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PARTISAN REVIEW
never been able to destroy the attraction which the totalitarian move–
ments had for avant-garde artists; this shows the elite's lack of a sense
of reality, together with its perverted selflessness, both of which resem–
ble only too closely the fictitious world and the absence of self-interest
among the masses. It was the great opportunity of the totalitarian
movements, and the reason why a temporary alliance between the
intellectual elite and the mob could come about, that in an elementary
and undifferentiated way their problems had become the same and
foreshadowed the problems and mentality of the masses.
What appealed to the elite was radicalism as such. Marx's hope–
ful predictions that the state would wither away and a classless society
emerge were no longer radical, no longer Messianic enough.
If
Ber–
dyaev is right in stating that "Russian revolutionaries ... had always
been totalitarian," then the attraction which Soviet Russia exerted
almost equally on Nazi and Communist intellectual fellow-travelers
lay precisely in the fact that in Russia "the revolution was a religion
and a philosophy, not merely a conflict concerned with the social and
political side of life." The truth was that the transformation of classes
into masses and the breakdown of the prestige and authority of politi–
cal institutions had brought to Western European countries conditions
which resembled those prevalent in Russia, so that it was no accident
that their revolutionaries also began to take on the typically Russian
revolutionary fanaticism which looked forward, not to a change in
social or political conditions, but to the radical destruction of every
existing creed, value, and institution. The mob merely took advantage
of this new mood and brought about a short-lived alliance of revolu–
tionaries and criminals, which also had been present
in
many revolu–
tionary sects
in
Czarist Russia but conspicuously absent from the Euro–
pean scene.
The disturbing alliance between the mob and the elite, and the
curious coincidence of their aspirations, had their origin
in
the fact
that these strata had been the first to be eliminated from the structure
of the nation-state and the framework of class society. They found
each other so easily, if only temporarily, because they both sensed that
they represented the fate of the time, that they were followed by
unending masses, that sooner or later the majority of European peoples
might be with them-as they thought, ready to make their revolution.
It turned out that they were both mistaken. The mob, the under-
