Communism, Fascism and liberals now
THE DEVIL IN HISTORY
Communism, Fascism, and some lessons of the twentieth century
326pp. University of California Press. $34.95; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £24.95.
978 0 520 23972 2
D iscussing the Declaration of the Rights of Toiling and Exploited People promulgated in the Soviet Union in January 1918, in which sections of the population regarded as “former people” were disenfranchised, Vladimir Tismaneanu writes: “It can hardly be considered a coincidence that the term byvshie liudi (former people), which became commonplace in Bolshevik speak, implied that those to whom it applied were not quite human”. The disenfranchised groups included functionaries of the tsarist police and military, class aliens who lived off unearned income, clergy of all religions and anyone economically dependent on those so far listed. Debarred from the rationing system (for many the chief source of sustenance), liable to have their property confiscated, and prohibited from seeking public office, people in these categories – along with their families, since being a former person was defined as an inheritable condition – were excluded from society. The system of categories, Tismaneanu writes, was “the prototype taxonomy for the terror that was to follow in later years”. Denying some human groups the moral standing that normally goes with being a person, this act formed the basis for the Soviet project of purging society of the human remnants of the past.
It is also one of the grounds for Tismaneanu’s belief that in important respects Communism and Fascism were at one. He is clear that “Communism is not Fascism, and Fascism is not Communism. Each totalitarian experiment has its own irreducible attributes”. Even so, the two were alike in viewing mass killing as a legitimate instrument of social engineering.
“Communism, like Fascism, undoubtedly founded its alternative, illiberal modernity on the conviction that certain groups could be deservedly murdered. The Communist project, in such countries as the USSR, China, Cuba, Romania, or Albania, was based precisely on the conviction that certain social groups were irretrievably alien and deservedly murdered.”
It is an observation that points to the central issue in the debate about twentieth-century totalitarianism. Ever since it was first developed by the Italian theorist of Fascism Giovanni Gentile – who approved of the system of unlimited government that totalitarianism denotes – the concept has been highly controversial. With many viewing Communist and Fascist regimes as too dissimilar in their structures, objectives and ruling ideas to be included in a single category and some seeing theories of totalitarianism as not much more than a rationale for Cold War struggles, the idea has moved from being widely contested to being distinctly unfashionable – in academic contexts, a more damningly final dismissal. For those who have lived in totalitarian regimes, this is a perplexing development. Tismaneanu writes vividly of his own experience. A child of Jewish parents who became Communist activists as part of the struggle against Fascism (his father lost an arm fighting in the Spanish Civil War, while his mother worked as a nurse), he first began thinking about totalitarianism when as a teenager in Communist Romania he read a clandestinely circulated copy of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. Later, as a sociology student at the University of Bucharest, he managed to get hold of forbidden books by writers such as Raymond Aron, Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Leszek Kolakowski and other anti-totalitarian thinkers. Also drawn to what he calls “the occulted traditions of western Marxism”, he did a doctorate on the Frankfurt School. Leaving Romania in 1981 and settling in the United States, he revisited the country on a regular basis after the toppling of Nicolae Ceausescu. In 2006 he was made head of a presidential commission established to examine the workings of the Communist dictatorship, an appointment that proved controversial, not least because of his parents’ and his own Communist past.
Tismaneanu has produced numerous studies of Stalinism, nationalism and totalitarianism, but it seems to be the parallels between the Ceauzescu regime and interwar Fascism that have come to preoccupy him. “Although Romania was a socialist state committed to Marxist tenets and thus ostensibly left-wing, especially after 1960, the ruling party started to embrace themes, motifs, and obsessions of the interwar Far Right.” After Ceausescu came to power in 1965, “the ideology came to blend residual Leninism with an unavowed yet unmistakable Fascism”. As Tismaneanu came to realize, “This was only an apparent paradox”. European Fascism was a mishmash of mad and bad ideas – clerical authoritarianism and anti-liberal Nietzschean atheism, a neo-primitivist cult of “thinking with the blood” and modernist worship of technology, among others. But ethnocentric nationalism, racism and anti-Semitism have been features of Fascism in all its varieties, and it is the Communist embrace of these far right themes that forms the background for The Devil in History. If his parents joined forces with Communism in order to resist Fascism, it has fallen to Tismaneanu to grapple with the fact that Communism acquired some of Fascism’s defining characteristics.
An ambitious and challenging rereading of twentieth-century history, The Devil in History is most illuminating in showing that parallels between the two totalitarian experiments existed from the beginning. Tismaneanu confesses to being baffled by what he describes as “the still amazing infatuation of important intellectuals with the communist Utopia”. “It is no longer possible to maintain and defend a relatively benign Lenin”, he writes, “whose ideas were viciously distorted by the sociopath Stalin.” Unlike Stalin, Lenin showed no signs of psychopathology. Rather than being an expression of paranoia, methodical violence and pedagogic terror were integral features of Bolshevik doctrine. By their own account, Lenin and his followers acted on the basis of the belief that some human groups had to be destroyed in order to realize the potential of humanity. These facts continue to be ignored by many who consider themselves liberals, and it is worth asking why.
Underlying academic debates about the adequacy of totalitarianism as a theoretical category, Tismaneanu suggests, is a question about evil in politics. Rightly, he does not ask which of the two totalitarian experiments was more evil – an approach that easily degenerates into an inconclusive and at times morally repugnant wrangle about numbers. There is a crucial difference, which he acknowledges at several points in The Devil in History, between dying as a result of exclusion from society and being killed as part of a campaign of terror and being marked out for death in a campaign of unconditional extermination – as Jews were by Nazis and their local collaborators in many European countries and German-occupied Soviet Russia. Numerical comparisons pass over this vital moral distinction. While the stigma of being a former person extended throughout families, it was possible to be readmitted into society by undergoing “re-education”, becoming an informer, and generally collaborating with the regime. When Stalin engineered an artificial famine which condemned millions to starvation and consigned peoples such as the Tatars and Kalmyks to deportation and death, he did not aim at their complete annihilation. Around one in five adult males is estimated to have spent time in the Gulag, along with unnumbered children after the age of criminal responsibility was lowered (along with liability to capital punishment) to include twelve-year-olds in 1935, as well as a massive influx of “female thieves” (war widows) after 1945; but most who spent time in the camps survived to return to what passed as normal life. Though there were sections of the Gulag from which few emerged alive – such as those described by Varlam Shalamov in Kolyma Tales – there was no Soviet Treblinka.
Lenin may have held to a version of humanism, but it was one that excluded much of actually existing humankind
Tismaneanu’s account of Communist totalitarianism will be resisted by those who want to believe that it was an essentially humanistic project derailed by events – national backwardness, foreign encirclement and the like. But as he points out, the Soviet state was founded on policies which implied that some human beings were not fully human. Lenin may have held to a version of humanism, but it was one that excluded much of actually existing humankind. It was not simply because they could be expected to be hostile to the new regime that priests, merchants, members of formerly privileged classes and functionaries of the old order were deprived of civil rights. They represented a kind of humanity that had had its day. There is nothing to suggest that the Bolsheviks viewed the fate of former persons as the tragic price of revolution. Such superfluous human beings were no more than the detritus of history. If radical evil consists in denying the protection of morality to sections of humankind, the regime founded by Lenin undoubtedly qualifies.
We are left with the question why so many liberals disregard these facts. Clearly a part of the explanation lies in the utopian character of the Communist project. In politics, the other face of radical evil is an inhuman vision of radical goodness. Lenin envisioned a world without states or markets in which power relations had ceased to exist. Hitler imagined a world in which power reflected an immutable racial hierarchy. It is hard to imagine any decent human being embracing the hideous Nazi vision – a mix of the völkisch chimera of a seamless “organic” culture, fraudulent “racial science” and revolutionary anti-capitalism – but the appeal to large sections of the German people of the fantasy of a conflict-free, homogeneous society cannot be denied. Lenin’s very different view of the future was in some ways no less hideous. Authentically Marxian in its most essential features, it left no room for the diverse forms of activity that humans have devised to create meaning in their lives. Religion and the practice of science and the arts for their own sake would be left behind. The little that survived of the human inheritance would be yoked to collective welfare and communal labour. It is a horribly impoverished vision, which fortunately has no prospect of being realized.
Liberals will object that Communist and Fascist projects are inherently opposed – one emerging from Enlightenment universalism, the other from Counter-Enlightenment ideas of racial purity. There is a difference, but there are commonalities as well. If Nazism repudiated Enlightenment values of human equality and universal emancipation, the Nazi project of racial hierarchy continued some influential strands of Enlightenment thinking. Nazi “scientific racism” had precedents in the Positivist plans for a science of society grounded in physiology, and in theories of human inequality and eugenics promoted by nineteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers such as Francis Galton and (in more explicitly racial terms) Ernst Haeckel. Lenin’s egalitarian project also claimed a basis in science – the ersatz science of historical materialism.
There is another respect in which Communism and Fascism were alike. At one in claiming a basis in science, they were both fuelled by millenarian religion. As Bertrand Russell recognized in his neglected classic The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (published in 1920 after he had visited the Soviet Union and talked with Lenin), Bolshevism was more than a political doctrine, however radical or extreme. With all its militant secularism, the Bolshevik drive to transform society was powered by apocalyptic myths. As Tismaneanu writes, with reference to Norman Cohn’s seminal work on millenarian movements, “both Leninism and Fascism created millenarian sociological and psychological constellations. Both were militant chiliasms that energized extraordinary ardor among unconditionally committed followers”. The chiliastic character of Communism is not a novel theme, and here as elsewhere in his book, Tismaneanu fashions a powerful synthesis of existing critiques. What he does not fully explore is the function of Communism in channelling religious myth in a modern secular form – a role that goes some way to explaining its continuing attraction.
Citing Boris Souvarine, Tismaneanu praises the heterodox Marxist for his account of “the strange blending of barbarism and derailed modernity in the ideological despotism of the extreme Left and Right”. In the context of the argument of The Devil in History, however, it may be the idea of derailed modernity that is strange. Elsewhere in the book, Tismaneanu recognizes Communism and Fascism as alternative forms of development, unquestionably barbaric but still fully modern. His ambiguity on this point reflects a gap in his account of contemporary liberalism. Throughout much of his argument, he takes for granted that the recycling of religious myth as secular political doctrine that occurred in Communism does not occur in advanced liberal democracies. But Western-led policies were based on the belief that after a brief period of economic shock therapy, post-Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe would revert to a normal path of development and adopt liberal values – an idea with no basis in history. In Russia and much of Europe, liberal values have never been “normal”. “In the end”, Tismaneanu writes, “‘the return to Europe’ heralded in 1989 stood for ‘normalcy and the modern way of life’.” However, if post-Communist countries have returned to normal it is to a version – so far relatively mild, but real enough – of the toxic normality that prevailed in much of the continent during long stretches of the twentieth century.
The blind spot in The Devil in History is the power of myth in liberal societies. “The demise of Communism in Europe”, Tismaneanu writes, “allowed space for alternative political mythologies, which left a proliferation of fantasies of salvation.” He is referring to post-Communist countries where the Soviet collapse left a vacuum that was filled by ethnocentric nationalism and a post-Holocaust variety of anti-Semitism that demonizes Jews in countries where hardly any Jews remain. But the impact of the collapse was also felt in Western democracies, where it boosted the belief that liberal societies are the only ones that can be fully modern. Commendably, Tismaneanu refuses to play “the obsolete pseudo-Hegelian tune of the ‘ultimate liberal triumph’”. However, the issue is not whether liberalism is destined to prevail – a stale debate about historical inevitability – but whether liberal societies can escape what he aptly describes as “a contagious hubris of modernity”. For those possessed by the idea that the Communist collapse was a triumph for the only truly modern way of life – a species of eschatological myth rather than any kind of empirical observation – the question did not arise. For them, liberalism was the riddle of history solved, and knew itself to be the solution.
The same myth – a hollowed-out version of a religious belief in providence – underpins the abiding appeal of Communism. One of the features that distinguished Bolshevism from Tsarism was the insistence of Lenin and his followers on the need for a complete overhaul of society. Old-fashioned despots may modernize in piecemeal fashion if doing so seems necessary to maintain their power, but they do not aim at remaking society on a new model, still less at fashioning a new type of humanity. Communist regimes engaged in mass killing in order to achieve these transformations, and paradoxically it is this essentially totalitarian ambition that has appealed to liberals. Here as elsewhere, the commonplace distinction between utopianism and meliorism is less than fundamental. In its predominant forms, liberalism has been in recent times a version of the religion of humanity, and with rare exceptions – Russell is one of the few that come to mind – liberals have seen the Communist experiment as a hyperbolic expression of their own project of improvement; if the experiment failed, its casualties were incurred for the sake of a progressive cause. To think otherwise – to admit the possibility that the millions who were judged to be less than fully human suffered and died for nothing – would be to question the idea that history is a story of continuing human advance, which for liberals today is an article of faith. That is why, despite all evidence to the contrary, so many of them continue to deny Communism’s clear affinities with Fascism. Blindness to the true nature of Communism is an inability to accept that radical evil can come from the pursuit of progress.
John Gray is Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics. His books include Black Mass: Apocalyptic religion and the death of Utopia, 2007, The Immortalization Commission: Science and the strange quest to cheat death, 2011, and, most recently, The Silence of Animals: On progress and other modern myths, which is due to be published next month.
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