VLADIMIR TISMANEANU
Lenin's Century: Bolshevism, Marxism, and
the Russian Tradition
M
ARXISM WAS,
as Leszek Kolakowski once said, the greatest
philosophical fantasy ever conceived by the human mind. All
its radical hubris notwithstanding, Marxism would have
remained a mere sociological doctrine had Lenin not turned it into a
most potent political weapon.
It
was thanks to Lenin that a new type of
politics emerged in the twentieth century, one based on fanaticism,
unswerving commitment to the sacred cause, and complete substitution
of reason through faith for millions of illuminated zealots. Leninism, a
Russian cultural and political phenomenon, was in fact the foundation
of the system that came to an end with the revolutions of
1989-91.
Put
briefly, without Leninism, there would have been no totalitarianism, at
least not in its Stalinist version . The twentieth century was in fact
Lenin's century. In other words, post-communism means a continuous
struggle to overcome the Leninist debris. In her acceptance speech for
the
2000
Hannah Arendt Award, given jointly by the city of Bremen, the
Heinrich Boll Foundation, and the Hannah Arendt Association, Elena
Bonner writes, "One of Hannah Arendt's key conclusions was 'The
totality of terror is guaranteed by mass support.'
It
is consonant with a
later comment by Sakharov: 'The slogan "The people and the Party are
one," painted on every fifth building, are not just empty words .'" This
is precisely the point: the internalization of Leninist forms of thinking
by millions of denizens of the Sovietized world, their readiness to accept
paternalistic collectivism as a better form of life than risk-driven,
freedom-oriented experiences. In my view, the major cleavage in today's
Russian political culture is between the Leninist her itage and the demo–
cratic aspirations and practices associated with the name of Sakharov
and Russia's human rights movement. To quote Elena Bonner again, "In
the preamble to his draft for a Soviet Constitution, Sakharov wrote:
'The goal of the peoples of U.S.S.R. and its government is a happy life,
fu ll of meaning, material and spiritua l freedom, well-being, and peace.'
But in the decades after Sakharov, Russia's people have not increased
their happiness, even though he did everything humanly possible to put
