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‘Coming to Terms with the Charm and Power of Soviet Communism’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2008
Extract
The day of communism is done, in Europe at any rate. If Minerva's owl flies at dusk, we should now expect the appearance of works which, while conceived during the epoch of communism, have been given their sense and conclusions by the events of 1989–91. The three books considered here are the fruit not only of scholarly reflection but also of personal reconsiderations of the nature of Soviet communism. Each author recounts a story through which he has lived, with glances backwards to find the origins of an idea (in Walicki's case), an illusion (in Furet's) or a word (in Gleason's). The Marxist idea of freedom (Walicki), the appeal of the Soviet Union to Western intellectuals (Furet) and the definitions and uses of the term ‘totalitarianism’ (Gleason) are the avenues taken towards an understanding of the role of communism in this century, avenues which lead from the lives of the scholars in question. The degree of intellectual, and the kind of political, engagement with the idea of communism was different in each case, reflecting most notably the nationalities of these three historians.
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References
1 Gleason, for example, records that Gramsci used the word ‘totalitarianism’ in a positive sense. See Jay, Martin, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press).Google Scholar
2 Which is not to say that no such case can be made, although Furet, who is likewise drawn to Sorel, argues: ‘En réalité, ni la terreur rouge exercée par Lénine pour se maintenir au pouvoir ni la terreur fasciste utilisée par Mussolini pour le conquérir n'ont grand-chose à voir avec l'idée philosophique de la violence dévelopée par le théoretician de la grève générale’, (pp. 207–8).
3 The chapter is also weakened by a number of errors, such as the following. It is an overstatement to claim (p. 168) that the Left has ‘always’ been weak in Poland. The sentence, ‘But in Eastern Europe, all intellectuals were anti-Communist’ (p. 169), must be attributed to carelessness. The claim that Paris Kultura was read ‘by all Polish intellectuals’ (p. 176) is a similarly romantic exaggeration. It is off the mark to refer to the Warsaw positivism of the nineteenth century as ‘Catholic opposition’ (p. 172). When Adam Michnik wrote that revisionism ‘was terminated by the events of March, 1968’ (p. 173), he was referring not to the invasion of Czechoslovakia but to police repression in Warsaw.
4 Such facts are taken from Walicki, Andrzej, Spotkania z Miloszem (London: Aneks, 1985).Google Scholar
5 ‘A dictatorship that not only deprives people of political and civil freedom but also aspires to control their minds and consciences, demanding not only passive conformity but active acceptance as well, keeping people under ruthless ideological pressure, in a state of continuous mobilization’ (p. 7).
6 The work of Lukács is considered the wellspring of Western Marxism, for he reasoned his way back to this idea of alienation without the aid of the writings of the young Marx. As Walicki has shown in a previous study, the Polish thinker Stanislaw Brzozowski (1878–1911) did much the same during his Marxist period, well before Lukács. Another Polish Marxist, Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (1872–1905), considered alienation to be a central problem of modern society.
7 Invaluable recollections are to be found in Crossman, Richard, ed., The God that Failed (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1950).Google Scholar
8 Lukács provided a sophisticated justification for the Leninist party.
9 A question arises as to what ‘total’ power means. Jan Gross distinguishes between relative and absolute power, arguing that the Soviet Union was effective in destroying alternative sources of power in society, but ineffective in achieving positive goals. Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland's Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).
10 Furet notes his debt to the works of Ernst Nolte and, in a long footnote (pp. 195–6), explains his attitude to Nolte's work. In my view, the note is insufficiently critical of Nolte's argument that Hitler's identification of the Jews with Bolshevism renders his attempt to exterminate them to some extent comprehensible. Furet remedies this in an essay which forms part of a very interesting debate on the relationship between fascism and communism. ‘Sur l'illusion communiste’, Le Débat, No. 89 (1996), 170–4.
11 In his memoirs (which might have proved useful to both Gleason and Furet), Aleksander Wat recalls that the figure of five million was not denied by Polish communists. Mój Wiek (London: Book Fund Ltd, 1977); the excellent abridged English translation is My Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988).
12 Judt, Tony, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 4.Google Scholar