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LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI
tus - which, because of this susceptibility, lost its balance after
Stalin's moral downfall- but they are being demoralized by con–
flicts among rival groups. In this sense, it might be said that partial
"de-Stalinization," carried out under pressure, led to a decline of
power, which, in tum, enabled the resistance movement to function.
In other words, as long as the apparatus is stable and immune to
political stresses, it can usually ignore society's discontents. Once
this stability is gone, fear of the leader and the police is replaced by
a perpetual fear of rivals, of local and foreign chiefs, of the working
class, the intelligentsia, and even of the small groups of intellectuals
of society.
Another insurmountable contradiction of bureaucratic socialism
is
the conflict with as well as the need for a radical ideology, hence
impossibility of dispensing with Stalinist-Leninist ideology. In con–
trast to a democracy, in which social consensus is the basis of its
legality, a despotism is sustained by an ideological system, however
impoverished it may be. In the Soviet world, legitimacy rests on the
principle that the ruling party is the embodiment of the interests of
the working class and the whole nation, and that the state is part of
the great international workers' movement, which has consolidated
its rule in certain parts of the globe and anticipates further victories.
Internationalist rhetoric is indispensable to the Soviet rulers, for it
is their only form of legitimacy; it also serves to justify the depen–
dence of local rulers on the center as well as their own power. It
might seem, for instance, that the Soviet rulers could ignore non–
ruling communist parties, whose efforts to seize power they do not
even openly encourage, and that the schism::; within these parties
should be of no political significance to them. However, the Soviet
rulers do not ignore these parties, because if they abandoned com–
munist action in countries outside their control, they would also have
to abandon the principles that justify this control. That is why the
rulers fall victim to their own ideology and all its nonsense. It is, of
course, paradoxical that this system of ideology in which no one be–
lieves - neither those who order others to proclaim it, those who
benefit from proclaiming it, or those who are required to listen to
it -
is still of such crucial importance. The dead and by now grotes–
que body of Marxist-Leninism is a burden on the rulers, impeding
their freedom of movement.
As
an instrument of persuasion in the
