NY Review of Books
Volume 54, Number 7 ·
April 26,
2007
Review
Why They Believed in Stalin
In a work published after he was expelled from the Soviet
Union, the dissident writer Alexander Zinoviev depicted a new
type of human being: Homo sovieticus, a "fairly
disgusting creature" who was the end product of the Soviet
regime's efforts to transform the population into embodiments of
the values of communism.[1] In
recent years the term has acquired a more neutral sense, as
material emerging from the archives of the former Soviet
Union—confessions, petitions and letters to the authorities,
personal files, and diaries— has given scholars new insights into
the ways Russians responded to the demand to refashion
themselves into model Communists.
As well as social historians such as Sheila Fitzpatrick,
Stephen Kotkin, and Lewis Siegelbaum, who focus on the
self-presentation of Soviet citizens in their relations with the
state, the new sources have attracted a group of young cultural
historians of the "Soviet subjectivity" school such as Jochen
Hellbeck, Oleg Kharkhordin, and Igal Halfin, whose approach
draws on contemporary work by social scientists, literary
theorists, and philosophers on the notion of selfhood. Contrary
to the theorists of totalitarianism who dominated Soviet
historical research in the 1960s and 1970s, they argue that far
from repressing the individual's sense of self, the pressures
exerted by the Soviet state's revolutionary agenda worked to
reinforce a drive to self-perfection whose roots lay deep in
pre-revolutionary Russian culture.
While the two approaches are mutually illuminating, they can
also lead to divergent views on the attitudes of Soviet citizens
toward the official ideology and the crimes committed in its
name. A comparison of recent books by Fitzpatrick and Hellbeck
shows that despite the prodigious increase in documentation on
the mentalities and motives of those who implemented or colluded
with Stalin's Terror, we are still far from a consensus on the
lessons to be drawn from that great historical catastrophe.
One of the most productive and influential of
Western Sovietologists, Sheila Fitzpatrick began publishing in
the 1970s in the US, where she was among the first to challenge
the "totalitarian" school's depiction of the Soviet people as
passive consumers of an ideology force-fed to them by their
rulers. Her studies of everyday Soviet life revealed a more
complex interaction between rulers and ruled, the latter often
adroitly manipulating the system for the purposes of their own
survival and advancement. She has used newly available archival
material on Soviet citizens' communications with the regime to
extend her analysis of their responses to its ideological
demands. The resulting articles, written over the last decade,
form the present book.
Tear Off the Masks concentrates principally on the
1920s and 1930s, when Soviet discourse was dominated by a
Manichaean division between allies and enemies of Soviet power,
defined in terms of class. Advancement depended on the ability
to prove that one was really proletarian; ruin followed from the
"unmasking" of citizens' concealed class identity—kulak or
bourgeois—on the basis of their words or practices. Fitzpatrick
ranges over the multiple and ingenious ways in which Soviet
citizens laid claim to a "good" class identity or attempted to
discredit the claims of others through letters to the
authorities, petitions, appeals, and denunciations, and the
autobiographical summaries included in the files kept on every
citizen.
Observing that all these forms of self-expression were
animated by the effort to "speak Bolshevik" (a phrase borrowed
from Kotkin)—to show that one was a genuine Soviet citizen—
Fitzpatrick points to the nervousness about self-presentation
and performance in Soviet society with its pervasive anxiety
about class and political identity. Citizens writing to the
authorities cast themselves in roles based on established Soviet
stereotypes—worker, activist, patriot, victim of past
oppression. She devotes two essays to the most polished and
inventive of Soviet performers: the con men who flourished in
the 1920s and 1930s, immortalized in Soviet literature in the
humorous novels of Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, whose
protagonist Ostap Bender speaks Bolshevik with such fluency that
he can assume any role in Soviet society at will.
These case studies in stratagems for survival under Stalin
add substantially to our knowledge of the functioning of early
Soviet society, but offer few insights into the personalities
behind the masks. They skirt around a question on which opinion
is still divided— whether the Soviet system worked to obliterate
the individual's sense of selfhood, creating, in Alexander
Zinoviev's words, "behavioral stereotypes without convictions."
Fitzpatrick seems to imply this in her concluding essay when she
cites the observation of another Soviet dissident, Andrei
Sinyavsky, that Ostap Bender's survival skills were those of "a
Soviet citizen who has imbibed this system body and soul": the
personification of Soviet "new man." But she emphasizes in her
introduction that the inner lives of her subjects are not her
concern, thereby firmly distancing herself from the scholars of
"Soviet subjectivity." While giving them credit for showing that
Soviet citizens could be ideological agents in their own right,
she questions what she sees as their overly theoretical approach
to the individual personality: "my kind of historian," she
explains, is uncomfortable with philosophical notions of an
intrinsic self, expressed through specific moral or ethical
convictions. "I am interested in...the way people locate
themselves in a social or group context rather than the way they
think about themselves as individuals."
Fitzpatrick implies strongly that despite its
self-imposed limitations her research has removed the ground
from beneath the feet of the other kind of historian,
maintaining that one encounters a "notable silence" in the
Soviet period with regard to individual soul-searching about
identity. In the diaries and memoirs of the time,
self-presentation took the place of self-exploration, as
citizens worried "pragmatically" about how best to conform to
the model of the Soviet "new man." In periods of revolutionary
turmoil, she suggests, "self-understanding becomes irrelevant,
even dangerous."
Fitzpatrick seems to be projecting onto Soviet society a
tension between, on the one hand, the claims of the public
sphere and, on the other, a liberal conception of selfhood as
the pursuit of individual autonomy. Of course there were Soviet
citizens who felt such a tension. But the Soviet notion of
selfhood had deep roots in a different cultural tradition which
did not recognize the same dichotomy of public and private. Lack
of historical perspective is a major flaw in Fitzpatrick's book.
The "new man" was not, as Fitzpatrick implies, a concept
invented by the Soviet regime. It was central to a tradition of
introspection and moral self-perfecting that arose in the early
nineteenth century as a response to the dilemma of the Russian
intelligentsia[2] whose talents
were frustrated in their benighted country, and whose longing
for personal fulfillment was combined with a strong commitment
to social justice. From Enlightenment rationalism, German
romantic philosophy, and French utopian socialism many educated
Russians absorbed a vision of history as a collective process
leading to the fullest self-realization of man through the
healing of all painful divisions between individuals and the
social whole. Radical critics urged writers to speed up the
advance to this goal by creating images of "new men," integrated
personalities whose personal fulfillment was achieved through
heroic labors for the good of society. We have the testimony of
Lenin himself that it was this exemplary type, as embodied in
Nikolai Chernyshevsky's enormously influential novel of 1863
What Is to Be Done?, that set him on his revolutionary path.
The romantic dream of self-realization through fusion with an
all-powerful collective force was transformed into alleged
scientific certainty by the Marxist account of the laws of
history; the notion of the new man was harmonized with Marxist
Prometheanism by Bolshevik theorists such as Leon Trotsky (who
described the Communists of the future as an "improved edition
of mankind"), the writer Maxim Gorky, and the Commissar for
Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky, who responded to the need to
energize the masses for the building of socialism with a
collectivist version of Nietzsche's heroic model of personal
authenticity. The doctrine of socialist realism did its part by
making the depiction of Communist heroes an imperative for all
Soviet writers. A secularized form of belief in the coming of a
millennium, Stalinist ideology aimed to transform not only
society but the very nature of man. Hence the endless campaigns
of purification, personal and public, ranging from
self-criticism in the workplace and Party cells to the show
trials of the Great Purge. We know now that very many who took
part in these campaigns were genuine believers in the messianic
ideal. The sacrifices involved in the country's industrial
transformation were prompted not only by coercion and fear but
also by the efforts of individuals to perfect themselves in line
with Party directives based on the Bolsheviks' claim to the sole
knowledge of history's path.
In the worst years of Stalinism many maintained their faith
in the Party's infallibility by developing a dual consciousness.
As Stephen Kotkin explains, for Soviet citizens the
discrepancies between lived experience and revolutionary
ideology based ultimately on theory seem to have given rise to a
dual reality: life could resemble "a split existence: sometimes
in one truth, sometimes in the other." Even when theoretical
"truth" was contradicted by common sense, it still formed an
integral part of everyday existence; without an understanding of
it, citizens found it impossible to know what was permitted and
what not. But acceptance of the truthfulness of the
revolutionary truth also fulfilled another function: "it was
also," Kotkin writes, "a way to transcend the pettiness of daily
life, to see the whole picture, to relate mundane events to a
larger design; it offered something to strive for."[3]
True believers could explain away the worst excesses of
Stalinism by viewing the present from the perspective of
eschatological time. In this form of secular religiosity,
history, like Providence, was seen to move in mysterious ways;
when the goal was attained it would become clear that policies
and actions which now seemed objectionable or senseless all had
their place in the overall grand design.
A telling example was the case of Nikolai Bukharin, one of
Bolshevism's founding theorists, convicted of treason in a show
trial of 1938 and shot, who explained that the combination of
shared Bolshevik goals and repugnant Stalinist methods produced
in him "a peculiar duality of mind." In conversations with
émigré Mensheviks during visits abroad in the 1930s he set out
his dilemma: the Party was the whole meaning of his life, and
though Stalin was a monster he was a "sort of symbol of the
party." Bukharin's faith in the Party's collective infallibility
made opposition to Bolshevism from within untenable for him.
Resigned to his eventual death at Stalin's hands, he consoled
himself with a historicist argument: "One is saved by a faith
that development is always going forward ...like a stream that
is running to the shore. If one leans out of the stream, one is
ejected completely.[4]
Stephen Kotkin observed in 1995 that in the
absence of documents from the secret police archives it was
difficult to judge how much people consciously thought through
the inconsistencies they saw between the Party's version of
events and what was actually happening. The declassification of
Communist Party records is still far from complete, but Jochen
Hellbeck's searches in private collections and his personal
inquiries have yielded a rich harvest of Stalin-era diaries
which give important new insights into the ways in which Soviet
citizens struggled to rationalize the monstrous irrationality of
Stalinism as they worked on perfecting their inner selves.
Unlike Fitzpatrick, Hellbeck has found no lack of
soul-searching in Soviet diaries—although not directed to
individualist purposes. He emphasizes the importance of the
traditional ethos of the intelligentsia and its ideal of the new
man in shaping Soviet citizens' attitudes toward the regime.
Bolshevik ideology was not just a corpus of official truths and
directives enforced from above; it was also a ferment of ideas
interacting in the individual consciousness with an illiberal
notion of selfhood, according to which authentic
self-fulfillment was realized through collective acts fulfilling
the laws of history:
Stalin-era diarists' desire for a purposeful and significant
life reflected a widespread urge to ideologize one's life,
to turn it into the expression of a firm, internally
consistent, totalizing Weltanschauung.
Soviet communism having become the vehicle for realizing the
hopes of the diarists, their diaries reflected an inner dialogue
with the Bolshevik project, as they sought to make sense of the
unfathomable.
Hellbeck concentrates on four individuals, who represent a
spectrum of responses to the 1917 Revolution. Zinaida
Denisevskaya, a thirty-year-old provincial schoolteacher and a
political gradualist when the Bolsheviks came to power, was
initially repelled by the regime's fanaticism, suppression of
individuality, and hostility to culture. As the son of a kulak,
Stepan Podlubny was forced to conceal his class origins in order
to be accepted into Soviet society. Leonid Potemkin was one of
the multitude of Soviet citizens from a deprived background whom
the Revolution permitted to fulfill their dream of a higher
education. As a mining engineer he had a significant part in the
industrialization process and rose in the Party administration
to become deputy minister of geology in 1965. Alexander
Afinogenov joined the Party while still at school, and became a
director of the Association of Proletarian Writers, the most
militant and doctrinaire Soviet literary organization. His plays
won praise from Communist leaders, including Stalin, whom he
regarded as his supreme literary mentor, and he rose to the top
of the Soviet establishment as a leading exponent of the
socialist realist aesthetic.
The four represent what Western historians have commonly seen
as two opposing categories: those who enjoyed the status and
material rewards of the Soviet establishment and those who
survived only by concealing their class origins. But Hellbeck
shows that these diaries should make us wary of typecasting the
first as careerists and the second as impostors: all four
diarists show a similar commitment to a revolutionary agenda of
self-cultivation and self-perfection.
Two factors were crucial in Denisevskaya's
conversion to Bolshevism: the intelligentsia's social ethic and
her own sense of isolation from others, compounded in her case
by unsuccessful personal relationships. She expresses envy of
the comradeship of Communist activists, and fascination with
ritual expressions of collectivism, such as the military parades
and workers' marches on revolutionary festivals. In 1931 she
takes the symbolic step of joining a demonstration to celebrate
Labor Day and exults at her sense of oneness with the
collective: no longer just an onlooker, "I was a drop in the
sea." Hellbeck notes her lack of any trace of regret at this
surrender of her individuality; she describes herself as having
been reborn. In identifying with the Soviet project she had
discovered her "true" self:
Throughout her life Denisevskaya cultivated her
"personality," which she defined by the possession of an
integrated, universalist "worldview" and the dedication to
working on behalf of history's progression. In the end she
came to consider the Soviet regime the sole legitimate
carrier of these core intelligentsia values. In her diary
the Bolshevik project of creating a new man appears as but a
variant of the preoccupation with perfecting the
"personality" that defined the Russian intelligentsia as a
whole.
Podlubny's diary records the skillful adaptive techniques
that enabled him to avoid being marginalized as a class alien
and become a brigade leader in the factory school of the
Pravda printing plant. But the primary goal of these efforts
is his inner transformation into a Soviet new man: his diary
serves to chart his progress in rooting out the habits of a
"useless person."
Born in 1914, Potemkin was shaped by the Soviet state as one
of its new elite. The smoothness of his trajectory to the top
suggests a careerist focused on honing his adaptive skills; but
his diary is devoted to charting the successes and setbacks of
an elaborate program of physical and psychological
self-improvement inspired by Gorky's and Lunacharsky's socialist
version of the Nietzschean superman. This glorified strength,
beauty, daring, and heroic will as the components of
collectivist subjectivity—an ideal that Leonid Potemkin, as a
political agitator, set down in a manual for Soviet youth.
Hellbeck observes that his diary reveals him as one of those who
found genuine fulfillment as Soviet citizens.
Afinogenov also was no careerist, despite the substantial
material privileges he enjoyed as a leading exponent of
socialist realism. He took his role very seriously, comparing
Soviet theater to a church which showed people how to live and
behave by exposing the vestiges of the past and depicting the
seeds of the future in everyday ethics. Stalin's attack on one
of his plays for its negative portraits of Communists plunged
him into anguished introspection, as he sought to realign
himself with the approved version of history. Believing like
Chernyshevsky that a writer must embody the standards he
preaches, he saw his diary as "gymnastics for the soul," a
process of self-cleansing through self-criticism.
Hellbeck's discussion of these four is interspersed with
references to other diarists of the period to support his
contention that identifying with the Revolution could spring
from an urge for self-expression and not, as is often claimed,
from a desire for self-effacement. He draws attention to the
general prevalence in the Stalinist years of the idea
that history furnished the ultimate standard of a person's
life and that the more a person's life served the needs of
society,...the more historically valuable it was.... On
account of its communal strength and historical
significance, this life promised authenticity and profound
meaning, and it was intensely desired. It was contrasted to
a life lived outside the collective or the flow of history.
[Diarists]... feared the void of meaning that expulsion from
[the collective] entailed.... They struggled not to be
superfluous in an age when both their public worth and their
self-esteem were determined above all by the extent of their
"usefulness to society."
The diaries Hellbeck has selected are
especially significant for the light they shed on an aspect of
the Soviet mentality under Stalin which, as he notes, Western
readers find particularly challenging: the acceptance of
violence in the service of self-realization. We see at first
hand the operation, chilling and sometimes poignant, of the dual
consciousness that allowed many to accept the mass slaughter of
collectivization and the Terror and to justify the violence
inflicted on them and those they cherished for crimes they did
not commit.
Since Denisevskaya was a member of the old intelligentsia who
first condemned and then embraced the Soviet regime, her case is
especially interesting. As a researcher at an experimental
station in the countryside, she witnessed the horrors of forced
collectivization at first hand, but she unquestioningly
supported the campaign. Aware that "bad things" were being done
in its name, she insists that such instances are peripheral and
should not deflect attention from the "main background to
life—the serious and active creation of new forms of life." She
records her disgust at the supposed crimes of forty-eight
high-ranking officials and agronomists, executed for
collaborating with foreign powers to create famine and weaken
the Soviet regime. When further arrests of agronomists include
some of her close colleagues, she struggles painfully to
overcome her skepticism about the charges against them.
Insisting that the Party is correct in its fundamental ideas,
she acknowledges: "I'm forcing myself to overlook petty details.
One must not confuse the particulars with the general. It is
very difficult to maintain a broad world view all the time,
especially for a non-party member."
Hellbeck comments on this classic instance of a dual
consciousness:
Only a...mind that situated every occurrence in the larger
picture of class struggle and historical inevitability could
rework unbelievable misdeeds into an unbroken pattern of
Communist belief. This "belief," Denisevskaya's case
suggests, was not merely a naive or desperate escape measure
for those who refused to accept the disillusioning truth
about Stalinism. It was really a complex and laborsome
process, an ongoing effort to sustain a coherent world-view
in spite of scattered observations that often contradicted
the ideological mandate.
Podlubny's success in remaking himself as a Soviet activist
was such that he was recruited by the secret police and given
the task of unmasking class enemies with class origins just like
his own. His program of self-development concentrated
obsessively on the development of willpower as the
distinguishing mark of the new man he wished to become. This
cult of the will determined his attitude toward the victims of
Stalinism: when his mother received an appeal for help from the
starving children of an aunt who was in prison for stealing
state grain to feed them, he comments in his diary that "for
some reason" the letter made him smile. His mother's stories of
starvation and cannibalism in her home village left him unmoved:
It has to be this way because then it will be easier to
remake the peasants' smallholder psychology into the
proletarian psychology that we need. And those who die of
hunger, let them die. If they can't defend themselves
against death from starvation, it means that they are
weak-willed and what can they give to society?
Podlubny's coolness deserts him, however, when Stalin turns
his violence against the Party in 1934. He confides to his diary
his distrust of the official reasons given for the thousands of
arrests and executions of Communists; he then repents of his
criticism as an expression of his alien class background. At the
height of the Terror his origins were publicly revealed. He was
expelled from the Communist youth organization and his mother
was sentenced to eight years for "concealment of social
origins." He reacts to her arrest with indignant defiance,
denouncing the policies and personality cult of "our Russian
Nero." But this rebellion undermines his self-image. Forced to
give up his university studies, he ponders his "useless"
existence. His diary stops with his arrest for involvement in a
minor deal involving speculation, and resumes a year later with
his release and entrance into military service during the war.
But now Podlubny writes without his former introspection, his
standing as an army officer and subsequently a bureaucrat having
apparently resolved his concerns about his place in Soviet
society. Hellbeck remarks that reading the later diary "only
underscores the urgency of his diary project of the 1930s—the
pressing concern for the state of his soul, the searching
introspection, and the work on his self."
Afinogenov's response to the Terror was
dictated by his urge to remain in step with history. He greets
it ecstatically as a crucial stage in the march to communism:
Genuine History is upon us, and we are granted the joy of
witnessing these turns, when Stalin mercilessly chops
off...all the unfit and weakened, the decaying and empty.
He sees the purge of the Party ranks as the climax of a
revolutionary agenda of purification of both the individual and
the social spheres of life. His diary is given over to intense
introspection as he seeks to cleanse and perfect his Bolshevik
self through communion with the purposes of history, a task
complicated when he was expelled from the Party on suspicion of
involvement in a Trotskyist plot to undermine the Soviet system.
Trapped in the absurd world of Stalinist paranoia, isolated from
the society that gave meaning to his individual existence, and
threatened with imminent arrest, he clung to his faith in the
all-seeing Party, seeking to locate the blame for his fate in
his own personality. He casts around for models of fall and
redemption in great literature from Cervantes to Dostoevsky, but
arrives at a formula for inner peace only by renouncing his
"selfish" concern with his own fate and accepting his role as a
tool in the hands of historical progress, as embodied in
Stalin's will: "you will understand everything," he tells
himself, "only when the purpose of all that is taking place has
become clear to you."
Hellbeck comments that such passages offer a glimpse into
"the self-destructive dynamic of the Communist project,"
particularly apparent during the Great Terror. Afinogenov
sub-mitted to the laws of history decreed by Communist leaders
not under duress but as the supreme form of self-realization:
This explains why Afinogenov (and other Communists as well)
accepted the prospect of being crushed by the party and
thrown into the dustbin of history: this apparent act of
self-destruction contributed to history's eventual
consummation and thereby satisfied the central purpose to
which he...had devoted his life.
His diary can be seen as a form of spiritual writing,
organized to enact the experience of conversion and rebirth
through a deeper understanding of history's laws.
In 1938 the Central Committee issued a resolution stating
that many Communists had been unjustly expelled from the Party,
the victims of "enemies" within the administration. Afinogenov
was among those reinstated. He continued to support the purge
campaign. His diary records that he viewed his personal ordeal
with gratitude: the self-examination forced on him had allowed
him to be reborn. But his fear of being left behind by history
continued to haunt him until a German bomb killed him in 1941.
The young Party activist Potemkin replaced his diary in 1936
with another kind of self-analysis, a platonic cor-respondence
with a female friend, a student of literature who shared his
spiritual vision and his agenda for self-transformation. He
consciously modeled himself on the critic Vissarion Belinsky, a
leader of the Russian Romantics of the 1830s whose thirst for
self-perfection was inseparably bound with his commitment to
build a new society. Both correspondents "extolled their ideals
of spiritual beauty and purity, and their vision of a bright
future, against a largely unmentioned but looming background of
present impurity, struggle, and death."
This high-flown correspondence in the Romantic mode seems
even more bizarre when one reflects that the mentalities of both
young participants had been shaped entirely under the Soviet
system. But Belinsky was lauded as an authority by Soviet
literary policy makers for his insistence that the writer embody
his commitment to progress in his work and his life. Potemkin
devoured his works, making copious notes and constantly
referring in his letters to Belinsky's views on the personality
and its fulfillment. Belinsky hoped that the next century would
see the advent of Russian new men who would find fulfillment in
society and its goals.
Potemkin believed himself to be an embodiment of this ideal,
copying his letters out so that others could learn from them.
"There was thus," Hellbeck remarks, "a dialogue on the new man
connecting Potemkin and Belinsky across a century of
revolutionary thought and practice," based on a shared
historical consciousness. Potemkin's social outlook is a
partic-ularly striking illustration of a central theme of
Hellbeck's book, summed up in its final chapter:
Bolshevik activists were successful in propagating the
urgency of individual growth through adherence to the
revolution because such thinking was rooted in Russia's
historical past. The moral duties of self-improvement,
social activism, and self-expression in concert with history
were a staple of Russian intellectual and political life for
almost a century before the revolution of 1917. As
Stalin-era diarists worked to align themselves with history
and to achieve a historically grounded notion of selfhood,
they acted in striking consistency with generations of
educated Russians since the early nineteenth century. To
behave in such ways was what distinguished a member of the
Russian intelligentsia.
Hellbeck's attempt to situate the Bolshevik
project of self-transformation within this wider cultural and
historical perspective (a dimension too often lacking in Western
studies of the Soviet era) is one of the outstanding virtues of
his impressive book. Never overburdening his narrative with
theorizing, his sensitive and sympathetic approach allows his
subjects to speak for themselves, expressing sometimes a
repulsive indifference to the fate of Stalin's victims,
sometimes a tragic struggle to rationalize the destruction of
friends or family accused of ludicrous crimes. He points out
that their expressions of personal doubt and ideological dissent
at times of intense pressure invalidate the suspicion that their
diaries were produced primarily for the eyes of the security
apparatus. The new man did not spring ready-made from the heads
of Communist theorists. As Hellbeck observes, the huge feats of
modernization accomplished by the Soviet Union in the 1930s, in
contrast with the economic crises rocking the capitalist systems
of the West, seemed to many to be convincing evidence of the
imminent realization of the Communist ideal.
His study adds an important dimension to the work done by
other scholars to throw light on the psychological reasons
behind the collusion of moral idealists in the extreme violence
of the Stalin years. He concludes by reminding us that the modes
of thought that encouraged Soviet citizens to accept violence in
the service of self-realization were not specific to the Soviet
Union or the political left. In the first half of the last
century the attraction of movements promising fulfillment
through an all-embracing worldview led intellectuals across
Europe such as Ernst Jünger and Georges Sorel to extol the
morally and aesthetically purifying effects of political
violence. He might also have cited a curious episode from an
earlier age which is particularly pertinent to his study: the
critic Belinsky's brief support for the brutal tyranny of Tsar
Nicholas I.
Tormented by his impotence as a superfluous person cut off
from his society by his dissident views, Belinsky found an
escape route in Hegel's formula "the real is the rational and
the rational is the real," reasoning that Tsar Nicholas's
regime, as contemporary historical "reality," had its necessary
role in the grand scheme of progress. By submitting to it he
would cease to be a "spectral" human being and become a "real"
man through an organic fusion with society and history's flow.
Belinsky's moral instincts eventually rebelled against such
thinking; he curses his "odious effort of reconciliation with an
odious reality," expressing his new outlook in an ironic
diatribe directed at Hegel—a great humanistic outburst against
all philosophies of history that viewed human beings in the
present as a mere means to the attainment of future goals:
I acknowledge your philosophical prowess, but...have the
honor to inform you that even if I should succeed in
climbing to the highest rung of the ladder of progress, even
then I would ask you to render me an account of all the
victims of life and history, of all the victims of chance,
superstition, the Inquisition, Philip II, and so on.
Otherwise I should hurl myself head first from that very top
rung. I do not want happiness, even as a gift, if I cannot
be easy about the fate of all my brethren, my own flesh and
blood.... What good is it to me to know that reason will
ultimately be victorious and that the future will be
beautiful, if I was forced by fate to witness the triumph of
chance, irrationality, and brute force.
Belinsky's brief exaltation of tyranny is a
notorious example of the moral abyss to which the Russian
intelligentsia's longing for wholeness could lead; but the
humanism inspiring his passionate defense of history's victims
was also a significant strand in pre-revolutionary Russian
culture. Its most outstanding representative is Alexander Herzen,
who outgrew his early enthusiasm for Hegel's vision of progress
to write From the Other Shore, one of the most prescient
attacks on historical determinism in all of nineteenth-century
thought. Many Russian liberals, as well as writers such as
Turgenev and Chekhov, warned against the dangers of the search
for ultimate certainties. Many radicals, too, were torn between
their thirst for utopia and the promptings of conscience. Not
all resolved their battle in the same way as Hellbeck's
subjects. The legacy of the slender but important tradition of
humanism represented by Herzen and some of Russia's greatest
writers can be seen in heroic dissidents such as Anna Akhmatova,
who during the Terror refused to surrender their moral autonomy
to the demands of ideology and brute force. Some wrote diaries,
such as the peasant Andrei Arzhilovsky, who was twice imprisoned
and then shot for his independence of spirit.[5]
How many others shared his thoughts? One can hope that Hellbeck
will follow the present fine study with a sequel on such
diarists.
Notes
[1] Alexander Zinoviev,
Homo Sovieticus, translated by Charles Janson (Atlantic
Monthly Press, 1985).
[2] On the sui generis nature
of the Russian intelligentsia, see the essay by Isaiah Berlin,
"The Birth of the Russian Intelligentsia," Russian Thinkers
(Viking, 1978), pp. 114–135, and The Russian Intelligentsia,
edited by Richard Pipes (Columbia University Press, 1961).
[3] Stephen Kotkin,
Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (University
of California Press, 1995), pp. 228–229.
[4] See Stephen F. Cohen,
Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography,
1888–1938 (Knopf, 1973), p. 351, and Andrzej Walicki,
Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and
Fall of the Communist Utopia (Stanford University Press,
1995), p. 463.
[5] Intimacy and Terror:
Soviet Diaries of the 1930s, edited by Véronique Garros,
Natalia Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen, and translated by
Carol A. Flath (New Press, 1995).