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Volume
54, Number 7 · April 26,
2007 Why
They Believed in Stalin By
Aileen Kelly Tear
Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia Princeton University Press, 332
pp., $24.95 (paper) Revolution
on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin Harvard University Press, 436 pp.,
$29.95 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 Sin-yavsky, 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 wor-
ried "pragmatically" about how best to conform to the model of the
So-viet "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
Promethe-anism 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
social-ism 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). |
