VLADIMIR TlSMANEANU
411
Leninism was not a new philosophy of praxis, but a new praxis of phi–
losophy. In fact, this meant that a group of self-appointed revolutionary
pedagogues managed to coerce a large population to accept their obses–
sions as the inexorable imperative of history. Indeed, as Vassily Gross–
man's novel
Life and Fate
poignantly reveals, there was no significant
distinction between the way the denizens of the Soviet world and the
subjects of the Nazi dictatorship experienced ideology and power
(which, of course, does not mean that the ideologies were identical, but
simply that what Steven Lukes calls "moral blindness" functioned in
both systems) . However, Leninism is unique and one must be very cau–
tious in writing its definitive obituary. Yes, as a Russian model of social–
ism it is exha usted, but there is something in Leninism, its
antidemocratic, collectivist pathos, if you will, that remains with us. All
political figures in post-Soviet Russia, all parties, movements, and asso–
ciations, must define themselves in relationship to Lenin's legacies. In
this respect, Leninism is alive, if not well. This is because the cult of the
organization and the contempt for individual rights is part and parcel of
one direction of the "Russian tradition." (I have doubts that one can
speak of the Russian tradition or, together with Helene Carrere d'En–
causse, of
Ie malheur russe.)
There is a plurality of trends in the Russian
memory, and one should avoid any kind of Manichean taxonomy. At
the same time, it is doubtless that, as Berdyaiev noticed, there is some–
thing deeply Russian in the love for the ultimate, universally cathartic,
redeeming revolution, which explains why Lenin and his followers
(including the highly sophisticated philosophers Georg Lukacs and
Ernst Bloch) did embrace a certain cataclysmic, absolutist direction
within the Marxist tradition. At the same time, one should place Lenin–
ism in contradistinction to other versions of Marxism, at least as legiti–
mate, if not more.
It
is not at all self-evident that one can derive the
genocidal logic of the Gulag from Marx's universalistic postulates,
whereas it is quite clear that much of the Stalinist system existed more
than
in embryo
in Lenin's Russia.
One might ask, What was Lenin's unique, extraordinary innovation?
The answer is the Party, what Gramsci called the "New Prince," a new
figure of the political that absorbs and incorporates up to the point of
definitive osmosis / asphyxiation the independent life of society.
It
is, in
the words of A.
J.
Polan, "the end of politics" via the ultimate triumph
of political will. Mayakovsky was right when he identified the two:
"When we say Lenin /We mean the Party /And when we say Party /We
mean Lenin." The Leninist Party is dead. But the cu lt of the institution,
the sectarian vis ion of a community of virtuous, righteous individuals,
