise, hovering, as it were, above a truer substratum. If we must call it appearance, then it is a produced appearance, a purposefully forged sign of a truer substratum. Show is the artifact of practice. The practice does not appear in the show, as in external semblance, but rather terminates and is summed up in it. The practice is not somehow more real than the show it produces. The two are one and the same reality, the reality of a process, only seen from two sides: as activity and its product. The term “production” expresses the unity of the two sides, as it refers both to the process (“The production of the play took eight months”) and to its overall result (“The critics agreed that it was an exquisite production”). As chapter 6 will show, with more empirical detail, Soviet ideology was the show of how ideas emerge “from life itself,” how they “take possession of the masses” and, having done so, “become a real material force.” One might be tempted to call this a metanarrative. Such a way of looking at it, while far from false, is also far from sufficient. Soviet ideology certainly was “meta-,” in the sense that it mediated with itself; it was an ideology framed by a reflection of what makes ideas and behaviors ideological. To speak of a “narrative,” however, is misleading, unless one means by this a vast symbolic performance in which millions of people were mobilized. The “framing” of ideas was not just a discursive operation but a comprehensive process of organizing and staging social action. If Soviet ideology is defined by a movement in which it figures as its own object, then it is crucial to adjoin that this self-objectifying and self-valorizing movement happened on streets and factory floors, and not just in the interiority of theoretical thought. Such being the case, “production” expresses what the term “metanarrative” threatens to obscure. The words production and show are bound to evoke the spectacular nature of politics in the Soviet Union, the ostentatious displays of ideological symbols, and the pomp of scripted public performances. These terms should also bring to mind Guy Debord’s “society of the spectacle,” an influential Marxist theorization that sought to account both for post-Fordist capitalism in the West and bureaucratic state socialism in the East.82 Yet, the meaning I am advocating presently points beyond the familiar theatricality of Soviet politics and in a different direction from the alienated spectacularity of Debord’s critique.83 In the first place, show implies that before us is an ideology that constitutes itself into the (normative) image of “what ideology should look

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like”; it makes itself ideological, essentializes itself. The production of meaning produces not just determinate meanings, but the appearance of how meaning springs from the bowels of social existence. And precisely because this is a produced appearance, there is no real that “comes through” the show; as I sought to show in chapter 1, the hermeneutic of ideology is disabled. The Marxist conception of ideology, at its most basic, is that the products of intellectual activity transmit social life. When the society in question is irrationally organized, its reproduction in the sphere of ideas is characterized by distortion and mystification. The result is false consciousness. The alternative—on which Marx himself did not expend much ink—obtains when social life is healed from all antagonism and oppression; then its extension into the realm of ideality, of knowledge and culture, is direct and truthful. The result is “progressive ideas,” “progressive art,” and “progressive laws.” This is just how Soviet ideology advertised itself. Such was the object of its self-presentation. But Soviet ideology was not just an object, this image of ontological truth. It was no less the subject of the said self-presentation. It was the multifarious agency through which the image was created and perpetuated; it was the entire enterprise through which the show of the Meaningful was produced. The unity of subject and object is nothing else than the process by which one becomes the other. The subject makes itself into the image of what it essentially is; it reproduces itself as an object of value. Ideology as the concrete organization of social practice passes into the valorized image of ideology as the revelation of epoch-making practice. What makes ideological meanings meaningful is their mediation by socio-economic reality, by being. This is the second form of the dialectic. Soviet ideology, then, presents us with another, further form, for it is the (practical) mediation of that mediation. It is the making of that which makes meanings meaningful, the staging of the relation between essential reality and its ideological reflection. The logic of this ideo-logy is that by which ideas are made to appear as mediated by the objective dynamics of reality. “Made to appear” is the crucial part of the formulation. For we are dealing with a produced appearance, a show. NOTES 1. This complexity is nicely illustrated in David Brandenberger’s account of the writing of Party history in the 1930s (25–50). 2. Lenin’s original idea was to establish the first in the world museum of Marxism. In 1921, the museum was transformed into a “scientific-research institute,” initially within the confines of the so-called Socialist Academy.

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3. In 1928, the Lenin Institute had already merged with the Institute of Party History. 4. On the early history of the Institute, see V. G. Mosolov, IMEL: Tsitadel' partiinoi ortodoksii. Iz Istorii Instituta Marksizma-Leninizma pri TsK KPSS, 1921–1956 (Moscow: Novyi khronograf, 2010). 5. A Museum of Lenin was founded shortly after the leader’s death, in 1924. A Museum of Marx and Engels opened doors in Moscow in 1960. Both operated as administrative divisions of the Institute. 6. For three years after Stalin’s death, his name appeared alongside those of the Institute’s other three patron figures. In 1956, the Institute received its final name: Institute of Marxism-Leninism. 7. On the early history of the Academy, see E. B. Pashukanis, “Bor'ba za leninskuiu partiinost' v nauke i zadachi Komakademii,” Vestnik kommunisticheskoi akademii 12 (1931): 3–12. In 1931, the research functions of the Academy and the Institute of Red Professors were amalgamated into a complex of disciplinary units: the institutes of agriculture, world economy and politics, the natural sciences, socialist construction and law, philosophy, literature, and history. In 1936, by an act of the Central Committee of CPSU, the Academy was absorbed into the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. 8. Kenez, Birth, 121–28; Brandenberger, 11–12. The administrative reach of Glavpolitprosvet did not equate to real power. As was the norm with organs of the Soviet government, its functions were duplicated within the Party apparatus, where most of the important decisions were taken. Glavpolitprosvet was established in November, 1920, as the government agency in charge of educational and propaganda work among the broader Soviet population. The Agitation and Propaganda Department of CPSU was supposed to fulfill analogous functions in the ranks of the Party. However, already in 1921, under Stalin’s direction, Agitprop decisively encroached on the prerogatives of the new entity. In 1930, the diminished stature of Glavpolitprosvet received an institutional imprimatur when the department was converted into a “sector for mass work” within the Commissariat of the Enlightenment. On the skirmishes between the Party and NARKOMPROS over the prerogatives of Glavpolitprosvet, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky (London: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 180–85, 243–55. 9. In 1938, the Institute of Red Professors was replaced by a Higher School of Marxism-Leninism (Vysshaia shkola marksizma-leninizma). In 1946, the latter morphed into an Academy of the Social Sciences. By a special decree of that year, CPSU created a Higher Party School (Vysshaia partiinaia shkola; VPSh), at the head of a nationwide network of similar institutions. See Kenez, Birth, 128–30. 10. Like so much else in the Soviet Union, political education fell under the overlapping jurisdictions of state and party institutions: Glavpolitprosvet, a section of the Commissariat of the Enlightenment; and the committee (glavk) for the “Marxist-Leninist preparation of cadres” within the Agitation and Propaganda Department of the Central Committee. For the early experience of the sovpartshkoly, see Nadezhda Krupskaia’s articles in Pedagogicheskie sochineniia, Vol. 9 (Moscow: Izd. pedagogicheskikh nauk, 1960), 93–100, 112–37.

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11. Brandenberger, 11–13; A. I. Gur'ev, Kak zakalialsia agitprop: Sistema gosudarstvennoi ideologicheskoi obrabotki naseleniia v pervye gody NEPa (Moscow: Akademika, 2013), 283–304; Kenez, Birth, 128–33. 12. Self-study (samoobrazovanie), in general, and political self-education, in particular, were prominent concerns of Glavpolitprosvet from its inception. See Krupskaia, 58–86, 229–36, 259–76. The fact that self-study became a permanent aspect of Soviet culture is reflected in the existence, since 1957, of a special journal published by the Central Committee of the CPSU, Politicheskoe samoobrazovanie (“Political Self-Education”). On the practices of self-study and self-improvement among the workers of the Moscow Metro, see Dietmar Neutatz, Moscovskoe metro: Ot pervykh planov do velikoi stroiki Stalinizma (1897–1935) (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2013), 397–98, 432–34. 13. See Gur'’ev, 308–12. In the conviction of Anatolii Lunacharskii, the Commissar of the Enlightenment, “We cannot imagine how it would be possible to conduct popular schooling without conveying a Marxist worldview to everyone who is supposed to become a conscious citizen of the RSFSR” (quoted in Brandenberger, 266). For a fuller, and popular, exposition of early Bolshevik views on education, see N. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhenskii, Azbuka kommunizma: Populiarnoe ob'iasnenie programmy kommunisticheskoi partii bol'shevikov (Peterburg: Gos. izd-vo, 1920), 179–93. 14. James Dyce and J. A. Dow, “Soviet Dentistry and Ideology,” Dental World 17, no. 3 (1962): 181. 15. For the early history of Soviet propaganda, see Kenez, Birth. Brandenberger’s Propaganda State in Crisis deals with pre-war Stalinism. 16. See Kenez, Birth, 58–62. 17. See A. I. Mazaev, Prazdnik kak sotsial'no-khudozhestvennoe iavlenie: Opyt teoreticheskogo issledovaniia (Moscow: Nauka, 1978), 312–49; James von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 1917–1920 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 156–63. The most famous of these mass dramatizations was The Storming of the Winter Palace staged by Nikoali Evreinov in October, 1920. 18. See Gur'ev, 282; Kenez, Birth, 137–38; Tumarkin, 222–24. 19. See Kenez, Birth, 143–44. 20. Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, s.v. “Agitpunkty,” 1st ed. (Moscow: Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1926). 21. Ocherki russkogo sovetskogo dramaticheskogo teatra: 1917–1940 (Moscow: Izd-vo Akademii nauk, 1954), 469–70; Russkaia sovetskaia estrada, 1917–1929 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1976), 326–44; V. Burecharskii, Zhivaia gazeta: Rukovodstvo (Kazan: Gos. izd-vo, 1920). 22. Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society: From. The Revolution to the Death of Stalin (New York: Tauris, 2006), 32–34. 23. Kenez, Birth, 134–44; Gur'ev, 327–29. 24. See Gur'ev, 338–53. 25. On thе late-Soviet life of the Section for Agitation and Propaganda, see Nikolai Mitrohin, “Back Office Mikhaila Suslova, ili kem i kak proizvodilas' ideologiia brezhnevskogo vremeni,” Cahiers du Monde Russe 54, no. 3–4 (2013), 409–40.

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26. Malte Rolf, Sovetskie massovye prazniki (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2009), 108, 201. From the earliest days of its existence, the Commissariat of the Enlightenment featured a special Section of Mass Presentations and Spectacles tasked with the central administration of all public festivities and demonstrations. On the early history of Soviet festivities, see Von Geldern. 27. The opening of state archives after Soviet Union’s disintegration resulted in a veritable torrent of publications documenting the workings of Soviet censorship. See: A. Artizov and O. Naumov, eds., Vlastʹ  i  khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia: Dokumenty TSK RKP(b)-VKP(b), VChK-OGPU-NKVD o kulʹturnoi politike, 1917–1953 gg. (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond “Demokratiia,” 1999); D. L. Babichenko,“Literaturnyi front”: Istoriia politicheskoi tsenzury, 1931–1946 (Moscow: Entsiklopediia rossiiskikh dereven', 1994); A. V. Blium, Za kulisami “Ministerstva pravdy” (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 1994); A. V. Blium, Sovetskaia tsenzura v epokhu total’nogo terrora (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2000); A. V. Blium, ed., Tsenzura v Sovetskom soiuze, 1917–1991 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004); Herman Ermolaev, Censorship in Soviet Literature, 1917– 1991 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996); Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds. Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917–1953 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); T. M. Goriaeva, Politicheskaia tsenzura v SSSR (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2002); T. M. Goriaeva, et al., eds. Istoriia sovetskoi politicheskoi tsenzury (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1997); L. V. Maksimenkov, Bol’shaia tsenzura: Pisateli i zhurnalisty v strane sovetov (Moscow: MFD, Materik, 2005). 28. As Goriaeva shows, during the Stalinist period the most important interventions of the state censor, Glavlit, were invariably initiated at the top of the Party apparatus (Politicheskaia tsenzura, 143–46). 29. V. A. Nevezhin, Esli zavtra v pokhod: Podgotovka k voine i ideologicheskaia propaganda v 1930kh–40kh gg. (Moscow: Iauza; Eksmo, 2007), 136; Blium, Sovetskaia tsenzura, 33. 30. During the 1920s, some publication ventures were exempt from the control of Glavlit. The most notable among them was the State Publishing House (Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo, GIZ), which had its own internal censorship mechanism. A reorganization carried out in 1930 made Glavlit’s dominion absolute. The preliminary screening of manuscripts was entrusted to individual journals and publishing houses, yet the agents responsible for this were vetted by and directly responsible to Glavlit. On this, see Blium, Sovetskaia tsenzura, 34; Goriaeva, Politicheskaia tsenzura, 203– 7. The history of Glavlit furnishes a good example of the bewildering flux of institution building during the early Soviet period. See Goriaeva, Politicheskaia tsenzura, 197–201. The “technology” of censorship as administered by Glavlit is described in Blium, Sovetskaia tsenzura, 36–44. 31. Blium Sovetskaia tsenzura, 15–16; Goriaeva, Politicheskaia tsenzura, 10, 153. 32. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks: Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 205–39. 33. For this common Soviet ritual, see Arch Getty, “Samokritika Rituals in the Stalinist Central Committee, 1933–38,” Russian Review 58, no. 1 (January, 1999): 49–70; Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices

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(Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 1999), 142–63; Kojevnikov, “Games of Stalinist Democracy: Ideological Discussions in Soviet Sciences, 1947–52,” in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London: Routledge, 2000): 142–75. For Soviet interpretations of these practices, see V. Ia. Ashanin, Kritika i samokritika v zhizni i deiatel'nosti KPSS (Moscow: Mysl', 1966); V. A. Kulinchenko, Kritika i samokritika v deiatel'nosti KPSS (Moscow: Znanie, 1975); В. Pchelin, Kritika i samokritika v kommunisticheskoi partii (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo polit. lit-ry, 1954); N. P. Vasilev and M. G. Zhuravkov, eds., Kritika i samokritika v sovetskom obshchestve. Sbornik statei (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1955). 34. Blium, Sovetskaia tsenzura, 14–15. 35. For an official formulation, see the article on Marxism-Leninism in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, authored by Party philosopher Mark Mitin: Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, s.v. “Marksizm leninizm,” 3rd ed. (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1974). 36. Blium, Sovetskaia tsenzura, 22–23. 37. On such ideological campaigns on the scientific front during late Stalinism, see Kojevnikov. 38. Hegel, Phenomenology, 70. 39. Emile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale, vol. 2 (Paris, Gallimard, 1974), 80; Jean Dubois, “Énoncé et énonciation,” Langages 13 (1969): 100–110. 40. Althusser, “Ideology,” 141–48. As Jan Rehmann points out, this distinction is modeled on Gramsci’s separation of political and civil society (222). 41. Especially in Marxist circles, Althusser’s theory of ideology has been the subject of extensive debate and frequent, at times vehement, criticism. The principal objections to it are summarized in Ted Benton, The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism: Althusser and His Influence (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 101–7; Eagleton, Ideology, 143–49. 42. Thus, from 1958 to 1966, the administrative arm of the Central Committee directing ideological work in the USSR bore the explicit name Ideological Commission. Documents pertaining to the Commission’s work are collected in Ideologicheskie komissiii TsK KPSS, 1958–1964: Dokumenty. ed. E. S. Afanas'eva et al. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1998). 43. An explicit notion of the “ideological,” influenced by Althusser’s ISA theory and Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, is to be found in the work of Wolfgang Fritz Haug and Projekt Ideologitheorie (PIT). With the “ideological,” Haug and his colleagues emphasize the material aspect of ideology. “It comprehends the latter not primarily as something mental, but as an ‘external arrangement’ in the ‘ensemble of social relations’ and as a specific organizational form of class societies reproduced by the state” (Rehmann, 230). The externality and materiality of ideology are obviously germane to Soviet official culture. Yet the insistence on the primacy of practices over ideas, basic for both Althusser’s theory and PIT, is at odds with the character of Soviet ideology. Here, ideas cannot be seen as derivative of more fundamental mechanisms of socialization. It is difficult to conceive of a pre-reflective context by which Soviet individuals would be claimed as subjects before such a claim is ideationally coded. As the present chapter insists repeatedly, the practices of the Soviet ISAs are not to

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be thought as separate from the objectification and valorization of ideas as such. In this context, the externality of ISAs was inseparable from the externalization, indeed fetishization, of meaning. 44. Althusser, “Ideology,” 155–57. 45. See, for instance, in Zhdanov’s diatribe against the journals Zvezda and Leningrad: Andrei Zhdanov, “Doklad tov. Zhdanova o zhurnalakh ‘Zvezda’ i ‘Leningrad,’” Literaturnaia gazeta 39 (1946): 2. 46. See Rolf, 89, 113. 47. I. V. Stalin, “O nekotorykh voprosakh istorii bol'shevizma,” in Sochineniia, Vol. 13 (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1952): 84–102. 48. Zhdanov, 2. 49. Igal Halfin and Jochen Hellbeck, “Rethinking the Stalinist Subject: Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain and the State of Soviet Historical Studies,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 44, no. 3 (1996), 456–63; Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000); Igal Halfin, ed., Language and Revolution: Making Modern Political Identities (London: Frank Cass, 2002); Jochen Hellbeck, “Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stephen Podlubnyi,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 44, no. 3 (1996), 344–73; Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Eric Naiman, “On Soviet Subjects and the Scholars Who Make Them,” Russian Review 60, no. 3 (2001): 307–15. 50. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. James H. Nichols (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 201. 51. V. I. Lenin, Materialism and Empiriocriticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy, Vol 14 of Collected Works (Moscow: Progress, 1962), 326. 52. I. V. Stalin, “Marksizm i voprosy iazykoznaniia,” in Sochineniia, Vol. 16 (Moscow: Pisatel', 1997), 137. 53. Already in 1924, shortly after Lenin’s death, the Commissariat of the Enlightenment issued this call: “We must use Lenin’s works extensively when studying every problem (independent of the ‘topic’ concerned) in order to formulate our view” (quoted in Tumarkin, 213–14). 54. N. Bobrovnikov, “V. I. Lenin o perevospitanii mass v khode sotsstroitel'stva,” Pod znamenem marksizma 1 (1934): 19–45. 55. Bobrovnikov, 19. 56. Bobrovnikov, 20–27. 57. Bobrovnikov, 21. 58. Bobrovnikov, 27. 59. Bobrovnikov, 29; emphasis added. 60. Quoted in Tumarkin, 214. 61. Kratkii filosofskii slovar', s.v. “Mirovozzrenie,” 2nd edition (Moscow: Politizdat, 1952).

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62. Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 10–12. 63. Konstantinov et al., Istoricheskii materializm, 404. 64. Konstantinov et al., Istoricheskii materializm, 555. 65. Konstantinov et al., Istoricheskii materializm, 699. 66. In his speech at the Seventeenth Party Congress, in 1934, Stalin famously announced: “The facts indicate that we have already built the foundation of socialist society in the USSR, and all that remains is for us to crown it with superstructures [uvenchat' ego nadstroikami]—a task indubitably easier than the building of a socialist society’s foundation” (I. V. Stalin, “Otchetnyi doklad XVII s'ezdu partii o rabote TsK VKP(b) 26 ianvaria, 1934g.,” in Sochineniia, Vol. 13 (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1952), 324. 67. As the Great Soviet Encyclopedia explained, “I[deology] is engendered so that it can actively assist in the entrenchment [of its basis] and help it in the struggle against another basis and its superstructure; I[deology] serves, protects its basis, its class” (Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, s.v. “Ideologiia” [Moscow: Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1952]). The source of this picturesque vision is Stalin’s “Marxism and Problems of Linguistics” (“Marksizm,” 104–5). 68. See chapter 1. 69. See pp. 50–51 in the present study. 70. “The great living power [velikaia zhiznennaia sila] of Marxist-Leninist philosophy consists in its unbreakable bond with the essential interests of the working class; it is their scientific expression, the ideological weapon of the proletariat in its struggle for communism” (Makarov, 1). For further discussion of Marxism-Leninism’s “vitality,” see chapter 6. 71. Konstantinov et al., Istoricheskii materializm, 647. 72. “Marxist philosophical materialism holds that social practice and, before all else, the practice of people’s material production is the basis, source of theory” (Kratkii filososkii slovar', 3rd edition, s.v. “Teoriia i praktika” [Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1951], 514). 73. See chapter 4. 74. Stalin, “Marksizm,” 136. 75. O. V. Kuusinen et al., eds., Osnovy marksizma-leninizma (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1960), 362. 76. “The power of dialectical materialism consists in its connection, in any given period, with the practical tasks of the revolutionary movement, with the building of socialism and communism. And these tasks change with every turn of history. The developing practice poses new questions over and over again, demanding an answer from theory. This is why, in order to preserve its connection with the practical tasks of this or that period of social development, dialectical materialism must itself move forward” (Makarov, 39). 77. Pavel Iudin, The Nature of Soviet Society: Productive Forces and Relations of Production in the USSSR (New York: International Publishers, 1951), 10. 78. Iudin, 10.

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79. Iudin, 10. 80. As the main Party journal expressed it in 1934: “[For a long time] socialism remained a dream, utopia. The names of Marx and Engels mark the transformation of socialism from utopia into science. Having taken possession of the masses of millions, this science, this theory becomes a material force of unheard-of power. The active struggle for socialism leads to its practical realization. The names of Lenin and Stalin mark the transformation of socialism into reality” (E. Khmel'nitskaia, “Likvidatsiia mnogoukladnosti i leninskaia teoriia postroeniia sotsializma,” Bol'shevik 1 [1934], 52). It was Marx who, in Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, proposed that “theory . . . becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses” (Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 3 [London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975], 175). I take up this meta-ideological theme again in chapter 6. 81. For a textbook gloss of the dichotomy between progressive and reactionary ideas, see: Konstantinov et al., Istoricheskii materializm, 558; Konstantinov, F. V. et al., eds., Osnovy marskistskoi filosofii: Uchebnik, 2nd edition (Мoscow: Politizdat, 1962), 572; Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1st edition, s.v. “Ideologiia” (Moscow: Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1952), 335. 82. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (London: Rebel Press, 1992). For the attempt to extend the logic of the spectacle to the other side of the Cold-War antagonism, see Debord, 31–32. In his paratactic exposition, Debord never quite explicates how the notion of the spectacle is supposed to apply to the socio-economic situation in the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc. 83. Debord’s notion of the spectacle can be seen as an update of Marx’s theory of alienation for the period of late capitalism. Whereas Marx saw human activity alienated in the commodity form, Debord discerns a new phase of this process, in which the fetishism of exchange value is both transformed and perpetuated as the fetishism of the image (broadly understood). See Debord, 19–24.

Chapter 5

The Show of Civilization

The course of the dialectical progression we have been following thus far can be schematized as follows: • x1 is something (an existing entity); • x2 is what makes something what it is (an essential relation); • x3 is the making of what makes something what it is (a process of self-determination, or self-constitution). I have maintained that, in a logical sense, Soviet ideology is a case of x3. It is the making, or production, of the essential relation that makes ideology what it is—ideological. The logic of this ideology is not the one that connects separate representations into a meaningful “story.” Nor is it the logic that connects representations with their determinants in the real world. Rather, it is the logic unifying the various moments of a self-objectifying, self-determining, and self-valorizing process. Here, we are dealing with a very different kind of unification from what we had at the previous two steps of the dialectic. The making of what makes something what it is results in the kind of unity that only a subject can bring about. This unifying-unity (einigende Einheit) is what Hegel understands by the logic of the Concept. It is the successor to the sphere of Essence, in which each category is reflected in its complementary other.1 This gives rise to a progressive series of dualities (ground/existence, whole/parts, content/ form, substance/accidents, and so on) in which one term has precedence, and counts as original, while the other has the character of what Hegel calls “positedness”: something secondary, derivative, or non-substantial. One is the determiner, the other is the determined.2 This distinction between factors of unequal ontological standing, definitive of the sphere of Essence, is overcome in the Concept, the domain of subjectivity, purposive agency, and freedom.3 Here, in a circular, self-enclosed movement, that which is determined is able to posit, or produce, that by which it is determined. Because 153

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it produces it, that other, determined factor is not really other but an ideal moment in a self-identical totality.4 By the same logic, the determining factor loses its independence and priority. When one conceives of a kind of essence that is capable of bringing about the conditions for its own realization—what Hegel calls the “positing of presuppositions”—then one has entered a new logical sphere, and what one is conceiving should properly be termed not essence, but concept.5 An accessible way of illustrating this ultimate species of logic in Hegel’s system is by reminding ourselves of his predecessor, Kant, and his moral subject, which fashions for itself a universal rule of ethical conduct.6 The moral imperative in Kant is the other by which the subject will be determined. In the previous chapter, I referred to it as the (objectified and valorized) “model” that is inextricably part of the process of self-determination. I make myself into a moral subject by adhering to this model, which is to say: by making the moral imperative the guide to all my actions. The model is (initially) something distinct from my being. But this is only for as long as I have not recognized it for what it is: my genuine essence. In fact, Kant would contend, the moral imperative is the bedrock of the human self. When I recognize this, then I can turn myself into a case of x3: the active making of what makes me what I am. My existence, then, ceases to be immediate, and receives its proper, essential mediation by the universal ought. If morality makes me truly human, then I can make myself such by obeying the moral imperative, by letting it determine my actions. I can become subject. By identifying with the ethical a priori, internalizing it, its universality becomes the actual content of my individuality. To see the implications for ideology from the transition between the two logical realms, of Essence and the Concept, consider next the familiar item we call “symptom.” It stands in a constitutive relationship with another term, “condition.” This is its determining other. We say that the condition is “responsible for” or “gives rise” to the symptom. The relation between the two belongs unmistakably on the logical plane of Essence. We think of condition as determining and prior; the symptom is determined by it and thus secondary. One is the cause, the other is the effect. Anyone familiar with Hegel’s dialectical procedure, however, should be able to anticipate how this seemingly straightforward relation would get upended. On further reflection, we come to realize that the existence of a symptom is what renders the condition “prior,” what makes it a “condition.” In this sense, it is the symptom that proves to be the necessary condition for there being a “condition.” Analogously, it is the effect that makes the cause what it is; in a sense, it causes the cause to be cause. As in the famous dialectic of master and slave, the two sides switch places: “Each side, therefore, in accordance with how it refers to the other both as identical with it and as the negative

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of it, becomes the opposite of itself.”7 This accomplishes the dissolution of their difference.8 What follows, then, and constitutes the logical sphere of the Concept, is the realization of the co-dependence of determiner and determined. It is crucial to note, however, that for Hegel, “realization” is more than comprehension, or coming to consciousness. It is the actual production of the identity-in-difference between determiner and determined. To stay with our example for a little longer, let us imagine a symptom that wants to not just be, to not just occur as a physiological event, but to assert itself qua symptom. For this—admittedly bizarre—wish to be fulfilled, the symptom must be able to posit, or produce, its other, the relatum by which it will be determined; it must bring about “condition.” Caution, however, is in order on this slippery logical ground: it wouldn’t do for the symptom to produce a condition, for example, the flu. For, in such case, it would have determined itself as something particular, a flu symptom (cough, for example).9 But our symptom has higher aspirations; it wants to assert itself not just as a symptom, but posit its universal nature, its “symptomaticity,” so to speak. For this, it needs to posit not a particular condition, but condition as such, or—in a clunkier formulation—the state of being-a-condition. Now, in the Soviet-Marxist understanding, ideology functions very much like a symptom. “Progressive ideas” are symptomatic of historically ascendant mode of being, just as a decadent worldview is an index of a social class, or an entire social world, in crisis. In fact, symptomatological contrasts between socialist and bourgeois ideology were a most common place of Soviet official discourse. Because ideas are correlative with a particular “condition” of society, or at least with that of a society’s dominant class, they can manifest the said condition, just as symptoms do. In this context, it is not quite so extravagant to think what it would mean for the symptom to wish to assert itself as symptom. In order to affirm its universality, that is, to determine itself as ideological, an ideology must posit its determining other, which is social being. In our case, we are dealing with a socialist ideology, whose correlative other is socialist society. But, just as with the symptom that wishes to assert its symptomaticity, this is an ideology that wishes to assert its “ideologicity.” For that, it needs to posit its other, too, in a universal aspect. In other words, before it stages a world with particular economic and political makeup (“socialism”), it must stage a world as such, or as Heidegger might express it, the “worldliness” of world.10 STALINISM AS A CIVILIZATION One of the signal contributions to the field of Soviet studies in the last thirty years, Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain, bears the subtitle Stalinism

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as a Civilization. The hefty volume recounts in fine detail and well-crafted prose the early history of Magnitogorsk, one of the “instant cities” of the First Five-Year Plan, built ex nihilo around a gigantic metallurgical complex. Kotkin tells his readers that what emerged in the harsh, wind-lashed steppe beyond the Ural Mountains was not simply a major industrial enterprise for the production of pig iron and steel, but also a “socialist city,” “socialist labor,” “socialist courts,” and other phenomena of that kind. In sum, a socialist civilization came into being, and supposedly remained in place until the Soviet Union was no more.11 Although it is not Kotkin who put the notion of such a civilization in intellectual circulation,12 his has been a highly influential claim. When it was advanced, in the mid-1990s, it provided a powerful rebuff to those who still thought of Stalinism as a political regime sitting atop a recalcitrant social reality, a reality that the regime could control solely by means of coercion and propaganda.13 In the wake of Magnetic Mountain, a group of post-revisionist historians took up boldly Kotkin’s idea of an alternative Soviet modernity intelligible within a common European paradigm.14 These scholars, however, largely avoided the term “civilization” and the conceptual commitment it implies. In Magnetic Mountain, the term receives no special analytical treatment, despite being so central to the book’s conception. There is not so much as a nod of acknowledgment toward some of the numerous definitions that scholars from different disciplines have proposed. In lieu of probing the meaning of “civilization,” Kotkin casually offers (partial) lists of ingredients: “a set of values, a social identity, a way of life”15 and “a new society manifest in property relations, social structure, the organization of the economy, political practices, and language.”16 I note in passing the curious stacking of items in the second quote, where society somehow turns out to be the primary reality and, as such, is said to be “manifest” in the economic structure. Are we to understand that the economy was an epiphenomenon of the social? We might give Kotkin the benefit of the doubt here and suppose that what he intends by “civilization” is the unity of a historical life world and its various expressions in the realm of culture, most broadly understood: institutions, laws, unwritten norms, behaviors and mentalities, material culture, and the arts. This unity is one we have encountered several times already; it is the relation of reflection whereby an essential reality finds expression in its phenomena. I will return to this point in due course; but in the meantime, let us ask: Was Stalinist Russia such a unity? Was it really a civilization? And how is one supposed to ascertain whether such was indeed the case? After all, the presence of civilization is no simple factual matter, like the presence of an alphabet, or the documented existence of a sewage system in an ancient city. The question comes down to things that are very difficult to measure and be certain about: the

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cohesiveness of a social body and the degree to which the material, cultural, and moral values one observes are the more or less organic products of that body. And could we possibly be sure whether the Soviet Union of the 1930s was a new society? Some authoritative voices have maintained that, in many ways, this was still the peasant Russia of old, only shaken and stirred in the political and economic turmoil of Stalin’s “revolution from above.”17 Kotkin, who is very well aware of the objection,18 would doubtless reply that the originality of Stalinist society can be appreciated by looking at such novel phenomena as “property relations, social structure, the organization of the economy, political practices, and language.” But this is a bad answer, for it rules in advance on the very issue that needs to be adjudicated: are the facts listed the organic outgrowth of the social process in Stalinist Russia? It seems to me indisputable that they are not. As I shall argue presently, the facts Kotkin gives as marks of civilization are not really “phenomena”; they do not emerge from some primary reality, as phenomena do. For this reason, they cannot be offered as evidence of a “new society.” For something to be taken as evidence of an underlying medical condition, it must first be shown to be a truly a symptom, that is, to be causally dependent on the said condition. As critics have pointed out, Kotkin’s claim is not very different from how the ruling regime, in Stalinist times and after, spoke about itself and the world it was building. Thus, Gabor T. Rittersporn charges that “Kotkin’s misreading of the civilization he pictures stems from the fact that, unlike Michel Foucault (whose oeuvre inspires him), he does not clearly distinguish among the self-understanding of his protagonists, the image they attempted (or were advised) to project of themselves, and everything that one can deduce by critically assessing collective representations and discursive practices.”19 From the early 1930s, Soviet party intellectuals were the first to insist that “socialism has become a way of life”; this assertion, repeated countless times, with a few rhetorical modulations, was fundamental to the regime’s self-presentation.20 By the late Soviet period, an entire cultural industry had formed around discussions and ceremonial enactments of sotsialisticheskii/ sovetskii obraz zhizni (“socialist/Soviet way of life”).21 This fact does not automatically invalidate Kotkin’s thesis, but it does call for acknowledgment and critical reflection. It is possible to contend that the Bolsheviks believed—and boasted—that they had created a new socialist civilization, and that such indeed turned out to be the case; in other words, one could hold that the regime’s advertised image of itself coincided with the reality of the situation. The problem is that Kotkin does not offer such an argument. He simply avoids confronting the problem. Quick to chastise Fainsod for uncritically reproducing “Stalinism’s self-presentation (with the values inverted),”22 Kotkin proceeds to do exactly the same.

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Was the so-called socialist civilization a wishful projection or a historical fact? Did it exist “in reality” or “in ideology”? And what would it mean to conclude that it existed “in ideology”? Is this to suggest that all reality is drained away, leaving us with mere shadows and empty words? If not, how are we supposed to think “ideology”? What is its reality and nature? These are the questions I will consider and attempt to answer on the pages that follow. Kotkin is clearly committed to treating Soviet civilization as a flesh-and-blood reality. A student of Malia at Berkeley, he, too, insists that socialism had materialized in the Soviet Union, and that the grotesque form of its materialization is what socialism essentially is.23 With this, the history of Magnitogorsk is offered as a cautionary tale on the hazards of the welfare state and of Enlightenment rationality, more generally.24 At times, however, Kotkin’s formulations are not quite so decisive. In one place, he invokes the “groping efforts to create a new culture.”25 And in another, quite suggestive passage, he writes: Bolshevism itself, including its evolution, must be seen not merely as a set of institutions, a group of personalities, or an ideology but as a cluster of powerful symbols and attitudes, a language and new forms of speech, new ways of behaving in public in private, even new styles of dress—in short, as an ongoing experience through which it was possible to imagine and strive to bring about a new civilization called socialism.26

Now, to “imagine” and to “strive to bring about a new civilization,” is not nearly the same as to have succeeded in accomplishing such a feat. It is one thing to claim that the Soviet experience made it possible to “imagine . . . socialism,”27 and quite another to directly equate that experience with socialism. There is, potentially, a valuable insight in these lines, perhaps an unintended one (at any rate, Kotkin does not make much of it): What if the usual relation between indices and their referents is in fact inverted? What if the new symbols, forms of speech, and styles of dress are not the outward manifestations of some primary given called socialist civilization (as the passage quoted earlier suggested) but are, instead, the means by which such a thing was first made to appear? It is understandable why Kotkin does not pursue this line of inquiry; it would run counter to his idée fixe that the Soviets, in fact, built that “quintessential Enlightenment utopia” called socialism.28 This much is certain: Kotkin’s civilization has little in common with the kind of historical totalities the word has traditionally named. There is no doubt that the culture of Ancient Greece featured “powerful symbols and attitudes,” as well as distinct “forms of speech” and “ways of behaving in public and private.” Only none of those were ever intended as tokens and enactments of a civilization. Nor were they meant to be the manifestations of an “epoch.”

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Those in Magnitogorsk, and all over the USSR, were. In Ancient Greece and Rome alike, there were human individuals, warriors and statesmen, artists and thinkers, that exemplified the cardinal values of the dominant culture. Such individuals were celebrated as heroes, sages, or masters, and offered as models for emulation. But they were not paraded as “new people,” which is to say, as the exemplary human specimens of a climactic historical time. The socialist heroes of Magnitogorsk were. In the same vein, an art historian may very well look back from the present day and identify the city of Florence as an outstanding example of Renaissance architecture and urban material culture. Yet Florence was not built in order to be a “model Renaissance city.” Magnitogorsk, on the other hand, was very much intended to showcase the essential features of a socialist city, whatever that meant. These seem to me rather obvious matters. They are meant to illustrate just how incongruous it is to take the term “civilization,” in its usual intellectual currency, and plug it without further ado into the Soviet context. Absent prior reflection and conceptual negotiation, the term is bound to be misleading, or meaningless.29 If there ever was such a thing as Soviet civilization, it departed from all prior historical examples not merely in its content but in its concept too. That is to say, the Soviets differed from the Aztecs not as one civilization from another; the difference, rather, lies in the very meaning of “civilization.” Nowhere in Magnetic Mountain is there any sign that its author has taken stock of this crucial difference. The phrase “Soviet civilization” speaks not simply of a different time and place, and different values, ideas, and sensibilities native to that time and place; at stake is a different kind of unity between those things, a different form. Just like “Soviet ideology,” the phrase does not point us to a species of a known genus (“civilizations”). Rather, it stands for a metamorphosis in the genus itself, through which it becomes an other to itself; it marks a qualitative leap in the universal. The transformation itself took place in history, as a result of very concrete social, political, and ideological developments. CONCEPTIONS OF CIVILIZATION Magnetic Mountain is dedicated to the memory of Michel Foucault. A year prior to his death (October 1984), Foucault had spent a semester at Berkeley, leading a research group that included Kotkin, a graduate student at the time.30 Apart from explicit acknowledgments, the intellectual debt the book owes Foucault is plain to see in its “archeological” approach to Stalinism, as well as in the conceptualization of the regime as one of productive—rather than merely repressive—power.31 Yet, as Rittersporn notes, Kotkin has failed to emulate Foucault’s unfailing sense for the historicity of concepts. It was the

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author of Les mots et les choses who famously announced that “man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old.”32 He could have easily made the same statement apropos of civilization. It, too, is a rather recent item in the inventory of Western knowledge. While the meaning synonymous with refinement—civilization as civilité— dates to the middle of the eighteenth century,33 the use of the same word, in the plural, to designate discrete cultural-historical monoliths did not gain much intellectual traction for another hundred years or so.34 In the broadest sense, what made possible the objectification of “civilizations” as items of knowledge was the advent of that historical consciousness so characteristic of the modern period in Europe and so unmistakably bound with the rise of the bourgeoisie. As Foucault would have put it, since the late eighteenth century, history became the fundamental dimension onto which the choses of Western knowledge were projected, organized, and cognized.35 More particularly, the discourse on civilizations grew from a new awareness of world history, which itself grew apace during the period between the “old” imperialism of the eighteenth century and the New Imperialism of the late nineteenth century. This later expansion of the West into “new worlds,” which took off about 1875, was contemporaneous with the extension of Western academic knowledge into new disciplines such as anthropology and ethnography, for which “civilizations,” past and present, became the objects of study. The older meaning of the term, as advance on barbarity, lived on, enduring well into the twentieth century,36 on the powerful impetus provided by evolutionary conceptions of history and society. Building from influential early treatments, such as those of Condorcet and Guizot in France,37 it eventually came to subsume an array of normative attributes thought to constitute a state of (advanced) civilization: the differentiation and complexity of social functions (in the first place through the division of labor), urban development, new systems of communication, rationalization, democratization, and so on.38 The standards of societal evolution became encoded in the so-called modernization theory, anchored in the sociology of Parsons and dominant in the American social sciences during the 1960s, a time when “development policy” set the terms of US relations with the Third World.39 Yet from the last quarter of the nineteenth century, this normative and universalist idea was in competition with another understanding of civilization, or Kultur,40 this one of German descent and Romantic inspiration,41 which valorized not progress and modernity, but particularity, organicity, wholeness, and vitality.42 In this other current of thought, a tributary of the CounterEnlightenment,43 there was not just one universal process of societal advance called “civilization,” but rather different unique manifestations of potent ethnic/racial life, each possessing a temporality proper to itself and impervious

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to the stream of general historical time (“Each nation has its center of happiness within itself, just as every sphere has its center of gravity,” wrote Herder).44 Civilizations were conceived in the manner of supra-individual characters, bound to their native time-space, endowed with organic integrity, and imbued by a unique ethos, or life-principle, which found expression in the institutions, laws, customs, and cultural creations of the society in question.45 As Ostwald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee were to explain later, in texts that crowned the intellectual tradition in question, these quasi-animate entities went through a cycle of birth, growth, decline, and death.46 While the universalist discourse on civilization placed the bourgeois social order at the forefront of an ascending trajectory of a common world history, its organicist counterpart allowed that same order to be seen as a phase in the life of one particular civilization, and an unhealthy phase at that (“decline of the West”). It is how Nietzsche saw it when, in The Twilight of the Idols, he charged that “The whole of the West has lost those instincts from which institutions grow, from which future grows.”47 Critics of bourgeois liberalism, especially those on the political right, used the standard of past civilizations to measure the current state of their world—atheistic, rationalistic, materialistic, permissively pluralistic; they found it lacking in vitality, without a binding principle (“the center cannot hold”).48 In contemporary culture—individualistic, hypersensitive, morbidly self-reflexive, increasingly commercialized—these intellectuals saw the reign of shapelessness, the exhaustion of the formative impulse (Bildungstrieb) that sustained each robust socio-cultural paradigm. Historians of art bemoaned the unprincipled eclecticism of their present day and looked back wistfully upon past epochs that had been powerfully shaped by a single grand style. Nor is it surprising that the idea of supposedly organic socio-cultural monoliths would have strong political resonance in Europe of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when recently minted—and fragile—nation states contended with the disintegrative effects of advancing capitalism on the social fabric.49 As economic crises exacerbated class antagonisms and pauperized large swaths of society (think of the immiseration of the Italian South following the 1861 Unification); as the dynamics of industrialization decimated traditional communities and ways of life; as urban poverty bred a myriad of ills (suicide, alcoholism, prostitution, epidemics); as the decline of religion threatened to remove a major agent of social cohesion; and as dramatic military defeats stoked fears of national decadence and racial adulteration50—all these, and other historical reagents, gave the idea of integral civilizations a definite ideological appeal and mobilizational potential. The idea mated easily with populisms intent on recapturing glorious national pasts; with the expansionist ethnic visions of pan-Germanism, pan-Slavism,

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pan-Romanism, and pan-Anglo-Saxonism, as well as with pseudo-scientific theories of race. The political fruit of the Counter-Enlightenment’s particularist and vitalist conception of civilization truly ripened in the early decades of the twentieth century. Once the conception had been reified in the field of public discourse, which is to say, once it had been valorized as an object of political desire, it became possible for a ruling regime to appear on the historical scene and head a wide-ranging campaign for national revival staged as the rebirth of a civilization. This is just what happened in Italy in the aftermath of World War I. In reaction to military defeat, interpreted as a result of wilting national vigor, and to the apparent impotence of liberal democracy, exemplified by the governments of Giovanni Giolitti, Mussolini’s Fascism sought to engineer the second coming of Ancient Rome.51 In a school essay of 1939, one Italian teenager will express what was happening to her country with these inspired words: “Even today in line with her tradition and according to her true mission and the purity of our race, the new Rome sets the foundations of a new civilization. History, great teacher of life, teaches us that whenever Italy decays, all horizons darken, but when Italy is reborn in a new season, the whole sky burns bright with the light of her civilization.”52 This is an eloquent testimony to the extent to which, by the end of the Fascist regime, the notion of a (resurrected) civilization had taken hold in the public discourse of Italy. The Duce himself explicitly identified the movement he led with the ambition to impart unitary style on the life of the patria, public and private.53 This style, in turn, was explicitly identified with the revenant spirit of Romanità54: “The Fascists presented themselves as a caste of the elect in whom inhered the authentic spirit of the ancient Roman and Italic ancestry, suffocated by other political forces and the ineptitude of liberal governments.”55 As scholars like Mabel Berezin and Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi have shown,56 the Fascist state project was, to a definitive degree, a cultural one. It was a highly self-conscious enterprise for the production of myths,57 the choreographing of rituals, and the adoption of symbolic representations and gestures.58 These included the fascio littorio (bundled rods), which gave the movement its name, the Roman salute, the passo Romano (a marching style modelled on the Prussian “goose step”), the black shirt, Roman architectural and decorative styles, a military taxonomy borrowed wholesale from Roman usage (“centuries,” “cohorts,” “legions”), and much else besides.59 Indeed, Italian Fascism was very much “a cluster of powerful symbols and attitudes, a language and new forms of speech, new ways of behaving in public in private, even new styles of dress.” I am quoting again Kotkin’s characterization of Bolshevism in order highlight an unmistakable similarity and raise again the nagging issue on which the present chapter takes a stand. It is fair to wonder, given the obvious parallels between the Italian and

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Soviet cases, whether Kotkin would have admitted Fascism, too, into the rank of civilizations. And why not admit also Nazi Germany, while one is at it? This would open the patently ludicrous possibility that in the first half of the twentieth century Europe was home to several distinct civilizations—what better way to rob the term of any analytical substance? And if Italian Fascism is not granted admittance, what would be the disqualifying factor? Certainly not duration, for although Mussolini’s regime lasted only some twenty years, this, according to Kotkin, was more than enough time for its contemporary, Stalinism, to congeal into a veritable civilization. Or were the Fascists symbols, forms of speech, and styles somehow not potent enough to have taken root and truly become “a way of life”? But how exactly does one measure the degree of rootedness, or way-of-life-ness? And can one really be sure that the institutions, symbols, and speech patterns of Soviet state socialism would come ahead in the contest? Most plausibly, perhaps, one could point to the economic sphere and argue that the innovations of the Mussolini government (the policy of corporatism, above all) were nowhere as radical as those of the Bolsheviks (collectivization of agriculture, full nationalization of industry, finance, and trade). Even this, however, is far from an open-and-shut case. It is fair to question how much of a departure the Soviet economy truly was, even under Stalin. How really socialist was it? A long line of Marxist critics have characterized the Stalinist economic system as a form of state capitalism.60 Kotkin himself has argued that, under the name “socialism,” the Bolsheviks implemented a version of the centralized, mobilizational economic regime pioneered by Germany during World War I.61 Variations of this regime were practiced in different countries around Europe during the inter-war period, and with particular urgency after the Great Depression; Italy under Mussolini represented one such local variant.62 If the argument is accepted, and economic socialism is regarded as such in name only, then we would have gone full circle and would find ourselves in the place from which we started, where “civilization” is a purely symbolic affair, a matter of how things were signified, presented, or imagined, rather than of how they actually were; from such a place, it is impossible to see why Stalinism should be classified under this category while the societies ruled by Italian Fascism or German National Socialism should not. The point of my short Italian excursion was to show that what went by the name “civilization” in the years of Mussolini’s reign was a highly mediated reality, a political project animated by the valorized idea of “what a civilization should look like.” The enterprise that was under way, at around the same time, in the Soviet Union differed in many significant ways from the Fascist one; still, between the two there was an unmistakable commonality of form.63 Both projects can be seen, in Peter Fritzsche’s terms,

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as “experimentation in postliberal design”64; they both involved the staging of epochal socio-cultural compacts in the face of modernity’s disintegrative thrusts. To inquire whether these artifices of early-twentieth-century political culture qualified as civilizations, in some neutral sense of the term accepted in the social sciences, is to be asking a patently incongruous question. It is to ignore the mediation and treat as factual that which was, in fact, arti-factual. “Civilization,” in this context, does not designate an objective state of affairs, comprising empirically ascertainable features, whose presence or absence would tell us whether a given society is worthy of the honorable title.65 If it is to be of any use at all, the word must be understood as naming subjectivity no less than objectivity. For whatever facts it might reference, they are all mediated by the attributes of a subject: design, intentionality, valuation, desire. THE SPECTACLE OF PHENOMENA As noted, Kotkin varies his terms and, instead of “civilization,” sometimes writes of Stalinism as a “way of life.” In this, too, his narrative echoes official Soviet discourse, in which paeans to sovetskii/sotsialisticheskii obraz zhizni grew louder as the USSR grew older.66 In Magnetic Mountain, the Soviet way of life is the end product of two interacting factors of unequal weight: the “grand strategies of the State” and the “little tactics of the habitat.”67 The first is the “totalizing revolutionary crusade” of a modernizing and resolutely ideological regime68; the second is the ant-like work of millions of Soviet subjects in their efforts to adapt to the radically new socio-economic environment, to find identity in it, improve their lot, or simply survive. Official ideology, Kotkin tells us, might have changed considerably over time, yet it retained a solid kernel of “fixed ideas.”69 Translated into governmental policies and practical undertakings, these foundational meanings configured the playing field on which Soviet citizens carried on their everyday existence.70 The latter certainly exercised agency of their own. On the micro level of the “habitat,” subjects engaged in creative maneuvers that took advantage of, sometimes circumvented, and sometimes undermined, ideologically dictated schemes.71 Still, it is the playing field, not the players’ tactical gambits on it, that determines the character of this so-called civilization.72 Ultimately, the ant-like activity of the ordinary Soviet citizens does not amount to subversion; Kotkin’s emphasis is on the participation of individuals in the state project and what such participation enables.73 Quite simply, subjects had no choice but to inhabit the practical, symbolic, and affective structures that the Stalinist state had erected for them.74 The Soviet way of life was inescapable; “there was really nowhere to hide.”75

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One could guess what prompted Kotkin to make this striking declaration. He is doing his best to make Stalinism fit Foucault’s model of discourse, which is to say, to imagine it as a closed system of categories and rules that define the limits of the thinkable and speakable. The result is unconvincing, to put it mildly. That Soviet workers in the 1930s, many of whom were old enough to remember the prerevolutionary days, and the great majority of whom still inhabited, mentally, if not physically, a peasant world very remote from Bolshevik visions—that these individuals could only make sense of reality in officially mandated categories is a patent absurdity. As Sheila Fitzpatrick reminds us, more than half of the Soviet population declared themselves religious believers in the 1937 census, a fact that places them outside the supposedly inescapable framework of Bolshevik values.76 Lewin, for his part, cautions: “Some superficial new veneer that is easy to acquire shout not be mistaken for change in deeper cultural and psychological layers that take much longer to mature.”77 Kotkin surely knows all this,78 yet in order to make the theoretical model work, he resorts to a sleight of hand. It was because, in the Soviet Union, expression was policed that certain meanings were unspeakable in public, and not because they were impossible to conceive (or hold dear). Conversely, the operative categories of official discourse were “inescapable” only in the sense that alternatives were dangerous or impractical, and not because the categories had been naturalized into a senso comune, a transcendental horizon of thought and behavior. Kotkin’s argument, thus, teeters on the verge of platitude: in order to participate in officially sanctioned public life, one could not express in public values that have been officially proscribed. What distinguishes Stalinism in Kotkin’s account is that it is a non-capitalist civilization, an “anti-world.”79 No less importantly, however, this world is characterized by the fact that it is an ideological one.80 It is built upon a foundation of ideas; its materiality is mediated by ideality. The Enlightenment vision of the welfare state is the base on which the entire edifice rests.81 The ideas sustaining that vision might have been implemented incompletely, idiosyncratically, or even grotesquely in the Soviet Union82; yet in Magnetic Mountain the seminal role of ideas is never in doubt. An updated version of the ideocracy thesis,83 Kotkin’s interpretation casts ideology as a moment of the greater whole called Soviet civilization. Ideology is the ground; “civilization” is the reality that grows out of that ground and includes it. Everything argued so far in this chapter, however, should convince us to reverse this relationship: “civilization,” or the “Soviet way of life,” should be seen as a moment of ideology’s self-presentation, of the self-valorizing process that it was. As Kotkin sees it, the Bolsheviks came and installed a system of (ideologically-derived) values that, in short order, became a way of life for millions of Soviet citizens. But is it not better to say that the Bolsheviks

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installed a regime that simulated a system of values that becomes a way of life? This counter-formulation is not particularly elegant, but it does the job of highlighting the principled divergence between my position and Kotkin’s. The Bolsheviks built not a civilization but, at most, an elaborate practical setup that produced the effect of civilization. Such a way of looking at things has the distinct advantage of sparing us unwarranted assumptions about the lived experiences of a very large mass of people. “Living socialism” is not a factum brutum of historiography. A reality it is, but one that is reflected in itself. That is to say: those who lived socialism were constantly made conscious that they were supposed to be doing just that. They were endlessly harangued to participate in the “Soviet way of life,” and to do so genuinely and fully. Soviet citizens also knew, more or less, what the imperative entailed in particular instances such as professional career, family life, education, work, leisure, and personal habits. The behavior expected of them was explicitly formulated and confronted them as the norms of “high social consciousness” (vysokoe obshchestvennoe soznanie), “social duty” (obshchestvennyi dolg), “communist morality” (kommunisticheskaia nravstvennost'/moral), “socialist attitude toward labor” (socialitsicheskoe otnoshenie k trudu), and so on. These were the component elements of the “Soviet way of life.” The latter was not a direct, spontaneous experience; it was not a transparent flow that carried Soviet individuals along. Rather, it stood before them, objectified for them in speeches, slogans, exhortatory maxims, manuals, posters, as well as in sanctioned “living” models of behavior. What is more, the subjects for whom all those exhibits were intended were themselves expected to respond in kind: to furnish models of what being a Soviet citizen and living socialism was supposed to look like. We raised the question of communist Trushin’s work in the brigade at the session of the Party committee. We invited all communist to participate in the session. On [the example of] Trushin we were teaching the Party organization and Communist Youth organization how not to be a communist in production and how one is supposed to fight. We gave [him] a definite task, gave [him] a deadline, corrected his [approach to] work and instructed him on what he needs to do.84

Comrade Trushin was being offered here as a negative example for the rest of the Party cell; he was being shown to others as an anti-token of a “communist in production.” Still, implicit in this public exhibit was how one should behave as a Party member and Soviet person. To wit, the “socialist way of life” was objectified not just for Soviet subjects, but also by and in them. Participating in this life meant being part of an exhibited and exhibiting reality. The institution of Soviet literature furnishes

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a large-scale illustration of this fact. I have described elsewhere, and at some length, what this process looked like in the milieu of Soviet writers during the 1930s, when a new kind of belles lettres was being institutionalized, itself a landmark phenomenon of the new civilization.85 I summarize here only the principal plot line of that story, as it dovetails with the present discussion. The writing known as “socialist realism” was a two-dimensional practice. It comprised, first, the act of writing proper, which is to say, the creation of literary representations. Its other, supervening dimension, however, reached well beyond the printed page. It consisted of various public performances by which the author was to render proof of his genuine connection to “our life.” The simplest symbolic act of this kind was a public profession of one’s closeness to the toiling masses and their deeds. But this was rarely sufficient, especially in the early days of the Stalinist literary establishment, when the members of this privileged caste, many of them still bearing the stigma of an alien class origin, were expected to visit industrial sites, take part in collaborative “brigades,” and fulfill sundry social functions. The living connection with the socialist present was supposed to be evident in the writing they produced; the Soviet way of life was to leave its imprint in a special way of seeing and feeling known as “revolutionary romanticism.” This does not mean that artistic works became exemplars of Soviet literature on account of their immanent properties. Such a status was conferred on them either because they were liked by Stalin and Zhdanov, or more commonly, because they resembled already anointed paragons. However, once recognized as outstanding representatives of socialist realism, novels, paintings, or musical compositions were taken retroactively as exhibits of what it meant to be integrated into Soviet reality. It took a few years for this logic to take hold, but once it did, it reacted back upon the starting point—the act of writing itself. Simply put, Soviet writers knew from the outset that they were not simply writing a poem, play, or novel, but crafting a certificate of socio-political belonging. And they strove to produce not works of literature simpliciter but works-tokens: the kind of representations that would be seen as specimens of a certain way of seeing and feeling supposedly native to, and expressive of, the “Soviet way of life.” It was not at all necessary to write about the Soviet way of life. Of course, a writer could very well devote her talents to the genre of historical novels, just as an artist could choose to paint nothing but still lives or landscapes. What was needed was to write from the Soviet way of life; or, better, to write as if one were integrally part of that modus vivendi. The practice of writing, as something separate from the public performances of belonging, soon became fused with the latter into a single symbolic practice. It might be objected that there is not much that is new here. For writers of the seventeenth century also produced literary works that can be taken

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as evidentiary signs of social belonging, in that those works reproduced an artistic style and a “structure of feeling” associated with a particular (dominant) class culture.86 Besides, seventeenth-century belles lettres, too, involved the conscious or unconscious emulation of models in which the culture in question had already found exemplary expression. At the risk of making the same point one too many times, I shall insist again on an all-important difference. That process of cultural creation in the early-modern period was not reflected in itself as was the case in the Soviet Union. Molière and his contemporaries did not operate in the categorial framework of “furnishing an example of class culture,” and even less of “being close to our reality.” Their consciousness of artistic form was the idea of what was dignified and proper, and not the explicit mandate to (re-)produce the general style of their “epoch” or “civilization.” To be sure, the works of those authors are tokens of a certain way of life, but they are such für ein anderes, not an und für sich. In one case, we have a relation of unmediated reflection (works that can be said to “reflect” a period’s dominant culture); in the other case, reflection is reflected within itself: it is a show of reflection. In short, we are dealing with heterogeneous species of cultural practice. If we zoom out, from individual literary works to the institution of Soviet literature as such, we can say with a fair degree of confidence that it, too, functioned as a showpiece, a token writ large. Beginning in 1932, a directive of the Party’s Central Committee initiated the creation of a single organization to incorporate all Soviet writers and, in so doing, to manifest the advent of a classless social order. The idea of what such a society should look like presupposed a monolithic culture and, within it, a likewise monolithic literary establishment. Before there were any actual works of socialist realism, the Party recognized the “objective tendency” of social development and the imperative demand for monolitnost' dictated by it.87 What the character of the new literature was supposed to be remained unclear for quite some time; just as it was unclear what a “socialist city,” “socialist trade,” “socialist law,” or “socialist festival” were supposed to be. Should the novel species of belles lettres be radically innovative or traditional in its general aesthetic outlook? Should the architecture of socialism display the austere, functional shapes of the industrial age, or radiate the classical harmony of a Greek temple? The answers to such questions were worked out and fixed in the course of the 1930s. “[T]he political center provided an agenda of rather vague aesthetic labels (for example, ‘socialist realism’) and a general idea of a functional dimension (for example, festivals as a tool for educating the masses), but left the debate about the specific form and content to a community of professionals.”88 The solutions reached depended on the victories and compromises in power struggles between intelligentsia factions, each of which sought and found patrons among the Party elite.89 There was nothing necessary, or

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self-evident, in the notion that the literature of socialism should resemble nineteenth-century realism90; that the architecture of socialism should be an eclectic neo-classicism; that “socialist family” should sanctify strict monogamy; or that the socialist holiday (sotsialisticheskii prazdnik) should be a highly choreographed affair, with pre-charted processions, pre-arranged meetings (with political dignitaries or “ordinary heroes”), and pre-scripted jubilations in which pre-approved props—flags, slogans, symbolic displays, costumes, bouquets—were deployed.91 The only point of certainty was that all those nominally socialist phenomena should be the opposite of their capitalist counterparts. This is a point that Kotkin makes repeatedly and insistently: “All anyone knew was that socialist settlements patterns were to be different from capitalist ones, whatever those were.”92 When the Stalin revolution began, contemporaries insisted that there was such a thing as the socialist city, and that Magnitogorsk was its outstanding example, but for some years to come, they could not yet say for sure what a socialist city was. The closest they ever came to a statement about the nature of the socialist city was when excoriating the capitalist city. In fact, this negative image of the capitalist city provided the basis for the solution to the question of the nature of the socialist city that took shape by the middle of the decade. Socialism, which began as a way of looking at the world based on a critique of capitalism, became a concrete form of social organization based on the suppression and ultimate elimination of capitalism.93

This is a thought-provoking passage, but I do not think it quite bears out the claim advanced in its last sentence. Here again, Kotkin wants to say that socialism was a very real thing. But if certain Soviet phenomena were conceived and spoken of as negations of capitalism, it does not at all follow that those negations were effective and actually resulted in the opposite of capitalism.94 To remember, the draconian labor laws of Stalinism were billed as “socialist legislation,” but this hardly made them the opposite of capitalist exploitation.95 One point that the quotation does bear out is the preponderance of form over content in the socialist city, and the same applies to socialist legislation, literature, justice, and so on. It was of secondary importance what all those things were; what really mattered was that they were. It was not the substance of the so-called socialist phenomena that counts, but their pure “phenomenality”; which is to say, the relation of reflection in which they stood to the supposedly-socialist being. Stalin’s Commissar of Heavy Industry, Lazar Kaganovich, might have been right, after all, “when he declared an end to the endless debates about the nature of the socialist city, stating that Soviet cities

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were socialists by virtue of being located inside the USSR.”96 Indeed, the socialist character of things was not due to any positive, ascertainable properties, but to the fact that the said things grew out of “our life.” Of course, things did not grow out of Soviet life spontaneously and on their own. They were grown quite deliberately, and precisely in order to serve as reflection of the purportedly socialist “base.” And Soviet ideology was the production of this reflection; it was the process of engineering phenomena as phenomena, that is, as intentional tokens of socialist being. This included institutions, subjectivities, practices, whether actually labeled as “socialist” or not. (In the next chapter, we will attend to the production of reflection in concreto, by examining the campaigns of socialist competition and Stakhanovism.) One of the most common pieces of Soviet rhetoric features the word obrazets (“example,” “exemplar,” “specimen”) in combination with a noun phrase designating this or that normative attitude or moral quality: obrazets sotsialisticheskogo otnosheniia k trudu (exemplar of socialist attitude toward labor); . . . sotsialisticheskoi nravstvennosti ( . . . of socialist morality); . . . nastoiashchego geroizma ( . . . of real heroism); . . . tovarishcheskogo sotrudnichestva ( . . . of comradely cooperation); . . . vysokoi (kommunisticheskoi) soznatel'nosti ( . . . of high [communist] consciousness); . . . podlinnogo kollektivizma ( . . . of genuine collectivism). The same phraseology was used for paragons of material or spiritual culture: obrazets sotsialisticheskoi arkhitektury (exemplar of socialist architecture); . . . sotsialisticheskogo realizma ( . . . of socialist realism); . . . podlinnoi nauchnosti ( . . . of genuine science); . . . vysokoi ideinosti (high intellectual content). Dat' obrazets (to furnish an exemplar) must be distinguished from another common Soviet expression, dat'/pokazat' primer (give/show an example). The latter connotes the presence of a group of people who are supposed to be motivated by the exemplary action; one needs to show them an example in order to overcome their passivity or push them to a higher plateau of consciousness or practical achievement. Dat' obrazets could be used in the same context, yet has another, more objective significance; it can be thought apart from pragmatic objectives and motivations. The obrazets stands on its own; it testifies to the active essence that is socialism. People can present obrazets, but they do not necessarily present it to other people. Ultimately, through their actions, it is Being that presences. In the Soviet Union, the practice of furnishing exemplars was one in which all other kinds of officially sanctioned practice met and identified with one another. Whatever their particular character—physical work, warfare, political activity, intellectual or artistic endeavor—they could, and were, premised upon the provision of tokens. Behind the pompous rhetoric was a system of material and symbolic rewards that ensured the steady supply of such

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tokens across all walks of life. The totality of all tokens-exhibits constituted what we might call the Soviet civilization. This totality was mediated by ideology; after all, the show of civilization was also the exhibition of ideology’s (ontological) truth, the movement of its self-valorization. In this sense, ideology was, indeed, formative of that civilization. But this is nothing like the case Kotkin has presented. In his account, the core values of Marxism are the blueprint of Soviet society, and they decisively shape this society’s way of life. The case I have been arguing is quite different: ideology is the medium in which the show of civilization was organized and administered. It was a medium of discourses, practices, and public performances through which socialism was shown to possess the power of Being: to issue forth, materialize in institutions, works, and mores, and thus constitute an integral material-spiritual world. Ideology did not determine the way of life in the Soviet Union. It only determined the “Soviet way of life.” SOCIALIST PHENOMENALITY While the phrase obraz zhizni was used widely, if far from rigorously, the word tsivilizatsiia occupied a rather marginal place in early-Soviet discourse. We find no entry on the subject in the first edition of Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia.97 The word is likewise absent from the hefty index Lenin’s collected works, fifty-five volumes in all. In the first three decades of Soviet power, hardly anyone of note spoke of a socialist or Soviet civilization.98 When not deployed in a neutral sense, the term was largely reserved for pessimistic or ironic refences to the bourgeois world in toto.99 Until World-War II, at least, socialism “was marked as a ‘formation’ or ‘culture’ but not as a ‘civilization.’”100 This should not be surprising. After all, the particularist idea of civilizations is foreign to Marxism. In historical materialism, there is just one world process, in which distinct types of socio-economic organization follow upon one another as interconnected stages: The social relations within which [humans] produce, the social relations of production [gesellschaftliche Produktionsverhältnisse] . . . in their totality form what are called social relations, society, and specifically a society at a determinate historical stage of development, a society with a peculiar, distinctive character. Ancient society, feudal society, bourgeois society are such totalities of relations of production, each of which at the same time denotes a special stage of development in the history of mankind.101

Still, as Marx himself indicates here, the diachronic moments of the historical continuum could very well be seen as discrete typological entities.

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Each of the major historical types of society displayed the same general anatomy: upon a “base” of forces and relations of production, there arose a “corresponding” superstructure of institutions, norms, ideas, and artistic styles. Although each such formation passed over into another, preparing the material and spiritual conditions for its successor before ceding the stage to it,102 one could very well abstract from the dynamics of the process and contemplate formations statically, as worlds “with a peculiar, distinctive character.” One could bring out the differences between these individual worlds on the basis of the structure they all shared. This was an integral part of the “teaching” of historical materialism, which endeavored to show the universal dependence between basic economic processes and the other, less material, aspects of social life,103 while also explaining how the terms of this relation varied through time. Nor did the privileging of economics in Marxist analysis preclude the use of biological metaphors to describe the unity of historical formations: Historical materialism views human society, the socio-economic formation, as a living organism subject to constant development and comprising economic, political, and spiritual relations taken in their inner connection.104 The study of society brings out . . . the fact that all sides of social life are organically connected to one another. This is why Lenin characterized the socio-economic formation as a unitary, holistic “social organism.” . . . It is this holistic character [tselosnost'] that is expressed by the notion of socio-economic formation.105 Every society represents . . . a holistic organism [tselostnyi organism], the so-called socio-economic formation, i.e., a definite historical type of society with its characteristic mode of production, base and superstructure.”106

Although the two principal sides of the relation—base and superstructure—possessed different content in different historical periods, the relation as such remained identical. And it is this general form, this unity of historical life in its sundry moments—economic, political, legal, ideological, moral, cultural—that Soviet ideologues claimed for socialism, even when they did not refer to it as a civilization. They presented it, not merely as an idea, or faith, but as a life-world, which in the present day faced its anti-world, capitalism. True, socialism was a world in the making, but this did not prevent it from exhibiting the “holistic character” (tselostnost') that had been the property of all previous historical formations. In the Soviet Union, the propensity to view (diachronic) stages as (synchronic) worlds was greatly stimulated by the fact that two such stages—capitalism and socialism—coexisted in the present historical moment, each “spatialized” over a sizeable part of the

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globe. And countless pages of scholarly and political literature were filled with contrastive characterizations of the two rival “orders,” “systems,” “organisms,” “societies,” or “civilizations.”107 Now ideology itself is a moment of the relation just described, one of the points of reflection in which the essential dimension of a given socio-economic order comes to be manifested. Being a component element of the superstructure, ideology stands in a relation of dependence upon the mode of production. In the “ruling ideas of an epoch” are reflected the interests of the dominant social group and,108 through those, the objective “interests” of productive forces at the given stage of their development. As we saw, in Marxism-Leninism an ideology qualifies as progressive when the interests it represents are those that objectively further the gesellschaftliche Produktionsverhältnisse; conversely, an ideology is deemed decadent when it represents social forces that work against the immanent tendencies of historical development.109 In either case, however, there is truth to ideology (just as there is truth to be had on both sides of Mannheim’s duality of ideology and utopia). Whether progressive or regressive, dominant social ideas are “representative”; because they transmit the essential dynamics of history in a given epoch, they are ontologically true even when they are politically retrograde or epistemologically false. In the first place, Soviet ideology presented itself as ontologically true in this broader, universal sense. It staged its own “representativeness,” which is to say, the general correspondence between the worldview of Marxism-Leninism and the objective interests definitive of a new era of historical being: Socialist ideology emerged as the ideology of the most advanced class, the proletariat, as an expression of the needs of society’s material life in its development, of the core, essential tasks of the contemporary period. If bourgeois ideology expresses the interests of a dying, reactionary force, Marxism-Leninism expresses the interests of the most vanguard revolutionary force of the present— the working class, a force that grows, strengthens, and hardens with each day; to this force, historically destined to destroy capitalism and build communism, belongs the future in the whole world.110

But there is more to the ontological show than the general relation between an epoch and the ideas in which its essential content—the objective tendencies of historical development—is reflected. In exhibiting its own concept, Soviet ideology exhibited not just the universal aspect of “what ideology is supposed to be,” but also the particular aspects of what the ideology of socialism is supposed to be. The broader show of civilization included, within

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itself, the show of a socialist civilization, possessing its own special anatomy, and the particular place ideology occupied within that anatomy. While each historical formation is a unity of base and superstructure, the elements composing the latter change over time; the relationship between them changes as well: With the passage of time, and especially with the separation of intellectual and physical labor, all of people’s social and spiritual life grows more complex. The state appears, and with it also law. New forms of social consciousness emerge: political theories appear, science, various kinds of art. The very process of reflection of material life in the mind of people also becomes more complex.111

In other words, the course of history changes not just what is reflected, but the very nature of the reflection. In the passage from one type of historical society to another, not only is the content of the superstructure transformed (as a consequence of the altered relations of production), but likewise its form: how the superstructure is internally structured. Depending on the character of the base, on the specific character of a given socio-economic formation, this or that form of social consciousness gains preeminence. For example, in the epoch of feudalism religion was preeminent and appeared as the dominant form of social consciousness. In the epoch of capitalism’s flourishing, the legal-juridical ideology came to be dominant. In socialist society, the decisive role belongs to scientific ideology. The great ideas of Marxism-Leninism constitute the soul of communist morality, Soviet science, literature, art.112

Thus, to each economic formation there corresponds a particular formation of social consciousness, which is to say, a particular architectonic of instances in which the essential-determining content (the mode of production) is reflected. This content is not simply taken up into politics, morality, law, and art, but first determines the specific forms this reflection assumes in a given historical moment, and which of those forms assumes the structurally dominant role: “The material conditions of people’s lives are always reflected in the social consciousness of people. But how exactly these conditions are reflected depends on the stage of historical development, on the economic base of society.”113 The same crucial “how” determines also the function and relative weight of ideas in each epoch: Advanced social theories, advanced ideas have played and continue to play a progressive role. But the extent of their influence on society’s development is

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not the same in different epochs. The role of advanced ideas in society’s development depends, in the first place, on the nature of the given social order, on the objective tendencies [zakonomernosti] and motive forces of its development; in the second place—on the accuracy with which social theory reflects the urgent needs of society’s material life and its development; in the third place—on the extent of dissemination of those ideas among the masses, which is to say, on whether the ideas are the property of a few individuals or are the banner under which the masses lead their struggle.114

It goes without saying that, in its self-presentation, Soviet ideology figures as the fulfillment of all these normative conditions: the worldview of Marxism-Leninism corresponds to the most advanced stage of historical development; this allows it to apprehend in a fully adequate, scientifically objective way the essential needs of society; and to exert unprecedented influence by virtue of its wide spread among the toiling multitudes. The last quoted passage makes thematic the value of ideology as such. As we can see, “social theories” are taken here in abstraction from any content they may have. It is not asked what the theories in question propound, but rather what the relative importance of ideas—as ideas—is within the totality of other factors that make up a socio-economic world. The Soviet version of historical materialism objectifies and valorizes not merely the relation between ideology and material life, but also between ideology and the other expressions of that life. As we saw earlier, an ideology can have (ontological) value, first, by virtue of transmitting the historical process, in general; and second, by acting as the plenipotentiary of those socio-economic forces that are about to write the next page in the book of history; the latter is that special case in which an ideology is deemed “progressive.” But the passage above shows us that the latter kind of value is, in fact, a hierarchy of value. Not all reflections are created equal; and so, not all progressive ideologies are equally progressive. Some are able to reflect being better, to spread wider and penetrate deeper the fabric of society, becoming a quasi-material force as a result: “Insofar as the ideas, appeals, and tasks promulgated by the Party correctly reflect the growing needs of society’s development, they become the property of the broad masses of people and exert powerful influence on the development of society.”115 Soviet ideology, then, presents itself, not simply as progressive, but as the ultimate species of progressive social thought. As such, it does not quietly take its place alongside other phenomena of the new socio-economic order, as just another instance of reflection. Rather, it claims for itself the function of intermediate determining instance—intermediate between the economic base (the ultimate determining factor) and the various components of the superstructure. Itself a reflection of history’s essential movement,

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Marxism-Leninism then proceeds to shape all other reflections of that essence. Differently expressed, it is the form of social consciousness that is itself formative, helping to bring out all other forms. This, according to Soviet historical materialism, is roughly analogous to the structural role played by religion during feudalism: The transition from slave-owning to feudal society brought about deep transformations not only in the content of social consciousness but also in the correlation between its different forms. . . . In the period of slave-owning society’s decline, religion comes to the fore. Religion becomes the wholly and absolutely dominant [vsetselo i bezrazdel'no gospodstvuiushchei] ideological form in the period of feudalism. All other forms of social consciousness—morality, art, science, and philosophy—find themselves subordinated to religion during the epoch of feudalism.116

The structural parallelism is sustained also on the level of rhetoric. In the same textbook exposition of historical materialism, just a few pages later, near-identical wording is used to characterize the hegemony of MarxismLeninism: “In the USSR, Marxism-Leninism is the absolutely dominant [bezrazdel'no gospodstvuiushchei] ideology of all the people”117; and in another place: “in the course of socialist construction, the dominance of socialist ideology becomes absolute [gospodstvo . . . stanovitsia bezrazdel'nym].”118 Just like religion had colonized and subjugated all other domains of feudalism’s superstructure, Marxism-Leninism was to colonize and hold sway over all superstructural domains of the new socialist civilization. And so it happened. . . . In its actual, practical existence, Soviet ideology was indeed this many-sided process by which Marxism-Leninism penetrated every sphere, every institution of social life, making them all into extensions of the ideological sphere. As noted previously, the process began in earnest during the years of the Cultural Revolution (1928–1931); its initial result was the promotion to “hegemony” of Marxist trends in science, scholarship, education, and the arts. Yet the episode was too short and anarchic for the proletarian ideological hegemony to result in real ideological homogeneity. From the early 1930s, the process recommenced as a thoroughgoing reformation of institutions, professional organizations, and artistic associations, with the goal of giving them a monolithic Soviet (rather than class-based, proletarian) character. But just like the proletarianization of social and cultural life during the Cultural Revolution, the Sovietization campaign that followed was synonymous with ideologization. In one sense, the mission was completed by the middle of the decade, as there remained no legal forms of social action or cultural production outside the state-built structures of ideological orthodoxy. In another sense, the mission did not and could not end. For as long as the Soviet

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Union found itself encircled by the anti-world of capitalism, it remained exposed to alien, corrupting ideological influences; these found their way inside Soviet institutions, threatening their socialist character, and needed to be opposed by the “weapon of Marxism-Leninism.” Ideological struggle was an ongoing task. So was political education and propaganda. There were always further layers of the Soviet population that Marxism-Leninism could reach, and there were always deeper layers of subjectivity, which it was yet to penetrate. The conquest of human selves was made difficult by the persistence of “survivals” of bourgeois psychology and ideology in the consciousness of the masses; and so the struggle continued on that front too.119 *** Soviet ideology was the projection of Soviet civilization, and within it the projection of itself—the “scientific worldview of Marxism-Leninism”—as the dominant form of social consciousness, as an “absolutely dominant ideology.” But this means that Soviet ideology cannot be identified with a “body” of ideas about history, society, and the economy. It is not synonymous with Marxism-Leninism. In its full reality, Soviet ideology was that larger drama of “crowning the socialist base with superstructures,” of unremitting “ideological struggle,” of ensuring “the purity of Leninist ideas,” of weeding out “alien” ideas and attitudes, of instilling communist consciousness, of raising the New Man. In short, it was the self-perpetuating drama of Marxism-Leninism’s “triumph.” Although very real, this was nevertheless a show; meaning that the process of thorough ideologization of Soviet life was mediated by the idea of what the civilization of socialism should look like and, further, of what the role of ideology in such a world should be. The being of Soviet ideology was the acting-out of that pre-scripted role. It was the exhibition of the concept of (socialist) ideology. As we saw, this involved the engineering of phenomena, the ideologically mediated establishment of socialist law, socialist morality, socialist competition, socialist realism, and so on. Soviet ideology was the organization of these phenomena and their ongoing maintenance, through practices that ensured that the institutions and undertakings in question remained faithful expressions of the world-historical essence of socialism. In so doing, the official ideology showed itself to be just what the worldview of a socialist society was supposed to be: the most essential phenomenon, the one through which all other phenomena came about. And this entire regime of “phenomenality,” the ideologically mediated emergence of phenomena from the economic base of socialism, was itself the ultimate mark of the new civilization. Socialism stood not just for a new world, but for a new way of having a world. Soviet ideology was the show of it, and through it—the show of itself as ontologically and epistemologically true.

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The epistemological truth of ideology is a function of its ontological truth, while the latter is premised on the reality of socialism. As the worldview of socialist humanity, Marxism-Leninism can be ontologically true only on the presupposition that what was taking place in the Soviet Union from 1917 onward was indeed a qualitatively new mode of world-historical being. Now, as I have maintained, the logic of Soviet ideo-logy is the logic of the Concept, and the logic of the Concept is about how something—a “subject”—is able to posit its presuppositions (and thus determine itself as what it essentially is). Soviet ideology is just this kind of something (a case of x3); it creates, as its own artifact, the other from which it receives its ontological truth, the other through which it is valorized. That other is socialism determined as a “civilization,” a “way of life,” a way of having a world. Ideology, of course, could not create the living reality of socialism. What it did create is the show of living socialism, and it did so through the production of tokens, the exhibit of exemplars, and the administered spectacle of phenomena. NOTES 1. “Since each of them is on its own account only in virtue of not being the other one, each shines within the other, and is only insofar as the other is. Hence the distinction of essence is opposition through which what is distinct does not have an other in general, but its own other facing it; that is to say, each has its own determination only in its relation to the other: it is only inwardly reflected insofar as it is reflected into the other, and the other likewise; thus each is the other’s own other” (Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, 185; emphasis in the original). 2. See Richard Dien Winfield, Hegel’s Science of Logic: A Critical Rethinking in Thirty Lectures (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012), 109–10. 3. Hegel distinguishes emphatically between the usual sense of “subjectivity,” associated with the individual person and another, radical view of subjectivity that sees it as immanent to the world process. This animating principle of being is the concrete Concept. See Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, 223. 4. The Concept, as Hegel characterizes it, is “the repulsion of itself from itself into distinct independent [terms], [but] which, as this repulsion, is identical with itself, and which is this movement of exchange with itself alone that remains at home with itself” (Encyclopedia Logic, 232; emphasis in the original). In another place, Hegel famously states: “The movement of the Concept must be considered, so to speak, only as play; the other which is posited by its movement is, in fact, not an other” (Encyclopedia Logic, 238). In the Science of Logic, this is expressed as: “the beginning that begins from itself is first of all the positing of this itself from which the beginning is made” (491). 5. “What is self-determined is posited but not posited by something other than itself. It is self-posited, and that self-determined character will show itself to be constitutive of what the concept is and what the self involves” (Winfield, 109). “When

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this manifestation of essence is set free, then we have the concept” (Hegel, Science of Logic, 521). “The truth is the whole and the whole is merely the essential nature [of something] realizing its completeness through the process of its own development” (Jindřich Zeleny, The Logic of Marx, trans. Terrel Carver [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980], 28). 6. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis, IN: Liberal Arts Press, 1956), 18–19. 7. Hegel, Science of Logic, 510. 8. “Consequently, an effect contains nothing whatever that the cause does not contain. Conversely, a cause contains nothing that is not in its effect. A cause is cause only to the extent that it produces an effect; to be cause is nothing but this determination of having an effect, and to be effect is nothing but this determination of having a cause. Cause as such entails its effect, and the effect entails the cause; in so far as a cause has not acted yet or has ceased to act, it is not a cause; and the effect, in so far as its cause is no longer present, is no longer an effect but an indifferent actuality” (Hegel, Science of Logic, 494; emphasis in the original). The interdependence of cause and effect is fully “realized” on the stage of reciprocal action (Science of Logic, 503–5), which, for its part, ushers in the logic of the Concept: “Causality has thereby returned to its absolute concept and has at the same time attained the concept itself” (Science of Logic, 504). 9. The logic described here is analogous to that of determinate causality in Hegel (Science of Logic, 403). 10. Heidegger, Being and Time, 59–62. 11. Andrew Zimmerman has observed that Kotkin’s notion of socialist civilization is readily extendable not only over the full length of Soviet history, but also beyond the Soviet Union, to other state-socialist regimes. See Andrew Zimmerman, “Foucault in Berkeley and Magnitogorsk: Totalitarianism and the Limits of Liberal Critique,” Contemporary European History 23, no. 2 (2014): 225–36. 12. The notion gained currency already in the 1930s, when a voluminous study by English socialists Beatrice and Sydney Webb asked: Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? In 1952, philosopher Corliss Lamont published Soviet Civilization, a book-length study of socialism in the USSR. While Kotkin was conducting his pioneering research in Magnitogorsk, exiled dissident Andrei Siniavskii’s earlier lectures at the Sorbonne were issued under the title Osnovy sovetskoi tsivilizatsii [The Principles of Soviet civilization]. See: Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? 2 vols (London: Longmans, 1935); Corliss Lamont, Soviet Civilization (New York: Philosophical Library, 1952); Andrei Siniavskii, Soviet Civilization: A Cultural History, trans. Joanne Turnbull (New York: Arcade, 1990). None of these publications deployed the term “civilization” in a rigorous analytical sense. 13. Anna Krylova, “Soviet Modernity: Stephen Kotkin and the Bolshevik Predicament,” Contemporary European History 23, no. 2 (May 2014): 173. 14. Among the representative texts of this subfield are: Peter Holquist, “‘Information Is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work’: Bolshevik Surveillance in Its Pan-European Context,” The Journal of Modern History 69, no. 3 (1997): 415–50; David L. Hoffman and Yanni Kotsonis, eds., Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices

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(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000); Peter Holquist, “State Violence as Technique: The Logic of Violence in Soviet Totalitarianism,” Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in Comparative Perspective, ed. Amir Weiner (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 19–45; Amir Wiener, Introduction to Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in Comparative Perspective, ed. Amir Weiner (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 1–18; David L. Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917–1941 (Cornell University Press, 2018); David L. Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). For a discussion of Kotkin’s influence on Soviet historiography, see Astrid Hedin, “Stalinism as a Civilization: New Perspectives on Communist Regimes,” Political Studies Review 2, no. 2 (April 2004): 166–84. 15. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 23. 16. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 2. 17. See: Moshe Lewin, “Society and the Stalinist State,” Social History 1, no. 2 (1976): 139–75; Terry Martin, “Modernization or Neo-Traditionalism? Ascribed Nationality and Soviet Primordialism,” in Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, ed. David L. Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2000), 161–82. The debate among historians on whether early Soviet society was modern or neo-traditionalist is mapped out in Michael David-Fox, “Multiple Modernities vs. Neo-Traditionalism: On Recent Debates in Russian and Soviet History,” Jahrbücher Für Geschichte Osteuropas 54, no. 4 (2006): 535–55. Following the lead of Edward Keenan, Arch Getty has argued for the persistence during Stalinism of an old political culture dating back to the times of Muscovy. See J. Arch Getty, Practicing Stalinism: Bolsheviks, Boyars, and the Persistence of Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); Edward L. Keenan, “Muscovite Political Folkways,” Russian Review 45, no. 2 (1986): 115–81. 18. In the introduction to Magnetic Mountain (5), Kotkin frames his approach by engaging with Lewin’s influential interpretation of Stalinism. 19. Gábor T. Rittersporn, review of Review of Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization, by Stephen Kotkin, The American Historical Review 101, no. 5 (1996): 1587. I return to Rittersporn’s critical point later in this chapter. See also Mark B. Tauger, review of Review of Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, by Stephen Kotkin, The Journal of Modern History 69, no. 1 (1997): 198. 20. “The idea of socialism has been embodied in life [voploshchena v zhizn']. We have created a new, higher type of civilization, which paves the way for the powerful, unceasing growth of material and spiritual culture” (E. Pashukanis, “Vsenarodnoe sovetskoe gosudarstvo,” Pravda [9 May, 1936], 2). 21. The decisive impetus was provided by the 25th Party Congress in 1976, during which Leonid Brezhnev emphasized the historical uniqueness of the Soviet way of life and called for its further “perfection” (sovershenstvonanie). See: Materialy XXV s'ezda KPSS (Moscow: Politizdat, 1977); V. V. Shcherbitskii, XXV s'ezd KPSS o sovershenstvovanii sotsialisticheskogo obraza zhizni i formirovanii novogo cheloveka (Moscow: Politizdat, 1977). The following selection of late-Soviet book titles should

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suffice to illustrate the notion’s high currency: V. G. Sinitsyn, Sovestskii obraz zhizni (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1969); Aleksandr Vasinskii, Obraz zhizni—sovetskii! (Moscow: Politizdat, 1974); A. P. Shevtsov et al., eds., Sotsialisticheskii obraz zhizni i narodnoe blagosostoianie (Saratov: Izd-vo Saratovskogo un-ta, 1975); M. N. Rutkevich, Sotsialisticheskii obraz zhizni i ego razvitie v SSSR (Moscow: Mysl', 1977); I. Ia. Kopylov, Konstitutsiia SSSR i sovetskii obraz zhizni (Kursk: Kurskii gos. pedagog. in-t, 1980); A. I. Savastiuk and K. P. Buslov, Sovetskii obraz zhizni—soderzhanie, struktura, dinamika (Minsk: Nauka i tekhnika, 1980); K. V. Adamson, Fizicheskaia kul'tura i sovetskii obraz zhizni (Moscow: Fizkul'tura i sport, 1982); S. N. Akhmeev, ed., Sotsialisticheskii obraz zhizni i razvitie lichnosti (Cheboksary, Soviet Union: Chuvashskii gos. un-t, 1983); E. A. Karpovskii, My—ateisty: sovetskii obraz zhizni i religiia (Gor'kii: Volgo-Viatskoe knizhnoe izd-vo, 1983). By the end of the 1970s, the literature on the topic had reached such a magnitude that a bibliographic index was deemed necessary: Sotsialisticheskii obraz zhizni: Ukazatel' literatury (Moscow: MISON, 1980). In 1985, a reference handbook of nearly three hundred pages was published in Ukraine, conceived as a “systematization of the knowledge accumulated by Marxist science on the questions concerning the [socialist] way of life” (V. I. Shinkaruk et al., eds., Sotsialisticheskii obraz zhizni: Spravochnik [Kiev: Izd-vo polit. lit-ry Ukrainy, 1985], 8). In addition to the flood of publications, there were numerous seminars, exhibits, TV programs, a magazine (Sotsialisticheskii obraz zhizni, published in Tallinn, Estonia), and even a festival for documentary films under the name “Our Soviet Way of Life.” 22. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 2. Later in the book, Kotkin castigates scholars whose “categories are trapped within the terms of the phenomena they are trying to analyze” (200). 23. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 150–54. For a critical commentary on this point, see Krylova, “Soviet Modernity,” 178. 24. Magnetic Mountain ends with this melancholy meditation: “Magnitogorsk was conceived and built as a utopian experiment—a socialist earthly paradise—but this vision, as well as the actual construction, embodied a way of thinking and a set of practices that, notwithstanding the rejection of capitalism, shared a great deal with other industrial countries, all of which developed forms of social regulation and the welfare state. In the lands of the former USSR, the welfare state centered on large factories has outlasted the institutionally redundant Communist party, but it is in deep crisis. Rather than as a cause for comfort or self-congratulation, this crisis might better be seen as also our own” (366). Blaming the Soviet “tragedy” on the Enlightenment was a common theme among exponents of the totalitarian approach, one Jacob Talmon developed at great length in The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1952). Contemporaneously with Kotkin’s book, Richard Pipes’s Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (1993) capped its own historical lesson with the following statement: “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” (511). Several few years later, Erik van Ree traced ideological Stalinism to the same point of origin. See Erik van Ree,

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The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth Century Revolutionary Patriotism (London: Routledge, 2002). 25. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 160. 26. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 14. 27. In a later text, Kotkin states plainly that “the Soviet Union advertised itself . . . as socialism and a new civilization” (Stephen Kotkin, “Modern Times: The Soviet Union and the Interwar Conjuncture,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 2, no. 1 [2001]: 150; emphasis added). 28. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 364. 29. For a recent discussion that uncritically applies the term “civilization” in the Soviet context, see Iu. A. Nisnevich and A. V. Riabov, “Leninizm i sovetskaia tsivilizatsiia (k 150-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia V. I. Lenina),” Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennost' 3 (2020): 112–23. 30. Keith Gandal and Stephen Kotkin, “Foucault in Berkeley," History of the Present 1 (1985), 6, 15. 31. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 22–23. 32. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), xiii. 33. As one scholar has observed, “The mental and social conditions for speaking about civilization in the manner recognizable in the year 2000 were not available before the middle of the eighteenth century” (Aziz Al-Azmeh, “Civilization, Concept and History Of,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences: Second Edition, 2015, https:​//​www​.sciencedirect​.com​/science​/article​/abs​/ pii​/B9780080970868620809). On the earliest uses of the neologism “civilization,” see Bruce Mazlish, Civilization and Its Contents (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 5–14. The history of the term “civilization” is discussed in Lucien Febvre, “Civilisation,” in Civilisation: le mot et l’idée (Paris: F. Alcan, 1930): 10–59; Jean Starobinski, Blessings in Disguise: Or, the Morality of Evil, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 1–34. 34. Lucien Febvre dates the earliest use of the plural “civilizations” in France to the year 1819. It took a few decades for this coinage to become broadly accepted (Febvre, 16). In the year 1900, a young Marcel Mauss was still not entirely comfortable with the plural form, as is evident from his memorable dictum, “there are no uncivilized peoples, only peoples of different civilization” (quoted in Jennifer Pitts, “Ideas of Empire: Civilization, Race, and Global Hierarchy,” in The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought The Nineteenth Century, ed. Peter E. Gordon and Warren Breckman [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019], 1:460). In Russia, the second edition of Vladimir Dal'’s dictionary still did not recognize the meaning in question, defining “civilization” only as “common existence (obshchezhitie), civility, the consciousness of the rights and obligations of a citizen,” and glossing “to civilize a people” as “to turn from a wild, rude existence into a civil one” (Tolkovyi slovar' zhivago velikoruskago iazyka Vladimira Dalia. – ispravlennoe i znachitel'no umnozhennoe po rukopisi avtora, s.v. “Tsivilizatsiia,” Vol. 2 [St. Petersburg: M. O. Vol'f, 1880–1882]. For the semantics of tsivilizatsiia in Russia during the early

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part of the nineteenth century, see Mikhail Velizhev, “‘Tsivilizatsiia’ i ‘srednii klass,’” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 4 (2010): 29–59. 35. Foucault, Order of Things, 217–20. 36. The most influential articulation of this line of thought remains Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. F. N. Jephcott (London: Blackwell, 2000). 37. Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat marquis de Condorcet, Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind: Being a Posthumous Work of the Late M. de Condorcet (London: J. Johnson, 1795); François Guizot, The History of Civilization in Europe (New York: D. Appleton, 1882). 38. As in the famous schema of cultural evolution proposed by Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society: Or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery Through Barbarism to Civilization (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1910). 39. A representative and highly influential example of the theory was authored by the future national-security advisor to President Lindon B. Johnson: Walt W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (London: Cambridge University Press, 1960). For a discussion of the various strands of modernization theory, see David Harrison, The Sociology of Modernization and Development (London: Routledge, 1990), 1–60. On the politics and ideology of “development” in US foreign affairs during the 1950s and 60s, see Hunt, 159–70. 40. Although in many contexts the two terms were used interchangeably, there developed a distinctly German tradition of treating “culture” as the positive alternative to “civilization.” An extensive discussion of these adjunct concepts can be found in Jörg Fisch, “Zivilisation, Kultur,” in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhard Koselleck, eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Vol. 7 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992), 679–774. See also: E. de Dampierre, “Note Sur ‘Culture’ et ‘Civilisation,’” Comparative Studies in Society and History 3 (1961): 328–40. 41. The main intellectual source for this understanding of civilization are the writings of Johann Gottfried Herder. See Johann Gottfried Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man (London: J. Johnson, 1803); Johann Gottfried Herder, “Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Mankind,” in Another Philosophy of History and Other Political Writings, trans. Ioannis D. Evrigenis and Daniel Pellegrin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2004), 3–98. 42. Jean Starobinski notes that from the time the term was coined, in the writings of marquis de Mirabeau, it exhibited a tendency to polysemy. For Mirabeau père, civilization denotes the process, as well as cumulative effect, of culture-cum-perfectability. This opens the possibility that different societies, at different times, could have flourished to an analogous degree and could, thus, justifiably be called “civilizations” (Starobinski, 5–8). 43. Isaiah Berlin, “The Counter-Enlightenment,” in The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1997), 243–68. 44. Herder, “Another Philosophy,” 29. Exemplary of this tradition of thought is the work of the Slavophile ideologue, Nikolai Danilevskii. In the place of a singular historical process, Danilevskii posited a plurality of local civilizations, each evolving from a distinct “cultural-historical type.” See Nikolai Danilevskii, Rossiia

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i Evropa: Vzgliad na kul'turnye i politichsekie otnosheniia Slavianskogo mira k Romano-Germanskomu (Saint-Petersburg: Glagol', 1995): 59–95. 45. This conception, too, was destined for a long life, as the publication in 1996 of Samuel P. Huntington’s much debated Clash of Civilizations testifies. See: Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). 46. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, 2 vols (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2003). Following established German usage, Spengler deployed the term Kultur for the phase of full-bloodied, creatively expressive social life; Zivilisation was reserved for the twilight age of societies, when their vital powers are spent, as feeling and instinct are desiccated by the critical powers of the intellect. 47. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 45. 48. William Butler Yates, “The Second Coming,” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yates. A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), 185–86. 49. As Peter Fritzsche has written, “Especially after 1848, as the failures of liberal reform became clearer, corrosion came to be regarded as characteristic of industrialism as manufacture. . . . The recognition of crisis gave nineteenth-century projects of reform their urgency. In the face of cholera epidemics, working-class revolution, and urban poverty, the modern experience added up to a relentless struggle to regulate and renovate civil society. Late nineteenth-century notions of national solidarity dramatized the importance of renovating the social body” (Peter Fritzsche, “Nazi Modern,” Modernism/Modernity 3, no. 1 [January 1, 1996]: 11). 50. On the notion of national degeneration, so widespread in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History (New York: Free Press, 2007), 109–31. 51. Helen Roche, “Mussolini’s ‘Third Rome,’ Hitler’s Third Reich and the Allure of Antiquity: Classicizing Chronopolitics as a Remedy for Unstable National Identity?,” Fascism 8, no. 2 (December 17, 2019), 151. 52. Quoted in Luisa Quartermaine, “‘Slouching towards Rome’: Mussolini’s Imperial Vision,” in Urban Society in Roman Italy, ed. Tim J. Cornell and Kathryn Lomas (London: Routledge, 1995), 207. 53. Benito Mussolini, “The Doctrine of Fascism,” The Living Age (November, 1933), 238, 242–43. 54. On the political uses of Romanità by Mussolini’s regime, see: Quartermaine; Roche; Romke Visser, “Fascist Doctrine and the Cult of the Romanita,” Journal of Contemporary History 27, no. 1 (1992): 5–22; M. Stone, “A Flexible Rome: Fascism and the Cult of Romanita,” in Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789–1945, ed. Catharine Edwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 205–20; Katie Fleming, “The Use and Abuse of Antiquity: The Politics and Morality of Appropriation,” in Classics and the Uses of Reception, ed. Charles

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Martindale and Richard F. Thomas (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 127–37; Jan Nelis, “Constructing Fascist Identity: Benito Mussolini and the Myth of ‘Romanità,’” The Classical World 100, no. 4 (2007): 391–415; Andrea Giardina, André Vauchez, and Elisabetta Bonasera, Il mito di Roma: da Carlo Magno a Mussolini (Rome: Laterza, 2000), 212–96. 55. Quoted in Giardina, Vauchez, and Bonasera, 214. Mussolini himself famously proclaimed: “We are Roman Italy (Italia romana), wise and strong, disciplined and imperial. Much of what was the immortal spirit of Rome rises again in Fascism: Roman is the Littorio, Roman is our organization of combat, Roman is our pride and courage. Civus romanus sum” (quoted in Giardina, Vauchez, and Bonasera, 219). 56. Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000). 57. In a speech on the eve of the March on Rome, Mussolini declared: “We have created our myth. Our myth is a faith, a passion. It does not need to be a reality. It is a reality because it is a spur, it is a hope, it is faith, it is courage. Our myth is the Nation, our myth is the grandeur of the Nation! And to this myth, to this grandeur, that we want to translate into a complete reality, we subordinate all the rest” (quoted in Falasca-Zamponi, 39). 58. One scholar has advanced the claim of “an aesthetic overproduction—a surfeit of Fascist signs, images, slogans, books, and buildings—in order to compensate for, fill in, and cover up its unstable ideological core” (Jeffrey Schnapp, “Epic Demonstrations: The 1932 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution,” in Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture, ed. R. J. Goslan [Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992], 3; emphasis in the original). 59. See Falasca-Zamponi, 89–110; Giardina, Vauchez, and Bonasera, 212–96; Laura Malvano, Fascismo e politica dell’imagine (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1988), 153. 60. Handy recapitulations of the debates on state capitalism in the Soviet Union can be found in W. Jerome and Adam Buick, “Soviet State Capitalism? The History of an Idea,” Survey: A Journal of Soviet and East European Studies, 62 (1967): 58–71; Charles Bettelheim and Brian Pearce, Class Struggles in the USSR (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1978), 464–76; Paul Bellis, Marxism and the U.S.S.R.: The Theory of Proletarian Dictatorship and the Marxist Analysis of Soviet Society (London; Macmillan, 1979), 129–73; Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, “State Capitalism in the USSR? A High-Stakes Debate,” Rethinking Marxism 6, no. 2 (June 1, 1993): 46–68; Marcel van der Linden and Jurriaan Bendien, Western Marxism and the Soviet Union: A Survey of Critical Theories and Debates Since 1917 (Boston, Netherlands: Brill, 2007), 49–63; M. C. Howard and J. E. King, “‘State Capitalism’ in the Soviet Union,” History of Economics Review 34, no. 1 (2001): 110–26; Nathan Sperber, “The Many Lives of State Capitalism: From Classical Marxism to Free-Market Democracy,” History of the Human Sciences 3 (2019): 100–24. Early interpretations of Stalinism as a state-capitalist system were advanced in such texts as: Friedrich Adler, “Das Stalinische Experiment Und Der Sozialismus,” Der Kampf,

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no. 25 (1932.): 4–16; Rudolf Sprenger, Bolshevism: Roots, Role, Class View, Method (New York: International Review, 1939); Friedrich Pollock, “State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9, no. 2 (1941): 200–225; R. L. Worrall, “U.S.S.R: Proletarian or State Capitalist?,” Modern Quarterly 11, no. 2 (1939): 5–19. Raya Dunayevskaya’s influential interventions in the debate are contained in Raya Dunayevskaya, Franklin Dimitriyev, and Eugene Gogol, Russia: From Proletarian Revolution to State-Capitalist Counter-Revolution (Leiden, Holland: Brill, 2017), 207–310. A seminal elaboration is that of Tony Cliff, State Capitalism in Russia (London: Pluto Press, 1974). Ernst Mandel’s essay “The Inconsistencies of State Capitalism” (1969) stoked a debate on the pages of the journal International Socialism. See: International Marxist Group and Education Commission, Readings on “State Capitalism” (London: Red Books, 1973). A Marxist conception of state capitalism as a definite historical phase in the development of forces and relations of production is formulated in Max Horkheimer, “The Authoritarian State,” Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 15, no. 3 (1973): 3–20. 61. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 31–32. See also Kotkin, “Modern Times.” 62. By the late 1930s, the share of state-owned enterprises in the Italian economy was second only to that of the Soviet Union (Martin Blinkhorn, Mussolini and Fascist Italy [London: Routledge, 1994], 46). Similarities between the inter-war economic regimes of the Soviet Union, Italy, and Germany were analyzed from early on by Rizzi, Burnham, and Horkheimer. 63. The common ground between the Italian and Soviet culture-building missions in the 1930s, has been noted by Katerina Clark: “In their bid to lead ‘world culture’ the Soviet establishment were not unique. Culture became an area where in the 1930s the rival states and rival world systems of Europe began to compete for the right to be considered the true leader of the continent. . . . In that the Bolsheviks were representatives of a world system with universalizing aims, potentially Moscow would form the center of a new, transnational imperial formation of some kind, a ‘Rome.’ In a reduced sense it already was; it was a version of the land-based empire, and ancient Rome is a paradigm of that formation” (Moscow, 11–12). 64. Fritzsche, 13. 65. Such an approach is typified by archeologist Vere Gordon Childe’s influential treatment of ancient urban civilizations. See: V. Gordon Childe, “The Urban Revolution,” The Town Planning Review 21, no. 1 (1950): 3–17. 66. See note 21 in the present chapter. 67. In Magnetic Mountain, these two expressions figure as subtitles of parts I and II, respectively. 68. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 155. 69. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 152. For a forceful critique of Kotkin’s narrative of “fixed ideas,” see Krylova, “Soviet Modernity.” 70. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 21. 71. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 22, 155, 223–25, 237. 72. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 224–25. This, once again, sets Kotkin’s account in opposition to social historians like Lewin, who see the Bolshevik project significantly

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altered, if not derailed, by old mentalities and behaviors characteristic of large swaths of the Soviet population. 73. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 22, 230, 235. 74. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 21. See also 221, 224, 235–37. 75. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 223.. 76. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 225. Given the circumstances in which the census was conducted, it is safe to assume that the true number of religious believers in the country was much greater. 77. “Grappling,” 303. 78. Magnetic Mountain, 221. 79. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 152–53, 360. 80. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 151–52, 356. 81. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 18–21. See note 24 in the present chapter. 82. “When we look closely at the USSR in the 1930s we see that the results of building socialism were not entirely what the Bolsheviks intended (that is, what the central party decrees said should happen). This does not mean, however, that the intentions can therefore be ignored or discounted” (Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 21). In another place, Kotkin writes of “the perverse assemblage of unintended consequences” of the Bolshevik leaders’ designs (279). 83. See chapter 1 of the present study. 84. Quoted in Neutatz, 527. 85. Petrov, Automatic, 131–72, 194–219. 86. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132. 87. “On the Reformation of Literary-Artistic Organizations,” in C. Vaughan James, Soviet Socialist Realism: Origins and Theory (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973), 120. 88. Malte Rolf, “A Hall of Mirrors: Sovietizing Culture under Stalinism,” Slavic Review 68, no. 3 (2009), 616. 89. Rolf, Sovetskie, 92. See also: Katerina Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), x; Susan Reid, “Socialist Realism in the Stalinist Terror: The Industry of Socialism Art Exhibition, 1935–41,” Russian Review 60, 2 (2001): 154; Hoffmann, Stalinist Values, 5–6. 90. Clark, The Soviet Novel, 31–32. 91. “According to the special ‘May Day’ instructions issued in 1933 by the Party committee of Moscow’s Lenin District . . . , ‘all drafts of all decorations of all enterprises, offices, and educational institutions, streets, large shop windows, artistic installations, posters, photo exhibits etc., as well as everything to be carried by parade participants, their performances, floats, etc., must be approved by the district’s Artistic Subcommittee” (quoted in Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government; A Saga of the Russian Revolution [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017], 527). 92. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 109. 93. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 151.

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94. The point has been forcefully argued by Herbert Marcuse: “[Soviet society] is not the negation of capitalism, but it partakes, in a decisive aspect, of the function of capitalism, namely, in the industrial development of the productive forces under separation of the control of production from the ‘immediate producers’” (Soviet Marxism, 150). 95. The argument that these laws were socialist because Soviet citizens perceived them as being very different from labor laws under capitalism cannot stand. On the one hand, it is quite impossible to be certain of what the majority of Soviet citizens actually believed; on the other, studies of labor under Stalinism have documented widespread discontent with labor legislation. 96. Kotkin, Magnetic Montain, 150. 97. A short article appeared in the second edition of the encyclopedia. 98. Iu. A. Asoiian, “Izcheznuvshaia tsivilizatsiia: Tsivilizatsionnye kategorii v sovetskom ideologicheskom diskurse 1920–1930-kh godov,” Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennost' 4 (2012): 114. 99. Asoiian, 114. 100. Asoiian, 115. 101. Karl Marx, “Wage Labour and Capital,” in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 9 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1977), 212. 102. “No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces, for which there is room in it, have been developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions for their existence have not matured in the womb of the old society” (Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. N. I. Stone (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1904), 12. 103. “Insofar as people’s way of life in this or that society is characterized by the mode of production, all other social phenomena depend, in the last instance, on the mode of production, they follow from it. The mode of production is the material-economic basis of society determining its entire internal structure. In the notion of economic social formation is reflected, above all, this dependence of all social phenomena on the material relations of production” (F. V. Konstantinov et al., eds., Osnovy marksistsko-leninskoi filosofii, 4th edition [Moscow: Politizdat, 1979], 225). 104. F. V. Konstantinov et al., eds, Osnovy marskistskoi filosofii: Uchebnik. (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1962), 302. 105. Konstantinov et al., Uchebnik, 302. 106. Kuusinen et al., 128; emphasis in the original. 107. Konstantinov et al., Istoricheskii materializm, 333; Konstantinov et al., Osnovy, 351. 108. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 67–71. 109. Konstantinov et al., Istoricheskii materializm, 558. 110. Konstantinov et al., Istoricheskii materializm, 554–55. 111. Konstantinov et al., Istoricheskii materializm, 541–42. 112. Konstantinov et al., Istoricheskii materializm, 560–61. 113. Konstantinov et al., Istoricheskii materializm, 546. 114. Konstantinov et al., Istoricheskii materializm, 646

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115. Konstantinov et al., Istoricheskii materializm, 567. 116. Konstantinov et al., Istoricheskii materializm, 549; emphasis in the original. 117. Konstantinov et al., Istoricheskii materializm, 555. 118. Konstantinov et al., Istoricheskii materializm, 633. 119. See Van Ree, 115–16. A striking illustration of this dictum was provided in the years after World War II, with the unleashing of the so-called anti-cosmopolitan campaign. According to the Agitprop directive, despite the successful construction of socialism and the victory in the war, a most harmful survival of bourgeois consciousness remained to be eradicated: fawning attitude toward the West and its culture (“Plan meropriiatii po propagande sredi naseleniia idei sovetskogo patriotizma,” Fond Aleksandra N. Iakovleva, 21 December, 2022, https:​//​www​.alexanderyakovlev​ .org​/fond​/issues​-doc​/69334).

Chapter 6

The Economy of Tokens

IDEOLOGICAL VALUES AND THE VALUE OF IDEOLOGY Some social scientists, intent on rescuing ideology from undue politicization and pejorative connotations of false consciousness,1 have interpreted it as a “system of values.” Influenced by theories of social psychology, the approach emphasizes ideology’s positive function in the conduct of social life: “The concept of system of values indicates that ideology, as well as culture, is a process of evaluation. Ideology and culture have something to do with a process of identification and are both the support of a project of life.”2 As Nietzsche taught, to be is to will, and to will is to value3; human groups can be said to be unified and defined by their members’ shared values.4 Even when ideology is regarded as a complex of ideas or beliefs, it still remains to be explained how the separate elements of the creed come together, what exactly welds them into a whole.5 This is where values come in. . . . They represent the deep dimension of the architectonic. What makes an ideology identifiable, what ties its diverse constituents—“ideas,” “representations,” or “beliefs”—is that they all “stem” from a few core values. Thus, in a highly influential text social psychologist Milton Rokeach defined values as “a type of belief, centrally located within one’s total belief system, about how one ought or ought not to behave, or about some end-state of existence worth or not worth attaining.”6 Rokeach went on to observe that “[a]n adult probably has tens or hundreds of thousands of beliefs, thousands of attitudes, but only dozens of values.”7 Insofar as beliefs are seen to be extensions of values, the former take on the character of the latter, which makes it possible to speak of the entire conglomerate as a “system of values.” Those explicit political doctrines we call ideologies represent an advanced stage on which a set of values has received 191

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intellectual elaboration in terms of definite principles, desiderata, and goals. As Daniel Bell explained in an important text: The function of an ideology, in its broadest context, is to concretize the values, the normative judgments of the society. . . . In sum, within every operative society, there must be some creed—a set of beliefs and values, traditions and purposes—which links both the institutional networks and the emotional affinities of the members into some transcendental whole. And there have to be some mechanisms whereby those values can be not only “internalized” by individuals (through norms) but also made explicit for the society—especially one which seeks consciously to shape social change; and this explicating task is the function of ideology.8

One serious problem with this conception is that its exponents have rarely gone to the trouble of scrutinizing the notion of “value” outside the range of made-to-order definitions. While the term is being used to specify what “ideology” might mean, its own meaning remains unproblematized. Values are taken in an ahistorical sense, as an invariant of human existence.9 Supposedly, everywhere and always people have valued and had values. Different individuals and groups value different things, and this gives rise to different value systems.10 What is seldom asked in the social sciences, however, is whether everywhere and always people have had values in the same way; that is, whether, apart from the content of values, there may not be variance in the form, or mode of being, of values. To my mind, the study of Soviet society and ideology makes such an inquiry imperative. The words “system” and “set” give an unmistakable clue that the interpretation of ideology in terms of values remains confined to the first stage of the dialectic. The unity we have before us, the unity that values are called upon to constitute, is that of internal coherence. I have stated many times and in many ways that this content-unity is not the mode of existence proper to Soviet ideology. But here, too, the inadequacy of the approach can be revealing, allowing us to see more clearly what is the case. If we accept, in a heuristic way, to regard Soviet ideology in the restricted sense of a system of values, we would notice right away that something is “off” in the picture. As indicated in chapter 4, we would have before us not one but two sets of values, to be distinguished not merely by the degree of generality or importance (“core” vs. “peripheral”), but as being of qualitatively different order. On the one hand, there are values attached to things in the world, what social psychologists have termed “cathected objects.” In the case of Marxism, these include the forces and relations of production, economic formations, classes and material interests, labor, exploitation, revolution, dictatorship of the proletariat, collectivism, equality, and so on. Apart

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from these ideological values, which fit neatly the customary understanding of the term, we find a special set of values that attach to ideology itself. Because in Marxist-Leninist discourse ideology is made an object of analysis and evaluation, this object, too, is “cathected.” The two orders can be distinguished as values in ideology versus values of ideology. Chief among the latter are such items as: nauchnost'/ob'’ektivnost' (scientific/objective character); monolitnost'/tselnost'/stroinost' (monolithic/holistic/well-ordered character); partiinost'/klassovost' (partisan/class character); narodnost'/massovost' (popular/mass character); revoliutsionnost'/deistvennost' (revolutionary/activist character); zhiznennost'/sila/tvorcheskii kharakter (vitality/power/creative character). The terms separated by slash signs are alternative expressions of—approximately—the same prized attribute. Although not quite synonymous, these alternatives are often used interchangeably in Soviet political rhetoric. Just as commonly, they are used in combination, in nominal or adjectival form, in order to amplify the intended meaning. Below are passages excerpted from authoritative Soviet sources that invoke the cardinal values of Marxism-Leninism: nauchnost'/ob'ektivnost' Marxism-Leninism is a rigorously scientific worldview. In creating a new, scientific, communist worldview, the founders of Marxism critically reworked everything that had been created by the thought of humanity.11 ‌‌‌‌‌‌‌ The laws of dialectics are just as objective and precise as the laws of chemistry, physics, and the other sciences.12 ‌‌‌‌‌‌‌ The Marxist-Leninist worldview grows out of science and relies on it, inasmuch as science never departs from actual reality and practice. With the development of science, [this worldview] itself develops and becomes richer. By discovering the basic laws of social development, Marxism elevated the teaching about human history to the rank of genuine science, capable of explaining both the character of each social formation and the development of society from one formation to another.13 ‌‌‌‌‌‌monolitnost'/tselnost'/stroinost' Marxism-Leninism represents a holistic [tsel'nuiu] and well-ordered [stroinuiu] system of philosophical, economic, and socio-political notions.14 ‌‌‌‌‌‌‌ Marxism-Leninism is a monolithic, holistic teaching, all parts of which—scientific communism, political economy, and philosophy—are organically related to each other.15

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‌‌‌‌‌‌‌ The internal coherence, integrity, iron logic, consistency of Marxism, which even the opponents of Marx recognize, is a result of the application of one method, one worldview, in all of its component parts.16 ‌‌‌‌‌‌partiinost'/klassovost' Dialectical materialism includes [the principle of] partisanship; in the struggle with bourgeois ideology, it openly expresses and defends the essential interests of the working class and all progressive forces of contemporary society.17 Marx and Engels, Lenin and Stalin, never concealed the partisan character of Marxism-Leninism from anyone. From the very beginning, they created historical materialism as a science of utmost partisanship [gluboko partiinuiu nauku], which is the theoretical basis of communism, the theoretical weapon of the working class and its communist party.18 ‌‌‌‌‌‌narodnost'/massovost' Living, creative socialism is the product of the masses themselves [samykh narodnykh mass].19 ‌‌‌‌‌‌‌ The secret of Leninism’s eternal youth is that Lenin’s teaching, its principles, its ideals, are comprehensible and near to the masses of millions, that every generation of people finds in [this teaching] clear answers to the questions that concern it.20 ‌‌‌‌‌‌‌ the mobilization of the masses for the fulfillment of this or that practical For task it is not enough for ideas to correctly reflect social reality and express the essential interests of the toilers. It is necessary that these ideas are disseminated widely and received by the toilers, so that the masses convince themselves from their own experience of the correctness of these ideas.21 ‌‌‌‌‌‌revoliutsionnost'/deistvennost' The most important trait of socialist ideology is its revolutionary character [revoliutsionnost'].22 ‌‌‌‌‌‌‌ . . . Marxist-Leninist philosophy is distinguished by its orientation on the revolutionary-practical transformation of society. It explains the world in a scientific way, but it does not stop there: the whole point of the explanation is to make people understand that a world based on exploitation and oppression should be not just explained but transformed.23 ‌‌‌‌‌‌‌ Being a theoretical expression of the needs of the workers’ movement, Marxist philosophy plays the role of a mighty weapon for the practical transformation of the world. Only dialectical and historical materialism show the way toward mastering the laws of nature and society, toward a practical recreation of the world in the interests of the working people. This determines such distinguishing qualities of Marxist philosophy as proletarian activism [proletarskaia deistvennost'], revolutionary-critical attitude toward reality, inextinguishable,

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all-conquering revolutionary energy, inimical to any drift, fatalism, to any contemplative attitude [sozertsatel'nost'] and passivity.24 ‌‌‌‌‌‌sila/zhiznennost'/tvorcheskii kharakter Historical materialism is not a scheme, not a summary of abstract principles, which one should learn by rote; no, this is a perennially alive, creatively developing social theory and method of cognizing social life.25 ‌‌‌‌‌‌‌The power [sila] of dialectical materialism lies in its connection, in any given period, with the practical tasks of the revolutionary movement, with the building of socialism and communism. These tasks change with every turn of history. The developing practice poses ever new questions and demands that theory supply the answer. For this reason, in order to preserve its connection with the definite practical tasks of this or that period of social development, dialectical materialism itself must be able to forge ahead.26

This is the self-image of Marxism-Leninism, broken up into its principal aspects. The different “characters” come together to make the total Character of Soviet ideology. From the quoted excerpts, it should be evident that we are not dealing with rigorously defined categories. The different aspects of Marxism-Leninism’s self-presentation tend to shade into each other, so an author rhapsodizing the communist creed’s revoliutsionnost' could equate it with its tvorcheskii kharakter, while another could treat as synonymous its zhiznennost' and narodnost'. Such conflations were not necessarily the result of sloppy thinking. They happened because the valorized features of Marxism-Leninism’s self-image were explicitly posited as constituting Identity; each was supposed to entail another and be entailed by another in turn. It is not that one “character” ended where another began; rather, each was implicitly contained in all others. This identity-in-difference, or rather, identity-through-difference, is the distinguishing mark of the Hegelian Concept. The difference is internal to the subjectivity movement; it is produced by the subject, which unites with itself through this (apparent) otherness. Quite obviously, nauchnost' implies monoltnost', since the scientific character of Marxism-Leninism is expressed in its being a perfectly coherent system of cognitions. The character of monolitnost' concerns, in the first place, the foundational postulate of Marxism-Leninism: the indivisible identity of its two sides, Marxism and Leninism. The two represent a single whole inasmuch as they emerge from the same historical continuum: the awakening of the proletariat for its revolutionary struggle against capital. Partiinost' is a basic attribute of all knowledge, derived from the ontological premise that historical being unfolds through the struggle of classes. Every philosophy and theory bear the mark of klassovost', because it objectively represents the interests of a particular social formation. We get partiinost'

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when this intrinsic quality of all knowledge becomes a self-conscious stance, overt political allegiance. Every student of historical materialism in the Soviet Union was supposed to learn and be able to explain to an examiner that partiinost'/klassovost' does not exclude nauchnost'/ob'ektivnost', since it is in the interest of progressive social groups to cognize reality in its undistorted truth (this ceases to be the case when the group in question is superseded and becomes a reactionary historical force).27 Clearly, revoliutsionnost'/deistvennost' is entailed by the principle of partiinost'.  Just as partiinost' is “realized” klassovost', so is revoliutsionnost'/deistvennost' the true fulfillment of partiinost'.  It is partisanship that has ceased to be just an intellectual position and has turned into real political action. Cognition that “realizes” its relation to the class struggle, proceeds to make itself into a weapon of that struggle. This, as authors of Marxist-Leninist textbooks tirelessly repeated, is the great turning point in the history of philosophy that Marx brought about. Massovost'/narodnost' is a straightforward development of klassovost': while all previous ideologies have been of a dominant class, the ideology of the proletariat ceases to be such when the struggle of the last, truly revolutionary class brings about a classless society. All previous ideologies have “belonged” to elites, while Marxism-Leninism is the first truly popular form of social theory—made possible by the liberation of the toiling multitudes and the spread of enlightenment among them. At the same time, massovost'/narodnost' is a necessary precondition for ideology’s deistvennost'. Only a weapon taken up by the great multitude of the narod can be effective. The ultimate form of historical ideology knows itself not only as instrumentality of the class struggle, but also as reflection of social practice. To wit, it is a reflection reflected in itself. Consequently, it consciously maintains its vital link with the masses and their struggle. From there issues its zhiznennost' and sila. By continuously “learning” from the masses and “answering” the questions immanently posed by the historical process, Marxism-Leninist theory, it is said, renews itself while remaining true to itself. It is quite astonishing that in the great mass of pages written on Soviet ideology over the years so little attention has been paid to the special kind of ideological values I have just glossed. When they have been noticed at all, it has been in order to brush them aside as inessential to the matter at hand. For, after all, this is how the official creed presented itself and not what it really was. Yet self-presentation is of the essence of the subject before us. We cannot peel off Soviet ideology’s valorized image in order to examine what it really was, how it actually functioned. For what we would be examining then would be a hollow abstraction. Its “functioning” did not happen somewhere apart from its self-presentation but in it and through it; Soviet ideology

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existed by way of projecting its own valorized Character. The performance of various kinds of ideological work was the practical actualization of this or that aspect of ideology’s autonomous value. Through each performance, the value of ideology as such was reaffirmed, which is to say, re-valorized. And so, if we step back and take the entire process at a glance, we would have to say that its subject is ideology-cum-value. VALUE AS SUBJECT/PROCESS The principled distinction I am urging here, between values in ideology and those of ideology, should be familiar to readers of Marx. An analogous distinction was the starting point of Marx’s economic theory. According to him, objects of economic activity can be said to have value insofar as they (1) satisfy human needs or (2) embody socially necessary labor. Marx called the former “use value” and placed it outside the purview of political economy.28 The latter he termed “exchange value” and analyzed its development by combining historical interpretation and logical construction. The common substance that each commodity instantiated in a particular material form received its general instantiation in money, the “universal equivalent.”29 Itself a product of developing relations of exchange,30 money further catalyzes this development until a moment is reached when the common substance of value “enters as subject.”31 Historically, this is the birth of the capitalist mode of production. Logically, it is the moment when the form is no longer just the commonality of pre-existing particulars but the “unifying unity” (einigende Einheit) that engenders these particulars as moments of its self-realization. It is what Hegel had termed the “positing of presuppositions.”32 In pre-capitalist modes of production, money mediates the movement of exchange values, but it does not initiate this movement (since it is not the principium movens in the production of commodities). This is value-as-substance. When money is able to subordinate the movement of exchange values to itself, from their creation through human labor to their realization on the market, so that this movement serves the purpose of its own augmentation, then money is no longer money but capital.33 This is value-as-subject. A diligent—and critical—reader of Hegel’s Logic,34 Marx believed he had found the Concept as an actual, history-shaping force in the world of his day. His theorization of capital is a straightforward mapping of Hegel’s subjective logic onto the realities of bourgeois political economy. This is particularly evident in the voluminous preparatory manuscripts known as Grundrisse, where even Marx’s language echoes Hegel’s philosophical idiom:

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These presuppositions, which originally appeared as conditions of [capital’s] becoming—and hence could not spring from its action as capital—now appear as results of its own realization, reality, as posited by it—not as conditions of its arising, but as results of its presence. It no longer proceeds from presuppositions in order to become, but rather it is itself presupposed, and proceeds from itself to create the conditions of its maintenance and growth.35

Capital has the logical form of subjectivity, or self-determination, because it is a process in which value—through its general form as money—is able to exchange itself for the factors that make possible its expansion, most importantly living labor. Capital is the animated circle of its objectifications— workers, raw materials, machinery, buildings, finished products, provisions for storage, transportation, and sale, and, of course, money—which all “come together” in the production and realization of surplus value. What animates these objectifications is a single purpose, the “profit motive.” They are all forms of the same thing—value—and their alteration is the self-movement of that substance.36 But a substance capable of moving itself, of positing its otherness and recollecting itself from it, is not substance but subject.37 What Hegel had treated as the self-determination of subjectivity reappeared in Marx as the self-valorization of value. The logical form, however, is one and the same. To quote Kojeve’s gloss again: “The negating being [i.e., the subject] negates its identity to itself and becomes its opposite, but it continues to be the same being. And this, its unity within opposition to itself is its affirmation in spite of its negation or ‘dissolution,’ or better, ‘transformation.’” The negation of capital, whose content is “dead” labor, is its opposite: living labor. Yet capital exists as the concrete power over this other, the power to buy the work capacity of living human beings and deploy it as its own capacity to produce surplus value. In that it makes living labor a moment of its process, capital negates its own negation, remaining in unity with itself in its opposite. The transformation into the other (through the purchase of labor power) is a necessary moment of capital’s self-affirmation (the reproduction-expansion of value). The same logic can be expressed in terms of determination: value-become-subject is able to determine that by which it is determined; under capitalism, living labor is not simply productive activity but specifically determined as labor power—as activity that yields surplus value; its historically concrete mode of existence is being-for-capital. Against Adam Smith and “vulgar” economists like Jean-Baptiste Say, who saw capital as a mere sum of values, Marx asserted its dynamic character: value-as-subject was value-in-motion, value-in-process.38 An analogous argument can be made about the subject of the current inquiry. Soviet ideology did not consist of values, or ideas. It “consisted” of its own valorization; which in turn “consisted” in the practical assertion/demonstration of its

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attributes: nauchnost',  monolitnost',  narodnost', and so on. The word I just enclosed in quotation marks is inadequate because it implies a static composition. Valorization, however, is a movement; it is the dynamic of the state-run enterprise of ideologicheskaia rabota; it does not “consist” of elements, but rather runs through moments and produces effects. The totality of these effects was the show of Soviet ideology. In chapter 5, we saw that the self-presentation of Soviet ideology begins and ends with the staging of a historical world that lives ideologically, just as the world of the Middle Ages lived religiously. This new civilization manifested its original character in a plethora of historically novel phenomena: institutions, human relationships and ethics, intellectual achievements, material and spiritual creations. At a deeper level, however, its uniqueness consisted in the special way in which the phenomena proper to it came about. The features of this new world did not just crop up spontaneously from life’s material base but were prefigured and midwifed into being by a knowledge that was scientific, partisan, activist, and so on. In this sense, the (staged) coming-to-be of Soviet civilization was, at the same time, the show of ideology, the demonstration of its essential predicates and, ultimately, of its “power.” It goes without saying that the coming-to-be of the new civilization, with all its original features and phenomena, was not a one-time event, but a happening extended in time. It went through phases, each with its particular content, each giving rise to shapes of being and institutions “corresponding” to the given stage of historical development. And this is tantamount to saying that the show was staged over and over again, in perpetual reenactments. Its content changed according to what this or that particular historical juncture “demanded,” what specific practice needed to be initiated to satisfy the demand, and what phenomena materialized out of the said practice. The form of the show, however, remained the same. It reproduced the same movement in which the valorized predicates of Marxism-Leninism were exhibited and reaffirmed. The movement can be schematized as follows: • Each major policy initiative of the regime, whatever its pragmatic motivations, was presented as a solution to a task immanently posed by “material reality in its development.” The exercise of political power, thus, appeared as the work of historical necessity itself, which was merely facilitated by enlightened and activist human mediators. • At each turn of history, the Communist Party, in magisterial possession of the scientific method of Marxism-Leninism, anticipated objective tendencies that had not fully manifested themselves in the life of Soviet

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society.39 It formulated “essential slogans of the present,” in which the objective demands of reality were given accessible, popular expression. • The slogans of the Party were invariably met with enthusiastic acceptance by the working multitudes of the Soviet Union. Expressing the needs of material life’s development, the slogans could not but align with the interests of the people whose life that was.40 • Mobilized and organized into action by the Party, and having recognized their true interests, the masses engaged in “practice” that concretely transformed the world, bringing about those very forms of being that, just a while earlier, had been a mere possibility (albeit, an objectively necessary one).41 • Once the objective necessity had ceased being a possibility and had turned into living reality, the time came for the production of high theory. Through the “generalization of experience” (obobshchenie opyta) and its “scientific explanation” (nauchnoe obiasnenie), the actual practice of millions was turned into a law, or typical feature, of socialist/ communist society and, as such, became a new contribution to the science of historical materialism. This ritualized sequence of happenings deserves the name “show” because it followed an institutionalized script but, more importantly, because its purpose was to exhibit ideology’s valorized character in its various moments. The movement connecting the different performances, as they combined to produce a single effect, unfolded in the Soviet public sphere the dialectic of Marxism-Leninism’s canonical attributes: nauchnost',  monolitnost', partiinost',  narodnost',  revolitusionnost', zhiznennost'. The show was the acting out of these attributes, their actualization, and the self-actualization of ideology-cum-value. When the new phenomena produced by practice were generalized into a new postulate of historical materialism, this showed that Marxism-Leninism was a “creatively-evolving” theory. Because the theory had learned from practice, it was “living.” Because the slogans of the Party had inspired millions, it was manifestly “popular.” But it could only have been such because those slogans faithfully expressed the interests of the people, which is to say, because of their klassovost' and partiinost'. Because it had anticipated the development of material life and reflected objective tendencies, the theory was objective-scientific. In that the anticipation had become policy, and then mass action, Marxism-Leninism had showcased its deistvennost'/revoliutsi onnost'. And because it was the totality of all of these things, it ultimately showed itself to be a veritable “material force”:

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Thus, the idea of socialist industrialization of USSR, having taken possession of the minds of millions of people, became a material force, overcoming all difficulties and obstacles, foiling the enemy’s perfidious designs. The Stalinist idea of industrialization was victorious because it corresponded to the essential tasks [nasushchnym zadacham] of the country. The idea of collectivization was transformed into life because it corresponded to the tasks of building socialism in the countryside, to the fundamental interests of the entire working peasantry. This is how the great theory and ideas of Marxism-Leninism become a powerful force of historical development, gigantically accelerating our movement toward communism.42

Even from such a rough sketch of Soviet ideology’s movement, it should be evident that it is one and the same content that appears, first, as an objective possibility; then as the policy and slogan of the Party; then as the subjective interest and practice of the “people”; then as a qualitatively new reality (the realization of the objective possibility); and finally as the theoretical reflection of that new reality. These are but transformations of the same “matter,” which assumes sequential guises of difference. It is plain that the “urgent tasks of the present” were simply whatever the regime found expedient at a particular moment in time.43 However, this content was presented not as something singular, but as two different things that met and united: an objective demand, on one side, and the scientific-providential “grasp” of that demand by the Party leadership. What the content was is quite irrelevant. The content could be quite arbitrary, since the leadership could legislate at will when there was a “turning point” in history and what the new set of circumstances “demanded” or made “objectively possible.” What truly matters is the form, which is to say, the movement through which each such content passed. Whatever value-in-ideology was being affirmed in a given campaign, the show ultimately affirmed the value of ideology as such. This is the real subject of the process, what assumes guises of merely apparent otherness, while remaining in communion with itself throughout. SOCIALIST COMPETITION The linchpin of the new civilization, its defining phenomenon, was, of course, labor. Under socialism, work—no longer subject to exploitation for profit— was to take on a special quality: The establishment of socialist relations of production signifies a radical transformation in the character of labor. The absence of exploitation and the changed position of the working person in society lead to a revolution in people’s view of labor and instill a new attitude toward work. While the social order based on

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exploitation made labor repulsive for many generations of workers . . . , socialism turns labor into a matter of honor, valor, and heroism; it imparts a more creative character on labor.44

And since, according to Marx, labor was definitive of the human species,45 this fundamental change brought about by socialism could not but precipitate a host of other transformations and a series of other novel phenomena in the realms of psychology, ethics, and culture. The history of the Soviet Union was, thus, also the history of different forms in which the socialist character of labor manifested itself. Periodically, state media publicized a new kind of practice that had been born in the “very thick of the working class” (v samoi gushche rabochego klassa) and that was said to “correspond to” or “reflect” the current phase of socialist construction, which is to say, the current state of the productive forces. The most important among these serialized tokens of socialism were: the unpaid working days known as “Communist Saturdays” (kommunisticheskie subbotniki); industrial conferences (proizvodstvennye soveshchaniia), conventions (smotry), and contests (konkursy); shock brigades (udarnye brigady); socialist competition (sotsialisticheskoe sorevnovanie); counter-planning (vstrechnoe planirovanie); collective patronage (shefstvo); cost-accounting (khozraschet) and technical-financial planning (tekhpromfinplan) by working collectives; social “tug-boat” (obshchestvennyi buksir); “integrated” brigades (skvoznye brigady); the quality excellence movement (otlichnichestvo); the voluntary tutelage of inexperienced comrades by shock workers, following the example of miner Nikita Izotov (izotovstvo); the Stakhanov movement for higher productivity through technical innovation (stakhanovstvo); front-line brigades (frontovye brigady), during World War II; brigades of communist labor (brigady kommunisticheskogo truda), from the late 1950s.46 All of these were phenomena within the broader phenomenon of “labor under socialism,” moments, or stages, of its historical realization.47 When the labor history of the Soviet Union was codified in the early 1930s, socialist competition, in a peculiar synecdoche, came to be recognized as the principal form and treated as virtually synonymous with the Ur-phenomenon, “labor under socialism.”48 (As we shall see shortly, the reason for this was Lenin, who had sanctified the topic of socialist competition by devoting several hurried pages to it in 1917). All the other forms of socialist labor were interpreted as historically specific developments of sotsialisticheskoe sorevnovanie, sub-forms of the principal form, even if some of them involved no competition at all.49 As one Soviet writer rhapsodized, “Growing and developing like an evergreen tree, socialist competition puts out ever-new shoots.”50 The new character of labor and the consciousness corresponding to it were said to have begun manifesting themselves immediately after the revolution

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in the Communist subbotniki and vozkresniki: the weekend days on which the most conscious members of the newly liberated proletariat volunteered to work without pay. Then, “after the victory in the Civil War and the transition to peace-time industry, the material conditions of life demanded the elaboration of new forms of mass participation in socialist construction.”51 And so, the following years saw the promotion of initiatives like the first shock brigades and industrial conferences, at which proletarians volunteered opinions on how to best organize work in a particular shop or enterprise. Socialist competition proper, which is to say, the comradely contest between working collectives and individuals,52 began in earnest in early 1929.53 It is more than a happy coincidence that the movement got under way at the same time as the First Five-Year Plan.54 Nor is it a happy coincidence that it all began with the publication of Lenin’s article “How to Organize the Competition?,” originally penned in 1917.55 The campaign was one in a long line of efforts by the Soviet state to extract more labor from its working population,56 an imperative that became that much more pressing with the launch of the First Five-Year Plan and the incredibly ambitious program of industrialization. If the Soviet Union was to “catch up and overtake” the West in the short span of decade, as Stalin insisted it must,57 Soviet workers, most of them yesterday’s peasants, needed to work longer, harder, and better. Yet this politico-economic imperative was presented as an intrinsic feature of life under socialism, which had been providentially known by Lenin,58 and which only needed to manifest itself fully in the real world. And its manifestation was not to be a direct, spontaneous outpouring of new energies on the part of the liberated proletarians; rather, it was to come through the agency of Lenin’s word, as a “response” to and a “fulfillment” of what he had foreseen. The CPSU Plenum held in November 1928 had called on all party members “to mobilize all creative powers of the working class so as to maintain at all cost the tempo of industrialization . . . and fulfill at any cost the economic plan.”59 In December, a resolution of the Eight Congress of the Trade Unions urged the raising of labor productivity on all workers.60 In the same month, Pravda initiated an All-Union review (smotr) of industrial conferences, with reports from these events published regularly on its pages. On January 15, Rabochaia gazeta (Workers’ Gazette), another organ of the CPSU Central Committee, initiated a national “roll-call” (pereklichka) of enterprises aimed at lowering production costs. In the context of these ongoing mobilizational exertions, the idea to publish “How to Organize the Competition?” was discussed and approved at a meeting of CPSU’s Central Committee. The fifth anniversary of Lenin’s death, January 21, provided the ceremonial occasion. The publication set off a feverish activity along the entire chain of Party and Youth League (Komsomol) organizations, which were tasked with

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popularizing the article and making it the “concrete foundation” of their everyday activity. Central newspapers ran campaigns, urging workings collectives to engage in socialist competition.61 Collectives responded promptly; or, rather, the vanguard representatives of those collectives did. At the end of January, a meeting of the aktiv in Gorlovo mine #1 in the Donbass resolved to issue a public challenge: “Not afraid of our own shortcomings, we gladly accept the proposal of Rabochaia gazeta to organize a competition with a mine from another region, so that both mines can adopt positive models of work, eliminate shortfalls, and raise the productivity of labor to the required level. We challenge to a socialist competition the Irmino mine (Lugansk region).”62 One of the earliest of its kind, the public challenge was printed in Rabochaia gazeta on January 31, 1929. It is noteworthy that the miners’ letter was itself a response to the challenge issued by Rabochaia gazeta earlier that month; it was a symbolic performance on a stage prepared in advance for just such performances. Needless to say, the Irmino mine, whose rise to national fame lay in the near future, accepted the vyzov. The first contract for socialist competition between shock brigades was signed at the beginning of March, in the Leningrad factory “Red Vyborgian.” An honor board (doska pocheta) was put up to commemorate the initiative, with the inscription: “On February 15, at the RV factory in Leningrad, Lenin’s idea of socialist competition was turned into life (pretvorena v zhizn').”63 An open letter in Pravda followed, in which the Red Vyborgians called on their comrades across the country to give broader, national scope to socialist competition, “in accordance with the directives of the government and our party.”64 Several weeks later, on April 29, the Sixteenth Party Conference was ready to declare that “Lenin’s idea about the organization of competition on socialist principles is finding ever-greater practical embodiment.”65 The document did not neglect to specify that the new movement was a continuation of the “best tradition of the communist Saturdays.” By May, just four months since the campaign’s inception, socialist competition had been recognized as an integral phenomenon of the new social order. A special Central Committee resolution stated as much, while also establishing a dedicated fund of material incentives for those who engaged in shock work.66 In a foreword to Elena Mikulina’s The Competition of Masses, which appeared in mid-May, Stalin gave his blessing. Echoing Lenin’s article, his successor wrote of sorevnovanie as an essential attribute of socialism, contrasting it with konkurentsiia, the Ur-phenomenon of capitalism. As a Soviet writer later put it, “In this short foreword, comrade Stalin gave a masterful development of Lenin’s ideas about socialist competition.”67 The Sixteenth Party Congress, held in June–July 1929, prescribed as “the most important task” of party and trade union organizations to “elevate to the highest level the movement for socialist competition and shock work.”68 By

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this time, official figures show 2 million workers participating in the movement, half of them registered as members of shock brigades.69 A year later, 71.3 percent of the Soviet working class were said to be engaged in socialist competition, with some branches of industry reporting nearly 90 percent participation.70 This now had truly the appearance of a mass movement.71 The real point of interest here is not that socialist competition was organized “from above,” by CPSU; but that, from the beginning and at each step of the process, this was done with the explicit intent of demonstrating the “power” of Lenin’s word. “A component part of the Marxist-Leninist teaching about socialism are Lenin’s ideas about socialist competition. V. I. Lenin discovered in socialist competition the indomitable moving force of development of Soviet society, the method of building socialism on the basis of the utmost activity of the working masses. This became one of the outstanding discoveries of scientific communism.”72 It was not just a matter of demonstrating that socialist labor had triumphed in the land of the Soviets, but that this triumph was, at the same time, the triumph of Marxism-Leninism, a living proof of its nauchnost', zhiznennost', deistvennost', and so on. By 1935, when the Stakhanov movement emerged, there was of course no culture of socialist labor in the Soviet Union; what had been established, in its stead, was an institutional culture of “emergence.” By this I mean a stable pattern of performances and interactions that generated new forms of nominally socialist work, which appeared to be growing “from below,” from “the thick of the working masses.” The pattern in question was as follows. The general direction of all campaigns within the framework of socialist competition was given from the top of the party-state edifice in Moscow. This was done in the form of resolutions, “appeals,” or directives for expanding and re-energizing the movement. The addressees of such signals were party committees of all levels, as well as Komsomol and trade-union organizations (the latter were officially tasked with the organization of socialist competition by the May 1929, Central Committee resolution). The primary mission of all these bodies was to ensure the timely fulfillment of production plans. But this was not all. The economic mandate was folded within a political-organizational one: the Plan had to be fulfilled through fostering the movement of socialist competition.73 Work needed be done for the building of socialism, but it needed to be done as an expressly socialist form of work. All primary party organizations in industry, whose unconditional obligation was to implement CPSU mandates—whatever their literary-administrative genre (reshenie, postanovlenie, ukazanie, vozzvanie, obrashchenie, prizyv—presented regular reports of their activities to the supervening node in the territorial-industrial hierarchy74, and beginning in 1929, these reports needed to specify what had been accomplished “on the front of socialist competition.”75 All responsible actors down the chain of command, if they cared

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about maintaining, or enhancing, their professional and political credentials, were bound to take seriously what was expected of them; by interpreting the specific signal coming from above, they were impelled to form in their minds a picture of a desired state of affairs “on the front socialist competition,” and do their best to recreate this picture on the sector of the front entrusted to them. Some parts of the picture were clearer; they were given in terms of the specific meropriatiia that needed to be enacted, the obligations that needed to be taken, and sometimes even the percentage of workers that needed to be involved in a particular undertaking. Other aspects of what “developing socialist competition” entailed were left deliberately unspecified, opening ample space for displays of Bolshevik initsiativnost'. In the present context, that meant pioneering new kinds of practice within the campaign’s established framework. The Russian word for an initiative of this kind is pochin. A pochin, by definition, came “from below.” In the great majority of cases, pochiny (pl.) were conceived by Party or Komsomol activists and intended as tokens of their initsiativnost'; yet they were invariably presented as coming straight from the shop floor, as an expression of the creativity and zeal of the common working people. The workers chosen to spearhead an initiative of this kind were entered on honor boards, in celebratory reports, and newspaper columns as zachinateli (“initiators,” “pioneers”). Typically, pochiny were enacted “in response” (v otvet) to specific Party interventions, or “in honor” (v chest') of important dates and events—most notably, CPSU congresses—when mass labor enthusiasm predictably peaked.76 Initially, a pochin was publicized through administrative reports, the factory and local press. Then came the time for the initiative to be given a political appraisal (otsenka) from the central organs. Some pochiny garnered scant attention, usually because they were not significantly different from existing practices; others were deemed an inadequate reflection of the current historical moment and its “tasks.”77 Those who were endorsed entered the circuit of nationwide propaganda as model practices that should be emulated widely.78 In several outstanding instances, a pochin was recognized as constituting not just a new form of socialist competition, but as marking a new historical stage of the movement. What had begun as a token of Bolshevik initsiativnost', circulating internally within the channels of political-organizational work, was thus transformed into a public token of socialism. Initiatives that had been generated from below and anointed from above were transmitted back down along the chain of party, Komsomol, and trade union organizations as objects of mobilizational efforts within the framework of “mass-industrial work” (massovo-proizvodstvennaia rabota). To give one example in passing: in early 1935, workers from the Menzhinsky metalworks in Moscow came up with the idea of a “march” (pokhod) for superior production quality and—as had become customary by that time—issued a public

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call, through the press, to all workers in the country to follow their example. The initiative was met with approval in high places. The Leningrad party committee discussed the matter and issued an instruction: “The party organizations in all enterprises of the Leningrad region must base their practical work for higher productivity, for the quality of output, and plan fulfillment, on the Menzhinsky initiative.”79 When a pochin was recognized as a mini-phenomenon of socialism (a phenomenon within the broader phenomenon of socialist competition), vanguard cadres in industry were made responsible for ensuring it was widely adopted by the working masses. And when this came to pass, it demonstrated the vitality (zhiznennost') of the practice in question. The principal index of a new form’s vitality was massovost': the sheer number of people who adopted a pochin (or who could be declared to have done so).80 If a significant majority of workers engaged in a new form of labor, this showed that the form was “living.” This, in turn, showed that the “evergreen tree” of socialist competition was “putting out ever-new shoots”; evidently, it, too, possessed great zhiznennost'. And because the culture of labor was the prime phenomenon of the new social order, this showed that socialism was living and real. The show that was Soviet civilization was made up of myriad such “showings.” STAKHANOVISM The most famous pochin in the history of socialist labor in the Soviet Union originated in the Donbass, in the aforementioned “Central-Irmino” mine, soon to be renamed “Stalin,” in recognition of its momentous importance. The country’s main coal-mining region, Donbass, was also one of the sore spots of the early Stalinist economy. It was crucially important for the success of the industrialization offensive, yet it continually fell short of the regime’s high demands. At the end of the 1920s, when the First Five-Year Plan commenced, the level of mechanization in the mines of Eastern Ukraine was low, working and living conditions were poor, while the turnover of workers was despairingly high. The combination of these ills resulted in repeated failures to meet the plan’s output quotas. The Party issued several resolutions on the subject, in addition to numerous admonitions in the press. In search of a more direct impact, high-ranking envoys like Kliment Voroshilov made the trip from Moscow to Eastern Ukraine on crisis-solving expeditions. Activists and administrators churned through the regional aparat, each new deputy replacing a previous, insufficiently effective office holder, on a mission to counteract this or that “breach” (proryv) of the production front. One such activist, Konstantin Grigor'evich Petrov, was delegated to “Central-Irmino” in 1934, after having served as a Party secretary at the

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neighboring Donbass mine, Golubovka. He had entered the Party in 1929, as a twenty-year-old, and immediately made himself useful in the collectivization campaign in Ukraine.81 At “Central-Irmino” he assumed the newly instituted role of Party organizer (partorg), which came with the same old job mandate: ensure plan fulfillment through mobilizing the work force, Party and non-Party members alike. In the troubled Donbass region, the “Central-Irmino” mine was one of the most troubled. Its reputation as an industry laggard was the reason why, in 1929, it had been “challenged” by the comrades of Gorlovo to raise productivity and lower costs.82 That challenge had been accepted, yet the mine’s poor performance continued into the period of the Second Five-Year Plan. Thus, in early 1935, the year of Stakhanov’s record, daily output at CentralIrmino ranged from 900 to 950 tons of coal, while the plan-mandated figure was 1,200 tons. As one Soviet account informs us, The party organization was deeply troubled by the mine’s lag. The Party organizer, Konstantin Grigor'evich Petrov, frequently raised the issue of the vanguard role of communists in production. On his initiative, a reorganization of Party forces was undertaken. . . . All of this yielded good results. A competition for the best hewer and best mining sector began in August, 1935, on the initiative of the Party committee.83

At about the same time, Petrov sent some six hundred letters to miners of “Central-Irmino” with two questions: “1) What should be done in to improve work on your sector; and 2) What are your living conditions and what can we do to help?”84 The idea for organizing a record-breaking shift should be seen in the context of these organizational and mobilizational initiatives by the mine’s partorg. In Petrov’s own recollections, “We were sitting in the Party committee one day thinking how best to celebrate the International Youth Day. We felt like we weren’t doing enough, that we needed to do more, that we were falling behind. Behind the plan, behind the country. . . . We had to show what our lads are capable of, especially since the holiday was upon us.”85 They decided to try for a production record—by no means an original idea. In the world of socialist competition and shock work, production records were a daily occurrence86; they were celebrated in the press and romanticized in novels like Valentin Kataev’s hugely popular Time Forward (1932). What made the pochin at “Central-Irmino” stand out was that it was a world record, by a single individual, operating a modern, Soviet-made, piece of machinery. To perform the heroic feat, the Party committee of “Central-Irmino” chose Aleksei Stakhanov, a thirty-year-old of peasant stock, employed at the mine since 1927, recently trained as a pneumatic pick operator, and a shock

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worker to boot.87 Many years later, Petrov admitted, “off the record,” that it was Stakhanov’s heavy fists that recommended him most for the job; this lad would be able to defend himself if fellow miners, less appreciative of production records, were to come after him.88 Special arrangements were made for the night of August 30, 1935, on the “Nicanor-East” sector, where Stakhanov was employed. Lumber for propping, usually procured in the course of the workday, was deposited at the site in advance. One man, Stakhanov, was to have the entire coal face to himself. As no other pneumatic picks were to be deployed in the sector, his tool could have full and steady supply of compressed air. Two experienced workers were to assist Stakhanov during the shift, propping and shoveling away the coal, allowing him to concentrate all his energy on cutting (in customary practice, pick operators divided their time between cutting and propping). Also present underground that night were the editor of the mine’s newspaper, Mikhailov; the head of the “Nicanor-East” sector, Mashurov; and, of course, the partorg, Petrov (he provided light for Stakhanov with a battery-powered lamp).89 At 4 a.m. the next morning, the small group emerged from the mine shaft triumphant: Stakhanov had cut 102 tons of coal in a single shift. The amount was fourteen times the current norm for a pick operator. After a night spent underground, the vanguard cadre did not go to sleep. At 6 a.m., an extraordinary meeting of the mine’s Party committee was called to take stock of the extraordinary achievement. It adopted a resolution in which it rewarded the record-setter with a one-month wage, a new apartment, “appointed with all necessities and soft furniture,” a riding horse, a resort vacation, and reserved seats to “the cinema, spectacles, and all manner of events.”90 A series of organizational measures (meropriiatiia) were drawn up to popularize Stakhanov’s method and facilitate its adoption by fellow miners. The resolution even announced a special evening for September 10, with the participation of several distinguished shock workers, to be held in Stakhanov’s apartment—the one that had just been awarded to him! It is unknown whether the apartment was “appointed” in time for the occasion. The opening, ceremonial portion of the resolution read: “The plenum of the mine’s Party committee acknowledges the great merit of Comrade Stakhanov in setting the record, and considers that his achievement was only possible because he mastered the technique of his craft; he took full charge of technology and succeeded in extracting every benefit from it.”91 The statement confirms that Stakhanov’s feat was a token performance from beginning to end. We saw that it was staged in anticipation (na vstrechu) of International Youth Day, and thus belonged to an official Soviet work calendar in which practical exertions were regularly undertaken to “mark” (otmetit') politically symbolic occasions. More significantly, as the resolution shows, the Stakhanov pochin

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had been conceived as a living illustration of Stalin’s slogan, “Bolsheviks must master technology!”92 The Leader had made the pronouncement in early 1931, but in May 1935, in a speech to Red Army Academy graduates—his last major oration before Stakhanov’s record—Stalin supplemented the earlier slogan with a new one: “Cadres decide everything!”93 The First Five-Year plan, he declared, had equipped the Soviet economy with bountiful new technology; now qualified workers were needed who would make the most of it. On September 12, a Pravda editorial gave the keynote for how the Stakhanov movement should be interpreted: “The Stakhanovs are the new generation of Izotovites, who are working in a Bolshevik way to turn into life [pretvorit' v zhizn'] Comrade Stalin’s slogan, ‘Technology, wielded by people who have mastered it, can and must produce miracles.’”94 Socialist competition was the realization of Lenin’s thought about labor under socialism. Stakhanovism was the realization of Stalin’s slogan, itself a development of Lenin’s thought, in accord with the development of material life, in other words, a historically evolving reflection. In the autobiographical Story of My Life, published in 1938, Stakhanov recalled: Comrade Stalin’s call to master technology,95 his words that technology wielded by people decides everything, were reaching the consciousness of every worker. The people were learning, raising the productivity of labor, and striving to eliminate shortfalls. It was in May that Comrade Stalin spoke about the decisive importance of people who have mastered technology. May, June, July, August—in those months we often repeated the words of Comrade Stalin and fought for their fulfillment.96

It is impossible to know whether Stalin’s twin slogans were indeed what motivated Stakhanov in his endeavor, or whether such politically correct motivation was suggested to him after the fact. Of this much we could be certain: in May, June, July, and August of 1935, Stalin’s speech served as the “foundation of all practical party work” in the Soviet Union.97 The speech’s resonance must have been particularly strong in the Donbass, where the mechanization of coal mining had advanced significantly in recent years, yet without yielding the expected breakthroughs. It is not important to establish whether Stakhanov really was inspired by Stalin’s speech. It is enough to know that the speech, framed from the outset as heralding a new stage of socialist construction, set to work hundreds of Party functionaries like Konstantin Petrov, who were duty-bound to respond to it “with deeds,” which is to say, with displays of Bolshevik aktivnost' and initsiativnost'. This

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is just what Petrov was doing when, earlier in August, he initiated a competition for the best pick operator at “Central-Irmino.” And this is what he was doing when he organized Stakhanov’s historic pochin. The main chronicler of Stakhanovism, Pravda journalist Mikhail Gershberg, confirms: “The mine’s party organization succeeded in showing an exemplar [pokazat' obrazets] of close, unbreakable unity with the masses, an example of Bolshevik initiative [primer bol'shevistskoi initsiativy] in the realization of Party policy.”98 The Stakhanov movement was a phenomenon much greater than the person whose name it bore and that person’s possible motivations. What matters for us, in the present context, is that this phenomenon was made to appear as lawfully growing out of socialism, at one of its stages, through the mediation of Stalin’s thought and words. “The Stakhanov movement shows with great fullness and clarity the characteristic features and peculiarities of the Soviet order, which make it a new stage of human civilization.”99 Whether by sincere conviction or external suggestion, Aleksei Stakhanov played his part in this show. When he took the podium at the First All-Union Conference of Stakhanovite Workers in November, he was already able, and willing, to say that Stalin’s May speech “made me think hard about what needs to be done to increase the productivity of labor, to make full use of all technology.”100 Public performances like this, broadly advertised by Soviet state media, had a significance quite independent of the performers’ subjective beliefs and motivations. Born in the Donbass, the Stakhanov movement spread quickly through the Soviet coal-mining industry and beyond. “In support of the innovators’ movement, the Communist party immediately deployed its most powerful weapon: its press. Several thousand newspapers . . . carried the news about the record at ‘Central-Irmino’ over the entire country.”101 In a matter of weeks, the pochin found its way into other branches of the economy. This happened through the already well-rehearsed choreography of “emergence.” A report to the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions (VTsSPS) offers a glimpse of the motions involved: The Stakhanov movement has found an eager response among the workers of the shoe industry. Workers from the giant of the shoe industry, the “Skorokhod” factory in Leningrad, became the pioneers [zachinateli] of the movement. The history of the emergence [vozniknovenie] of the Stakhanov movement in the factory is as follows. On September 19, the trade-union committee (chaired by comrade V. I. Maksimova) called a small conference of Izotovite shock workers. . . . After analyzing Pravda materials about the extraordinary successes of Aleksei Stakhanov, the conference discussed concrete industrial-technical measures [meropriiatiia] needed for implementing Stakhanov’s work methods at “Skorokhod.”102

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In other words, Comrade Maksimova, hearkening to the Party injunction for “broadening the Stakhanov movement,” called a meeting of the factory trade-union committee (zavkom), and asked workers who had participated in the previous campaign of socialist competition (the Izotovite movement) to attend. In compliance with instructions from the center, the attendees set to “work through” (prorabatyvat') the Pravda coverage of the Stakhanov movement. (The first Pravda editorial on the subject, from September 11, was titled “An Important Initiative [pochin] in the Donbass.”)103 Then they “decided” on the only available course of action: to devise a record of their own as a way of showing the applicability of the Stakhanov methods to the footwear industry. As the largest enterprise of its kind in the country, “Skorokhod” was expected to give an example; for its trade-union leader, Comrade Maksimova, it meant that she needed to give an example of Bolshevik initsiativnost'. An appropriate person was chosen to be the zachinatel' of the new practice: Nikolai Smetanin, an experienced shoe laster, brigade leader, Izotovite activist, and member of the trade-union regional committee (oblkom). In this, too, an official script was followed; the Pravda editorial proclaiming that yesterday’s Izotovites are today’s Stakhanovites had appeared just a week earlier and was certainly among the materials that were “worked through” at the meeting. Be that as it may, on the following day Smetanin gave a token of proletarian initiative and zeal when he approached the shop engineer and “presented a series of technical-organizational demands requisite for raising the productivity of labor.”104 Expressed less formally, he requested certain arrangements to be made on the shop floor that would enable him to set a production record a la Stakhanov. It must be assumed that the nature of these practical arrangements, as well as comrade Smetanin’s bold solicitation, had been discussed and agreed upon during the meeting referenced in the report. The engineer, comrade Khodulinskaia, obliged without delay, and on the next day, September 21, 1935, “Smetanin achieved a never-before-seen productivity of labor: 1400 pairs of shoe lasts, given a norm of 655 pairs for one shift.”105 The first Stakhanovite of the Soviet footwear industry had been made, just three weeks after Stakhanov’s original feat. For his pochin, Smetanin was awarded the Order of Lenin in December of that year.106 Speaking at the First All-Union Conference of Stakhanovite Workers, Smetanin, like Stakhanov, echoed Stalin’s slogan: the high productivity of labor he had attained was only possible when one “fully masters the technique of one’s craft.”107 The same mechanism by which the Stakhanov example was replicated across different branches of industry was responsible for attaining the scale befitting of a “mass phenomenon.” Already in early September, Pravda began insisting on the need to pass “from a competition of individuals to mass competition.”108 In October and early November, rallies (slety) of shock workers were held across the country, headed up by the first crop of Stakhanovites.

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This set the stage for the All-Union Conference, held with much fanfare in mid-November, for which three thousand delegates gathered in the Kremlin. Official statistics from that month show Stakhanovites already constituting between 6 and 8 percent of the workforce in several major industries. Some enterprises reported numbers in excess of 25 percent.109 Soviet officials used material and symbolic resources at their disposal— wages and honoraria, apartments, horses, vacation passes, theater seats, access to special cafeterias and consumer goods, professional promotions, medals, honorary titles, honor boards and honor rolls—to co-opt workers for the campaign.110 A system of progressive piece-rate pay—once the ruble had stabilized and rationing lifted—beckoned candidate shock-workers with a drastically higher standard of living.111 As Lewis Siegelbaum has shown, officials also resorted to various “creative” strategies in determining who should count as a Stakhanovite, which inflated the number of campaign participants to the desired level.112 A picture of astonishing early growth was the result. Consider, for example, how the numbers of Stakhanovites in Leningrad’s textile industry surged from the beginning of October through early November (in five-day intervals): 37—63—353—958—1,278—3,487—4,290.113 After quoting these remarkable figures, Liudmila Rogachevskaia concludes: “The rapid increase in the number of A. G. Stakhanov’s followers testifies to the vitality [zhiznennost'] of the new movement.”114 It needs emphasizing that this is not simply a post-festum interpretation of the facts. It was very much the framework within which the facts were being produced in the autumn of 1935. All cadres responsible for the organization of the movement were quite aware that, in delivering high numbers of Stakhanovites, they were delivering indices of massovost', which itself was the prime index of zhiznennost'. And since Stalin’s slogan had inspired the movement, the latter’s zhiznennost' was a token of the fact that Leninist ideas were living and acting as a “true material force.” Only a month after Stakhanov’s record, a Pravda editorial gushed: “These are all monumental facts! They herald the beginning of a new phase in the remarkable life of our country. The idea of the Leader is becoming a material force because it has been taken up by the masses.”115 The Plenum of CPSU’s Central Committee in late December 1935 decreed an increase in production norms, citing the hundreds of records set over the past three months as proof that exceptional productivity of labor had become nothing exceptional in the land of the Soviets. The Plenum’s resolution also decreed massification: “In order to spread the Stakhanov movement over our entire country, to not treat the mass movement as a short-lived campaign, to help Stakhanovites in overcoming the obstacles in their way, all party and trade-union organizations must be engaged in developing the Stakhanov movement and steering the efforts of Stakhanovites in an organized direction

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[v organizovannoe ruslo].”116 Naturally, the Plenum was declared “historic” and followed by the customary wave of meetings of regional, city, and factory committees, adopting resolutions on how best to implement the Central Committee resolution.117 The goal for the new year was to pass “from the records of individuals—to Stakhanovite shops and enterprises, from Stakhanovite days—to permanent Stakhanov-like work.”118 And indeed, 1936 witnessed a range of such initiatives, invariably spearheaded by Party and Komsomol functionaries in industry: formation of Stakhanovite brigades, including the so-called “integrated” (skvoznye) ones; the movement of the “two-hundred-percenters” (dvukhsotniki, workers who consistently overfulfilled norms); entire collectives assuming obligations—usually through the press—to work with Stakhanov-like ardor and challenging other collectives to do the same; Stakhanovite five-day periods (piatidnevka), which quickly grew to ten-day periods (dekada) and then months.119 January 11 entered the official calendar as a Day of the Stakhanovite, while 1936 was declared a Stakhanovite year. By August, some industries reported a quadruple increase in the number of workers-innovators since November 1935.120 By the end of the second Five-Year Plan, in 1937, official statistics show nearly 3 million Stakhanovites in the country, a quarter of the entire Soviet working class.121 THE APPEARANCE OF APPEARANCE The production of Stakhanovism was, in the first place, the production of Stakhanovites, in numbers sufficient to fit the notion of a “mass phenomenon.” This, of course, presupposed real work, in mines, shoe factories, and kolkhoz fields. Real though it was, such work was framed in advance by an image of what Stakhanovite labor should look like, whether or not it took place in the context of officially designated Stakhanovite shifts or periods. In performing work, Soviet toilers in factories and fields were also “giving an example” of Stakhanovite work. That is to say, their practice was, at the same time, a token of socialist labor practice. Performances of labor were complemented by public performances of subjectivity. Appearing at congresses, rallies, parades, production conferences, or factory committee meetings, Stakhanovites, for the most part, spoke and acted as a Stakhanovite was expected to. Their speeches usually featured a narration of “How I work” (Kak ia rabotaiu) and a condensed biography that culminated in the exhilarant present of socialist labor.122 As we saw with Stakhanov and Smetanin, the speeches sometimes explicitly tied a shock worker’s biography to important Party decisions and slogans. When the workers themselves neglected to make the connection, it was made soon

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enough in the administrative reports and press materials through which these exhibits of subjectivity were publicized. The production of token labor and token subjectivity went hand in hand with the production of literature about Stakhanovism—literature in which those tokens were both documented and interpreted as tokens. In the four years between 1936 and 1940, an astounding 4,643 books and brochures were published on the subject, with a cumulative print run of 49 million copies.123 A specialized journal, Stakhanovets (Stakhanovite), began appearing in January 1936. The flood of publications was befitting of a mass phenomenon so integral to the new civilization. It goes without saying that the literature in question, issued under the vigilant eye of state censorship, reproduced accepted ways of speaking about the phenomenon. The sections devoted to the general character of Stakhanovism and its connection with the broader movement of socialist competition were modeled on previously published accounts that already bore the stamp of official approval. The Marxist-Leninist theoretical interpretation of Stakhanovism that solidified in a relatively short time began from a contrast of the two historical world orders, capitalism and socialism, just as Lenin had done at the beginning of “How to Organize the Competition?” and Stalin had repeated in the preface to Mikulina’s book. Each phase of historical being (i.e., each mode of production) obeyed the general laws of historical development, while also exhibiting laws (zakonomernosti) peculiar only to itself. It is these latter that made it a distinct socio-economic order. The laws, for their part, manifested themselves in worldly phenomena, and through those they became an object of scientific cognition. Sorevnovanie was a most essential manifestation of socialism, just as konkurentsiia was of capitalism.124 As the mode of production evolved, its Ur-phenomenon underwent its own internal evolution, passing through distinct micro-forms, each reflective of a given historical moment and its socio-economic content. Stakhanovism was just such a form, the “highest stage of socialist competition,” which was said to reflect a new level attained by the productive forces in the Soviet Union. The First Five-Year plan had successfully modernized the country’s industry; the standard of living and cultural level of Soviet workers—those living forces of production—had risen. This qualitatively new state of affairs posed an “objective demand”: “The new forces of production created in the country as a result of industrialization and the Party’s caring attitude toward cadres demanded a higher level of production relations. The Stakhanov movement was born as a way to solve this urgent need [nazrevshei potrebnosti].”125 In his speech of May 1935, Stalin had anticipated the categorical demand coming from socialism’s evolving base. His slogan about cadres had galvanized a mass popular movement,126 and it had done so precisely because it had been a true expression of material life’s embryonic, yet imperative, tendency.

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“The movement of innovators was historically ripe [istoricheski nazrevshim], and for this reason it was inevitable and inexorable [neizbezhno i nepreodlimo]”;127 “Only a movement that was fully ripe could spread so rapidly and acquire such transformative power.”128 As we saw previously, the historically novel character of the Soviet civilization was due not only to the peculiar socio-economic laws operative in it, but equally to the manner in which these laws manifested themselves. They did not act blindly but were known in advance and facilitated in asserting themselves by the policies of the CPSU. This applies fully to socialist competition. In it were reflected the new relations of production characteristic of socialism; yet this reflection was made possible through the mediation of ideas and governmental action: Socialist competition acts as an economic law that is known and consciously utilized through the policy of the Communist Party.129 ‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌The thousands of Stakhanovites, innovators in production, who gave exemplars [davshikh obraztsy] of high socialist productivity of labor, could not themselves assess the full significance of their feat, could not uncover its essence, its lawful nature [zakonomernost']. This was done by the Bolshevik Party in the person of its leader. The genius of Stalin, supported by Marxist-Leninist theory, by the dialectical method, revealed with utmost penetration the essence of the Stakhanov movement, its role in the development of the socialist [mode of] production, in the transition from socialism to communism.130 ‌‌‌‌‌‌‌ The instructions of the great Lenin about [socialist] competition, developed and enriched by Comrade Stalin, represent a mighty force, which mobilizes and organizes our people for feats of labor. Comrade Stalin, on the basis of the practice of socialist construction, discovers new laws [zakonomernosti] of socialism, uncovers their sources, and on every stage of development defines the conditions for the most optimal utilization of those laws.131

Stakhnovism, then, was a reflection of a historical zakonomernost', within the greater movement of socialist competition, itself a reflection of a most essential law of the new social order.132 As the passages above testify, no secret was ever made of the fact that the Party’s mighty hand was behind the Stakhanov movement. Quite the opposite is true: this fact was insistently foregrounded. Titles such as “The Party Organization—the Soul and Organizer of the Stakhanov Movement” appeared regularly on the pages of Pravda and Za industrializatsiiu (For Industrialization).133 Such being the case, the typical Western view of Stakhanovism as an artificial creation—whose most engaging presentation is Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble (1977)—is not so much false as facile. Its critical sting misses the mark, as the standard of authenticity it implies is not

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germane to Soviet culture. True, Stakhanovite feats of labor were commonly arranged by Party activists, but from a Bolshevik point of view, there was nothing “wrong” about this. It certainly did not render the movement any less genuine. On the contrary, it is what made it a properly socialist movement. Its “artificiality” was the original mark of its phenomenality. For the phenomena of socialist labor were not supposed to spring into life spontaneously. Like everything else in the workers’ movement—according to Leninism—they could only emerge through the mediation of objective-scientific knowledge, and since this knowledge rested with the enlightened vanguard, the socialist character of labor could only materialize through the Party’s propagandistic and organizational work. As one Soviet author emphasized, “The most important principle [zakonomernost'] of socialist competition is that it can develop successfully only on the condition of daily leadership and proper direction by the Communist Party.”134 Let us pause for a moment to appreciate what this statement tells us. Socialist competition manifests a fundamental law of the Soviet life-world. But this manifestation is itself subject to a law: a zakonomernost' of zakonomernost', a principle of how essential principles become phenomena of life. Even the mass scale of the phenomenon was understood as an artifact of politically- and ideologically-directed practice: “Guided by V. I. Lenin’s instructions, the Communist party practically organized the mass competition, gave it popular character [vsenarodnyi kharakter] in accordance with the scope, depth, and novelty of the transformations undertaken by the socialist community; it constantly perfected, and continues to perfect, the content [of socialist competition], its methods and functions.”135 In other words, knowing in advance the “demand” of being, the Party made sure to give the nascent phenomenon the aspect of massovost' and narodnost' that would render it a proper expression of that being. Socialist competition and Stakhanovism were produced as reflections, not just interpreted and proclaimed as such. *** Soviet ideology was not a system of meanings but a regime of practical doings (including the production of texts) in which meanings become objectified and valorized as “progressive ideas.” They were not merely spoken of as “scientific,” “popular,” “revolutionary,” and “living” but shown to be such in a movement of interconnected performances-tokens that spanned the full breadth of the Soviet public sphere. These were the performances of millions of people, tied in each case to official duties or unofficial efforts to improve one’s standing in life. Quite a few among those people must have been impelled by a desire to convince themselves of the living power of Marxist-Leninist ideas and the living reality of socialism in Russia. Thus,

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in speaking of their actions as “exhibits” and “tokens,” I render no judgment on their authenticity. They were tokens not because they were proffered in bad faith but because they were delivered in response to definite expectations formulated in explicit, institutionally operative categories such as initsiativnost',  otvetstvennost',  organizovannost', and so on. We cannot—and do not need to—know what motivated an actor to produce a token of an officially sanctioned value. It suffices to know that there were absolutely compelling political constraints and practical benefits for Party and Komsomol functionaries to demonstrate initsiativnost'136; just as there were compelling material and symbolic rewards for workers to engage in exhibits of “socialist attitude toward labor” and the kind of subjectivity that this presupposed.137 The effects produced by the actions of agents—from Party leaders to common workers—were independent of what those agents invested in their actions, emotionally and intellectually. Regardless of individual motivations, a movement like Stakhanovism presented an “objective appearance” of massovost', which could then be interpreted as a token of narodnost', zhiznennost', deistvennost', and revoliutsionnost'. By the same token, the ideas that had, purportedly, incited the movement appeared as popular, revolutionary, objective-scientific; in short, as what progressive ideas were supposed to be in the era of socialism. In its fullest scope, Soviet ideology was the makingvisible of how zakonomernosti, mediated by ideas, constituted reality; it was the produced appearance of phenomena, the appearance of appearance. The performances and effects that rendered the appearance of appearance cannot be measured with some external standard of verity. As I argued previously, it makes very little sense to ask whether Marxist-Leninist ideas were truly scientific. In order to answer such a question, we would need to abstract them from the context in which they existed and treat them as mere claims (which could then be examined in the light of verifiable facts and proven false). In the context of Soviet ideology, however—and this has been my main point all along—ideas did not exist as claims, but as objectified values in an autonomous, institutionally circumscribed movement. To be sure, it is epistemologically “false” that Stalin’s pronouncements on the Stakhanov movement were an expression of an objective state of affairs on the level of production relations; yet making a point about it is banal. Refuting this assertion gives scant intellectual satisfaction since what is being refuted was never simply an assertion. The existence of objective conditions for the emergence of the Stakhanov movement is not proven by looking at the facts of the case, such as data on technological modernization in Soviet industry, or on workers’ standard of living and levels of education. Needless to say, Party economists and historians never failed to provide such statistics in their accounts of Stakhanovism. Yet, ultimately, what “proved” the objectivity of material life’s demand was

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the existence of the movement itself. The mass phenomenon of Stakhanovism demonstrated that “all the necessary conditions [had been] in place” for it. And since those conditions had been present, this demonstrated that the ideas that had registered them and catalyzed the Stakhanov movement had been scientific—which they could only be by adhering to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism (monolitnost'). The show is just this circle of “demonstrations,” practical and discursive, each of which points to another “demonstration,” and not to the world of empirically verifiable facts. To assert, as I have just done, that the process of ideology-cum-value was autonomous implies that it cannot be understood in relation to some true state of affairs that is there “behind” the show. In the case of Stakhanovism and socialist competition, it is certainly tempting to regard the state-choreographed pageantry as masking the true intentions of the regime: to extract surplus labor by raising production norms; to secure a social base for itself by creating a privileged caste of workers (and detonating class solidarity in the process); to discipline an under-skilled, culturally backward, and politically illiterate workforce.138 The motivations of rulers are notoriously difficult to ascertain, but in the present case this is not even the main problem. Even if one could prove that those practical considerations were what prompted decision-makers in the Kremlin to initiate the campaigns of socialist competition and Stakhanovism, this would in no way explain why the show took on the form that it did. Nor could we forget that this form was reproduced over the many decades that the movement for socialist competition perdured, right until the very end of the Soviet Union. How much of this extended happening is actually explained with what the Politburo intended in the late 1920s? As I noted earlier, the very same motions were repeated in other campaigns, in which other phenomena of Soviet socialism emerged—or, rather, were “emerged”—keyed by other “progressive ideas,” and corresponding to other “imminent tasks.” It would be a fool’s errand to search, in each such case, for a Machiavellian pragmatic agenda for which the phenomenon could be said to be a disguise. What exactly was concealed behind the show of “socialist morality,” “socialist pedagogy,” or socialist realism? It is easy to point out that “socialist law”—supremely embodied in the Constitution of 1936—was feted at a time of rank abuses of legality by the Stalinist regime; yet the former cannot be understood as just a reflex of the latter. Similarly, the phenomenon of the “socialist city” coexisted through the 1930s with widespread urban poverty, overcrowded and unsanitary dwellings, thousands of daily hardships, and just as many remnants of pre-modern life. Yet it would be incredibly reductive to maintain that the discourses, projects, and material incarnations of the “socialist city” were only a façade for the inglorious aspects of Soviet urban life. All those nominally socialist phenomena were moments in the

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greater “production” of Soviet civilization, which cannot be interpreted as a ploy for attaining a specific practical objective. Soviet ideology does not hide anything; it shows. As we saw in this and the preceding chapters, the show shows not only that socialist phenomena are emerging in the Soviet Union, but that they are emerging in a regime of phenomenality proper to socialism, which is to say, through the agency of ideology. This precisely is the “triumph of Marxism-Leninism.” Soviet ideology’s “operations” are nothing but the continually reenacted exhibits of what ideology is supposed to be when, in the climax of history, it returns to itself and “realizes” its relation to being. In this truest, highest form, ideology presents itself as providential, scientific, monolithic, partisan, popular, and—as the upshot of all these qualities—ontologically transformative. The unity with being, which was implicit on the second stage of the dialectic, has now become explicit. Or rather, the third form of the dialectic is but the process of this explication, of bringing out into the open and celebrating the living power of ideology to act as a plenipotentiary of material life. There is nothing “behind” the process, of which it could be said to be an expression, effect, or dissimulation; just as there is nothing behind the self-determining and self-propelled movement of value Marx calls Capital: “never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.”139 Before us is a non-relational—because selfrelated—reality. All pertinent relations are internal to it; they are the relations between the different moments of the concept of (socialist) ideology, posited by the concept’s own movement. Essence gives rise to appearance and is reflected in it. Yet essence does not give rise to appearance as appearance, which is to say, as its intended other. While it is reflected in appearance, essence does not produce appearance for the sake of reflecting itself in it. When such becomes the case, then we are dealing not with essence but with what Hegel calls concept: a one-dimensional process, in which the distinction between determiner and determined, essence and appearance, has vanished, or is purely nominal. The “essential tendency of [the current stage of] socialism” is only nominally different from the “leading ideas of our time.” These two sides are posited as different only so that their identity can be asserted; only in order to show that the latter, indeed, reflects the former. The posited, artificial difference is but a means for producing (the effect of) reflection. Soviet ideology was this production in which two things were shown in simultaneity: the living reality of socialism, reflected in the fact that historically new laws of socio-economic being were becoming manifest in qualitatively new phenomena; and the living power of Marxist-Leninist ideas, reflected in the fact that the laws defining the new civilization only became phenomena of life when they were grasped beforehand in “progressive ideas,” made the basis of governmental

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policies, popularized as “essential slogans,” and taken up by the masses of people as their “fighting banners.” NOTES 1. See, for example, Van Dijk, Ideology, 1–3. For a short and lucid discussion of the redemption of ideology in political science, see Freeden, “Ideology.” 2. Yvon Pesqueux, “Ideology and Organization,” in Developing Philosophy of Management—Crossing Frontiers (Oxford: Hal Open Science, 2002), 2. https://hal. science/hal-00480986 3. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 356. 4. In Teun van Dijk’s definition, “ideologies allow people, as group members, to organize the multitude of social beliefs about what is the case, good or bad, right or wrong, for them, and to act accordingly” (8; emphasis in the original). 5. Stanley Feldman, “Values, Ideology, and the Structure of Political Attitudes,” in Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology, ed. D. O. Sears, L. Huddy, & R. Jervis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 44. 6. Milton Rokeach, Beliefs, Attitudes, and Values: A Theory of Organization and Change (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1968), 124. For a useful review of the literature pertaining to values and value systems in the field of social psychology see M. J. Rohan, “A Rose by Any Name: The Values Construct,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 4, no. 3 (2000): 255–77. 7. Rokeach, Beliefs, 124. 8. Daniel Bell, “Ideology and Soviet Politics,” Slavic Review 24, no. 4 (1965), 595. 9. A prominent example is the universalist understanding of values (“institutionalized normative patterns”) in Parsons’s sociology. See Talcott Parsons, “An Outline of the Social System,” in Classical Sociological Theory, ed. Craig J. Calhoun et al. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 421–40. Rokeach operates in a similarly abstract vein, defining value as “an enduring belief that a specific mode of conduct or an end-state of existence is personally or socially preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or end-state of existence” (The Nature of Human Values [New York: The Free Press, 1973], 5). 10. Geuss, 5. 11. Makarov, 8. 12. V. P. Chertkov, “Dialekticheskii materialism—mirovozzrenie marksistskoleninskoi partii,” in O dialekticheskom materializme: Sbornik statei (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1953), 19. 13. Kuusinen et al., 6. 14. Makarov, 3. 15. М. А. Leonov, “Dialekticheskii i istoricheskii materializm—teoreticheskii fundament kommunizma,” in O dialekticheskom materializme: Sbornik statei (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1953), 420. 16. Konstantinov et al., Uchebnik, 9. 17. Makarov, 24.

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18. Konstantinov et al., Istoricheskii matirializm, 53. 19. V. I. Lenin, “Zasedanie VTsIK 4 (17) noiabria 1917 g.,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 35 (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1958), 53. 20. Iu. V. Andropov, Leninizm—neischerpaemyi istochnik revoliutsionnoi energii i tvorchestva mass: Doklad na torzhestvennom zasedanii v Moskve posviashchennom 112-i godovshchine so dnia rozhdeniia V. I. Lenina, 22-go aprelia 1982 goda (Moscow: Politizdat, 1982), https:​//​document​.wikireading​.ru​/h4CTIeGKwD. 21. Konstantinov et al., Uchebnik, 576. 22. Konstantinov et al., Istoricheskii materializm, 636. 23. Konstantinov et al., Uchebnik, 55. 24. Leonov, 431–32. 25. Konstantinov et al., Istoricheskii materializm, 6. 26. Makarov, 29. 27. Kuusinen et al., 94. 28. Marx, Capital 1:125–37. 29. Marx, Capital 1:162. 30. “As they develop, the interrelations of commodities crystallize into distinct aspects of the universal equivalent, and thus the exchange process becomes at the same time the process of formation of money” (Marx, Critique of Political Economy, 51). 31. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), translated by Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin, 1973), 236–37. 32. See pp. 153–54 in the present study. 33. “Money . . . , as capital, has lost its rigidity, and from a tangible thing has become a process” (Marx, Grundrisse, 263). The historical-logical transformation of money into capital is discussed in Marx, Capital 1:247–57. 34. For the best account of how Hegel’s Logic informs Marx’s analysis of capital, see Zelený. 35. Marx, Grundrisse, 460 (emphasis in the original). 36. “The different modes in which the values existed were a pure semblance; value itself formed the constantly self-identical essence within their disappearance. Regarded as a value, the product has in this respect not become product, but rather remained identical, unchanged value, which merely exists in a different mode, which is, however, irrelevant to it and which can be exchanged for money.” (Marx, Grundrisse, 312–13; emphasis in the original) 37. “Further, the living Substance is being which is in truth Subject, or, what is the same, is in truth actual only in so far as it is the movement of positing itself, or is the mediation of its self-othering with itself. . . . It is the process of its own becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal, having its end also as its beginning; and only by being worked out to its end, is actual” (Hegel, Phenomenology, 18; emphasis in the original). 38. “Capital is not a simple relation, but a process in whose various moments it is always capital” (Marx, Grundrisse, 258). 39. “The great leaders of the proletariat and masters of Marxist-Leninist science, Lenin and Stalin, possess the deepest understanding of the new that emerges from life;

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they are able to separate the new that has barely begun to come out from under the layers of the old; they have the ability to organize the working class for a struggle to make the new into a dominant force. . . . The new initially presents only a possibility of development. But this possibility cannot become actual all by itself. The experience of history shows that the development of society, which puts this or that task on the agenda, requires the activity of people for its solution” (М. Rozental', Marksistskii dialekticheskii metod [Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1952], 156, 160). See also Kuusinen et al., 361. 40. “It is clear that the plans advanced by state power from above, in fulfillment of the people’s own aspirations, find full support among the masses. This support accounts for the decisive power of governmental plans, their reality and vitality [zhiznennost']” (Rozental', 230); “Insofar as the ideas, appeals, and tasks advanced by the party correctly express the urgent needs of social development, they become the property of the broad masses of the people and exert powerful influence on the development of society” (Makarov, 576). 41. “The working class perceived the Party’s course for socialist industrialization as a policy corresponding to its vital interests [otvechaiushchuiu ego zhiznennym interesam]. Responding to the call of the Party, the working class advances a new initiative in [the movement of] socialist competition” (S. Gershberg, Rukovodstvo kommunisticheskoi partii dvizheniem novatorov promyshlennosti, 1935–1941 [Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1956], 21). 42. Konstantinov et al., Istoricheskii materializm, 654. 43. Early on, Trotsky charged that “The theory of each successive turn has been created after the fact, and with small regard for what they were teaching yesterday” (Revolution Betrayed, 86). 44. K. V. Ostrovitianov et al., eds, Politicheskaia ekonomiia. Uchebnik (Moscow: Gos. izd. polit. lit-ry, 1954), 427; emphasis in the original. 45. Marx, Capital, 1:283–84. 46. For a canonized list of these forms, see R. Ia. Khabibulina, Leningradskie kommunisty—organizatory stakhanovskogo dvizheniia (1935–1937 gg) (Leningrad: Izd-vo Leningradskogo univ-ta, 1961), 4. 47. On the historical development of different forms of socialist competition, see V. G. Smol'kov, Sotsialisticheskoe sorevnovanie v usloviiakh razvitogo sotsializma (Moscow: Mysl', 1974), 32–48. 48. See the characterization of socialist competition given by the Central Committee of CPSU in 1971 in Kommunisticheskaia partiia Sovetskogo Soiuza v rezoliutsiiakh, resheniiakh s'’ezdov, konferentsii i plenumov TsK, vol. 10 (Moscow: Politizdat, 1983), 488–89. 49. One Soviet labor historian writes: “The forms of socialist competition correspond to this or that level of the development of the social production; they depend on the material-technical basis of the national economy. At the same time, every new form reflects the cultural-technical level of the producer of material wealth, the working class above all, the level of its consciousness and organization” (Khabibulina, 4). Another writer explains: “The variety of forms in which the creative initiative of the masses is expressed reflects the peculiarities of the historical stages through which

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the Soviet people passes in its struggle for the building of communism; it reflects the peculiarities of those economic tasks that the Party has set, and continues to set, before the working people” (I. I. Changli, Sotsialisticheskoe sorevnovanie—dvizhushchaia sila razvitiia sovetskogo obshchestva [Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1951], 18). 50. I. I. Changli, Dvizhushchaia sila, 3. 51. I. I. Changli, Sotsialisticheskoe sorevnovanie i novye formy kommunisticheskogo truda (Moscow: Izd-vo sotsial'no-ekonomicheskoi lit-ry, 1959), 49; emphasis added. 52. Although sorevnovanie does translate as “competition,” or “contest,” some English-language sources have opted to render the term as “emulation,” thus highlighting the principled difference between the socialist and capitalist culture of labor. 53. Some of the early Soviet chroniclers of the movement had noted, innocently, that socialist competition did not exist prior to 1929. This heretical notion was soon censored in favor of the view that the principle of socialist competition had been active from the very birth of the new social order. For explicit statements to this effect, see: R. P. Dadykin, Nachalo massovogo sotsialisticheskogo sorevnovaniia v promyshlennosti SSSR (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1954) 219; Gershberg, 14; Smol'kov, 33; Changli, Novye formy, 44. 54. The First Five-Year Plan commenced officially on October 1, 1928. 55. V. I. Lenin, “Kak organizovat' sorevnovanie?” Pravda, January 20, 1929, 1. 56. Lewis Siegelbaum, “Soviet Norm Determination in Theory and Practice,” Slavic Review 36, no. 1 (1984), 48–67. See also the resolutions of the April, 1926, and February, 1927, plenums of Central Committee of CPSU in VKP(b) v rezoliutsiiakh, resheniiakh s'’ezdov, konferentsii i plenumov TsK, Part II (Moscow: OGIZ, 1940), 100, 168; as well as Stalin’s report to the Sixteenth Party Congress in Voprosy leninizma, 402. 57. Voprosy leninizma, 368. 58. “The genius of V. I. Lenin foresaw that such a radical transformation in the relations of production ought to lead, inevitably, to a vigorous development of the people’s creative powers, and that on this new basis [socialist] competition will acquire enormous significance as a mighty active force of socialist construction” (Ia. G. Shvets, Sotsialisticheskoe sorevnovanie na sovremennom etape razvitiia [Moscow: Mysl', 1973], 10–11). 59. “Plenum TsK VKP (b) 16–24 noiabria 1928 g.,” in Kommunisticheskaia partiia Sovetskogo Soiuza v rezoliutsiiakh, resheniiakh s'’ezdov, konferentsii i plenumov TsK, Vol. 4 (Moscow: Politizdat, 1984), 383. 60. Rogachevskaia, 92. 61. Industrializatsiia SSSR, 1929–1932gg: Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow: Nauka, 1970), 465–68. 62. Industrializatsiia SSSR, 1929–1932gg, 469. 63. Gershberg, 23. 64. Sotsialisticheskoe sorevnovanie v SSSR, 1918–1964. Dokumenty i materialy profsoiuzov (Moscow: VTsSPS Profizdat, 1965), 66–67. 65. VKP(b) v rezoliutsiiakh, Part II, 304. 66. Industrializatsiia SSSR, 1929–1932gg, 480–82.

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67. B. L. Markus, Trud v sotsialisticheskom obshchestve (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1939), 138. 68. Smol'kov, 23. 69. Markus, 164. 70. Shvets, 21–22. 71. As the May 1 bulletin of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions informed, “The economic competition began developing quite widely already in February. During March and April it turned into a powerful mass movement of the working class” (Industrializatsiia SSSR, 1929–1932gg, 476). 72. Gershberg, 10. 73. Consider this very characteristic statement by a collective of the Stalingrad factory “Red October,” from February, 1933: “In response to the appeal of the Central Committee of CPSU, and under the leadership of our party organization, our collective exerted every effort to eliminate the shortfall in production. From September, the output went up sharply, and our factory fulfilled the smelting norm by 101%, and the norm for rolled metal by 106%. . . . The factory . . . achieved these successes exclusively on the basis of the broad expansion of socialist competition and shock work” (Industrializatsiia SSSR, 1933–1937: Dokumenty i materialy [Moscow: Nauka, 1971], 520–21; emphasis added). 74. See articles 19, 23, 24, 48 of CPSU’s Charter in Ustav Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo soiuza: Utverzhden XII s'’ezdom, shastichnye izmeneniia vneseny XIII s'’ezdom KPSS [Moscow: Politizdat, 1970]). 75. For example, the Central Committee of the Union of Railroad Workers made it incumbent upon all its regional committees “under their leaders’ personal responsibility [pod lichnuiu otvetstvennost' rukovoditelei], to report every ten days to VTsSPS and the Central Committee of the Union of Rail Workers, by either telegraph or mail, on the state of socialist competition” (Sotsialisticheskoe sorevnovanie v SSSR, 111). Eventually, the CPSU Charter will make it an official obligation of each primary organization to “develop socialist competition” (see Article 57d in Ustav). 76. For instance: “Inspired by the resolutions of the XVI Party Congress, the workers of the Leningrad machine-building factory ‘Karl Marx’ appealed through Pravda to the entire working class to come forth with industrial-financial counterplans [vstrechnye promfinplany]” (Gershberg, 27); “VTsSPS directed all local trade-union organizations to use the anniversary of [the movement for] socialist competition for a new creative upsurge of the masses in the struggle for fulfillment and over-fulfillment of production norms, for the full utilization of the working day, for high production quality, and ever-greater inclusion of workers in socialist competition” (Khabibulina, 39); “The news about the XXI Congress of CPSU elicited new creative initiative on the part of the Soviet people. In factories, plants, and on construction sites, workers were taking higher obligations in honor [v chest'] of the congress” (Rogachevskiaia, 261). 77. Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 44. The most important pochin to be scrapped was that of production communes during the First

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Five-Year Plan. See Lewis Siegelbaum, “Production Collectives and Communes and the ‘Imperatives’ of Soviet Industrialization,” Slavic Review 45, no. 1 (1986): 65–84. 78. See the announcement of one such pochin, the “social tugboat,” in Sotsialisticheskoe sorevnovanie v SSSR, 91–92. 79. Khabibulina, 45–46. 80. Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism, 45. 81. Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism, 67. 82. Industrializatsiia SSSR, 1929–1932gg, 468–69 83. Rogachevskaia, 141. 84. Rogachevskaia, 141. 85. Oleg Dziuba, “Chelovek iz uglia: Neoptimisticheskaia tragediia Alekseiia Stakhanova. Chast' 1” Literaturnaia Rossiia 30 (2019), https:​//​litrossia​.ru​/item​/ chelovek​-iz​-uglya. 86. This was the time when, in the words of Isaac Deutscher, “the shock-worker, the industrial record-man, became in a sense the central figure of Russian society” (Isaac Deutscher, Soviet Trade Unions: Their Place in Soviet Labour Policy [London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1950], 99). On the record-mania in Magnitogorsk, see Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 208–9. 87. For Stakhanov’s own recollections of this episode, see Aleksei Stakhanov, Rasskaz o moei zhizni (Moscow: Sotsekgiz, 1937), 20–21. 88. For the resistance of many Soviet workers to the Stakhanov movement, see Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 32–34; Deutscher, 89; Donald A. Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization: The Formation of Modern Soviet Production Relations, 1928–1941 (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 116–20; Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism, 195–204. 89. Stakhanov, 24–25. 90. Stakhanov, 26. 91. Stakhanov, 26; emphasis added 92. I. V. Stalin, “O zadachakh khoziaistvennikov: Rech' na Pervoi Vsesoizunoi konferentsii rabotnikov sotsialisticheskoi promyshlennosti 4 fevralia 1931g.,” in Sochineniia, vol. 13 (Moscow: OGIZ, 1952), 41. 93. Stalin, “Rech',” 60–62. 94. “Rekord Nikity Izotova,” Pravda, September 12, 1935, 1. 95. The word tekhnika translates as either “technique” or “technology” depending on the context. In his speech, Stalin spoke at length about tekhnika dela, which refers more generally to a craft’s know-how. However, in the context of the Stakhanov movement and the drive to modernize Soviet industry, “technology” is the more appropriate translation. 96. Stakhanov, 19–20. 97. In Stakhanov’s own testimony, the mine’s partaktiv approached him with the words, “Aleksei Grigor'evich, we already discussed with you Comrade Stalin’s speech; you know what tasks he has set for the country. We need to think about how we can fulfill them” (Stakhanov, 20–21). 98. Gershberg, 41.

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99. “Stakhanovskii god,” Pravda, January 1, 1936, 1; emphasis added. 100. Pervoe vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie rabochikh i rabotnits-stakhanovtsev, 14– 17 noiabria 1935 g: Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: Partizdat, 1935), 12. 101. Gershberg, 54. 102. Industrializatsiia SSSR, 1933–1937, 572. 103. “Vazhnyi pochin v Donbasse,” Pravda, September 11, 1935, 1. 104. Industrializatsiia SSSR, 1933–1937, 572. 105. Industrializatsiia SSSR, 1933–1937, 572. 106. Smetanin will go on to become the director of “Skorokhod,” in 1938, and then a Deputy Commissar of Light Industry, in 1939. 107. Pervoe, 38. 108. “Velikii istochnik nashei sily,” Pravda, September 17, 1936, 1. 109. Rogachevskaia, 150. 110. Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism, 187–89; Filtzer, 185–87. 111. Deutscher, 110–11; Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism, 185. 112. Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism, 145–78. 113. Rogachevskaia, 151. 114. Rogachevskaia, 151. 115. “Novyi razmakh sotsialisticheskogo sorevnovaniia,” Pravda (28 September, 1935), 1. Similar statements were made by Stakhanovites themselves. See “Moskovskii slet stakhanovtsev—tov. Stalinu,” Pravda (22 October, 1935), 1. 116. “Voprosy promyshlennosti i transporta v sviazi so stakhanovskim dvizheniem,” Pravda, December 26, 1935, 1. 117. “Even on the very day of the resolution’s publication . . . meetings and conversations were held in the plants and factories of Moscow, during which workers took new obligations for raising the productivity of labor” (Gershberg, 136). See also Rogachevskaia, 156–57. 118. Quoted in Rogachevskaia, 156. 119. “Stakhanovskaia piatidnevka,” Pravda (20 January, 1936), 1; “Uroki pervoi stakhanovskoi piatidnevki,” Pravda (25 January, 1936), 1; “Stakhanovskii mesiats metallurgov,” Pravda (29 March, 1936), 1. 120. The picture of growth looked like this: in metalworking, Stakhanovites had increased from 7.5 percent to 27.7 percent of the workforce; in chemical industry—from 7 percent to 26 percent; in metallurgy—from 6.6 percent to 26 percent; in textiles—from 7 percent to 19.7 percent. See: Zavershenie sotsialisticheskogo preobrazovaniia ekonomiki, pobeda sotsializma v SSSR, 1933–1937 gg., edited by I. A. Gladkov et al. (Moscow: Nauka, 1978), 95. 121. Lewis Siegelbaum, “The Making of Stakhanovites, 1935–36,” Russian History 13, no. 2/3 (1984), 262–63. 122. On the expression of Soviet subjectivity through official speech genres like surveys, work histories, and memoirs, see Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 215–17. 123. A. L. Oprishchenko, Istoriografiia sotsialisticheskogo sorevnovaniia rabochego klassa v SSSR (Kharkov: Vysshaia shkola, 1975), 70. 124. On socialist competition as a fundamental law of socialism, see Changli, Novye formy, 13; L. A. Beilin, “Sotsialisticheskoe sorevnovanie kak ekonomicheskaia

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kategoriia,” in Ekonomicheskie zakony sotsializma i ikh ispol'zovanie (Moscow: Mysl', 1970), 247; G. N. Evstaf'ev, Sotsialisticheskoe sorevnovanie—zakonomernost' i dvizhushchaia sila ekonomicheskogo razvitiia (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1952), 29; A. M. Rumiantsev, O kategoriiakh i zakonakh politicheskoi ekonomii (Moscow: Mysl', 1966), 151; V. K. Fedinin, Sotsialisticheskoe sorevnovanie na sovremennom etape (Moscow: Ekonomika, 1974), 6–46. On the principled opposition between sorevnovanie and konkurentsiia, see Evstaf'ev, 5–24. 125. Changli, Novye formy, 50. 126. “The mass movement of workers-innovators emerged in the USSR at the end of 1935, during the Second Five-Year Plan, in response [v otvet] to the slogan of the Party, “Cadres Decide Everything!”; “The leadership of the Party created all conditions for a new phase of socialist competition, one associated with new technology” (Gershberg, 4, 35). 127. G. Ia. Ponomarenko, Vo glave trudovogo pod'’ema: Kommunisty Donbassa— organizatory sotisalisticheskogo sorevnovaniia (Kiev: Vysshaia shkola, 1971), 34. 128. Changli, Novye formy, 58. 129. Changli, Novye formy, 17 (emphasis in the original). 130. Istorischeskii materializm, 653–54. 131. Changli, Dvizhushchaia sila, 9. 132. Gershberg, 7. 133. “Partiinaia organizatsiia—dusha i organizator stakhanovskogo dvizheniia,” Pravda, April 9, 1936, 2. 134. Khabibulina, 6. 135. Smol'kov, 22. 136. Ronald G. Suny, “Stalin and His Stalinism,” in Stalinism: The Essential Readings, edited by David L. Hoffman (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 26. 137. “In exchange for extending to undeserving workers the title of shock workers—and the access to privileges that went along with it—factory committees and party organizations achieved consent to socialist competition as an integral—and permanent—feature of Soviet industrial culture” (Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism, 45). See also Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 209–15. 138. The first two factors were emphasized by Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed (1936). His interpretation influenced the accounts of Isaac Deutscher and Donald Filtzer. See: Trotsky, Revolution, 78–85, 123–28; Deutscher, 96–116; Filtzer, 200– 205. On the economic rationale of the Stakhanov movement, see Robert W. Davies and Oleg Khlevniuk, “Stakhanovism and the Soviet Economy,” Europe-Asia Studies 54, no. 6 (2002): 687–903. 139. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 6.

Conclusion

In August 1928, the Japanese Kabuki theater visited the Soviet Union, giving a number of performances in Moscow and Leningrad.1 It was the troupe’s first-ever venture abroad. For Sergei Eisenstein, an admirer of Japanese art and a theorist of avant-garde theater, this was a most felicitous occasion.2 He attended all the shows in Moscow, befriended some of the actors, and wrote an article on the principles of Kabuki theater for a special issue of the journal Zhizn' iskusstva (Life of Art).3 A few months later, in early 1929, he penned another essay, “Outside the Frame,”4 as an afterword to Naum Kaufman’s pamphlet Japanese Cinema.5 One of the principal expositions of Eisenstein’s montage theory, “Outside the Frame” is a one-of-a-kind exercise. It might well be the only afterword ever written that does not discuss the text of which it is an afterword. It alludes to Iaponskoe kino just once, at the very beginning, and this, in order to distance itself from it. It is bizarre, Eisenstein exclaims, to write about something that doesn’t exist. Here we have a pamphlet about Japanese cinema, but there can be no cinema without cinematography. And so, Eisenstein will now explain to the readers of Kaufman’s pamphlet that Japanese culture possesses cinematographic qualities, yet they are to be found outside of cinema.6 He proceeds as follows: Cinema is: so many corporations, such and such turnovers of capital, so and so many stars, such and such dramas. Cinematography is, first and foremost, montage. Japanese cinema is excellently equipped with corporations, actors, and stories. But the Japanese cinema is completely unaware of montage. Nevertheless, the principle of montage can be identified as the basic element of Japanese representational culture.7

Eisenstein will go on to argue that a logic of dismemberment and juxtaposition of non-contiguous pieces of reality is operative in Japanese writing, painting, and its Kabuki theater. His own account, however, is framed by a 229

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different logic. The first two steps of it are in plain view. First, we have cinema as a conglomerate of corporations, capital investments, celebrities, and films. This is a case of x1: something that is merely there, an inertly factual existence. Eisenstein counterposes to it cinematography as the essence of cinema, an essence defined by montage. This is x2: the quality that makes something what it is. Other Soviet theorists of montage, endeavoring to separate film from the older representational arts (theater, above all), referred to its distinguishing quality as kinematografichnost', “cinema specificity.”8 Eisenstein states that Japanese cinema is factually non-existent ([ee] fakticheski net).9 But what he really wants to say is that it exists only factually. In Hegelian terms, what Japanese cinema lacks is actuality, not factuality. Its empirical being, in the form of such-and-such corporations, capitals, personalities, and products, is divorced from its essence. In Eisenstein’s paradox, the essence of film art is to be found everywhere in Japanese culture but not in its film industry. Eisenstein does not write explicitly about the third moment of the dialectic; it remains outside the frame, so to speak. And yet, it is quite easy to extrapolate from the essay what a hypothetical x3 might refer to in this context. It would be a kind of enterprise, a practical project informed by a normative idea of cinematic art, which would seek to make the idea in question fully actual. Such a practical einigende Einheit (“unifying unity”) would bind cinema’s being-there to its lost essence by making the former into the material means for producing the latter. The result—which Eisenstein might well have contemplated—would be an entire film industry operating in accordance with the (avant-garde) notion of what filmmaking is supposed to be. While x1 is thing-like, and x2 is a quality, x3 has the character of conscious praxis. It is conscious of the essential determinacy, x2, and it seeks to remake the inert existence that is x1 in accordance with it. One could mime the paradoxical overture of Eisenstein’s essay and say that in the Soviet Union the official ideology was: so many state agencies, publishing ventures, mechanisms of control and censorship, such and such doctrinal texts, prescribed slogans, canonized ideas, public rituals. Yet this gives us a merely factual assemblage. The actual life of Soviet ideology would not be captured by the enumerated facts. What we must endeavor to see is the movement in which all those empirically present things were mobilized and interrelated. The actuality of Soviet ideology was a process-project of self-actualization. All-importantly, it was not the ideas of socialism that were made actual in the Soviet Union, but rather the idea of ideology; that is to say, the normative notion of what ideology is supposed to be at the end of history. It, like the notion of montage, is purely formal. It stipulates how ideas are born, what role they play in social life, and what value they carry— “scientific,” “revolutionary,” “popular,” and so on—without any regard for

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the content of ideas (it is understood that the content would change with the ever-changing historical situation). Here is to be found the resolution of the thorny problem with which this inquiry began, “One ideology or many?” When we see Soviet ideology as the movement beyond content, beyond the unity of interlocking principles or propositions, we do not have to wonder, with Alfred G. Meyer, “Precisely which body of ideas is being referred to when we talk about Soviet ideology.” The latter is not defined by the substance of ideas, socialist or otherwise, but rather by the formal principle of self-valorization. It was not a question of whether such and such notions promulgated by the Soviet regime were truly consistent with the tenets of Marxism, but whether they could be made to appear consistent; and moreover—whether they could be made to appear as growing out of the socialist experience and acting back upon it as a “true material force.” Such a formal principle can accommodate virtually any content: internationalism as well as nationalism (“Soviet patriotism”), political radicalism as well as traditionalism, egalitarianism as well as meritocratic hierarchy. The present book would not have been worth writing if all it wished to say is that Soviet ideology is a self-reflexive discourse, centered on the idea of what ideology is supposed to be. That Soviet Marxism-Leninism knows itself as an ideology and glorifies itself as such is a most obvious matter. It can point us toward a solution but is far from being that solution itself. The originality of Soviet ideology does not lie in the fact that it, qua discourse, features both statements about the world (first-order values) and propositions about the nature and role of ideology in the world (second-order values). It lies, rather, in the fact that the discursive proper is just a moment in a greater “production,” which rendered manifest in social space the ontological function of ideas. For this reason, it behooves us to think of Soviet ideology as something different from Marxism-Leninism. In the textual corpus of the latter, ideology was certainly objectified. Yet we need a broader framework to account for the fact that Marxism-Leninism itself became an object of activities with a definite telos. “Soviet ideology” is that broader concept, which “comprehends” the officially promulgated meanings together with the multitude of real-world activities that objectified those meanings and imparted on them the valorized attributes of nauchnost', monolitnost', narodnost', partiinost', and so on. Here is to be found the key to that other nagging issue with which we began: how can a notion of ideology in the Soviet context be made to accommodate things like institutions or rituals, so native to that context and yet so incommensurate with the ideal nature of meanings? Were we to take “ideology” in its immediate significance, as a matter of ideas, then administrative structures and public performances would necessarily appear as extraneous

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matters. Yet we have now come to see Soviet ideology as the ongoing production of truth effects. In such a perspective, ideas do not confront rituals and institutions as heterogeneous realities; all these matters exist in concrete, dynamic unity insofar as the ideas were the objects of ritualized practices directed and coordinated by the institutions in question. It is worth reiterating that such a synthetic “view” of Soviet ideology is not a cerebral scheme of our making by means of which we seek to hold together aspects of an academic subject, which threaten to drift apart.10 If a film industry is organized in accordance with a certain notion of how cinema should be made (cinematography as montage, for instance), then Hegel would say that the industry itself is that notion at work. And likewise, if a concept of what ideology should look like is immanent to a state-run agitprop enterprise, then it is not first in our minds, but in the workings of that enterprise that unification is accomplished. To wit, the synthesis is not at all a “view” of the subject, Soviet ideology, but something that the subject itself brings about. The terms “enterprise” and “project” are not intended to imply that a single agent, individual or collective, with a singular intelligence and will, was responsible for realizing the normative concept of ideology. The terms do no more than indicate that the show of Soviet ideology has an intelligible telos, in accordance with which it gave rise to certain effects in the public sphere. These effects, however, were produced by millions of people, who participated in the enterprise with quite different mindsets and motives. There can be no doubt that some among them, especially in that early age of the Soviet experiment, were convinced that the ideas of Marx and Lenin were a “true material force”; consequently, they did their utmost to bring about such an “objective appearance.” Yet, great many more found themselves in a social game of tokens whose possible moves had, by the time they stepped onto the playing field, already congealed into rules of desirable professional conduct—which was always, at the same time, political—or simply sound practical sense. For most participants, it was not necessary to believe that Marxism-Leninism was “living,” nor even to understand that such was the show’s overall effect.11 All that was needed was the motivation to perform certain actions—pragmatic, symbolic, or both—in the local context in which one found oneself, and thus furnish one in the chain of tokens that together constituted Marxism-Leninism’s ongoing “triumph.” By the late Soviet period, this mechanism had become routinized through and through. Select pronouncements by the Party leaders were routinely made into “essential slogans of the day” by those at the top of the agitprop apparatus; they also devised campaigns to “turn into life” the slogans in question. Lower-level functionaries routinely responded with tokens of initsiativnost' by organizing “lively discussions,” pochiny from below, and pageants of massovost', while

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employees, workers, and peasants took part in such initiatives because of formal obligations or informal accommodations. The theorization developed on these pages does not prevent us from inquiring how the Soviet political regime was legitimized. It does, however, place this question in another, dialectically altered, perspective. Instead of asking how political power was buttressed by ideological meanings, we should see it operating through the very production of the Meaningful. Differently stated, the Communist Party drew legitimacy not so much from the postulates of Marxism-Leninism, but from the total show that was Marxism-Leninism’s “triumph.” Since the latter was nothing like a claim or argumentation, but a pervasive mechanism of social practice, the phrase “ideological legitimation,” if used at all, must be supplied with a wholly new sense. The special significance of the Soviet case for a theory of ideology begins with the ability of the party-state, through its unprecedented mobilizational prowess,12 to model another world within the world of common experience, a second reality that would count as true reality, nastoiashchaia deistvitel'nost'. Inhabiting it meant that one was living the true life, nastoiashchaia zhizn'. It was the only real reality, for it was the only one pregnant with the future. Whatever else was to be found on the quotidian surface of life was dross destined for the dustbin of history. The nastoiashchaia deistvitel'nost' comprised all the “essential tendencies” of historical development and the phenomena that were their materialization. It was an artifactual, organized world. But for many who eagerly participated in its organization, there was nothing counterfeit or suspect about that. On the contrary: what made “our life” an artifact of conscious organizational practice was exactly what made it a higher, truer reality. In this modeled world, ideological discourse possessed its very own “other.” Not an indifferent, “alien” counterpart, but one specifically constructed for the purpose of showcasing ideology as a “true material force.” This is not quite the same as claiming that the Soviet regime was in the business of building Potemkin villages. The point is not that the authorities put up a fake reality that mirrored ideological notions of what should be the case. Before being the reflection of any particular ideological content, nastoiashchaia deistvitel'nost' reflected the general form of ideology. And since this form, in a Marxist perspective, is about how ideas reflect essential historical dynamics, one could say that nastoiashchaia deistvitel'nost' was the reflection of reflection. The facile talk about Potemkin villages assumes an external standard of reality by which the displays of “our Soviet life” can be judged. Yet what seems to me most original about Soviet ideology is that this project involved the projection of its own, internal standard of reality, its “intended” other.

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Thus, the notion of show, so central to my case, does not point to a world of make-believe. It does not say that such and such undertakings were “just for show,” as this would imply comparison with how things really stood. The notion posits, in the first place, that self-presentation is constitutive of the subject we have been considering. There is no thing-in-itself called Soviet ideology that is there “behind” the valorized image of itself that it projected. As I just noted, however, this self-presentation involved the modeling of a world, a socialist “civilization,” in which ideas played a most vital role. They mediated the appearance of this civilization’s essential features: socialist labor, socialist morality, socialist law, and so on. In the second place, then, show refers to the process in which the essence of socialism showed itself, externalized in phenomena. The book’s last chapter adumbrated the mechanism that rendered this visibility. I referred to it as the appearance of appearance. It could also be called the appearance of reflection, for what was made visible in public space was the “correspondence” between ideological notions and objective tendencies, which allowed those notions (forged into “fighting slogans”) to act as a catalyst of the historical process. If Marxism-Leninism was the object of this display, then Soviet ideology should designate the subject-object logic of the Concept, a dynamic of self-essentialization, or self-valorization, that produced the appearance of appearance. NOTES 1. The history of the theater’s first Soviet tour is detailed in Yukiko Kitamura and Dany Savelli, “Opravdannaia ekzotika, ili Priezd teatra kabuki v Sovetskii soiuz v 1928 godu,” Voprosy literatury no. 5 (2018): 39–75. 2. On Eisenstein’s interest in the cultures of the Far East, see Viacheslav Ivanov, “Eisenshtein i kul'tury Iaponii i Kitaia,” in Vostok-Zapad. Issledovaniia. Perevody. Publikatsii, ed. Mikhail Gasparov et al. (Moscow: Nauka, 1985), 279–90. 3. Sergei Eisenstein, “Nezhdannyi styk,” in Izbrannye proizvedeniia v 6t, vol. 2 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1964), 283–96. Eisenstein’s notes taken during the performances have been published in “‘Nezhdannyi styk’: Chernovye nabroski,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski no. 75 (2005), 78–82. 4. Sergei Eisenstein, “Za kadrom,” in Izbrannye proizvedeniia v 6t, vol. 5 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1964), 303–10. 5. N. Kaufman, Iaponskoe kino (Moscow: Tea-Kino-Pechat,’ 1929). 6. Eisenstein, “Za kadrom,” 283. 7. Eisenstein, “Za kadrom,” 283. The English translation is sourced from: Sergei Eisenstein, “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram,” Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace Yovanovich, 1977), 28.

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8. Lev Kuleshov, “Montazh kak osnova kinematografii,” in Iskusstvo kino (Moi opyt) (Leningrad: Tea-Kino-Pechat', 1929), 10–12; Lev Kuleshov, “Iskusstvo, sovremennaia zhizn' i kinematografiia,” Kino-Fot 1 (1922), 2. 9. Eisenstein, “Za kadrom,” 283. 10. David-Fox’s “ideological sphere,” cited in the introduction, is a good example of such an intellectual construct. 11. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 220. 12. For the interpretation of the early Soviet Union as a “mobilizational state,” see Hoffmann, Cultivating.

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Winfield, Richard Dien. Hegel’s Science of Logic: A Critical Rethinking in Thirty Lectures. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012. Wolfe, Bertram D. An Ideology in Power: Reflections on the Russian Revolution. New York: Stein and Day, 1969. Worrall, R. L. “U.S.S.R: Proletarian or State Capitalist?” Modern Quarterly 11, no. 2 (1939): 5–19. Yates, William Butler. “The Second Coming.” In The Collected Poems of W. B. Yates. A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran, 185–86. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989. Yurchak, Alexei. Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. Zavershenie sotsialisticheskogo preobrazovaniia ekonomiki, pobeda sotsializma v SSSR, 1933–1937 gg. Edited by I. A. Gladkov et al. Moscow: Nauka, 1978. Zeitlin, Irving M. Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968. Zelený, Jindřich. The Logic of Marx. Translated by Terrel Carver. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980. Zhdanov, Andrei. “Doklad tov. Zhdanova o zhurnalakh ‘Zvezda’ i ‘Leningrad.’” Literaturnaia gazeta 39 (1946), 1–2. Zimmerman, Andrew. “Foucault in Berkeley and Magnitogorsk: Totalitarianism and the Limits of Liberal Critique.” Contemporary European History 23, no. 2 (2014): 225–36. Zinov'ev, Aleksandr. Kommunizm kak real'nost'. Lausanne, Switzerland: L’Age d’homme, 1981. Zinov'ev, G. E. Leninizm: Vvedenie v izuchenie leninizma. Leningrad: Gos. izd-vo, 1925. Žižek, Slavoj. “Introduction: The Spectre of Ideology.” In Mapping Ideology, 1–33. London: Verso, 1994. Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 2008.

Index

abstract immediacy, in Hegel, 70–71 abstract universal, in Hegel, 74 Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 146n action program, 10, 12 aesthetic overproduction, 185n Agitprop (Agitation and Propaganda Department), 127, 131, 143, 146–47n, 189n, 232; Committee for the Marxist-Leninist Preparation of Cadres, 146n agitpunkt (propaganda center), 127 agit-ship (propaganda ship), 127 agit-train (propaganda train), 127 alienation, in Marx, 152n Althusser, L., 24n, 41–44, 46, 58n, 68–69, 76, 131, 149n American Academy of Sciences, Conference on Ideology at, 33, 51n Ancient Rome, in Italian Fascism, 162. See also Romanità anti-cosmopolitanism, 5, 189n anti-Semitism, Soviet. See anti-cosmopolitanism appearance, 45, 67, 116n, 140; of appearance, 218, 234; deceptive, 36, 38, 41; and essence, 66, 68, 80, 144; objective, 67, 218, 232;

posited, produced, 144–45. See also phenomena Arendt, H., 28, 30–31, 51n, 63 Aron, R., 28 authoritative discourse, 17, 46 Avenarius, R., 116n Bachelard, G., 24n Bakhtin, M., 17 base, 40, 57n, 58n, 64, 66, 139–40, 142–43, 151n, 170–72, 174–75, 177, 199, 216. See also superstructure being, 123, 143; being there (factual existence), 3, 62–63, 66, 70–71, 73–75, 77, 79, 81, 87, 230; Heidegger on, 95–96, 98–99, 114, 115–18n; logic of (in Hegel), 70, 74, 76–77, 230; power, sway of, 139, 170–71; radiating essence, truth, 99–100, 103; social, socio-economic, 57n, 132, 140–41, 143, 145, 155, 169–70, 173, 178, 215, 217, 220 Bell, D., 33, 54n, 192 Berdiaev, N., 28–29, 52n Bettelheim, C., 57n Bildungstrieb (formative impulse), 161 Bobrovnikov, N., 138 Bofa, G., 39 257

258

Index

Bolshevism, 28, 157–58, 162–63, 165, 186–87n bourgeoisie, bourgeois society, 36–37, 110–12, 160–61; state bourgeoisie (in Bettelheim and Chavance), 57n Brandenberger, D., 2, 4–5, 58n, 145n, 147n Brezhnev, L., 180n brigades: of communist labor (brigady kommunisticheskogo truda), 202; front-line (frontovye brigady), 202; integrated (skvoznye brigady), 202, 214; shock (udarnye brigady), 202– 4; Stakhanovite, 214; writers’ 167 Brzezinski, Z., 28, 31–33 Bukharin, N., 56–57n, 101 bureaucracy, Soviet, 5, 47–48; as a new ruling class, 39–40, 56–57n; Cohen on, 57n; Trotsky on, 56n capital, in Marx, 197–98, 220, 222–23n capitalism, 161, 172, 197; contradictions of, 37, 104, 106, 111; late, 144, 152n; state capitalism, 57n, 163, 185–86n; uneven development of, 107. See also imperialism cathected object, 192–93 cause and effect, in Hegel, 154, 179n censorship, 127, 130, 136, 143, 148n, 215, 230 census, Soviet (1937), 165 Central Committee. See Communist Party of the Soviet Union “Central-Irmino” mine, 204, 208, 211 challenge, to socialist competition. See vyzov Chavance, B., 57n Childe, V. G., 186n Civil War, Russian, 202 civilization, 96, 139–40, 170; in Antiquity, 158; conceptions of, 159– 64, 182n; as cultural sophistication (civilité), 160, 183n; as Kultur, 160, 183–84n; organicist notion of, 160–62, 171, 183n; as political

project, 163–64; show of, 165–66, 172–78, 199, 207, 220, 234; Soviet, 155–59, 163–69, 170–78, 179–80n, 183n, 207, 215–16, 220–21, 234; universalist notion of, 160–61, 186n Clark, K., 186n class struggle, 8, 40, 110, 195–96 clearing, in Heidegger. See Lichtung Cobban, A., 52n Cohen, S., 5, 7, 10, 57n collective patronage. See shefstvo collectivization, Soviet, 8, 163, 201, 208 Comintern (Communist International), 128 Commissariat of the Enlightenment (NARKOMPROS), 126, 146–48n, 150n; Section of Mass Presentations and Spectacles, 148n commodity, 197, 222n; fetishism (in Marx), 36–37, 41, 152n; form (in Marx), 36, 152n communism, 2, 12, 30, 54n, 142, 194, 216; Russian, 8–9, 28, 51n. See socialism Communist Academy of Social Sciences. See Socialist Academy of Social Sciences Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), 128, 140, 143, 168, 199, 204–7, 211, 215–17, 228n, 233; cadres, 101, 123, 166, 203, 206–8, 213, 217; Central Committee of, 101, 119n, 126–28, 146–47n, 149n, 168, 203–4, 214, 223n, 225n; Charter of, 225n; committee, local party organization, 101, 127–28, 166, 187n, 205, 207–8, 211, 216, 225n, 228n; Ideological Commission of, 149n; December 1935, Plenum of, 213; November 1928, Plenum of, 203; Seventeenth Congress of, 138, 151n; Sixteenth Conference of, 204; Sixteenth Congress of, 204, 224n; Twenty-First Congress of, 225–26n;

Index

Twenty-Fifth Congress of, 180n. See Agitprop Communist Saturdays. See subbotniki communist universities. See komvuzy Communist Youth League. See Komsomol concept, logic of, 70–73, 75–76, 78–79, 83n, 87, 100, 113, 140, 153–55, 178– 79n, 195, 197, 220, 230, 234 condition, notion of. See symptom Condorcet, J.-A.-N., 160 consciousness: bourgeois, 36–37, 39; class, 38–39, 42, 109; faculty of, 90; imputed, 39, 56n; political, 48, 109; social, 57n, 110, 174–77; trade-union (in Lenin), 39. See also ideology; survivals of bourgeois consciousness contradiction, dialectical, 16, 25n corporatism, 163 cosmopolitanism. See anti-cosmopolitanism cost-accounting. See khozraschet Counter-Enlightenment, 160, 162 counter-planning. See vstrechnoe planirovanie criticism and self-criticism. See kritika i samokritika cult of the leader, 4; of Lenin, 119n; of Stalin, 6, 22n; in MarxismLeninism, 6 Cultural Revolution, Soviet, 125, 132, 176 Dal', V., dictionary, 182n Daniels, R. V., 37–38 Danilevskii, N., 183–84n Dasein, in Heidegger, 92–93, 118n David-Fox, M., 13–14, 235n Debord, G., 144, 152n decadence, degeneration, 155, 161, 173, 184n deistvennost' (activist character). See Marxism-Leninism dekada (ten-day period), 214 democratic centralism, 5

259

derivations, in Pareto, 45 desire, in Freud, 45–46, 68 determinate concepts, in Hegel, 83n Deutscher, I., 13, 226n, 228n development policy, 160 dialectic, 14, 16, 19; of Being, Essence, and Concept, 73–82, 87, 98–99, 153–54, 220, 230; Hegel on, 16; not a method, 16 dictatorship of the proletariat. See proletariat discourse: Foucault on, 69, 164–65; instead of ideology, 17, 69 Djilas, M., 39–40 Donbass, 204, 207–8, 210–11 doska pocheta (honor board), 204, 213 Dunayevskaya, R., 186n dvukhsotniki (two-hundredpercenters), 214 Eagleton, T., 34, 82n economism. See Marxism ego: ego cogito, 44; in psychoanalysis, 44; transcendental (in Kant), 79 einigende Einheit (unifying unity), in Hegel, 153, 197, 230 Eisenstein, S., 229–30, 234n Eleatic age, philosophy of, 97, 117n emergence: choreography of, 205, 211; of superstructural phenomena, 139– 40, 156, 177, 218–19 enemies of the people, 4, 40, 47 Engels, F., 35–37, 104–5, 109–10, 120n, 122n, 125, 129, 194 Enlightenment, 75, 158, 165, 181n enterprise, 134, 136, 143, 145, 163, 199, 230, 232. See also Soviet ideology environment, notion of, 90–91, 94 epistemological truth. See truth epistemology, 88 epoch, 140–43, 158, 168, 173–74 Epstein, M., 29 Ereignis (event), in Heidegger, 90–91, 95–99, 104–6, 113, 117n

260

Index

es gibt (it gives, there is), in Heidegger, 92, 95, 98, 118n essence, 51, 67–68, 70–71, 73–78, 81, 94–95, 99, 118n, 144, 153–54, 170, 175, 230; and appearance, 75, 144, 220; and existence, 75, 78; immediacy of, 66, 77–78; logic of (in Hegel), 70–71, 178–79n, 220, 230; self-essentializing, 112, 145; and Soviet ideology, 19, 51 Evans, A. B., 12 Evreinov, N., 147n example. See primer exchange value. See value exemplar. See tokens exhibit, exhibition, 166–67, 170–71, 173, 177–78, 199–200, 215, 217–18, 220. See also tokens Fainsod, M., 23n, 57n, 157 fantasy, in Žižek, 46–47 fascio littorio (bundled rods), 162, 185n Fascism: German, 28, 31, 49–50, 162– 63; Italian, 162–63, 184–85n Febvre, L., 182 festivals, Soviet, 127, 132, 148n fetishism of commodities. See commodity Feuerbach, L., 55n Filtzer, D., 228n First All-Union Conference of Stakhanovite Workers, 211–13 Fitzpatrick, S., 2, 165 five-day periods. See piatidnevka Five-Year Plan, in USSR: First, 7–8, 140, 156, 203, 207–8, 210, 215, 224n, 226n; Second, 208, 214, 228n for another (für ein anderes), 70, 88, 123, 168 for itself (für sich), 70, 100, 168 form, 15, 159; artistic, genre, 15, 61, 168; of external determination, 65–69, 95, 100, 102, 111, 123– 24, 132, 140, 145; of internal coherence, systematicity, 62–67,

94, 102–3, 123–24, 125, 138, 142, 191–92; logical, 62, 79, 198; of self-determination, 100, 113, 123–24, 132–34, 143, 145, 153–54, 178, 198 formative impulse. See Bildungstrieb Foucault, M., 45, 48–49, 59n, 69, 157, 159, 164 foundations (osnovy), in Stalin, 103–5 Frankfurt Institute of Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung), 49–50, 140 Freeden, M., 30, 63 Freiburg University, 88 Freud, S., 41–42, 45–46, 68 Friedrich, C., 28, 31–33 Fritzsche, P., 163, 184n Frow, J., 45 genre. See form Gentile, E., 51n Gershberg, M., 211 Getty, A., 180n Geuss, R., 82n Giolitti, G., 162 giving, in Heidegger. See es gibt Glavlit (Soviet censorship administration), 127, 148n Glavpolitprosvet (Main Committee for Political Education), 126, 146–47n “Golubovka” mine, 208 “Gorlovo” mine, 204, 208 gosudarstvennost' (statehood), 4 Gramsci, A., 149n Great Depression, 163 Great Soviet Encyclopedia (Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia), 149n, 151n, 171 Great Terror, 5, 40 Great Turn, Stalin’s, 4, 7 ground, grounding, 50, 65–66, 70–71, 75, 80, 100, 102–3, 111, 113–14, 123, 131, 165 Groys, B., 10 Guizot, F., 160 gulags, 2, 33

Index

Gurian, W., 28 Habermas, J., 46–47, 84n Haug, W. F. See Projekt Ideologitheorie Hegel, G. W. F., 16, 70–74, 81, 82–83n, 87, 134, 153–55, 197, 220, 232 hegemony, in Gramsci, 149n Heidegger, M., 84n, 88–100, 104–5, 109, 113–14, 114–18n, 155; language, 89–90, 115n Herder, J. G., 160–61 hermeneutic: of ideology, 40, 46, 65, 69, 145; pact, 35, 47, 50, 61, 69; of suspicion (in Ricoeur), 44, 65 high theory. See theory Higher Party School (Vysshaia partiinaia shkola; VPSh), 146n Higher School of Marxism-Leninism (Vysshaia shkola marksizmaleninizma), 146n Hilferding, R., 58n Hitler, A., 50 honor board. See doska pocheta Houlgate, S., 84n humanity, 96; as existing entity, 73; as ideal, essence, 75; as project, 76 Hunt, M. H., 3 Huntington, S. P., 184n Husserl, E., 84n id, in psychoanalysis, 44 idea, 63, 84n; Hegel on, 73; logic of (in Arendt), 28, 31; Russian (in Berdiaev), 28 idealism, 36–37, 116n ideas: fixed (in Kotkin), 164, 186n; as a material force, 142–43, 152n, 175, 200–201, 213, 218, 231–33; objective basis of, 82n, 111, 114, 123–24, 145; progressive, advanced, 142–43, 145, 152n, 155, 173–75, 218–19, 221; reactionary, 142, 152n, 155, 173; ruling, 39, 173; social, 45, 140, 142, 173; “turn into life,” 128, 201, 204, 210, 232; unity with

261

being, 68, 95, 102, 108, 111, 114, 124, 139, 220 identity, 14–16, 41, 48–49, 134, 155, 164, 195, 220 ideocracy thesis, 8, 27–29, 34, 51–52n, 63, 165 ideological, the, 27, 33–36, 46–47, 49–50, 55n, 61, 65, 69–70, 99, 123; as different from an ideology, 33–34; in Projekt Ideologitheorie, 149n Ideological Commission. See Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) ideological critique, 34, 46, 50, 65–66, 69, 100, 114, 123 ideological fantasy. See fantasy ideological front (ideologicheskii front), 132 ideological production, 135, 143 ideological sphere, 132, 176; in DavidFox, 14, 233n ideological state apparatuses, 68, 131, 143, 149n ideological struggle, 176–77 ideological work. See ideologicheskaia rabota ideologicheskaia rabota (ideological work), 132–33, 136, 196–97, 199 ideologicheskii rabotnik (ideological worker), 132 ideology: adjectival sense of, 33–35, 49, 64; as appearance, 67, 69; of a class, 38–41, 65, 67, 110; as a body (system) of ideas, 10, 16, 34, 50, 62–65, 67, 70, 80–81, 133, 135, 140, 177, 231; bourgeois, 5, 37, 39, 67, 109–10, 155, 173; constituting subjects (in Althusser), 41; debasement of, 8; definitions of, 11–15, 19, 24–25n; dialectic of, 95, 101–2, 109, 113–14, 123, 133, 138, 140, 142–43, 153–54, 192; as different from an ideology, 55n, 61, 63, 82n; as discourse, 17, 25n, 69; as dissimulation/distortion,

262

Index

35–36, 41, 44, 46–47, 67–68, 145; end of, 33, 50, 53–54n; as false consciousness, 35–39, 50, 65, 145, 191; falsity of, 36–38, 67–68; as form, 15–17, 61–62, 130; function of, 41–43, 68, 132, 192, 221n; as imaginary relation (in Althusser), 41, 65; as inversion (in Marx and Engels), 36; levels of, 10–11, 17; logic(s) of, 61–82, 123; materiality of (in Althusser), 68; moment of truth in, 35, 64–65, 69, 82n, 87, 173; as necessary illusion, 36, 41, 50, 58n; particular and total (in Mannheim), 54n; proletarian/socialist (in Lenin), 39, 67, 109–10, 155; as rationalization, 44–48; reactionary, 155; and realism, 37, 55n; and science, 68; as a secular religion, 6, 28, 33, 139; in the social sciences, 38, 62; spatial representation of, 17, 63, 66, 82n; as a system of values, 64, 191; totalitarian, 31–34, 50, 53n, 63, 140; and utopia, 28, 30, 34–35, 54n, 63, 173. See also ideological, the; political ideologies imaginary, 41–42, 46 immediacy. See being imperialism, 103–8, 111; chain of, 103–4, 106–8, 124; contradictions of, 103–8, 111; Lenin’s theory of, 104–8, 111–13; and monopoly capitalism, 104, 111; old and new, 160; weakest link of, 106–8, 120n. See also capitalism indoctrination, 28 industrial conferences. See proizvodstvennye soveshchaniia industrial contests. See konkursy industrial conventions. See smotry industrial rallies. See slety industrialization, 161; Soviet, 200, 203, 207, 223n initiative. See pochin

initsiativnost' (resourcefulness, initiative), 206, 211–12, 232 Inkeles, A., 33 Institute of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, 126, 145–46n Institute of Party History, 146n Institute of Red Professors, 126, 146n intelligentsia: bourgeois, 4, 121n; Russian radical, 28; Soviet, 5, 136, 168, 121n interests, 69, 173, 200–201; of a class, 40, 110–11, 113, 173, 191–92; determining ideology, 110–11 internal censor, 128 International Youth Day, 208–9 internationalism, 5, 231 interpellation, in Althusser, 42, 58n, 68–69, 149n “Irmino” mine. See “CentralIrmino” mine Iudin, P., 141–42 izba-chitalnia (village reading room), 127 Izotov, N., 202 izotovstvo (Izotovite movement), 202, 210–12 Jameson, Fredric, 46–47 Japanese cinema, Eisenstein on, 229–30 Jones, E., 44 Kabuki theater, 229, 234n Kaganovich, L., 169 Kalinin, M., 101 Kant, I., 78, 93, 154 “Karl Marx” machine-building factory, 225n Kataev, V., 208 Kaufman, N., 228–29 Kautsky, K., 107, 110, 121n Keenan, E. L., 180n Kehre (turn). See ontological turn Kenez, P., 42 Kennan, G. n20 khozraschet (cost-accounting), 202

Index

kinematografichnost' (cinema specificity), 230 klassovost' (class character). See Marxism-Leninism knowledge, 89; biological basis of (in Nietzsche), 95; essence of (in Heidegger), 94; and power, 45, 69; scientific, 79–80; sense knowledge (in Hegel), 70–71 Kojeve, A., 134, 198 Kolakowski, L., 28 Komsomol (Communist Youth League), 203, 205–6, 214, 218; activists, 206, 214, 218; organizations, 203, 205–6 komvuzy (communist universities), 126 konkurentsiia (competition). See socialist competition konkursy (industrial contests), 202 Konrád, G., 39 Kosik, K., 55n Kotkin, S., 49, 57n, 155–59, 162–65, 169, 179–82n, 186n kritika i samokritika (criticism and selfcriticism), 128, 148n Krupskaia, N., 146n Kultur. See civilization labor: and capital (in Marx), 193; defining humanity (in Marx), 202; laws, 169, 188n; living (in Marx), 198; dead (in Marx), 198; division of, 132, 160; history of (in USSR), 202, 207; power (in Marx), 37, 58n, 198; as the other of capital, 198; socialist, 201–2, 205, 207, 214–15, 224n labor aristocracy, in Lenin, 111–12 Lacan, J., 41, 46 Lamont, C., 179n Lefort, C., 34 Left Opposition, in CPSU, 101 Lenin, V. I., 39, 57n, 67, 88, 100–104, 119–21n, 123–24, 128–30, 135, 137, 141, 145n, 150n, 194–95, 202–3, 216–17, 232

263

Leningrad, journal, 150n Lenin Institute. See Institute of Marx, Engels, and Lenin Lenin’s corner. See Red corner Lenin’s Enrollment, 119n Leninism, 40, 101, 123–24, 135, 141, 194–95, 217; period of (in Stalin), 102, 105; Stalin on, 102–14, 130; as a term, 102; Trotsky on, 102 Lévi-Strauss, C., 46 Lewin, M., 2, 4, 48, 165, 180n, 186–87n liberalism, 161–62 Lichtheim, G. n20, 30 Lichtung (clearing), in Heidegger, 90–91 Linden, C. A., 28 linguistic turn, 17 Lipset, S. M., 33 live newspaper. See zhivaia gazeta logocracy, 51n Löwith, K., 118n Lukács, Georg, 37, 67 Lunacharskii, A., 101, 147n Lyotard, J.-F., 33 Mach, E., 116n Magnitogorsk, 156, 159, 169, 181n, 226n Malia, M., 7–9, 23n, 28–29, 159 Mandel, E., 186n Mannheim, K., 32–33, 35, 38, 53–55n, 65, 173 Marcuse, H., 84n, 188n Martin, J. L., 25n Marx, K., 29, 32, 33, 35–37, 41, 54n, 57n, 65–68, 82n, 104, 110, 120–21n, 125, 129, 142, 145, 149n, 152n, 171, 194–97, 202, 232 Marxism, 7–8, 12, 23n, 28, 38, 40, 51n, 56n, 67–69, 102, 104–5, 110–12, 120n, 138, 140–41, 145, 171–72, 192–93, 195, 231; dissident Marxists in Eastern Europe, 12; economist, 107; fatal logic of (in Malia), 8–9, 23n; historicist, 41; Plato-Marxism (in Epstein), 29;

264

Index

psycho-Marxism, 46; vulgar, 71. See also Marxism-Leninism Marxism-Leninism, 2, 4, 6, 9–13, 22n, 24n, 39, 48–49, 51n, 61, 81, 88, 120n, 125–29, 132–41, 149n, 151n, 173–75, 177, 193–96, 199–201, 215–16, 233–34; abstract nature of, 4; as creative development of Marxism, 135, 141, 200; as dead letter, 49, 61; hegemony of, 139, 176; monolithic character of (monolitnost', stroinost', tselnost'), 135, 138, 193–95, 200, 219; partisan, party character of (partiinost', klassovost'), 193–96, 200; popular character of (narodnost', massovost'), 193–96, 200, 207, 223n; revolutionary character of (revoliutsionnost', deistvennost'), 193–95, 200; scientific character of (nauchnost', ob''ektivnost'), 135–36, 141–42, 152n, 175, 193, 195–96, 199–200, 217–19; “triumph” of, 177, 205, 220, 232–33; vitality of (zhiznennost', sila, tvorcheskii kharakter), 138, 140–43, 151n, 193–96, 199, 221, 223n, 232; as the worldview of Soviet people, 139, 143; valorized attributes of, 193–200, 218, 220, 230–32 mass organizer. See massovik mass-industrial work. See massovoproizvodstvennaia rabota massovik (mass organizer), 132 massovo-proizvodstvennaia rabota (mass-industrial work), 206 massovost' (mass character), 207, 211, 213–15, 217–18, 232. See also Marxism-Leninism master and slave, dialectic of (in Hegel), 154 materialism, 116n, 151n; dialectical, 103, 125, 151n, 194–95; historical,

120n, 125, 141, 171–72, 175–76, 194–95, 200 Mauss, M., 182n McLelland, D., 54n Meaningful, the, 98, 143, 145, 233 meaningfulness, 96–98, 132, 145 mediation, 14, 41, 65–66, 70–71, 75–77, 81, 85n, 111, 124, 129, 133–35, 144–45, 154, 164, 171, 177, 211, 216–18, 222n, 234 Mekhlis, L., 128 Mensheviks, 102 “Menzhinsky” metalworks, 206–7 meropriiatia (organizational measures), 206, 209, 211–12 Merton, H., 53n metanarrative, 144; delegitimation of metanarratives (in Lyotard), 33 metaphysics, 88, 92, 97, 117–18n Meyer, A. G., 4, 7, 231 Mikulina, E., 204, 215 Mirabeau, H.-G., 183n Mitin, M., 149n mock trials, political, 127 mode of production. See production model, of self determination, 134, 154 modernism, 15, 19 modernity, 117n, 160, 163; Soviet, 156, 179–80n modernization theory, 160, 183n modernization, 22n Molotov, V., 128 money, Marx on, 197–98, 222n monolitnost' (monolithic character), 168, 172. See also Marxism-Leninism monopoly capitalism. See imperialism montage, 229–30, 232 moral imperative, in Kant, 154 Morgan, L. H., 183n Moscow Metro, 147n Museum of Lenin, 146n Museum of Marx and Engels, 146n Mussolini, B., 162–63, 185n mystique, in Inkeles, 53n

Index

myth: and Italian Fascism, 162, 185n; and Soviet ideology, 7, n24 narodnost' (popular character), 217. See also Marxism-Leninism nastoiashchaia deistvitel'nost' (true reality), 233 National Socialism, 88, 98, 115n, 163; ideology of, 50;. See also Fascism Nationalism: Russian, 4–5, 231; in the Second International, 121n nauchnost' (scientific character). See Marxism-Leninism Nazism, Nazi regime. See Fascism; National Socialism New Criticism, American, 19 New (Soviet) Man, 143, 177 Nietzsche, F., 44, 45–46, 68–69, 88–100, 109, 113–14, 114– 18n, 161, 191 nominalist epistemology n25 ob'ektivnost' (objective character). See Marxism-Leninism objectification, 44, 79, 134, 166; of ideas, ideology, 124, 128–30, 132– 35, 140, 150n, 175, 217, 231; selfobjectification, 16, 79, 144, 153. See also valorization objective tendency. See tendency obrazets (exemplar), 170 obshchestvennyi buksir (social “tugboat”), 202 obtaining, 66, 69–670, 77, 88, 132 ontological truth. See truth ontological turn, 88, 105; Kehre (in Heidegger), 88, 91 opportunism, 113, 124; Lenin on, 110–13 Order of Lenin, 212 organizational measures. See meropriiatia other: apparent, 71, 99–100, 114, 178n, 195, 201; constitutive, determining,

265

64, 111; indifferent, 64, 71; own, 71, 178n, 233 otlichnichestvo (quality excellence movement), 202 otsenka (political appraisal), 206 Overman (Übermensch), in Nietzsche, 97 Pareto, V., 45 Parsons, T., 31–33, 53n, 160 partiinost' (partisan, party character). See Marxism-Leninism partorg (Party organizer), 208–9 Party committee, organization. See Communist Party of the Soviet Union Party organizer. See partorg Parvus, 120n passo Romano (Roman military step), 162 pereklichka (roll-call), 203 performances: of belonging, 167; discursive, 124; public, 128, 143–44, 167, 211, 214, 217, 231; symbolic, 144, 204, 209–11, 217 performative shift, in Yurchak, 17, 25n perspectival, the, 91, 95, 105 Petrov, K. G., 207–9, 211 phenomena, 156–57, 215; of socialism, 140–41, 143, 169, 177, 199, 207, 211, 215, 217, 219–21, 233–34 phenomenality, socialist, 169, 171, 177, 217, 220 philosophy, 98–100, 103, 113; German (in Marx), 36, 65–66; Hegel on, 71; Russian religious, 52n; Western, 90, 95–97, 100, 117n piatidnevka (five-day period), 214 pioneers, of new industrial practices. See zachinateli Pipes, R., 28, 181n Plato, 28 Plato-Marxism. See Marxism pochin (initiative, undertaking), 206–12, 232

266

Index

Pod znamenem marksizma (Under the Banner of Marxism), journal, 121n, 137 pokhod (march), 206 politgramotshkoly (schools of political literacy), 126 political economy, 125, 135, 137, 193, 197 political education, 48, 126–27, 130, 143, 146n, 177 political ideologies, 12, 32, 34, 63–64, 130–31, 191–92; as indifferent to one another, 64; intellectual genesis of, 64; morphology of, 63–64 political mock trials. See mock trials political patronage. See shefstvo political religions, 28, 51n political science, 10, 33–34, 63, 81, 221n populism, 4, 161 positing, positedness, in Hegel, 70, 72, 153 positing of presuppositions, in Hegel, 154, 178, 197–98 post-revisionism, in Soviet studies, 156 power, 17, 44–46, 48–49; Foucault on, 45, 59n, 69, 159; and knowledge. See also knowledge; will; will to power practice, 40, 42, 68–69, 141, 143–45, 149n, 151n, 199–200 Pravda, newspaper, 101, 107, 203–4, 210–13, 216 primer (example), 170, 211 problematic (problématique), 16–17, 19, 24–25n production, 68–69, 114; of appearance, show, 136, 140, 143–44, 220–21; forces of, 57n, 141–42, 172–73, 192, 202, 215; ideological, 135, 143; mode of, 37, 66, 140, 142–43, 172–74, 188n, 197, 215–16; means of, 141–42; norms, 213, 218, 225– 26n; records, 208, 211–13, 226n; communes, 226n; relations of, 40,

57n, 66, 69, 141–42, 171–74, 192, 201, 215, 218 proizvodstvennye soveshchaniia (industrial conferences), 202–3 Projekt Ideologitheorie, 149n proletariat, working class, 28, 39, 67, 106–7, 109–11, 120n, 139, 151n, 173, 194–96, 196, 202–3; dictatorship of, 121n, 125, 137, 193; German, 105, 109, 120n; Russian, 28, 107, 109–10, 119n, 121–22n, 202, 205, 214, 223–25n Proletarskaia revoliutsiia (Proletarian Revolution), journal, 132 propaganda, 12, 38, 127, 136, 143, 147n, 156, 177; agitation and, 127; campaigns, 127, 149n, 203, 206; monumental, 127 proryv (breach), 207 Proust, M., 14–15, 61 pseudoconcrete, in Kosik, 55n psychoanalysis, 41, 44, 46 psycho-Marxism. See Marxism quality excellence movement. See otlichnichestvo “quicksand society,” in Lewin, 48 Rabochaia gazeta (Workers’ Gazette), newspaper, 203–4 Ranciere, J., 58n rational communication, in Habermas, 46 real, the, 46–47, 68 reason: categories of (in Kant), 79, 93; Freud’s critique of, 44; Nietzsche on, 44, 69, 93, 115n; totalitarianism of, 29 Red corner, 127 “Red Vyborgian” factory, 204 reflection, relation of, 40, 42, 66, 69, 140–41, 143, 156, 168–69, 173–75, 196, 216–17; external, 70, 99, 131; Hegel on, 71; ideological, 141, 145, 175, 201; internal, 99; posited/

Index

produced, 87, 168, 170, 216, 220; reflected in itself, 166, 168, 196, 232 reformism, 111 reification, 37; in Marx, 36–43 religion, 58n; decline of, 161; in feudalism, 174, 176; Marx on, 82–83n; during Stalinism, 187n repressive state apparatuses, in Althusser, 131 reproduction: of ideological meaning, 130; of science, 79; social, 41, 58n, 68, 131–32, 145; textual, 6 residues, in Pareto, 45 revisionism: Russian nationalist, 4; in Soviet studies, 1–2, 5, 9, n21, 32–33 revoliutsionnost' (revolutionary character). See Marxism-Leninism revolution: from above, 157, 169; Lenin’s theory of, 103, 105–10, 112; proletarian, 106–8; Russian, 43, 106–8, 113–14, 121n, 138; French, 35; Stalin on, 104–8, 113–14 revolutionary romanticism, 167 Ricoeur, P., 58n Ridgewell, C., 54n Rittersporn, G. T., 157, 180n rituals, 6–7, 13–14, 24n, 42–43, 81, 129, 140, 143, 148n, 162, 230–32 Robinson, N., 10, 17 Rogachevskaia, L., 213 Rokeach, M., 191, 221n roll-call. See pereklichka Romanità (spirit of Ancient Rome), 162, 164–65n Rostow, W. W., 183n Russian Formalists, 18–19 Russian Futurists, 18 Russian Idea. See Idea Russian Research Center, Harvard University, 53n Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), 102 Russian Studies, 1, 20n, 53n

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samokritika (self-criticism). See kritika i samokritika samoobrazovanie (selfeducation), 126, 147n Sartre, J.-P., 84n Say, J.-B., 198 Scherbakov, A., 128 schools of political literacy. See politgramotshkoly Schopenhauer, A., 44 Schull, J., 3 science, 18, 76; dialectic of, 76–79, 85n; as domination of nature, 80, 84n; as dynamic form, 78; ideal of, 78, 80; as project, 79–80, 84–85n; as “the sciences,” 77; as “the scientific,” 77–78; as self-determining actuality, 78–80; during Stalinism, 149n; standards of, 77–81 Second International, 38, 41, 107, 124; Stalin on, 105;. See also opportunism secular religion. See ideology self-actualization, self-determination. See form; subject self-education. See samoobrazovanie Seliger, M., 10, 63 Shcherbakov, A., 128 shefstvo (political patronage), 127, 202 Shils, E., 33 shock work (udarnichestvo), 204, 208–9, 225n shock worker (udarnik), 209, 211, 213, 226n, 228n show, 136, 140, 143–44, 173, 177–78, 199–200, 207, 211, 219–20, 234 Siegelbaum, L., 213 sila (power). See zhiznennost' Siniavskii, A., 179n “Skorokhod” footwear factory, 211–12, 227n slety (industrial rallies), 213 slogans, 6–7, 42, 57n, 127, 129, 143, 199–201, 212–13, 215, 221, 230, 232; “Bolsheviks must master technology!” (Stalin), 210–11, 213,

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Index

226n; “Cadres decide everything!” (Stalin), 40, 210, 228n; “catching up with the West” (Stalin), 203 Smetanin, N., 211, 215, 227n Smith, A., 198 smotry (industrial conferences), 202–3 Social Democracy, 120n social development, in MarxismLeninism, 151n, 168, 175, 193, 195, 223 social (socio-economic) formation, 57n, 171–72, 174, 188n, 192–93, 215 social historians, 2, 19n, 21n, 28–29, 42, 186–87n socialism, 7–9, 27–30, 40, 42, 47, 110, 142, 158, 163, 166, 168–69, 171–72, 177, 194, 201–4, 206, 216, 218–19, 230; “actually existing,” 47, 139, 141; as anti-world, 165, 172, 215; building of, 120n, 140, 142, 151n, 187n, 189n, 195, 201, 205, 216; as essence, 170, 177, 216, 234; “in one country” (Stalin), 48; laws of, 141, 215–16, 220–21; and the power of being, 170–71; reality of, 143, 152n, 157–58, 169, 177–78, 180n, 207, 218, 220; scientific, 39, 104–6, 109–10, 121n, 152n, 205; state socialism, 22n, 29, 48, 144, 163, 179n; as utopia, 8, 28, 34, 52n, 63, 158, 181n. See also civilization; Soviet way of life Socialist Academy of Social Sciences, 126, 146n socialist attitude toward labor (socialitsicheskoe otnoshenie k trudu), 166, 218 socialist city, 156, 159, 168–69, 219–20 socialist competition (sotsialisticheskoe sorevnovanie), 143, 170, 201–8, 210, 215–19, 223–25n, 228n; as a fundamental law of socialism, 204, 217, 228n; historical forms of, 202, 215, 223–24n; and konkurentsiia, 204, 215, 224n, 228n; Lenin on,

202–5, 215; as a reflection of the base, 202, 216 socialist law, 219 socialist realism, 143, 167–68 socialist way of life (sotsialisticheskii obraz zhizni). See Soviet way of life social psychology, discipline, 191, 221n social sciences, 38, 62, 164, 192; in the United States, 30, 53n, 160 social “tug-boat.” See obshchestvennyi buksir society of the spectacle, in Debord, 144, 152n Soviet Constitution (1936), 12, 47, 128, 219 Soviet ideology: aspects of, 13–14; and belief, 12, 24n, 42; as content, 16, 24n, 81; as different from MarxismLeninism, 177, 231; as discourse, 17; as doctrine, 13; as dogma, 12, 49; epistemological truth of, 177–78; exhibition of its concept, 177, 220, 232; as false consciousness, 37–38, 56n; as genetic code, 7, 28; institutionalization, apparatus of, 6, 11, 76, 80–81, 128–29, 131–34, 230–32; as legitimation of power, 48–49, 59n, 223; as meta-narrative, 144; mobilizational function of, 7; official, 2, 5–6, 11; one or many? 4–5, 13–14, 231; ontological truth of, 108, 120n, 135, 143, 145, 171, 177–78; as paragon of ideology, 29, 33; practices of, 125–29, 135–36; problems of conceptualizing, 1–14, 29–30; as process/project, 81, 130, 132, 136, 144, 153, 165, 219, 230, 232; production, show of, 136, 144, 199–201, 217–21, 231–32; and phenomena, 141, 143, 170, 175, 177–78; and policy, 5, 7; selfdetermination, self-actualization, 134, 153, 200, 230; as self-evident reality, 2–3, 11; self-presentation, self-image of, 135–36, 138, 141, 143,

Index

145, 157, 165, 175, 195–96, 199, 234; six faces of (in David-Fox), 13–14; Stalinist ideology, 4–5, 37, 47, 58n; as subject, 19, 145; as (more than) text, 143, 231; as a topic, 1, 3; value form of, 129, 132, 136, 140, 142–43, 145, 175, 219 Sovietization campaign, 176 Soviet literature, 166–68 Soviet Marxism. See Marxism-Leninism Soviet modernity. See modernity Soviet patriotism, 231 Soviet studies, 1, 3, 7, 17, 30, 33 Soviet (socialist) way of life (sovetskii/ sotsialisticheskii obraz zhizni), 143, 157, 164–66, 171, 178, 180–81n sovpartshkoly (Soviet party schools), 126 “speaking Bolshevik,” in Kotkin, 58n Spengler, O., 161, 184n Stakhanov, A., 208–11, 215, 227n Stakhanovets (Stakhanovite), journal, 215 Stakhanovism, Stakhanov movement, 128, 170, 202, 205, 207, 210–19, 225n, 227n Stakhanovite shift, 214 Stalin, I. V., 8, 50, 88, 100–114, 119– 20n, 123–24, 128–30, 132, 135, 137– 42, 146n, 163, 167, 169, 194, 203–4, 210–11, 213, 215–16, 218, 224–27n; rhetorical style, 101–2, 119n Stalinism, Stalinist period, 4–5, 28, 31, 40, 49–50, 56n, 57n, 132, 136, 138, 140, 156–57, 159, 163–65, 181–82n, 185n, 188n, 207, 219; as a civilization. See Soviet civilization Starobinski, J., 183n state, 174; bourgeois state, 131; nation state, 161; grand strategies of (in Kotkin), 164; mobilizational state, 163, 235n; welfare, 159, 165, 181n State Publishing House, 148n statehood. See gosudarstvennost'

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stroinost' (well-ordered character). See monolitnost' structuralism, 46 subbotniki (communist Saturdays), 202, 204 subject, 46–47, 59n, 76, 79, 153, 164, 178, 201, 232; class as, 46; of cognition, 18; Heidegger on, 96–97; moral (in Kant), 154; and object, 97, 99–100, 113–14, 124, 145, 234; in psychoanalysis, 44; selfdetermination of, 79, 132–34, 178, 178n, 198, 222–23n subjectivity, 132, 134, 164; performances of, 167, 214–15, 218; in Hegel, 153, 178n, 195, 198, 222– 23n; Soviet, 133, 150n, 170, 228n Suny, R. G., 1–2 superego, in psychoanalysis, 44 superstructure, 57–58n, 65–66, 71, 112, 140, 142–43, 151n, 172–77;. See also base survivals of bourgeois consciousness, 137–38, 177, 189n Sverdlov, I., 101 Sverdlov University, 101, 123, 126 symptom: ideology as, 59n; and condition, 154–55, 157; the enemy as, 47; in psychoanalysis, 46 Szelényi, I., 39 tactics of habitat, in Kotkin, 164 Talmon, J., 181n technical-financial planning. See tekhpromfinplan technology: Heidegger on, 89, 118n; science and, 79, 84n; and the Second Five-Year Plan, 209–11, 226n tekhpromfinplan (technical-financial planning), 202 ten-day period. See dekada tendency: ideological, 110–13; objective historical, 112, 140–41, 168, 173, 175, 199–201, 216, 220, 233–34

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theory, 104, 176; high theory, 128, 149n, 200; literary, 18–19; and practice (in Marxism-Leninism), 140–41, 151n, 195; revolutionary Marxist, 106, 109–10, 112–13; truth of, 106, 109–12 there, in Heidegger, 92, 95–96 tokens, 167–68, 170, 178, 202, 206, 211–15, 217–18, 232 totalism, 52n totalitarian approach, model, 1–2, 7, 12–13, 20n, 22–23n, 28, 38, 54n, 181n totalitarianism, 20n, 22n, 28, 30–33, 49–50, 51–53n totality, in Hegel, 70–71, 153 Tovstukha, I., 119n Toynbee, A., 161 Tracy, A. D., de, 35 trade unions, Soviet, 204–5, 211; AllUnion Central Council of (VTsSPS), 203, 211, 225n; committee, local organization, 204–6, 211–12, 214, 225n; Eight Congress of, 203 trauma, 45–47 Traverso, E., 52n Trotsky, L., 56n, 101–2, 223n, 228n truth, 89, 140; Heidegger on, 93, 96–98, 99, 117n; epistemological, 69, 82, 104, 108, 135, 176–78; Nietzsche on, 94, 98; ontological, 69, 82, 88, 108, 112–14, 120n, 124, 135, 139, 143, 145, 171, 173, 175–78; effects, 232 true reality. See nastoiashchaia deistvitel'nost' tselosnost’ (holistic character), 172. See also Marxism-Leninism tsitatnichestvo (“citationism”), 6 tvorcheskii kharakter (creative character). See Marxism-Leninism two-hundred-percenters. See dvukhsotniki. Unification of Italy, 161

Union of Railroad Workers, Soviet, 225n unmasking. See vigilance Ural Mountains, 156 use value. See value valorization, 199; of capital, 198; of ideas/ideology, 124, 129–30, 132–35, 142–45, 150n, 175, 217; selfvalorization, 130, 144, 153, 165, 171, 178, 198, 231, 234 value: exchange, 197; of ideology, 193, 196–97, 200–201, 220; notion of, 192; as substance and subject (in Marx), 222n; surplus, 198; use, 130, 132, 197 values: and beliefs, goals, 12–13, 191– 92; in ideology, 64, 93–94, 97, 191– 93, 197, 201; as “institutionalized normative patterns” (in Parsons), 221n; Nietzsche on, 93–94 Van Dijk, T., 7 vanguard, political/revolutionary, 109– 10, 203, 207, 217 Van Ree, E., 181–82n varnishing of reality, 13, 47, 57n vigilance, 128 village reading room. See izba-chitalnia Viola, L., 2, n22 vitality. See zhiznennost' Voroshilov, K., 207 vstrechnoe planirovanie (conterplanning), 202, 225n vyzov (challenge), 204, 206, 208 Wajda, A., 217 Waller, M., 12–13 Webb, B., 179n Webb, S., 179n Weltanschauung, 30, 67 White, S., 3 will, 89; to power, 65, 68, 89, 93–94, 98, 116n; to truth, 94, 116n Wittfogel, K., 32 working class. See proletariat

Index

world: having a (in Heidegger), 91–92; life-world, 92, 139, 156, 172, 217; occurrence of, 91–92, 95. See also Ereignis worldliness (Weltheit), in Heidegger, 155. See also world World War I, 121n, 162–63 World War II, 1, 30, 33, 39, 189n, 202 Young Hegelians, 65–66 Yurchak, Aleksei, 17 zachinateli (pioneers), 211–12 Za industrializatsiiu (For Industrialization), newspaper, 216

271

zakonomernost' (law, lawful pattern), 174–75, 215–18 Zhdanov, A., 128, 150n, 167 zhivaia gazeta (live newspaper), 127 zhiznennost' (vitality), 207, 213, 218, 223n. See also Marxism-Leninism Zhizn' iskusstva (Life of Art), journal, 229 Zimmerman, A., 179n Zinov'ev, A., 29, 33 Zinov'ev University, 126 Žižek, S., 46–47 Zvezda (Star), journal, 150n

About the Author

Petre Petrov has taught at Princeton University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Automatic for the Masses: The Death of the Author and the Birth of Socialist Realism (University of Toronto Press, 2015) and co-editor of The Vernaculars of Communism: Language, Ideology and Power in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2015).

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